From: Rafal Smigrodzki (rafal@smigrodzki.org)
Date: Thu Mar 06 2003 - 00:19:23 MST
----- Original Message -----
From: "Hal Finney" <hal@finney.org>
>
> We can then ask, what percentage of instantiations of a given world X
> exist in the real universe versus in simulations? This is a question
> that is answerable in principle, at least if we stick to a simple form
> of parallelism like Tegmark's level one (namely that in a spatially
> infinite universe, all possible worlds exist an infinite number of times).
>
> You'd have to estimate what fraction of worlds evolve intelligent life
> forms capable of performing such simulations. These would include worlds
> whose past history is identical to our own but which are farther along
> their developmental path because they got started a little earlier.
> They would have seen a slightly younger universe than we do now, but
> given the uncertainties, they could easily be at least many thousands
> of years ahead of us and still have us be a valid model of their past.
### I remember discussing exactly this issue about a year and a half ago
here, with scerir, in relation to Nick Bostrom's then released article about
living in simulations. I argued that his conclusion that we are very likely
in a simulation, based on the anthropic principle, is hard to justify, and I
mentioned Vilenkin's eternal expansion as a counter-argument. I argued that
we have very inadequate basis for estimating the fraction of N/S, where N is
the number of civilizations created naturally, and S is the number of
simulations. The way I see it now, a large N/S would mean that either we
will die soon, or if we don't die we won't be running many simulations, or
else we indeed *are* likely to be in a simulation. The second possibility is
most interesting as a way of predicting future development in ethics - if we
don't run simulations despite being alive, and we do not enter technological
stasis (this would be an unlikely event IMO - we will either grow or die),
then the reason for not running them would be ethical, and pertinent to a
large fraction of cvilizations.Would it mean that transhuman ethical
development precludes simulations?
Of course, since we can't for now dis(prove) being simulated, this is all
just hazy theo(log)(r)ising.
Rafal
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu Mar 06 2003 - 00:24:20 MST