I believe if you read my previous comments, you'll see that they all are attempts to do exactly this. I will bow out of this conversation now.

(Meta: you're tripping my troll sensers. I'm sorry if it's unintentional on your part. I'm just not getting the sense that you're trying to understand me. Or it's the case that the two of us just really cannot communicate in this forum. Either way, it's time to call it quits.)

EDIT: Your response to this has caused my P(you're trolling me) to rise from ~60% to ~95%.

Ah, you're disagreeing with the model and phrasing it as "if that model were true, no one would sell you btc, but people are willing to sell, therefore that model is false." Do I understand?

If so, I do not agree that "if that model were true, no one would sell you btc" is a valid inference.

You have mentioned the Mathematical Universe hypothesis several times, and Tegmark's is a name very much associated with it, ...

Right, I know what the MUH is, I know who Tegmark is, I just don't recognize terms that are a combination of his name and (im)materialism. Please taboo your terms! I don't know what they mean to you!

If anything, let's call my position "non-distinctionalism"-- I maintain that there's no other coherent models for the word "exist" than the one I mentioned earlier, and people who use the word "exist" without that model are just talking gibberish. There's no distinction between "material existence" and "immaterial existence" in the sense that the first clause of this sentence is meaningless noise.

You second sentence doens't follow from your first. Someone can define "material existence" as existence in your sense, plus some additional constraint, such as the "world" in which the pattern is found being a material world.

Yes, if you look at the last paragraph, I (tried to) say explicitly that is my desired state of the terms, it's just not the standard usage, afaik.

So, if I were writing the terms, "material existence" = exists in our sub-branch of the MUH, "immaterial existence" = exists in a sub-branch of the MUH inaccessible to us (except via simulation). However, I don't think people ordinarily use the word "material" to mean this.

Actually, now that I think about it, I think that's a bad way to think of things. Really, the concept those terms would express is accessibility, not existence. When I hear other people say things like "immaterial existence", my brain interprets that as "exists, but not in a branch of the MUH," which I think is gibberish.

What Vaniver said. Also, emperically, you can look at the current price/order book on an exchange and see that people are in fact willing to sell you these things. If my holdings represented a life altering sum of money it would be time to take less risk and I would be one of those people.

The computer doesn't hold cash (clearly), it has account # and password of a bank account (or private key to bitcoin addresses if it's a particularly risky computer). The two thin computers therefore only have half as much money to bet. (Or they'll overdraw their account.)

Bitcoin is plenty liquid right now unless you're throwing around amounts > $1 mil or so.

Thanks for editing-- I'm still puzzled.

I also don't know what "Tegmarkian immaterialism" is and I'm not arguing for or against it. I do not know what "immaterialism" is and I'm also not arguing for or against that. (Meta: stop giving either sides of my arguments names without first giving the names definitions!)

If anything, let's call my position "non-distinctionalism"-- I maintain that there's no other coherent models for the word "exist" than the one I mentioned earlier, and people who use the word "exist" without that model are just talking gibberish. There's no distinction between "material existence" and "immaterial existence" in the sense that the first clause of this sentence is meaningless noise. I can be disproved by being informed of another coherent model. I maintain that my thought experiment shows that it's difficult to hold any distinction between exists-in-reality and exists-in-the-mathematical-multiverse.

(If I were king of the world, "immaterial existence" would mean "exists in an inaccessible place of the mathematical universe", but for me to use the term that way would currently be idiosyncratic and just confuse everyone further.)

I think we are having very significant communication difficulties. I am very puzzled that you think that I think that I'm arguing against MUH. I think something like MUH is likely true. I do not know what "Tegmarkian materialism" is and I'm not defending or attacking it. I also cannot make sense of some of your sentences, there seems to be some sort of editing problem.

So far, none of this tells us what immateriality is. But then it isn't easy to say what matter is either.

Yeah. There's supposedly two mysterious substances. My claim is that I can't see a reason to claim they're separate, and this thought experiment is (possibly) a demonstration that they're in fact same thing. Then we still have one mysterious substance, and I'm not claiming to make that any less mysterious with this argument.

There are more than two options. If you had evidence of a bitstring corresponding to a billions of years of biological development involving trillions of organims -- amuch more comple bitstring than a mind, but not a mind,-- it might well be most probable to assign the production of a mind to that.

I don't know if you realise it, but your argument was Paleyian

Whoa, I think you understood something pretty different from what I was trying to say. I was definitely not claiming a deity of some sort must have been responsible! Let me repeat with unambiguous labels:

(1) Given that you've found a bitstring in a simulation that represents mind M existing, taking actions, and feeling things, ... it's therefore (4) vastly more probable that mind M actually performed computations in the course of producing that bitstring, than it is that you found it randomly.

Yes, of course mind M will have been the result of some evolutionary process in any universe I can imagine finding via simulation, but that dosen't make mind M less real. I suppose you could probably see this as a special case/expansion of the Anti Zombie Principal-- any system that produces the outputs of a mind (at least) contains that mind.

(If you meant something else by the Paleyian comment, you'll have to spell it out for me. I'm not the one that downvoted you and I appreciate the continued interaction.)

What would "immaterial existence" even mean?

I don't know exactly, but if "material existence" means something, so does "immaterial existence".

Hm. I don't think "material existence", if it's a thing, has a unique opposite.

I guess I'd define exists-in-the-real-world as equivalent to a theoretical predicate function that takes a model of a thing, and a digitized copy of our real world, and searches the world for patterns that are functionally isomorphic (given the physics of the world) to the model, and returns true iff it finds one or more.

This model of existence doesn't work if you don't supply the real world (or at least a world) as an argument. I'm interpreting "immaterial existance" as "exists, but not in a world" which seems like a logical impossibility to me. Of course, this is a function of how I've defined "exists", but I don't know of a better way to define it.

Rather than assuming that there are infinite numbers of real but immaterial people floaitng around somewhere, I prefer to assume that "memories" are just data that don't have any intrinsic connection to prior events.. Ie, a memory proper is a record of an event, but neurons can be configured as if there were a trace of an even that never happened.

OK, that's a reasonable position. I'll adjust my argument. My claim now is:

(1) Given that you've found a bitstring in a simulation that represents a mind existing, taking actions, and feeling things,

(2) this bitstring is quite astonishingly long,

(3) most long bitstrings do not similarly describe minds by any reasonable mapping function,

it's therefore (4) vastly more probable that a mind actually ran to produce that bitstring, than it is that you found it randomly.

Basically, I'm treating the outputs of a mind as being something like a proof that there was a mind running. Similarly to the idea that publishing an SHA-256 hash of some data is proof that you had that data at the time that you published the hash.