From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Sun Apr 21 2002 - 10:04:42 MDT
Ben Goertzel wrote:
>
> After all, this universe we all think we're living COULD just be a highly
> advanced virtual reality simulation, right? The six-eyed alien running the
> simulation could turn it off at any moment, or change the channel....
>
> When a posited hypothesis strikes me as LESS LIKELY than the "we're all
> brains in a vat being neurally stimulated with a VR reality" hypothesis, I
> tend to turn my attention elsewhere ;>
Actually, this is Existential Risk #3 in Nick Bostrom's ordering, because of
what Bostrom regards as a strong Bayesian argument for the simulation
hypothesis. (Of course I have a different ordering of the existential
risks, but this is to be expected.) And of course nobody buys the literal
form of the vat hypothesis these days; it seems pretty obvious that if it's
a simulation it's a computational simulation and we don't actually have
brains somewhere.
However, Bostrom does agree with you that, as a risk, Existential Risk #3 is
pretty hard to minimize.
Further reading:
http://www.nickbostrom.com/existential/risks.html
http://www.simulation-argument.com/
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://intelligence.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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