[extropy-chat] Analyzing the simulation argument

[Adrian Tymes]

--- Mike Lorrey <mlorrey at yahoo.com> wrote:
> What is really surprising to me are the number of
> people here who are
> ardent cryonicists, betting their fortunes and lives
> on what can very
> easily be regarded as a Pascals-wager-type risk, but
> won't make the
> same bet on the SA.

The SA makes no suppositions on what the "real" world
outside the sim is like, and gives no intrinsic
guidance for its effects on our world.  It could as
easily be good as bad.

With cryonics, one takes an honest look at the broad
course of human history, and sees that things have
generally gotten better for almost everyone as
technology improved.  (This is "better" by the
standards of the observer - a hypothetical extremely
long lived observer, if there was no one person
actually alive in both historical periods under
comparison.  But, e.g., there were people who saw
both the Civil War and WWI, and were freer with a
better standard of living at the start of the latter
than at the start of the former.)  It therefore seems
likely that, by the time technology improves to where
cryo patients can be usefully revived, the world will
in general be even better than it is now.  The odds of
the world getting worse in that time are, based on the
strongest evidence we have (history), less than the
odds of improvement.

Besides, there's nothing to really bet on with the
SA - everything's the same if it's a sim or not, and
you can't even place bets on that because there's no
way to prove it.  Whereas with cryo, there is usually
a very measurable difference between being alive and
being dead.