You are using Occam's Razor incorrectly. A preference for parismony in problem solving is not identical with parsimony being the only state of the world.
As a side note, which directly applies to your comment, Occam's Razor was invented by Friar William of Ockham as a defense of divine miracles.
"Everything is really under control of invisible stuff" make it impossible to use parisomy under any circumstances. It fundamentally discards Occam's Razor.
Occam's Razor was invented by Friar William of Ockham as a defense of divine miracles.
While I wouldn't personally accept a God that acts in the world, the argument is about having some sort of evidence based interpretation of the world. Flying Spaghetti Monster is response to arguments like "God makes the rain fall" etc, not to a God that appears in the world but a God that can essentially be evoked for anything and in any fashion.
You are fundamentally misunderstanding Occam's Razor. It is not a law - Occam's Razor is a preference for how to view the world, not a law that was violated. [1]
There are alternate rules-of-thumb, such as one by Ockham's contemporary, Walter Chatton. Chatton created Chatton's anti-razor in opposition to Ockham's Razor: "Consider an affirmative proposition, which, when it is verified, is verified only for things; if three things do not suffice for verifying it, one has to posit a fourth, and so on in turn [for four things, or five, etc.]. (Reportatio I, 10–48, paragraph 57, p. 237)" [2]
[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ockham/#OckhRazo
[2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/walter-chatton/#AntiRazo
Yes, Occam's Razor isn't a law but a method of understanding reality. My point is that if you throw out Occam's Razor in total, not in one or another situations, you're left with nothing to understand the world with.
The "God wants it that ways" and "because it's simulation" can be substituted for any proposition at all under any circumstances and there's not counter argument to such substitutions. This approach is also "the paranoid worldview" - "because they want to think that" also has this "insert everywhere" quality.
And you're link describing the original ideas of William of Occam doesn't what you'd imagine. "Occam's Razor" is broad approach that's evolved over time and just takes that label for convennience. Virtually no one is evoking the authority of William of Occam or claiming to follow his Nominalism or whatever. The generally means that adding unneeded hypotheses should generally be avoided. If you can never follow that guide, you're in trouble.
Same thing if someone engineers a super complicated method to murder someone while appearing to physically be at a different place. It isn't the simplest explanation, but it can still be correct!
Sure. But if the entirety of reality is created by magicians, then one's concept of reality collapses. The "simulation" view point is indeed pretty much the idea that magicians control everything.
If you read the argument above, my point isn't that Occam's Razor is always correct but if you posit a world where it is generally/always incorrect, your ability to coherently understand reality collapses.
This is the logical fallacy with what you wrote. You don't know what is needed or unneeded.
A logical fallacy is an error in reasoning that is based on poor or faulty logic.
Lol, it seems clear you are the one setting up a debate and attempting to win it. I actually am working on the implications of the "simulation" argument. All of my positions are based "plausible reasoning" with similarities to formal logic being only incidental.
EDIT: maybe we need another word in this context besides 'creationist' since it has a lot of baggage in the culture at this point. What else to call someone who hypothesizes that there is some kind of intelligence behind the universe? The simulationists seem to fit into that category as do the various flavors of 'creationist', 'intelligent design', 'theistic evolutionist' and probably even Hindus, etc.
Interestingly, I think some of the distinction as to why this idea is more palatable is that it doesn't require "supernatural" or "magic" deities. The "creator" could be just like us. We already have evidence that creating virtual worlds is possible--we do it ourselves with games, so I think it takes a lot less faith, as we have a limited proof of principle already.
Also, most magical creationism is totally untestable. You can make some predictions about a simulation, though. If simulations are subject to constraints, which is likely, you should be able to ascertain, in the design of the universe, that items with the biggest O might be subject to performance optimizations. If you find lazy loading, caching, or other performance optimizations at the smallest scale (biggest O), which is what this might predict, you at least have some hints.
I respect people who believe in a bearded White omnipotent homophobic God who lives in a sky palace more than I respect people who believe in this insane drivel about the probability of living in a simulation. At least the former were indoctrinated as their brain was forming.
I think you've expressed a number of confusions.
First, I think you contradicted yourself. The line you quote says that posthuman civilizations are unlikely to create simulations, but you say this is false because a universe simulation requires more power than available in the universe. So you're agreeing with the outcome while saying you're disagreeing.
