I disagree. Something missing is different than a god. A god is often not well-defined, but generally it is assumed to be some kind of intelligence, that is it can know and manipulate information, and it has infinite agency or near to it. Something missing could be a simple physical process. One is infinitely complex (god), the other is feasibly simple enough for a human to fully understand.
The koopas are both pointing to the weirdness of their world, and the atheists are talking about randomness and the theists are talking about maybe it is a Sky Koopa.
I don’t think this is really what you wrote the first time, but the argument you’re presenting here doesn’t progress us anywhere so I won’t spend more time on it. I think we should drop this metaphor from the conversation.
Before too long we’ll be able to write software that does basically what our brains do… There will be a lot more minds in simulations than have ever existed inside of human bodies...
Disagree again. First, “basically what our brains do” and “what our brains do” is almost certainly a non-trivial gap—if our brains are too complex for us to fully know every aspect of it at once, that is well enough to make precise predictions—then the jump to “basically what our brains do” introduces a difference in what we would predict. If we want to program all the neurons and neurotransmitters perfectly—have a brain totally modeled in software—then that brain would still need input like actual humans get or it may not develop correctly.
To the second point about ” a lot more minds in simulations...”, I also think this argument is fatally flawed. Let’s assume that a perfect human brain can be simulated, however unlikely I think this is personally. To convince that simulated mind that it is in a base reality, it would have to be able to observe every aspect of that reality and come to the conclusion that the universe can and does fully exist by it’s own processes. To be convinced it is living in a simulation, it may only need to see one physically “weird” thing; not a seemingly-too-improbable thing like no aliens, but an absolutely wrong thing, such as reversal of causality, that would be basically a glitch of the system.
Now some may argue that the simulators could “roll back” the simulation when these glitches occur, but I’m skeptical of the engineering feasibility of such a simulation in the first place that could, even for thousands of years, trick human minds. If we take a “lossy” simulation like video games now, it’s clear that besides obvious bugs and invisible walls that bound the world, there’s also a level of information resolution that’s low compared to our world. That is, we can explain the physics of modern games by their physics engines, while we still struggle to explain the physics of the whole universe. If you have any amount of “lossiness” in a simulation, then eventually minds capable of finding that lossiness will—a brain in a vat will discover that, actually, nothing is made of atoms, but instead have their textures loaded in. Even if the brains we make don’t have the ability to find this edge of resolution, we must assume that if we can create a superintelligent machine, and we can create a simulation of our own minds, then our simulated minds must also be able to create a superintelligence, which would either be able to find those lossy resolution issues or make a smarter being that can. Then the jig is up, and the simulations know they’re in a simulation.
To get around the inevitable finding of lossiness in a simulation, the simulation creators would need to make their simulation indistinguishable from our own universe. This implies two things: first that such a simulation cannot be made, because making a perfect simulation of our universe inside our universe would take more energy than the universe has (see the Second Law of Thermodynamics if this doesn’t make sense right away); the second is that if we could make a simulation indistinguishable from our universe, then we would know all the secrets of our universe, including whether or not we were in a simulation.
In physics, the answer to the question of “what’s the something missing?” is not god, it is “we don’t know yet.” The answer that physicists look for makes specific predictions about testable phenomenon, and so far it does not seem that there are even any good testable claims that we’re in a simulation.
What would those claims even be? Can we see where our universe is stored in memory on the machine we’re supposedly running on? Why or why not?
Seems super arrogant for us to presume that we are the exception.
And it’s super arrogant for theists to believe that a god created them special. So your argument from distaste of the other is not helping you.
The idea that one planet alone would have life is just too much of a score counter, too much of a giveaway.
We still don’t know that we’re the lone planet with life. And maybe it’s too much of a giveaway to you, but it means almost nothing to me besides “the conditions to create life in the universe are rare even under arrangements where it is possible”. Seeming like a score counter is not evidence it is a score counter. Only observing life on Earth is not a prediction about anything, it is not an explanation of anything—it is merely information, and the fact that you’re twisting that information to give you a conclusion only says something about what you want to believe.
It feels like you’ve gone from asking for an explanation to resisting a conversion effort that I’m not making here.
Minds simulatable:
It’s kind of weird that I’m the one saying that there is nothing magic about a mind, and you are the one basically adding souls, yet we are theist and atheist respectively, but surely if minds are unable to be simulated that would be a blow ‘against’ your beliefs, yeah?
Doing that being hard:
That doesn’t seem knowable. Like, yeah, it seems like faking five senses would be hard, but that’s just from our perspective. We can make much simpler minds than ours easily, presumably whatever made us is far enough beyond us that this isn’t a big deal.
