connick
Junior Member
I would say, again, that we can't know anything about an outside world or what it contains.excreationist said:If there is no causality in the outside world I think there is no "before" or "cause" for the simulation... this possibility sounds a bit like the Christian God - having no time at all then somehow creating our universe.... (though you'd say that the thing that created the universe might not have any intelligence)
Please note that this is not a question of what I believe, but rather, of what your argument entails logically. To be clear, I believe that at least I am experiencing something because I axiomatically reject the possibility of being in a simulation. However, if we accept the first premise of your argument as true, then we cannot be sure of anything at all.excreationist said:That quote was about watching a "screen".... i.e. a simulation. It says "the essential you is the pure awareness that just watches the stuff go by on the screen". Do you think that we don't have awareness?
Pac Man might make any number of assumptions about our world, but none of them would be justifiable because he can't know anything about the outside world from inside of his simulation.excreationist said:BTW if PacMan was conscious I thought that he might assume that something outside of the simulation is also conscious (and in our case this is true). Though you'd insist that that doesn't need to be the case....
This is still a fundamentally flawed position. We can know absolutely nothing about an outer world. Even if every man, woman and child was running simulated universes on their cell phones, it would tell us nothing about the likelihood that we are in a simulation ourselves.excreationist said:All of the simulations/games in our world were started by an intelligent force. In the future this would probably also be the case. There would probably be billions or trillions of simulations in the coming years. So it seems likely that the simulation we might be in could have been created by an intelligent force. Perhaps the alternative is a simulation created by a non-intelligent force... chance...? Intelligence is a lot more efficient than unguided chance at creating meaningful complex structures. e.g. chance creating Boltzmann brains vs evolution or technology...
Intelligence being more efficient than chance means intelligence could create more simulations than chance with a given amount of resources - so it would imply that it is more likely we'd be in a simulation created by intelligence than by chance.
As I've said many times now, if we accept your first premise, "it's possible we're in a simulation," as true, then every subsequent premise can be justifiably dismissed. Everything after that could be a delusion resulting from a simulation.