Stupid Questions January 2015

Gondolinian

This thread is for asking any questions that might seem obvious, tangential, silly or what-have-you. Don't be shy, everyone has holes in their knowledge, though the fewer and the smaller we can make them, the better.

Please be respectful of other people's admitting ignorance and don't mock them for it, as they're doing a noble thing.

To any future monthly posters of SQ threads, please remember to add the "stupid_questions" tag.

Please be respectful of other people's admitting ignorance and don't mock them for it, as they're doing a noble thing.

To any future monthly posters of SQ threads, please remember to add the "stupid_questions" tag.

I have the following questions regarding the simulation argument:

Unless I’m missing something, it is always (?) talked about “ancestor” simulations. So, my questions are:

Why does it have to be an “ancestor” simulation?

Couldn’t it be also considered that there are civilizations that run simulations of civilizations that were never “real”?

I.e. couldn’t we be a simulated civilization that was never an ancestor to the civilization that is simulating us?

And sub-questions would be:

So, maybe consciousness is unique in our simulation, i.e. those who simulate us don’t have consciousness?

So, maybe death is unique/special in our simulation, i.e. those who simulate us don’t die?

Thanks very much in advance.

I forget the details, but I think the argument intentionally focuses on ancestor simulations for epistemic reasons, to preserve a similarity between the simulating and simulated universes. If you don't assume that the basement-level universe is quite similar to our own, it's hard to reason about its computational resources. It's also hard to tell in what proportion a totally different civilization would simulate human civilizations, hence the focus on ancestor simulations. I'm not sure if this is a conservative assumption (giving some sort of lower bound) or just done for tractability.

ETA: See FAQs #4 and #11 here.