Second, I suggest reading the the paper fully, because Bostrom explains that we don't need full universe simulations, we need only consciousness simulations (kind of like the Matrix). The very premise of a post-human civilization is that they have knowledge sufficiently advanced that they have algorithms to simulate human minds.
Much like how video games only render the part of the world that is visible to the players, so a consciousness simulation only needs to simulate minds and their perceptions of a macroscopic, classical world, they do not have to simulate a full quantum universe. Our brains are great at filling in information that we expect to be there, so even the parts that we directly perceivedon't need to be simulated with complete fidelity.
Frankly, I don't think you've given the argument sufficient thought, but by a happy accident you picked exactly the outcome that I think is most likely, and I elaborate on why here:
https://higherlogics.blogspot.com/2021/02/why-we-are-likely-...
Right, but the simulation is nonetheless bottlenecked by whichever system requires the greatest fidelity, and the more technology advances, the more of a problem that becomes. For instance, medieval times would likely be far easier to simulate than modern times, because the latter requires simulating our entire computer infrastructure.
And I think that infrastructure is harder to simulate than you'd think: I could use a solver on a big NP problem (we'll assume that P != NP), get a solution after an hour, and in theory, with some practice, I could probably check if the answer is correct in my head. So the simulator can't simply give me what I "expect". It has to actually compute the thing, and then it's clear that the faster our computers get, the slower the simulation has to run.
Alternatively, the simulation could mess with our minds so we never notice anything out of place, but at that point I'm not sure I understand the point of it. Might as well wonder if this is all a dream.
Agreed.
> because the latter requires simulating our entire computer infrastructure.
Maybe, that isn't clear. There are probably plenty of optimisations here too if given some thought.
> I could use a solver on a big NP problem (we'll assume that P != NP), get a solution after an hour, and in theory, with some practice, I could probably check if the answer is correct in my head.
Yes, but note that we very rarely solve NP or EXPTIME problems exactly due to the costs. We often solve them heuristically or approximately, which wouldn't pose a problem for a simulation either.
Then there's also the possibility that we are simply not free to choose the problem to solve. When running a solver for an NP problem, we just need to input any kind of NP problem, and a simulation could easily have large sets of precomputed solutions available.
> Alternatively, the simulation could mess with our minds so we never notice anything out of place, but at that point I'm not sure I understand the point of it
Depends on whether any such changes affects the point of the simulation. If the simulation is to test world-scale economic models, then isolated tribes wouldn't have much influence on those outcomes.
Then again, maybe the point is simply entertainment. Maybe we're just The Sims for post-humans, in which case there's no point anyway.
Idle curiosity is drives a lot of human behaviour, particularly in philosophy!
No, they are saying the opposite. The argument that simulating the universe requires more atoms than the universe says that a later civilization would not simulate the entire universe. IE, #2 of the refutations really true.
The simulation only needs to produce observations that are consistent with the knowledge of the first observer. Sometimes bit even that, as I describe in the blog post, because eyewitness testimony is known to be quite unreliable.
I'm not sure what sort of history you're thinking of specifically.
The amount of information science could infer on many questions is strictly bounded and in those cases we could only reason stochastically. The data presented at time of first observation can then be generated randomly from the set of answers consistent with what's already known.
The place to implement an optimization like this would be at the items with the biggest O in your world, which is usually the smallest building block--what you'd have the "most" of, which would drive the largest memory and processing demands.
Also, why the assumption that post-humans are running the simulations (as in the paper)? Couldn't it be any ultra-advanced civilization that's playing with an evolutionary simulation?
> Also, why the assumption that post-humans are running the simulations (as in the paper)? Couldn't it be any ultra-advanced civilization that's playing with an evolutionary simulation?
Sure, potentially. The paper makes no assumptions about the existence of other life forms, it instead extrapolates the likelihood of a simulation given the only intelligent life we know to exist: us.
Therefore you can see the simulation argument from that paper as a lower bound on the probability we live in a simulation. Positing the existence of other life forms that run random simulations can only increase the probability we're living in a simulation, assuming one of the other outcomes isn't more likely.
