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Will_Newsome

[Post redacted 'cuz I unfairly and carelessly misrepresented someone's views (Eliezer's). The messages of this post was: disbelief that aliens visit Earth in spaceships is a bad reason not to look into ufology. My apologies for this ugly post.]

I was just re-reading Doc Smith's Subspace Explorers last night, and it occurred to me that if psionic powers existed, and if the model/theory he used in his book worked - a unity of sorts between the psychic's mental map and the real world - it would be significant evidence for living in a simulation. Maybe they were bugs, and they dried up because the simulation was debugged. Note that I don't think this is likely, the most likely explanation for psychic powers is still a combination of self-delusion and fraud.

(I'm sure you know this, but just to be clear, "self-delusion and fraud" is a fully general counterargument/explanation, and you likely wouldn't be motivated to use that counterargument/explanation unless you thought psi was unlikely for other unmentioned reasons.)

4TheOtherDave14y

I think you have an extra negation in your last sentence. Also, I can't quite see why a direct link between mental models and their referents is any stronger evidence of living in a simulation than anything else is. If it turns out that that's how reality works, then that's how reality works, and it's just as real in that case as the direct link between mass and the strength of gravitational attraction. I sort of have a similar intuition to yours, but it seems clear to me that in my case I'm simply reacting to how weird the psychic-powers thing sounds. (Where weird -> unreal in my head.) But of course reality is full of things that are weird until they are commonplace.

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