Z._M._Davis comments on The Gift We Give To Tomorrow - Less Wrong

44 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 17 July 2008 06:07AM

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Comment author: Z._M._Davis 17 July 2008 08:01:30PM 2 points [-]

Unknown: "We might be living in a simulation. If we are, [...] there is no reason to assume any likeness at all between our world and the real world. For example, the fundamental entities in the real world could be intelligent beings, instead of quarks."

Bostrom's simulation argument is only persuasive because it gives us reasons (posthuman civilization is plausible; posthumans could run ancestor simulations) from within our world for thinking that our world is a simulation that bears likeness to the "real" one. Without such reasons, the simulation hypothesis has no advantage over other hypotheses of extreme skepticism, like solipsism, Descartes's deceiving demon, &c.

Fox: "If you replace 'love' in this article with 'theistic spirituality' [...] would it not just as well argue for the propagation of religion to our descendants?"

I think the difference is that we're pretty sure that love actually exists, whereas God most probably doesn't. (We could just keep the emotion corresponding to "transcendent spiritual awe," while trashing the epistemology.)