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The argument seems to be missing a proposition: 4. It is possible to create and live in a simulated world, but not with the level of fidelity/flexibility neces

• philwelch 12y ago
  You can fold that into #1 if you want, or fold 1 and 2 together, but they're largely equivalent formulations.
  • mc808 12y ago
    I don't think it fits cleanly into 1 or 2. Maybe people choose not to live in deeply nested simulations because of the degradation, but that still misses the possibility that simulated people do want to keep the process going but it becomes increasingly difficult.
    • vidarh 12y ago
      That's possible, but besides the point. The point is not to set up clear, unambiguous, "perfect" choices, but to wade into the long lasting philosophical question of whether our reality has a physical existence - one of the oldest questions of philosophy - and recast it in terms of technology. The point is that unless there's some fatal logical flaw in the set of choices, some combination of the choices needs to be true, and whichever choice or combination is the correct one, it has profound implications on us.
• maaku 12y ago
  The simulation could be lazy, only simulating what it needs to for the observers contained within. Keep in mind that if you are inside a simulation, your sense of time is artificial. When something requiring more fidelity is run, the entire simulation could slow down, or stop momentarily while lazy contexts are evaluated, and you wouldn't know it.
  • tomp 12y ago
    The problem isn't runtime, it's the memory. The earth is the most efficient storage of all the information about the positions/trajectories of all particles that make up earth.
    • maaku 12y ago
      That's missing the point, I think. In the simulation the Earth doesn't exist. Instead, some high-level model is used to generate the observations we make at the macro scale. Only when we perform sensitive experiments which require a finer resolution is that detail generated in such a way as to remain consistent with observations made so far. Of course as someone who writes simulations I can tell you that it is not so easy in our computational models. Indeed it would seem very difficult, though not fundamentally impossible for a high level model to correct macro behavior in all cases. But we cannot know the constraints of the universe which contains our simulation, which may be very different from ours.
• chriswarbo 12y ago
  Just to nit-pick, the simulation argument doesn't rely on simulations-in-simulations, let alone an "infinite regress". If we consider the proposed form of simulation to be feasible/reasonable/etc. then the existence of one simulation would give us 50/50 odds of being inside it. With two simulations running, we're more likely to be simulated than not. The simulation argument claims that, if such simulations are possible at all, then there will be very many of them. In which case, the improbability of being in a particular simulation is more than compensated by the number of simulations.
  • deleted 12y ago
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