We notice there are no immortal world leaders on Earth.
There's no way you could possibly know that unless...Phil...you...you killed them all! How could you?!
Two things I haven't seen anyone else point out.
If you set P(ego|ent, sim) according to the fraction of entertainment simulations in which the person playing the game has an avatar in the game, then P(ego|ent, sim) > .99.
The most popular PC games ever are The Sims and The Sims 2. Then World of Warcraft which is a multiplayer game. Single player games with avatars do not make up 99% of the market, not even close. And that says nothing about the non-electronic games people play like sports and dating which are almost all multi-player.
We notice there are no immortal world leaders on Earth.
Quite a few have not died yet. One might infer from history that they will- but once you decide we're in an entertainment simulation that evidence is worth little- the simulation may have just begun. I suggest you seriously consider swearing allegiance to Kim Jong Il. Further, there is no particular reason to assume the player is any good at the game- perhaps she died without saving in 500 BCE.
In general the probabilities are really off and you haven't dealt with the issue of having extreme utilities for competing choices (should I choose Christianity or Islam or trying to extend my life and save the world?). But I upvoted because it is kind of interesting and not deserving of -7, though I predict it will go much lower than that.
If you set P(ego|ent, sim) according to the fraction of entertainment simulations in which the person playing the game has an avatar in the game, then P(ego|ent, sim) > .99.
Except the actual P(ego|ent, sim) is not based on the percentage of cases where the game includes a self-insert, but the cases where such a self-insert is to be glorified in the simulation.
If we therefore limit the possible avatars that our simulator God is using on Earth to the major monotheistic religions of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism,
Why rule out the avatar arranging ...
We notice there are no obviously immortal world leaders on Earth (but see vi21maobk9vp's comment below). If we therefore limit the possible avatars that our simulator God is using on Earth to the major monotheistic religions of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, and consider them all equiprobable; plus a 25% chance that this God is jumping from one avatar to another, or chose to reveal Himself via Jesus but then Paul screwed everything up, or some other minority position; then p(chr0|ego, ent, sim, Earth) = .25.
I find it hard to believe you mean all thi...
About immortal leaders... Well, what about the idea that Dalai Lama is a reincarnation of previous Dalai Lama? This role gives a lot of glorification and doesn't give enough power to remove challenge, and also you cannot be stuck with dilemma of whether to abandon retired president character.
There's another issue that your version of the argument has. If one of the standard Christian versions of a deity exists, it isn't going to think that worshiping it because it is the simulation runner is going to cut it. Saying "I will worship you because you run the simulation" isn't very similar to a heartfelt confession of sins and acknowledgement of Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior. Moreover, if a simulator is as petty as you hypothesize, and as you hypothesize doesn't want to break its feeling of immersion, they will likely want to also punish people who worship it because they've realized that it runs the simulator for ruining its fun.
Hum, I don't agree with many of your estimates.
P(sim) : 99% seems way too high - 99% is not even what I would put to "it is possible to simulate something as big and complex as the world we are living in, for so long, with that level of consistency and precision". Just for the possibility of a simulation of us being possible wouldn't go above 95% to me. That we are inside a simulation, much less.
P(ent|sim) : most computers are used for entertainment (and even that isn't sure, many personal computers are also used for "serious" business...
This doesn't deal with some of the common objections to Pascal's Wager. The problem of many competing religions is a serious one. Simply reducing yourself to the major religions is a difficult one. I'm also worried that every single part of the argument is completely and utterly isomorphic if one simply swapped Islam and Christianity and made the appropriate mapping.
This also relies on not just finding the simulation argument plausible but assigning it high probability. This seems like a bad idea when the laws of physics as far as we can tell don't seem t...
We also know that there are things that a quantum computer can do that an equivalent classical machine simply cannot do in reasonable time.
I thought it was still an open question whether there are computations that a classical computer is necessarily slower at than a quantum computer. From Aaronson's Philosophy/Comp-Complexity paper, p.35 :
...More generally, that quantum computers can solve certain problems superpolynomially faster than classical computers is not a theorem, but a (profound, plausible) conjecture. [49] [50]
Footnote 49: A formal version of this conjecture is BPP =/= BQP, where BPP (Bounded-Error Probabilistic Polynomial-Time) and BQP (Bounded-Error Quantum Polynomial-Time) are the classes of problems efficiently solvable by classical randomized algorithms and quantum algorithms respectively. ... any proof of the BPP =/= BQP conjecture would be considered almost as great a breakthrough as P =/= NP.
