nigerweiss comments on [Paper] On the 'Simulation Argument' and Selective Scepticism - Less Wrong

11 Post author: Pablo_Stafforini 18 May 2013 06:31PM

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Comment author: nigerweiss 19 May 2013 07:17:53PM 7 points [-]

Unless P=NP, I don't think it's obvious that such a simulation could be built to be perfectly (to the limits of human science) indistinguishable from the original system being simulated. There are a lot of results which are easy to verify but arbitrarily hard to compute, and we encounter plenty of them in nature and physics. I suppose the simulators could be futzing with our brains to make us think we were verifying incorrect results, but now we're alarmingly close to solipsism again.

I guess one way to to test this hypothesis would be to try to construct a system with easy-to-verify but arbitrarily-hard-to-compute behavior ("Project: Piss Off God"), and then scrupulously observe its behavior. Then we could keep making it more expensive until we got to a system that really shouldn't be practically computable in our universe. If nothing interesting happens, then we have evidence that either we aren't in a simulation, or P=NP.

Comment author: Luke_A_Somers 20 May 2013 12:23:12AM *  0 points [-]

, or the simulating entity has mindbogglingly large amounts of computational power. But yes, it would rule out broad classes of simulating agents.