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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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I don't think we can draw any meaningful conclusions based on the hypothesis that our current layer is a simulation

You're the one claiming the Fermi Paradox has merit even in a simulation.

The argument that "our simulators must be simulating something similar to their reality" is I think pretty weak

Yes, I know. Are we even having the same conversation? Two posts up I said "This does not tell us much about what the simulators' universe actually looks like, or what resemblance it bears to ours, if any."

You're the one claiming the Fermi Paradox has merit even in a simulation.

I didn't say "we can't draw any conclusions if we're in a simulation." What I said was "We can't draw any conclusions based on the hypothesis that we're in a simulation." Essentially what I'm saying is that that hypothesis gives us very, very little evidence towards anything and so even if we are in a simulation we can reason as if we are not.

Yes, I know. Are we even having the same conversation? Two posts up I said "This does not tell us much about what the simulators' universe actually looks like, or what resemblance it bears to ours, if any."

You're the one drawing conclusions based on hypotheses about what our simulators' universe actually looks like. Namely, your conclusions rely on an assumption that other universes similar to ours are also being simulated, and I don't think that there's any good evidence for that.

Essentially what I'm saying is that that hypothesis gives us very, very little evidence towards anything and so even if we are in a simulation we can reason as if we are not.

Obviously not, since your posture leaves you confused why we aren't apparently in a grabby civilization, and mine solves that. The simulation hypothesis doesn't provide a lot of concrete advice, but it does solves some anthropic dilemmas such as the Fermi Paradox.

Namely, your conclusions rely on an assumption that other universes similar to ours are also being simulated

It does not, in any respect. Already said this several posts up: "This does not tell us much about what the simulators' universe actually looks like, or what resemblance it bears to ours, if any, but it does tell us that we probably aren't in the bottom layer."

OK, tell me, how does this solve the Fermi Paradox? Please do so without relying on any information about what the simulators' universe is like, including information on what they're simulating.

The Fermi Paradox basically says, isn't it weird that the universe seems so easily colonizable, yet hasn't been colonized? The Simulation Hypothesis says, no, that isn't weird, because once you agree that we're in a simulation, the best that the Fermi Paradox brand of anthropic reasoning can demonstrate is that the set of simulations that our simulators are running does not make it overwhelmingly likely that we'd find ourselves in a simulation where the skies are filled with grabby aliens. No paradox left!

Sure, and there are all sorts of other possible explanations for the Fermi Paradox too. Could be that God simply banned aliens, they're hiding from us, we're wrong about how physics works in some drastic way, there's a snail in the Andes which excretes a gas which renders us incapable of perceiving aliens and their effects, etc. When I hear "paradox" I don't think "there is no possible explanation for this," what I think is "this seems to indicate that we're wrong about the universe in some fundamental way."

The simulation hypothesis can definitely explain the Fermi Paradox, but I think reasoning in that way is very unproductive. The simulation hypothesis can also explain literally anything else--we just surmise that things are the way they are because that's how they were simulated to be. Because of this, I don't think it makes sense to use the simulation hypothesis to explain anything at all.

For example, let's say we're contemporaries of Einstein when he's coming up with relativity. There were issues with the Newtonian model, and it would absolutely be valid to say something like "all this shows is that our simulators are adjusting the numbers behind the scenes." It would also be valid to come up with a million other possible explanations, but each of those explanations has no actual explanatory value, it's just post-hoc reasoning. You can't use your hypothesis that "aliens adjust the numbers behind the scenes" to predict how the numbers will be adjusted, even though it absolutely does address and nullify the "paradox" that the numbers aren't adding up the way we'd expect them to.

So building off of that, EVEN IF WE ARE BEING SIMULATED, I don't think that we can use that hypothesis for anything at all, since it will equally explain literally anything. Maybe on their layer of reality, the opposite of anthropic reasoning is true, so we just find ourselves alone due to how logic actually works. Maybe cause and effect don't actually exist, nor does logic, and the Fermi Paradox is nothing but an illusion created by our feverish minds trying to force patterns onto a naturally chaotic reality.

There are plenty of non-simulation ways to resolve the Fermi paradox too, but they rely on fairly unsupported claims (such as that life is vanishingly unlikely to arise even on optimal planets) and I think that's what you're doing here too.

I don't think that even granted we're in a simulation, we can make any conclusions at all based on that knowledge.

The simulation hypothesis can definitely explain the Fermi Paradox, but I think reasoning in that way is very unproductive. The simulation hypothesis can also explain literally anything else--we just surmise that things are the way they are because that's how they were simulated to be.

No, it specifically addresses anthropic dilemmas differently and more comprehensively than other types of uncertainty, as I've already explained, and which addresses the remaining four paragraphs of your response.

Your point is essentially that the type of simulation can outweigh the anthropic dilemma, right? The simulators choose to simulate universes like ours, so universes like ours outweigh grabby universes?

I understand that, which is why I've made such a big point out of arguing that we can't know what the simulators are like at all. We can't even know that it's universes like ours that are getting simulated; I think that that is too much of a stretch not backed up by anything.

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