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lmm comments on Does the simulation argument even need simulations? - Less Wrong
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I don't think that can be right. We believe in the continued existence of stars that have moved so far away that we can't possibly observe them (due to inflation).
Yet, that belief constrains our observations.
How does it? What would be observe differently if some mysterious god destroyed those stars as soon as they moved out of causal contact with humanity?
No, but the hypothesis of a mysterius god destroying stars exactly when our best cosmological models predict we should stop seeing them is unparsimonious.
And anyway, distant stars never appear to cross the cosmological event horizon from our reference frame. Their light becomes redshifted so much that we can't detect it anymore.
Sure. But believing or not believing in it doesn't constrain what we expect to observe, just the same as "the belief that we are living in a computer simulation/a projection of the Platonic Hyperuranium/a dream of a god". What's different from the situation in your first post?
Point of order:
i feel like we shouldn't be putting these two so close together.
"All mathematical statements are equally real"
and
"We are being simulated"
seem like two different claims that shouldn't be blurred together - the first is a matter of ontology and semantics, the second is a matter of fact. If all mathematical structures are equally real it might have weird moral implications, especially for simulations, but even if we successfully reject the idea that all mathematical structures are equally real it does not rule out the simulation hypothesis, and if we accept the idea that all mathematical structures are equally real it does not confirm the simulation hypothesis.
Epistemology 101, part two: choose the simplest hypothesis among those which are observationally undistinguishable from each other.
I think the hypothesis that human civilization will at some point derive the ultimate laws of physics, along with enough observations about the state of the early universe to construct a reasonable simulation thereof, is simpler than the alternative - to say that we won't seems to require some additional assumption that scientific progress would stop.
If we accept the existence of a large number of simulated universes, then while I don't have a good theory of anthropics, rationalists should win, and blindly assuming that one is not in a simulation seems like it leads to losing a lot of the time (e.g. my example of betting a cookie with Bob elsewhere in these comments).
It is not possible, and it never will be possible, to simulate within our universe something as complex our own universe itself, unless we discover a way to perform infinite computations using finite time, matter and energy, which would violate many known laws of physics.
We already are able to simulate "universes" simpler than our own (e.g. videogames), but this doesn't imply, even probabilistically, that our universe is itself a simulation. Analogy is not a sound argument.
Why not? Because you assign them a low anthropic weighting, or some other reason? (I also had an argument that the Dyson computation applies, but I think that's actually beside the point)
If the simplest possible explanation for our sensory observations includes a universe that contains simulations of other universes, it's a reasonable question which kind we are in, even if they don't all have the same physical laws or the same amount of matter. There's no a propi reason to privilege one hypothesis or the other.
The hypothesis that there exist another universe, certainly much different from ours in many aspects, quite possibly with a different set of physical laws, is more complex that the hypothesis that no such universe exists. Futhermore, you could iterate the simulation argument ad infinitum, "turtles all the way down", yielding an infinitely complex hypothesis.