The format also contributes to a pretty patronizing tone.
Fair enough. It’s hard to anticipate how people will take it because the creator is blinded by whatever tone they originally envisioned. In this case I suppose it doesn’t come across as light-hearted as I intended.
I can see where you’re coming from; we know that there is something here (simulation or not) but we don’t know that complex simulations are possible. Bostrom likely considers this objection, but I’ve only heard him describe his view orally. I haven’t read the articles where he defends his view in detail. This isn’t my area, but your point tempts me to go take a look!
Well I suppose it depends on your views of consciousness. Some would argue that our consciousness is nothing more than an emergent phenomenon grounded on the electrical impulses of our neurons. Personally, I’m convinced that the phenomenon need not be physical. It should be possible, with enough computing power, to model the same interactions. But I admit that if you reject this possibility, then the simulation hypothesis loses credence.
It certainly might be something they could do, but we don’t have any proof that’s possible.
To be fair to Bostrom, his simulation argument outlines three possibilities but doesn’t tell us that the simulation hypothesis (#3) is actual.
Almost all civilizations go extinct before reaching technological maturity
Almost all advanced civilizations lose interest in creating simulations.
We are almost certainly living in a simulation.
Bostrom technically only argues that you can’t coherently reject all three. But, going farther, our computing power has increased dramatically in a miniscule amount of time. If you believe that aliens exist, then it isn’t too hard to suppose that some have vastly greater technological abilities than we have now. In that case, the idea that we’re living in a simulation isn’t something we can easily rule out.
The argument makes less sense outside of it’s context. Moore was responding to the skeptical position that we’re all in a simulation. Moore argues that this skeptical argument undermines itself: all of the language, terms and concepts which form the simulation argument are based on the sensory experience that the argument would effectively dismiss. Furthermore, any argument that we’re in a simulation is epistemologically on a par with the argument that we’re not. Therefore we should have less confidence in the skeptical argument than the common sense conclusion that we have hands.
Sorry, I suppose people haven’t heard of the “Simulation hypothesis” in philosophy.
Nick Bostrom argued that, statistically, it is more likely that we live in a simulation than not. Assume that an advanced civilization could build a machine with enormous computing power, sufficient to simulate a human mind and a universe “around” it. It follows that the number of such simulated minds/universes could be near infinite. So the probability of our actually being in a simulated universe dwarfs the probability that our reality is not a simulation.