John Ku wrote:
I think I am conceiving of the dialectic in a different way from the
way you are imagining it. What I think Bostrom and others are doing is
arguing that if the world is as our empirical science says it is,
then the anthropic principle actually yields the prediction that we
are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. That is the
argument I was addressing.
There is another way you can try to run the argument where you are
just directly trying to argue that we are living in a computer
simulation or that we can't know that we aren't because there are no a
priori reasons we can marshall against it. I think this argument is
much less interesting. For one thing, this argument is nothing new and
has been around at least since Descartes and his idea that there could
just be an evil demon deceiving us into thinking there are other minds
and an external world and probably extending back to the Greek skeptics.
...
Try this then:
If the world as we know it is a simulation, it might be a simulation of
something far in the past of the species running the simulation, on the
analogy of historical fiction. And it might be no more an accurate
simulation than is much historical fiction. On can presume that a lot
of "consistency checking" could be performed by sub-intelligent
functions, so that the resulting fiction would be consistent in as many
ways as the author of the fiction chose.
I don't find it useful to presume that I'm living in a simulation. That
leaves too many unanswered questions about "how should I act?" and "is
that a zimboe I see before me?"...questions that are not only
unanswered, but which appear in principle unaddressable.
If I presume that I'm living in the "real world", then I *may* be making
the choices of action that would be correct were I living in a
simulation, and I *am* making my best effort at the choices of action
that are appropriate if I'm not.
Yes, I see no valid argument asserting that this is not a simulation
fiction that some other entity is experiencing. And there's no
guarantee that sometime soon he won't "put down the book". But this
assumption yields no valid guide as to how I should act, so I ignore the
possibility.
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