Comment on Open thread, 11-17 March 2014

Fri, 14 Mar 2014 16:06:17 GMT

in a simulation-argument occams razor doesn't apply to gods and super-natural effects

Occam still applies to the parent universe (I think). And predictions about the parent universe imply predictions about its child simulations.

So a variant of Occam (or at least, a prior over universes) still applies to the simulation. There are 2^100 more possible universes of description length 200 than of description length 100, so each 100-length universe is more probable than each 200-length universe, if the simulators are equally likely to simulate each length of universe. This fails if e.g. the simulators run every possible universe of length <300. It also fails if they try to mess with us somehow, e.g. by only picking universes that superficially look like much simpler universes.

Discuss