I'm a tad annoyed that it apparently breaks my space bar - arrow keys and pgup/pgdwn work, but space does nothing.
Anyway, my basic reaction is that you give no interesting reasons for preferring a planetarium over a simulation besides philosophy of mind (most of which theories, I believe, would not predict any output difference in the absence of real qualia in a simulation) or efficiency (which to the extent we can analyze at all, weighs in strongly for simulation being more efficient).
I also don't understand how such an entity would even build a planetarium in the first place. Wouldn't any physical shell badly interfere with predictions of planetary or cometary orbits? Or cause parallax? etc. What would the timing be, and is there really no natural records that would throw off a planetarium constructed just in time for humans to be fooled (akin to testing the fine structure constant by looking at natural nuclear reactors from millions/billions of years ago)?
I'm a tad annoyed that it apparently breaks my space bar - arrow keys and pgup/pgdwn work, but space does nothing.
Google's fault. Thanks for letting me know, though.
Anyway, my basic reaction is that you give no interesting reasons for preferring a planetarium over a simulation
Right—the argument is pretty modest. It's mostly just that the planetarium hypothesis is on par with other hypotheses like the simulation argument.
I also don't understand how such an entity would even build a planetarium in the first place.
Yeah, I left this to "a wizar...
Here.
Long story short, it's an attempt to justify the planetarium hypothesis as a solution to the Fermi paradox. The first half is a discussion of how it and things like it are relevant to the intended purview of the blog, and the second half is the meat of the post. You'll probably want to just eat the meat, which I think is relevant to the interests of many LessWrong folk.
The blog is Computational Theology. It's new. I'll be the primary poster, but others are sought. I'll likely introduce the blog and more completely describe it in its own discussion post when more posts are up, hopefully including a few from people besides me, and when the archive will give a more informative indication of what to expect from the blog. Despite theism's suspect reputation here at LessWrong I suspect many of the future posts will be of interest to this audience anyway, especially for those of you who take interest in discussion of the singularity. The blog will even occasionally touch on rationality proper. So you might want to store the fact of the blog's existence somewhere deep in the back of your head. A link to the blog's main page can be found on my LessWrong user page if you forget the url.
I'd appreciate it if comments about the substance of the post were made on the blog post itself, but if you want to discuss the content here on LessWrong then that's okay too. Any meta-level comments about presentation, typos, or the post's relevance to LessWrong, should probably be put as comments on this discussion post. Thanks all!