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The thing that I find most frustrating about this thought-experiment is the one ridiculous argument that we statistically must be living in a simulation that po
by vanderZwan 9y ago
The thing that I find most frustrating about this thought-experiment is the one ridiculous argument that we statistically must be living in a simulation that pop-science keeps repeating (not this article, for once).
Here's the TL;DR: say you can simulate multiple universes in one universe, and at some point those simulated universes start simulating multiple universes, then you must end up with infinite universes at the bottom. So at any given moment you find yourself in a universe, statistically speaking it should be one of the simulated ones.
Which shouldn't take anyone more than a second to realise as complete bogus, because it's like saying "Let's say you have a cookie. If I break it in half, I have two. I can repeat this until I have infinite infinitesimal cookies. Since this is a much larger number of cookies, statistically speaking any time you have a cookie it must be one of the infinitesimally tiny cookies".
- alexvy86 9y agoWhile not convinced by the statistical argument either, I think a more accurate analogy would be "Imagine you have a cell. It breaks apart into two identical cells. [Rinse and repeat a bunch of times]." And then if you pick a cell at random from the resulting set, it is indeed more probable that you picked one that is not the original one. IMO this doesn't apply as cleanly to simulated universes because they're not literal clones of one another, plus we're not even sure it's even possible to simulate one (while we know cells do go through mitosis).