On 15 Oct 2012, at 22:04, Jason Resch wrote:
On Mon, Oct 15, 2012 at 12:56 PM, meekerdb <[email protected]>
wrote:
On 10/15/2012 7:33 AM, John Clark wrote:
Nick Bostrum, a philosopher at Oxford University wrote an
interesting paper on this subject:
http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html
The following is from the abstract:
"This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions
is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before
reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is
extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of
their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are
almost certainly living in a computer simulation."
I'd guess they are in order of decreasing probability.
I think there is an analogous "heaven argument". If there is a
thing as heaven, where you live forever and can remember moments of
your previous life with perfect clarity, then you almost certainly
are already in heaven and right now is one of your numerous
"recollections" rather than the original experience.
Yes. We comp we are in Platonia with probability 1.
But some part of Platonia can be hellish, so it might not been
necessary "heaven" in the sense used by many religion.
Regardless of what the probabilities for the simulation hypothesis
is, its possibility means these other extensions/continuations
exist, and it they may become probable in certain situations (e.g.,
near certain death).
With "exist" = "exist arithmetically". OK.
In fact if computationalism is correct, we are always in an infinity
of simulations. We might defined a simulation of order 0: they are
those where we discover exactly the comp-physics (the physics
extracted from comp) when we look below our common substitution level.
Then a simulation of order 1: this would be a simulation brought by
aliens, or our descendant, based on our physical reality (the most
probable sheaf of computations), etc. If the laws of physics inferred
from observations are different from the laws of physics based on the
comp reversal, this means that either comp is false, or that we are in
a simulation of order bigger than 0. We can only test this (and I have
been often slightly incorrect when saying that comp is 100% refutable:
it is only comp OR a simulation of order bigger than zero).
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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