RE: New website: The Simulation Argument
From: Nick Bostrom (nick@nickbostrom.com)
Date: Mon Dec 03 2001 - 17:17:11 MST
Damien wrote:
Nick assumes univocity all the way
down and sideways, whereas a Tiplerian version argues
for redemptive or meliorative alternative instantiations of all
possible
worlds, while a pure `experimentalist' perspective might expect
every
possible world, including unmitigated suffering to the highest
degree
inflicted as widely as feasible. The former would make the likelihood
of
this universe being exactly simmed very low indeed
If that is so, then most of the credence you assign to the
Simulation-hypothesis should be passed on to the more specific hypothesis
that we are living in a simulation and that posthumans mostly run
ancestor-simulations of a kind similar to the world that we are
experiencing.
(Note, BTW, that the likelihood of finding ourselves in situation x is
diminished by the postulation that most observers find themselves in
situation y only if the latter observers are in the same reference class
as we are. I can't go into it here, but this stuff (and much more!) is
described by my theory of observation selection effects, which I present
in a forthcoming book <plug> Anthropic Bias: Observation
Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy (Routledge, New York,
April 2002). Five sample chapters are available at
http://www.anthropic-principle.com/book/.
Or see how philosophy is relevant to traffic analysis,
http://plus.maths.org/issue17/features/traffic/index.html
:-) <\plug>)
it is an intriguing
exercise to consider the P values if the later is the case (are we most
probably in one of the `most mediocre possible worlds'? not too hot, not
too cold, just pretty damned ordinary).
That depends on the frequency of different kinds of simulated worlds, which in turn depends on the simulators' interests and inclinations, which are hard to predict.
Nick Bostrom
Department of Philosophy, Yale University
New Haven, CT 06520 | Phone: (203) 432-1663 | Fax: (203) 432-7950
Homepage: http://www.nickbostrom.com
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