[ExI] simulation stat goofiness

[Darin Sunley]

Well that's just all of naturalistic philosophy:

"Given these premises, which seem reasonable, and the generally accepted
rules of logical implication, this counter-intuitive result seems to
follow. Prove me wrong."

It's a wonderful game, but one of the tricks to playing it well at a
professional level is to scrupulously never state anything that doesn't
follow trivially from your premises - you minimize your exposed attack
surface that way.

On Fri, Sep 18, 2020 at 9:23 AM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> 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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