From: Damien Broderick (thespike@satx.rr.com)
Date: Wed Jul 07 2004 - 13:01:19 MDT
>On Jul 7, 2004, at 12:15 PM, Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote:
>>If the sim hypothesis is compatible to some degree with such things as
>>psychic powers, divine intervention, giant killer aardvarks, and many
>>other things which we have not in fact observed, then that
>>*compatibility* - that predictive probability mass - must have been
>>diverted from other possibilities.
More exactly (I assume), adventitious occurrences without causal support.
But wait, isn't this a quantum universe where *everything* is without
causal support except as a sort of stochastic average of acausal flickering?
Randall Randall:
>Doesn't this presuppose knowledge about what a
>non-sim world would contain? That is, could it
>not be the case that the non-sim world contains
>psychic powers and divine intervention, and that
>this world is a sim without them?
Or, indeed, either a sim or non-sim which *does* contain psychic events?
Divine intervention is trickier, since it would seem more consistent with
the general stochastic regularity of the world that any interventions from
a deeper reality would be hidden from us behind a veil. There are giant
killer aardvarks in every large museum, near enough; they died out, and
there's no rule that says sims have to be internally inconsistent.
Damien Broderick
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