Comments on: Strangeness Heuristic

By: Kaj Sotala

Kaj Sotala — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 14:42:44 +0000

will perkins: The original paper shows that, according to our laws of physics, it's probable that we're living in a computer simulation. If it can be shown that our physics allow it, then it's a legitimate argument that we're likely to live in one - otherwise it's just a repetition of the millenia-old argument that it's possible for us to be living in a hallucination. If one wants to make a plausible case for this, you have to start from our laws of physics and establish that it's likely according to them. Once you have already established that it's likely, then you can go around speculating about the physics in other worlds, because you've shown that there is at least one universe in which the argument holds (and the people simulating us might be living in a similar universe).

By: will perkins

will perkins — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 12:21:52 +0000

Isn’t the whole premise of the original paper a little wrong? He claims that the probability of our being in a simulation depends on whether or not humans will eventually be able to simulate full worlds. But the two are unrelated. It is not our future descendants or ‘post-humans’ who would be simulating us, it is someone in a completely different universe with different laws of physics.

Think of it like this – the fact that the little Sims in SimCity are simulated has nothing to do with their ability to create a simulation inside the game.

By: Zubon

Zubon — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 22:19:22 +0000

Robin: Oh good. I was debating between irony and whether you were thinking of people having R2D2s or Mother Boxes with them. I should have linked originally: here and here are postings that I meant.

By: TGGP

TGGP — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 20:19:41 +0000

Matthew C, you remind me of creationists who always insist that we just haven’t read THIS particular tome promoting intelligent design or whatnot. Are there any peer-reviewed studies published in respected scientific journals you’d like to point out? Any phenomena reliably reproduced in front of skeptics? Because I doubt Eliezer is going to purchase Irreducible Minds before Atlas of Creation.

By: Nick Tarleton

Nick Tarleton — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 16:39:40 +0000

Chad, I bet those people still see history as going from strangeness to normality to strangeness, they just pick a different time at which to place ‘normality’. (Well, unless their idea of normality is the Paleolithic.) The psychology of this is interesting.

By: Matthew C

Matthew C — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 15:07:33 +0000

Which is why psychic powers always go away whenever a scientist tries to look at them! This statement speaks volumes about your complete unfamiliarity with the literature. You might want to read my short message about uninformed versus informed criticism of psi phenomena.

By: Chad Walters

Chad Walters — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 06:52:06 +0000

The notion of hindsight bias is interesting, but it seems to me that for every person who has the feeling that history has progressed from strangeness to normality, there are those who feel quite the opposite and long for times past when “things made sense”. Is this “nostalgia bias” perhaps?

By: Eliezer Yudkowsky

Eliezer Yudkowsky — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 05:39:54 +0000

Which is why psychic powers always go away whenever a scientist tries to look at them!

By: Robin Hanson

Robin Hanson — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 04:11:14 +0000

Andrew, I don’t know how hard it is for a sim to capture water flow and so on. But I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be hard to identify the scientists who were noticing a discrepancy between the sim and their scientific theories, reverse the sim there and rerun it with better fudged data that eliminate the discrepancy.

By: Hopefully Anonymous

Hopefully Anonymous — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 03:05:57 +0000

Andrew, on this one I think the stronger case is that we’re more likely to be in an intrareality simulation than in a non-simulation reality. The analogy is more the move away from a terra-centric model of the universe than the move away from creationism in my opinion. How do you factor the multiple simulations of our universe already within the universe, and potential for a far greater number of simulations to be created and running within our universe as evidence that we’re more likely to be a simulated than a nonsimulated reality?

Also, I’m curious about the degree to which the bluriness of our apparent reality at a sufficiently small scale may be evidence that we’re in a simulation of a more nuanced/articulated nonsimulated (or less roughly simulated) reality.