Re:The Most Terrifying Thought Experiment
by eli_gottlieb on Saturday July 19, 2014 @05:52AM
(#8057093)
> Because any such statements aren't falsifiable (see Karl Popper).
We're going to have a thread about LessWrong and people bring up Karl "hypothetico-conjectural I DON'T REALLY BELIEVE THERE'S A SCIENTIFIC METHOD YOU MAKE THINGS UP WITH YOUR MAGICAL HUMAN MINDS" Popper?
For God's sake, it's not as is unfalsifiability doesn't have a meaning in Bayesian philosophy of science as well.
The assertion that we are living in a simulation has the same epistemological status as the assertion that God is a pygmy turtle who created the physical laws of the universe while smoking hashish.
You don't even have to think about Roko's Basilisk to get paranoid. You can just suppose that the turtle has rigged the universe so that if you urinate more than 4 times a day, your future children will slowly torture then murder you.
If you suppose that we are living in a simlulation, you can come up with any number of ghastly thoughts. You don't even need to suppose the conditions of Roko's Basilisk. That's just extra BS on top.
BTW, the reason I brought up "with the computers of today" is because the I think the only reason anybody believes simulation is possible is because computers exist. I'm pretty sure that nobody in the 19th century was writing about simulation, because they couldn't imagine a mechanism by which it is possible.
I still can't imagine a mechanism by which it's possible... but some people can, simply because computers can do kind of impressive things that are not really related to simulating the universe.