Rollback:
Same as above? LIke, maybe this is happening constantly, maybe not. No way for us to know.
We might find aliens one day!:
Sure, I’ll change my mind when that happens. For now the evidence is that we are a special case, which implies a hidden variable. That hidden variable is most likely a mind, since that’s what it would be if any simulated intelligence asked what it was.
The earth is unlike the rest of everything we’ve observed. That’s weird. One potential reason is that a mind we cannot observe arranged things that way. That will be the right answer for any of our fictions that we give the ability to ask this question in the future, so it is probably the right answer for us.
First, I’m not “resisting a conversion”. I’m disagreeing with your position that a hidden variable is even more likely to be a mind than something else.
you are the one basically adding souls
I absolutely am not adding souls. This makes me think you didn’t really read my argument. I’ll present this a different way: human brains are incredibly complex. So complex, in fact, we still don’t fully understand them. With a background in computer science, I know that you can’t simulate something accurately without at least having a very accurate model. Currently, we have no accurate model of the brain, and it seems that the first accurate model we may get is just simulating every neuron at some level. What I’m saying is that unless that level we simulate neurons on is sufficiently small, there will be obvious errors. Perhaps this is feasible to simulate some human minds, even at the level of quantum mechanics.
My claim against a simulation being run in our universe that could sufficiently trick a human is this: There is not enough energy. This can be understood by thinking about the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and recognizing that to fully simulate something would require giving that thing the actual energy it has; to simulate an electron, you would need to give it the charge of an actual electron, or else it would not interact properly with its environment. Then it follows, if everything is simulated with its actual energy, it would take more energy than the universe has to simulate, because practically we lose energy to heat every time we try to fight entropy in some small way. The conclusion is that the universe is precisely simulating itself, which is indistinguishable from reality.
The need for this perfect simulation is a consequence of maintaining the observable complexity that is apparent in the formulations of these hypotheses by people like Bostrom. I wouldn’t claim humans being in a simulation is impossible—my claim is that our own civilization cannot perfectly recreate itself.
So there’s no actual good reason to believe we’re in a simulation of ourselves, unless you take Bostrom’s arbitrary operations on even more arbitrary numbers as evidence. Which I obviously don’t think anyone should.
Finally, as I said before, the claim of a simulation makes no predictions, and we can’t even know a way, if any, of proving we’re in a simulation—except by construction, which seems impossible as outlined above. So, with no way to prove we’re in a simulation, no way to prove a god exists, and no decent way to even make a reasonable estimate of the likelihood of either, the potential mechanisms that created the universe should be part of random distribution until we can sufficiently understand and test physical processes at a deeper level.
It feels like you are answering the old question of whether God could create a rock he couldn’t lift by explaining that lifting is hard.
Like, the idea that an entity simulating our universe wouldn’t be able to do that, because they’d run out of energy doesn’t pass even the basic sniff test.
Say ‘our’ universe, the one that you and I observe, is a billionth the size of a real one. Say they are running it so that we get a second every time they go through a trillion years. Say that all of us but me are p-zombies, and they only simulate the rest of y’all every time you interact with my experiences. The idea that there aren’t enough resources to simulate the universe isn’t even really wrong, it just seems like you haven’t thought through the postulation of us being a simulation.
Even the invocation of our laws of physics as applying to the simulation is bonkers. Why would the reality where our simulation is run in have anything resembling ours? Our creations don’t have physics that resemble ours. Video game characters don’t fall as per gravity, characters in movies and books don’t have real magnetism. Why would you imagine that our simulator is recreating their home conditions?
Lastly, you need to either fish or cut bait on the humans being possible to simulate. If you aren’t postulating a soul, then we are nothing but complicated lighting and meat, meaning that we are entirely feasible to simulate. If you do think there’s something about the human mind going on that God’s computers or whatever can’t replicate, then I’ll certainly cede the argument, but you don’t get to call yourself an atheist.
It’s even more bizarre to see you say that the claim of simulation makes no predictions, in response to me pointing out that it’s prediction (just us in the observable universe) is the reason to believe it.
Walter if no aliens: Simulation/creator of some kind
Walter if aliens : Real
Denim if aliens: Real
Denim if no aliens: looks really hard away from how monstrously unlikely our situation is.
Like, the idea that an entity simulating our universe wouldn’t be able to do that, because they’d run out of energy doesn’t pass even the basic sniff test.
