In many discussions I'm pulled back to the distinction between not-guilty and innocent as a way to demonstrate how the burden of proof works and what the true default position should be in any given argument. A lot of people seem to not have any problem seeing the distinction, but many intelligent people for some reason don't see it.
In this article I explain why the distinction exists and why it matters, in particular why it matters in real-life scenarios, especially when people try to shift the burden of proof.
Essentially, in my view the universe we are talking about is {uncertain,guilty,innocent}, therefore not-guilty is guilty', which is {uncertain,innocent}. Therefore innocent ⇒ not-guilty, but not-guilty ⇏ innocent.
When O. J. Simpson was acquitted, that doesn’t mean he was found innocent, it means the prosecution could not prove his guilt beyond reasonable doubt. He was found not-guilty, which is not the same as innocent. It very well could be that the jury found the truth of the matter uncertain.
This notion has implications in many real-life scenarios when people want to shift the burden of proof if you reject a claim when it's not substantiated. They wrongly assume you claim their claim is false (equivalent to innocent), when in truth all you are doing is staying in the default position (uncertain).
Rejecting the claim that a god exists is not the same as claim a god doesn't exist: it doesn't require a burden of proof because it's the default position. Agnosticism is the default position. The burden of proof is on the people making the claim.
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Notes -
What about Bostrom's Simulation argument?
https://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.pdf
Either it's very difficult/impossible to reach a high level of civilizational achievement (controlling the resources of many star systems), or civilizations that do this totally shun simulating their ancestors, or we are in a simulation.
It should be trivial for a powerful civilization to simulate their ancestors, they ought to have billions of times more computing power than is necessary, billions of years to have their fun. Even if they're just operating on the physics we know (which is a dubious assumption given that we take lots of shortcuts in our own simulations), planetary scale computers would do the trick very nicely. You wouldn't need something really advanced like a Matrioshka brain.
It seems very likely they would do this. A lot of people today play games simulating our history. Maybe if we have a certain kind of hostile AGI taking over every single time, that would prevent ancestor simulations. But would every single civilization fall to AGI? That seems unlikely. It only takes one powerful real civilization to create millions, billions of ancestor-simulations. We should conclude that most pre-singularity civilizations exist in simulation.
Thus it seems very reasonable to conclude that we are in a simulation and we are thus ruled by a deity. Unlike with traditional religions, we have empirical proof of how God's powers of creation could work based upon principles we already understand and observe. There's no need to justify prophets, miracles or other dubious functions. There is no need to justify a benevolent God ruling over a harsh universe - we can assume our simulators are not really interested in our welfare.
You can invert the burden of proof argument. If we take agnosticism as default, that's the same as saying we're not sure whether we live on the highest level of reality or any of the myriad lower levels of simulation. I reckon it's overwhelmingly more likely that we live in a simulation, likely a nested simulation. There's only one highest level, there are surely many many lower levels.
I see people make this probabilistic fallacy very often. You can say
Xis very likely, so it's reasonable to conclude it's true, but winning Russian roulette is likely, do you think it's reasonable to conclude you will win? This doesn't change with higher values ofX.If you change the statement to "it's reasonable to conclude that we are likely in a simulation", then I would agree.
I don't believe
rand() < 0.99istrue, because it could befalse.I think you're making an isolated demand for rigour here. You can't be 100% sure of anything except "there are thoughts" because the chance that a Cartesian Daemon is screwing with your thought process is not zero. So if you require 100% certainty to call anything "true", your set of "true statements" has one member.
I don't require 100% certainty to call anything true, but even if I did, I don't need to call absolutely anything true.
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Eh, why should it be trivial to simulate a younger civilization?
Say our ancestors want to simulate Earth alone in real time. The stars and microwave background and gravity waves are just a projector on a sheet. How many bits of information are in that bubble? By definition, I don’t think they could fit on an Earth-sized computer.
The problem can be handwaved away if our simulators exist in different laws of physics, but we’re assuming that our own laws reflect theirs. Memory can also be traded off for time if our perceptions can be stepped frame-by-frame. That tradeoff opens up the possibility that higher reality just hasn’t had long enough to run a simulation of our observed fidelity. I don’t think that’s a knockout, just another possible resolution to the paradox.
He discusses this in the paper:
a rough approximation of the computational power of a planetary‐mass
computer is 10^42 operations per second, and that assumes only already known
nanotechnological designs, which are probably far from optimal. A single such a
computer could simulate the entire mental history of humankind (call this an
ancestor‐simulation) by using less than one millionth of its processing power for
one second.
You just take shortcuts. You don't need to simulate the whole atomic-level phenomena unless it's actually being used, if someone is pointing an electron microscope at it for example. Or if they make it into a semiconductor. The interior of the Earth can be simplified hugely too, along with much of the deep oceans.
And if it takes a million or a billion times more processing power than expected for whatever reason, they could increase their computing operations to match. The galaxy is not short of stars or planets to be converted.
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I wish this argument would be true.
It is unfortunately inept however, have you any idea of the energy and computing power needed to simulate a universe? Have you any idea of the energy and computing power needed to simulate a bottle of water at the atomic level? A single cell ? We can barely exhaustively study quantum systems with more than 2 particles IIRC
The universe has finite resources and the constraints of mathematics are universal or even meta-universal and so is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_complexity your hypothetical aliens must bends to those extreme limits. Even mankind has already mostly reached them, we have extreme diminishing returns everywhere.
Bostrom did the maths - he found that a planetary-scale computer operating on principles we know has more than enough computing power, provided you take a few shortcuts. Only go to the full quantum simulation if it's actually needed, like if there's an electron microscope pointing at the target. The twin slits phenomenon is one example of the kind of method they could use.
Why do people assume that a simulation needs to be perfect down to the very last particle? Most of that stuff is just noise. You can have everything outside the solar system be an elaborate skybox, abstract away most of the Earth's crust aside from tectonic drift and volcano/earthquakes. The Sun can be greatly simplified.
Furthermore, what stops them using methods unknown to us, or methods that they deliberately leave out of the simulation? One might just as well say it would be prohibitively expensive to make a Minecraft computer capable of simulating the world they observe in Minecraft. They can't automate the construction of redstone circuitry like we can - and there is no notion of quantum computing at all in Minecraft. Say that there's such a thing as 'Quantum Computing 2' using more advanced physics that we can't even access - that would make it very easy. But that's not even required, according to Bostrom's analysis.
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