Calling myself an agnostic would put me in an empirical cluster with people who think gods worthy of worship might exist, and possibly have some vague hope for an afterlife (though I know not all agnostics believe these things). I do not think of potential matrix overlords the way people think of the things they connect to the words “God” and “gods”. I think of them as “those bastards that (might) have us all trapped in a zoo.” And if they existed, I wouldn’t expect them to have (real) magic powers, nor to be the creators of a real universe, just a zoo that looks like one. I do not think that animals trapped in a zoo with enclosure walls painted with trees and such to look like a real forest should think of zookeepers as gods, even if they have effectively created the animals’ world, and may have created the animals themselves (through artificial breeding, or even cloning), and I think that is basically analogous to what our position would be if the simulation hypothesis was correct.
Hmm. I was more thinking about a physics simulation by something that is nothing like a human than an ancestor simulation like in Bostrom’s original argument. I think that most people who assign a non-trivial chance to ancestor simulation would assign a non-trivial chance to physics simulation.
I don’t think either variety is very similar to a zoo, but if we were in a physics simulation, I do not think our relationship with our simulators is anything like a animal-zookeeper relationship.
I also think that you should taboo the word “universe,” since it implies that there is nothing containing it. Whatever it is that we are in, our simulators created all of it, and probably could interfere if they wanted to. They are unlikely to want to now, since they went so long without interfering so far.
I also think that you should taboo the word “universe,” since it implies that there is nothing containing it.
It may have once meant that, like the word “atom” once meant “indivisible.” But that’s not how people seem to use it anymore. Once a critical mass of people start misusing a word, I would rather become part of the problem than fight the inevitable.
Calling myself an agnostic would put me in an empirical cluster with people who think gods worthy of worship might exist, and possibly have some vague hope for an afterlife (though I know not all agnostics believe these things). I do not think of potential matrix overlords the way people think of the things they connect to the words “God” and “gods”. I think of them as “those bastards that (might) have us all trapped in a zoo.” And if they existed, I wouldn’t expect them to have (real) magic powers, nor to be the creators of a real universe, just a zoo that looks like one. I do not think that animals trapped in a zoo with enclosure walls painted with trees and such to look like a real forest should think of zookeepers as gods, even if they have effectively created the animals’ world, and may have created the animals themselves (through artificial breeding, or even cloning), and I think that is basically analogous to what our position would be if the simulation hypothesis was correct.
Hmm. I was more thinking about a physics simulation by something that is nothing like a human than an ancestor simulation like in Bostrom’s original argument. I think that most people who assign a non-trivial chance to ancestor simulation would assign a non-trivial chance to physics simulation.
I don’t think either variety is very similar to a zoo, but if we were in a physics simulation, I do not think our relationship with our simulators is anything like a animal-zookeeper relationship.
I also think that you should taboo the word “universe,” since it implies that there is nothing containing it. Whatever it is that we are in, our simulators created all of it, and probably could interfere if they wanted to. They are unlikely to want to now, since they went so long without interfering so far.
It may have once meant that, like the word “atom” once meant “indivisible.” But that’s not how people seem to use it anymore. Once a critical mass of people start misusing a word, I would rather become part of the problem than fight the inevitable.
If you were using the word that way, then it seems they are “creators of a (real) universe.”