Thread:User talk:Armondikov/Getting your dander up/reply (12)

Well, presuming a simulation would at first kick dualism in the teeth pretty hard because "I experience, therefore I am", but I'd only be code if simulated. But that's no different to showing that p-zombies are stupid as a serious concept.

One could make a "plea to mediocrity" type argument, well, a plea to a lack of mediocrity.

Note that a Turing Complete machine can simulate a Turing Complete machine inside it, which can simulate another inside that, and another, and another, and another... and so on. One would immediately conclude that "assume a simulation" as a first premise would imply that we can never know that we're at the "top" level or not; we assume we're in a simulated universe, but similarly people in the "real" world must also be simulated, and their "real" world is too simulated. I.e., nested simulations. Nested simulations are therefore an almost a logical certainty if you do anything as audacious as "assume a simulation" as a first premise - there's simply no way to break that chain of reasoning without special pleading. This produces an infinitely long chain of nesting, so one would expect, by chance to be in the middle of this chain (we expect to be average, and non-special by chance) and we would be running a simulation ourselves are are aware of it. No such simulation exists so we can conclude, at the very least, we're at the very bottom of the chain if one exists. Given that these nested simulations must go on forever if you "assume a simulation", our lack of mediocrity because we're not running Turing Complete simulations of universes ourselves must be pretty unlikely, indeed infinitesimally so. While it's not strong evidence, the simulation argument itself is probability based around premises no less absurd, so I feel I can get away with this for now as, while not a contradiction to simulation, at least a highly improbable implication.

But what if we go the other route and presume "no simulation"? Well, then we have less to work with as What You See Is What You Get. There's no way to prove a simulation from "presume no simulation".

In fact, there's also an observational issue over what one would mean by "simulation". By observational qualities alone, aka the only qualities that really matter, it would be real. In other words, we can't tell the difference between a "real" and "simulated" universe in either practice or principle. And by the law of identity, this must mean that a simulated universe is "real" by all possible descriptive definitions of "real". "Simulated" then ceases to have a meaningful distinction, and Occam's Razor simply collapses us down to defining it as "real".

Don't tell me that this is any more absurd than the simulation hypothesis itself.