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Bostrom's trilemma is as follows:
No civilization will reach a level of technological maturity capable of producing simulated realities.
No civilization reaching aforementioned technological status will produce a significant number of simulated realities, for any of a number of reasons, such as diversion of computational processing power for other tasks, ethical considerations of holding entities captive in simulated realities, etc.
Any entities with our general set of experiences are almost certainly living in a simulation.
The disjunct made up of the three statements seems fairly solid and many of us have lowish priors for the first two disjuncts, and so assign a highish probability to the third disjunct.
Reductio ad absurdum.
I clicked on the PDF and found the first few chapters to be rather childish, to be blunt. Assuming we can transform large amounts of matter into thinking material than what conceivable reason would there be for an ancestor simulation to be made? Do you imagine that we could create simulations on our laptops? Please tell me how we will be able to conjure infinite information out of nothing. "we don't know that it can't happen" is hardly an answer and isn't really unprovable either.
Also, what would the point be in creating humans to be in the sim? Why not just have them be controlled by some AI and have them act as humans do (assuming that it isn't for "research purposes" which is ridiculous as well because a transhuman civilization of that level wouldn't actually need the information from it)?
- I want to simulate history.
- I'm a human.
- Therefore, some humans want to simulate history.
This doesn't actually invalidate my statement. I don't see how it makes a difference, though, unless you can prove that a lot of people are very interested in creating ancestor simulations- enough to utilize large amounts of resources to achieve that end- or that one day you'll be able to create worlds on your personal computer.
The rest of your comment seems incredibly...uninformed of the relevant literature, to say the least.
The article held up Civilization as a precursor to future ancestor sims. I pointed out how ridiculous that was. I suppose Occam's Razor works if you believe in an infinite reality, which I'm not certain of.
Well, I don't want to go through all of that just to find where it talks about my specific objections... but let me ask, how many people here believe this?
What evidence is there for us being in a simulation? I've never heard of humans wanting to "simulate" history. Civilization doesn't play even remotely like a simulator and never claimed to be. The information equivalent to an entire world would have to be converted into data storage for such a project and what possible motive could there be for that? I'll follow Occam's Razor on this one- the more assumptions you make, the more likely you are to be wrong unless you have some sort of evidence.
Yeah, I knew I couldn't have been the only one to have thought of this.
Here's an interesting problem: why do we live in this era? Imagine the people that lived before we migrated out of Africa; when the human population was less than 10,000. What were the odds of being one of those people? At least less than winning the lottery. So we can conclude that the likelihood of existing in a specific era is proportional to the amount of consciousness in existence during that time period.
This presents a major problem for a technological singularity as the odds of living before the singularity turned all matter in the universe into consciousness are virtually nil. So there will be no singularity, and it's almost frightening to imagine what we can conclude from this for our future.
Here's an interesting problem: why do we live in this era? Imagine the people that lived before we migrated out of Africa; when the human population was less than 10,000. What were the odds of being one of those people? At least less than winning the lottery, obviously. So we can conclude that the likelihood of living in a specific time period is proportional to the amou