[ExI] simulation stat goofiness

William Flynn Wallace foozler83 at gmail.com
Fri Sep 18 14:55:52 UTC 2020


The simulation argument appears strikingly close to a religion to me.  Dylan

Or maybe it's just a game smart people play - What If?  And if a person can
come up with interesting scenarios, alternatives, 'evidence', it's a fun
game to play.  bill w


On Fri, Sep 18, 2020 at 9:15 AM Dylan Distasio via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> I'm sure someone smarter than me has addressed this, but it seems obvious
> to me that there is absolutely no chance we are in a simulation (ok, close
> to none).  I don't believe the processing power exists to accurately
> simulate the number of atoms we have access to, even on the immediate
> planet, let alone the visible universe.  This isn't even considering
> subatomic particles, momentum, particle interactions, and other important
> pieces of information.
>
> The simulation argument appears strikingly close to a religion to me.
>
> On Fri, Sep 18, 2020 at 10:02 AM Will Steinberg via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>> I have always thought there were a few issues with the simulation
>> argument.
>>
>> One that I keep coming back to is the reality of the simulator's world
>> itself.
>>
>> Let's say that K_0 is equal to the number of worlds that are simulated
>> with fidelity in the neighborhood of the fidelity of ours.  This means
>> that, comparing all the simulated worlds with the original world, there is
>> a 1/K_0 chance that we are in the original world.  And we reject the null
>> hypothesis that we are in a real world, as long as 1/K_0 is less than some
>> chosen probability which we can call p_real.
>>
>> However, can't you make a similar argument for the world of the
>> simulator?  How many worlds are there with a fidelity close to theirs?
>> Well, I would say that, since it requires more processing power, the amount
>> of worlds like that is less than K_0, call it K_1.  So comparing all the
>> worlds like that to the world of their potential simulator, there is a
>> 1/K_1 chance they are real.  This is still likely less than p_real.
>>
>> But if you keep applying this argument, eventually we reach a world which
>> has so many levels of simulation in its simulations, that it's rare enough
>> that their world is likely to be real.
>>
>> The next question is, what the hell is that world like?  Does that world
>> simply have access to more processing power?  Why?
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