Comment by brianchu

10 years ago

It's funny to see grown adults in tech taking the simulation idea seriously just because Elon Musk said it. I was interested in science fiction in high school and thought about these things, but I concluded they were worthless.

Why? It is ontologically no different from 1) solipsism, a philosophical idea that even most philosophers considered worthless centuries ago, or more loosely 2) belief in a higher deity who created the world.

It's completely unfalsifiable. The answer to the question clarifies nothing about our understanding of the world [1] and furthermore has absolutely no impact whatsoever on how you ought to live your life.

[1] Even if you conclude we live in a simulation, we will never know for sure anything about the nature of the simulation or the nature of the world outside the simulation.

10 comments

brianchu

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dsacco  10 years ago

You can expand your reasoning to include all religion, while you're at it. And anything anyone does that evidences a belief in something irrational or unfalsifiable.

The thing is, you're not wrong. You're just kind of mean and arrogant to reduce a multiplicity of nuanced worldviews that many people care about very deeply to simple meaninglessness.

  • brianchu  10 years ago

    Let's not resort to calling people names.

    Your argument is ironically the reductive one. I have complete respect for people who choose to believe in an organized religion. But it remains the case that whether or not you can prove a higher deity, that in of itself has no bearing on how you should live your life. You can disprove the existence of god and still choose to believe in religion. You can prove the existence and still choose to not believe in any religious system. So proving the existence is worthless.

    • dsacco  10 years ago

      Fair enough; I don't know enough to say that you are arrogant personally, nor would that be productive. What I meant to express is that the comment itself is an arrogant statement because it's self-centered. You directly compared an idea people enjoy debating about and believing in to idol worship (Musk) and something you dismissed as a teenager in high school.

      This comment is actually a much more reasonable expression of your point than the earlier one - you mentioned you respect the people who believe in religion and revised your claim to state that proof of the unfalsifiable is meaningless (which is nearly tautological). That logic is sound (though you could make an argument that attempting to prove something unfalsifiable when you're emotionally invested in it and it's otherwise harmless could be fulfilling).

      Your earlier comment had a different tone and sentiment; namely, that belief in something unfalsifiable has no impact on someone's life, and that you can't understand why grown adults would bother with it. That was the specific sentiment I found to be offensive.

      For what it's worth, I'm agnostic.

      2 replies →

tlb  10 years ago

The negative ("we are not in a simulation") is the falsifiable version. It could be falsified by discovering a flaw in the simulator.

Bostrom's formulation has a properly constructed hypothesis: see http://simulation-argument.com/simulation.pdf

  • brianchu  10 years ago

    It can't. We cannot distinguish between flaws and non-flaws. What is a flaw anyways? That is ill-defined - we are conjecturing about what will or will not be present in a reality that we have no indication will resemble our reality.

vikiomega9  10 years ago

> Why? It is ontologically no different from 1) solipsism

Sure, but it is vastly interesting to think about, and imagine about and have meandering ideas about. There's probably also trappings of psychoanalysis in here somewhere.

mindcrime  10 years ago 

    "It's the question that drives us, Neo. It's the question 
    that brought you here. You know the question, just as I 
    did."

    "What is the Matrix?"