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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   30778 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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Robin's view makes sense if we consider ourselves in the reference class of sentient beings experiencing a Fermi paradox. Robin's theory explains why we exist very early in the universe given our reference class. I think if we take our reference class to be sentient beings we should assume we are in a computer simulation run by Hawking radiation since for the vast majority of the time the universe will be capable of sustaining life we will be in the black hole era where the only source of free energy will be Hawking radiation. In the black hole era, the expansion of the universe will have made being a grabby civilization obsolete.

Why should we assume that the simulation is run by Hawking radiation in particular? If indeed we are in a simulation, it could well be the case that the universe containing the "hardware" running the simulation has free energy from sources other than Hawking radiation.

In fact, there is no strong reason a priori to assume that the universe-containing-the-simulator is similar to our (supposedly simulated) universe in any way whatsoever, except for similarities that are required for a simulation to exist in the first place -- so, for example, we can safely assume that the universe-containing-the-simulator has a nonzero amount of free energy ... that is, unless the assumption that computation requires free energy is itself a requirement only in our (simulated?) universe, and not a universal multiversal truth!

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