Footnote 50: Complicating matters, there are quantum algorithms that provably achieve exponential speedups over any classical algorithm: one example is Simon’s algorithm [119], an important predecessor of Shor’s algorithm. However, all such algorithms are formulated in t
More generally it's inconsistent to believe in non-negligible chance of living in a simulation and negligible chance of various religious claims being true, but plenty of people here do so.
To me this mostly shows that people don't do anything like Bayesian propagation of evidence, but I don't think Bayesianism is a good model of thinking processes.
I have had a revelation.
A few minutes ago, as my algebraic geometry class finished up, something spoke to me. It identified itself as "not exactly a deity but close enough for all relevant purposes." It made a similar remark when I asked if we were in a simulation that it was running. It called itself "the Entity".
According to this Entity, it really likes to be believed in and worshiped. There is an afterlife run by this Entity. Moreover, the Entity will increase the utility it awards in the afterlife for worshiping it now to compensa...
I appreciate your observations (for example, as interesting to think about). The arguments against Pascal's Wager you've listed aren't the best even if people use those most frequently. The only compelling argument I've heard against Pascal's Wager is that you can't/shouldn't believe something just because it is convenient to do so.
But suppose your hypothetical scenario, in broad strokes, is true. We are in a simulation that has been tweaked so that we will worship the creator. How is this any different from the beliefs of Christianity? For example, 'creat...
Even adjusting for all the arguments provided here, only the probability given the other premises that the simulator would chose to represent itself through Christianity is on the same order of magnitude of what I would assign.
I don't understand at all why you lump entertainment and religious purposes into a single hypothesis and treat evidence for one as evidence for the other. If we accept that our universe is being simulated for entertainment purposes, it would still not give us significant reason to believe that it's being simulated for religious purp...
To what degree can we make inferences about the outside of the simulation from what we observe inside it?
If we therefore limit the possible avatars that our simulator God is using on Earth to the major monotheistic religions of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, and consider them all equiprobable; plus a 25% chance that this God is jumping from one avatar to another, or chose to reveal Himself via Jesus but then Paul screwed everything up, or some other minority position; then p(chr0|ego, ent, sim, Earth) = .25.
I have a big problem with this step. Why should (have lots of adherents) imply (is point of simulation)? Surely there will be more unskilled play-throughs of "simgod" than skilled ones. I think this number can be made arbitrarily low just by adding in all known religions...
I initially rankled at your suggestions on how I should vote, but ultimately I agree. I've never taken the simulation hypothesis seriously, but it's still an interesting argument.
Our actual history is less exciting to me than I expect from a game or a work of fiction. This is only relevant to the extent that we insist on making predictions as if the likely simulators are psychologically like us. I can't even begin to justify the prior (on what kinds of who are likely to be making what kinds of simulation) that would support that, especially with the "...
If you accept the simulation argument, then P(sim) > .99.
That is not the usual conclusion of the simulation argument.
The conclusion of it is this:
at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) The fraction of human-level civilizations that reach a posthuman stage is very close to zero; (2) The fraction of posthuman civilizations that are interested in running ancestor-simulations is very close to zero; (3) The fraction of all people with our kind of experiences that are living in a simulation is very close to one.
On games...
If we consider games with a big population of modeled characters (we are obviously in a game with many characters), strategies of various kinds and multiplayer RPGs come forth.
In multiplayer RPGs, logical behaviour for a killed character is either to reincarnate anew (player character, some NPCs), respawn as previously seen (simpler NPCs - not observed in our world? or maybe some amoebas..) or vanish forever. Player characters in games are not supposed to be stuck in a state they cannot change; and emulating NPCs in player-inaccessible afterlife...
Thank you for this excellent example of a clever arguer. You clearly want Christianity to have a chance in hell, so you invent all kinds of rationalizations to support it. Maybe this should be added to the therefore god exists list, though #298 is already close. I understand now why EY refuses to engage in any discussion with you. There are plenty of fallacies in your post, many pointed out in the comments, but it is pointless to argue about it with you, since you have already written your bottom line and will not budge.
