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.

D_Malik comments on Open thread, 11-17 March 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: David_Gerard 11 March 2014 10:45PM

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

Comments (226)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Gunnar_Zarncke 13 March 2014 08:40:14AM 3 points [-]

On baseline of my opinion on LW topics I closed with the lemma:

''Arguments for the singularity are also (weak) arguments for theism.''

I'd want to know whether there is anything wrong with the following reasoning:

If the singularity is likely, then it is (somewhat less) likely that it is used to run what Bostrom calls ancestor simulation. As we cannot know the difference it follows that it is likely that we already are in a simulation.

If we are in simulation, then the physical parameters don't necessarily follow simple rules (occams razor) but may be altered in complex ways to suit the ends of the actor running the simulation. The alteration may take may forms but one form is to allow an interaction of the actor with the simulation - somewhat like in a computer game but 'infinitely' more 'real'.

The actor could choose to be a god in the simulation. Whether the actor chooses to do so in any simulation is another question which reduces the likelihood for our universe of course. He could play a bit and then loose interest for example or look at the results to compare it to models of religion (or provide hell/heaven if he so chooses).

The key point is that in a simulation-argument occams razor doesn't apply to gods and super-natural effects anymore. In the end increasing the likelihood of or finding arguments for the singularity amounts to this taking over to support theism - albeit with the caveat that it presumes an embedding universe, though this is no new really.

Comment author: D_Malik 14 March 2014 04:06:17PM 0 points [-]

in a simulation-argument occams razor doesn't apply to gods and super-natural effects

Occam still applies to the parent universe (I think). And predictions about the parent universe imply predictions about its child simulations.

So a variant of Occam (or at least, a prior over universes) still applies to the simulation. There are 2^100 more possible universes of description length 200 than of description length 100, so each 100-length universe is more probable than each 200-length universe, if the simulators are equally likely to simulate each length of universe. This fails if e.g. the simulators run every possible universe of length <300. It also fails if they try to mess with us somehow, e.g. by only picking universes that superficially look like much simpler universes.