As far as faith being useful to complement science, sometimes it is. Collapse Theory, for example, is a useful faith, because it makes some sense of quantum mechanics. I can’t see how the Simulation Argument can help anything except Matrix fan forums.

You need a big universe just to get humans.

Also, humans might be a step on the way to filling the universe with computronium – in which case all the inanimate matter observed might be seen as being the result of the simulation having only recently been booted up.

Bottom line is the formula as shown doesn’t logically follow from its own foundations on the indifference principle (or DD argument). Easy enough to demonstrate if anyone cares although its pretty straight forward.

Then we should expect the world around us to appear optimized for entertainment to a far greater degree, no? Consider “learning” vs. “entertainment”. Only the former predicts that reality will be as faithful as possible to a low-level physics, because it is an attempt to learn about an outside phenomenon that runs on low-level physics.

Or to put it more simply: This, our world, may or may not be a simulation by some ahumane entity to learn about the initial conditions of Singularities it could run into; the Holocaust is faithfully simulated because it is what would happen under unified physics. But it’s probably not there for entertainment, unless the entity is maximally entertained only by faithful simulations of unified physics.

“Jonathan and nc, you could have made your basic point in a few paragraphs.”

We were educated to cite our sources. Once that’s done, it’s easy to be terse, as the cited article can be read in detail by the curious.

You and I have also both critiqued the Doomsday Argument (mine in a submitted article to Analog, which was not bought, but excerpts from which were scattered over several issues).

I also cited you in a paper at last year’s NKS Wolfram Conference, on whether or not one could enumerate all possible economic systems. I think I quoted you (with attribution) on Economics of Abundance.

I agree with HA and Eliezer that we should avoid bundling these various claims about simulation. I would go further, and urge that we always remember the difference between the simulation argument and the simulation hypothesis. The simulation argument does not show, and was not intended to show, that we are living in a simulation. The simulation argument claims that a certain tripartite disjunction is true, and the simulation argument is one of the disjuncts. (It would be fair to say, however, that if the simulation argument is sound, then the simulation hypothesis is worth taking more seriously than we would otherwise have reason to do.)