JonathanBirch

Thanks Benja. This is a good objection to the argument I make in the 'Rejecting Good Evidence' section of the paper, but I think I can avoid it by formulating BIP* more carefully.

Suppose I’m in a situation in which it currently appears to me as though f-sim = x. In effect, your suggestion is that, in this situation, my evidence can be characterized by the disjunction (A ∨ B). You then reason as follows:

(1) Conditional on A, my credence in SIM should be >= x.

(2) Conditional on B, my credence in SIM should be 1.

(3) So overall, given that A and B are mutually exclusive, my credence in SIM should be >= x.

I... (read more)

Thanks, everyone, for your comments on my paper. It’s great to see that it is generating discussion. I think I ought to take this opportunity to give a brief explanation of the argument I make in the paper, for the benefit of those who haven’t read it.

The basic argument goes like this. In the first section, I point out that the ‘Simulation Argument’ invokes (at different stages) two assumptions that I call Good Evidence (GE) and Impoverished Evidence (IE). GE is the assumption that I possess good evidence regarding the true physical limits of computation. IE is the assumption that my current evidence does not support any empirical claims non-neutral with respect... (read more)