I think the parent poster was noting that it is a pretty fundamentally different argument than say, positing the existence of a creator, because we exist at all - and that said creator has certain specific requirements of us regarding what we do on Sundays, for instance, or with whom and when we have kids.
Is that a requirement of every flavor of creationism? Actually, maybe I shouldn't use 'creationism' in this context because that's a loaded term with a lot of baggage at this point. What else to call a hypothesis that asserts there's some kind of intelligence behind the universe that we see? Simulationists would seem to fall into that broader category as would old-school creationists.
Seems like first you'd need to have some kind of falsifiable evidence that we were in a simulation first before jumping there? Plenty of folks trying to do that though, without falling into the first case.
Personally it seems to have little to no real impact on anything I care about one way or another, so filed in the 'cute but who cares' bin.
Assuming any kind of simulation at all leads to more questions than answers - simply delegating the creation of the universe to the next turtle down. It's not a matter of how "persuasive" an argument is or isn't. It is the evidence the scientific method has produced from which we draw our conclusions.
A. The idea that intelligence beyond human beings would grant it's possessor power that are in ways absolute in very specific, rigid fashion. Human being can accomplish a lot of things. It's notable those things human beings do better than computers seem very tenuous. Humans seem to drive rather haphazardly yet humans drive much better than computers and driving overall seems a "bucket chemistry" sort of activity. Humans calculate much worse than computers and calculation is an exact, defined activity (arguable, the exact, defined activity). But for the singularians, transhuman devices will do the uncertain, tenuous activities that humans do but with "no mistakes". And for a lot human activities, "no mistakes" actually might not even mean anything. Despite humans driving better than computers, humans probably wouldn't even agree on what absolute good driving even means.
B. Simulation as exact map. Any human created simulation of some system is going to be an approximation of that system for the purpose of extracting particular phenomena. Some things are discarded, other focused on and simplified. A model of the solar has to consider conservation of energy or tiny deviations will produce instability over time since errors overall on unavoidable in current hardware. Even a simulation of a computer chip isn't useful unless one knows the chip's purpose is logical operations. But for Bostrom and partisans of
C. Incoherent ontology. If we could produce an exact model of a thing, which is the real subject and which is simulation? What if we could produce twenty "exact simulations", which is real? In a realm of unlimited hypotheticals and unlimited exact simulations, wouldn't a least a countable infinite simulations of "everything" exist. Which is real is quite a conundrum but this problem itself only exists in a world of multiplied objects which we actually have no reason to suppose exists.
As for aging and life extension, I honestly don't understand how anyone could reasonably think we shouldn't stop or reverse aging.
I can certainly comprehend why one would wish to become an immortal being incapable of death. But I just want to be human. Sure you can live forever, but at what cost? A fear for sunlight, garlic, and crosses? For me, "Death is very likely the single best invention of Life."
Not true! It implies we might find performance optimizations, especially at the lowest level. Lazy loading, caching, pointers to constants, that sort of thing. It also doesn't discard Occam's razor. We actually have examples of simulated worlds (physics engines in games), so we know they are possible, unlike the flying spaghetti monster.
Nah, as other have noted, no simulation could have a 1-1 relationship between data humans observe and data in a physical device that exists in a world congruent to what humans observe - because there aren't enough atoms in the reachable universe for this. So such simulation either compresses the actions it simulates using higher level constructs or its happening in some universe congruent to the world we're in. Any such machine is going be a product of a future we don't know about yet and so it's constraints could be wildly different. Moreover, since the standard assumption of this simulation foolishness is that future humans or future post-humans want to learn about their ancestors, one can naturally assume you mechanisms that compensate for any "glitches" that might otherwise be obvious. Which just adds to my original claim.
The issue is that you can only learn whether you're in a simulation if the simulator allows you to do so. Otherwise, the moment that you discover a performance optimization, the simulator could just pause the simulation, delete the discovery from your mind, and resume.
Being "in a simulation" doesn't imply that we're in simulation created by later humans, it doesn't give any indication how fine-grain the approximations are, etc. etc.
"We're in a simulation" fundamentally discard Occam's Razor in the fashion of the belief in God as controlling everything. And thus this belief has the same weight as belief in the Flying Spaghetti Monster [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Spaghetti_Monster