Personally, I downvoted the main post for providing an argument, which you said you felt was the best argument for Christianity, which I felt deserved so little probability mass as to be unworthy of being raised for discussion (as far as I can remember this is the first time I've affirmed that I downvoted anything,) but I never assumed that you were Christian.
If I had previously assigned a significant probability to the proposition that you were a Christian, this post would have forced me to revise it downwards, I just thought it was ill considered.
- limit U(1)→∞, P(chr)→0 P(chr)U(1) is undefined, and
- invoking infinite utilities isn't fair.
You can get these problems if you have only finite utility, but infinite expected utility.
It's impossible for a prior with a converging expected utility to result in a posterior with diverging expected utility using only a finite amount of evidence.
While it's correct that just using absurdly low probability and absurdly high utility won't cause that problem, it's not likely to come up without that problem being there in the first place.
The fact that we do not see continual interference, and obvious evidence of a deity, is very strong evidence against the ego-trip theory of godly existence.
The fact the bible mentions multiple gods, repeatedly, throughout the old testament, is very strong evidence that it is not a book written by an ego-tripping deity.
Moreover, if the universe is being run as an ego-trip heaven is likely to be, as described in some christian sects, praising 'god' for all eternity. Which is worse than most depictions of hell; making the whole pascal's wager thing null and void.
Let P(chr) = the probability that the statements attributed to Jesus of Nazareth and Paul of Tarsus regarding salvation and the afterlife are factually mostly correct; and let U(C) be the utility of action C, where C is in {Christianity, Islam, Judaism, atheism}.
Two of the key criticisms of Pascal's wager are that
If, however, P(chr) is not infinitessimal, and U(Christianity) is merely very large, these counter-arguments fail.
Many poor arguments have been made that P(chr) > .1. But as far as I know, no one has ever made the best argument in favor of Christianity:
If you accept the simulation argument, then P(sim) > .99.
If you look at the fraction of computing power used for entertainment, I don't know what it is, but the top 100 supercomputer list for June 2011 lists a total of 4,531,940 cores in the top 100 supercomputers in the world; versus (rough guess) a billion personal computers and video game consoles, and a similar number of ordinary computers used at work. It would be reasonable to set p(ent|sim) = .5.
If you set P(ego|ent, sim) according to the fraction of entertainment simulations in which the person playing the game has an avatar in the game, then P(ego|ent, sim) is large. I originally set this at p > .99, but am now setting it to p = .5 in response to Jack's comment below.
We notice there are no obviously immortal world leaders on Earth (but see vi21maobk9vp's comment below). If we therefore limit the possible avatars that our simulator God is using on Earth to the major monotheistic religions of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, and consider them all equiprobable; plus a 25% chance that this God is jumping from one avatar to another, or chose to reveal Himself via Jesus but then Paul screwed everything up, or some other minority position; then p(chr0|ego, ent, sim, Earth) = .25.
P(follow-thru) is difficult to estimate; I will set it somewhat arbitrarily as .1. Given our observations of game-players here on Earth, it is not independent of p(ego), as players of self-glorifying games are likely to be young adolescent males, and so are people who enjoy burning insects with magnifying glasses.
We now have p(chr) > .99 x .5 x .5 x .25 x .1 = .0061875. As stipulated, your afterlife accounts for at least 99% of your utility if follow-thru (and hence chr) is true. If we suppose that the length of time for which God rewards us in Heaven or torments us in Hell has an exponential distribution, and we are considering only the part of that distribution where >= 99% of your utility is in the afterlife, then almost certainly p(chr) * U(Christianity | chr) > (1-p(chr)) * U(atheism | not(chr)). It now appears we should accept Pascal's wager.
(The expected utilities for Christianity and Islam are similar, and this argument gives no reason for favoring one over the other. That is of only minor interest to me unless I accept the wager. The important point is that they both will have expected utilities similar to, and possibly exceeding, that of atheism.)
You can argue with any of the individual numbers above. But you would have to make pretty big changes to make p(chr)(U(Christianity|chr)) negligible in your utility calculation.
(IMHO, voting this article up should indicate it passed the threshold, "That's an interesting observation that contributes to the discussion", not, "Omigod you're right, I am going out to get baptized RIGHT NOW!".)