You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

occlude comments on Falsification - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: TheatreAddict 12 March 2012 03:59AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (39)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: occlude 12 March 2012 04:02:50PM 0 points [-]

Check out Occam's Razor. The Simulation Hypothesis requires that a real, physical universe exists, and that someone is simulating another universe within that "real" universe. P(our universe is a simulation within a "top level" universe) < P(ours is the "top level" universe), given no further evidence of simulation. The God hypothesis (typically) assumes the existence of a complex, sentient being -- not really a simple explanation when known physical laws can describe our observations.

Comment author: billswift 12 March 2012 04:43:07PM 1 point [-]

P(our universe is a simulation within a "top level" universe) < P(ours is the "top level" universe), given no further evidence of simulation.

I thought the argument was that since there will almost certainly be more simulated universes than the one real one, we are more likely to be in a simulation? Note that I don't have a strong opinion either way, I don't see, despite Robin's essay, that it makes any real difference.

Comment author: occlude 13 March 2012 03:01:14AM 0 points [-]

Robin ultimately calculates that he is probably not a sim in this post. Much like the variables in the Drake equation, Robin's probability estimates are built on a number of unknowns, so we really can't do the calculation. But I have to admit that my own logic failed to take any of these variables into consideration, so please ignore that part of the grandfather.