Open thread, 21-27 April 2014

Metus

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Thread started before the end of the last thread to ecourage Monday as first day.

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Thread started before the end of the last thread to ecourage Monday as first day.

Sorry if this has topic has been beaten to death already here. I was wondering if anyone here has seen this paper and has an opinion on it.

The abstract: "This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed."

Quite simple, really, but I found it extremely interesting.

http://people.uncw.edu/guinnc/courses/Spring11/517/Simulation.pdf

The argument falls apart once you use UDT instead of naive anthropic reasoning: http://lesswrong.com/lw/jv4/open_thread_1117_march_2014/aoym

0[anonymous]12y

I've seen it. It seemingly ignores the possibility that humanity will not go extinct [EDIT: in the near future, possibly into the tens of megayears] but will also never reach a 'posthuman state' capable of doing arbitrary ancestor simulations.

3gwern12y

Discussed occasionally: https://www.google.com/search?num=100&q=%22simulation%20argument%22%20site%3Alesswrong.com