I’m convinced you are not actually reading what I’m writing. I said if the universe ours is simulated in is supposed to be like our own/we are an ancestral simulation then this implies that the universe simulating ours should be like ours, and we can apply our laws of physics to it, and our laws of physics say there’s entropy, or a limit to the amount of order.
I also believe that if we’re a simulation, then the universe simulating ours must be very different than ours in fundamental ways, but this tells us nothing specific about that universe. And it implies that there could be no evidence, ever, of being in a simulation. Just like there could be no evidence, ever, of a god, or a flying spaghetti monster, or whatever other thought experiment you have faith in.
What I am trying to say is that you need a level of complexity to sufficiently trick intelligent beings in to not thinking they’re in a simulation, and that humans could not create such a simulation themselves.
If you aren’t postulating a soul, then we are nothing but complicated lighting and meat, meaning that we are entirely feasible to simulate.
Key word: complicated. Wrong word: feasible. I think you mean possible. Yes we are possible to simulate, but feasible implies that it can readily be done, which is exactly what I’m arguing against. Go read up about computer science, how simulations actually work, and physics before you start claiming things are feasible when they’re currently impossible and certainly difficult problems that may only be feasible to the entirety of humanity working together for centuries.
It’s even more bizarre to see you say that the claim of simulation makes no predictions, in response to me pointing out that it’s prediction (just us in the observable universe) is the reason to believe it.
The prediction something makes is never the reason to believe something. The confirmation of that prediction is the reason to believe something. You cannot prove that whatever prediction the simulation makes is true, therefore there is not a rational reason to believe we are in a simulation. This is the foundation of logic and science, I urge you to look into it more.
The lack of aliens isn’t proof of anything (absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence).
It’s super aggravating that if you already understood that we can’t know anything about the (universe simulating ours / the mighty God who created us / the inscrutable machinations of the Spaghetti Monster who cooked the broth of our creation) you go on these long tangents about what they could and could not do.
You do it again with regard to simulating humans. Yes, it would be tough to do now. Easier in the future. By definition a cakewalk for the unknowable entity responsible for doing it right now with me and you. Since you understand that we have no knowledge of the mind responsible for our creation, why do you go on about how tough it must be for it?
Look, in regards to evidence, you get this in your day to day life. You must, you are a living being. If there are no muddy footprints in your hallway then your toddlers didn’t run down it.
Earth’s complexity in a vastly more simple universe is the same as the coin that flips heads a googleplex times. Earth is weird (should I steal your cool habit of using italics on important words for weird?). The absence of other things like it in our light cone is evidence that there is a hidden variable. (In the same way that me guessing your card more than 1⁄52 of the time is evidence that you are missing the trick)
In every other case we can set up or find where this situation is roughly analogous (watchmaker is the classic), the answer is that the experimenter is to blame. He put the watch in the desert, the other rocks are less complicated not because of chance, but because they weren’t put there by a civilization that can make watches.
If you are still hung up on how hard it will be to simulate our minds, then just imagine that our simulations are simpler than us, ok? They can only hear, and time goes slower. There are only ten people in their whole universe, whatever. Point is, that when they ask this question, the ‘right’ answer for them to come to is that they have a creator. That’s also the right answer for us to come to.
So far you’ve told me to read up on computer science, and ‘the foundation of logic and science’. My turn I guess? Keep a diary for a day or two, you’ll be surprised at what you already know. Don’t fence off your common sense from your commenting. You know how evidence works.
I mostly agree with this, except for argument that we are in a simulation based on the non-existence of aliens, since I have no reason to believe that it is easy to get life from non-life in the first place. There may be one civilization out of every ten thousand spaces the size of our visible universe. This could change, of course, if it turns out that abiogenesis is extremely easy. Such a fact would actually support your position (which falsifies the implied claim in this thread that there cannot be evidence for it in principle.)
I definitely agree that it is a mistake to assume that an external simulating universe should have the same physical laws, or to argue that we are not in a simulation because it is “hard,” or that it would use too much energy.
Could you give an actual criticism of the energy argument? “It doesn’t pass the smell test” is a poor excuse for an argument.
When I assume that the external universe is similar to ours, this is because Bostrom’s argument is specifically about ancestral simulations. An ancestral simulation directly implies that there is a universe trying to simulate itself. I posit this is impossible because of the laws of thermodynamics, the necessity to not allow your simulations to realize what they are, and keeping consistency in the complexity of the universe.
Yes its possible for the external universe to be 100% different from ours, but this gives us exactly no insight at all into what that external universe may be, and at this point it’s a game of “Choose Your God”, which I have no interest in playing.
I agree that no one is ever going to run any ancestor simulations in our world. When Bostrom made his argument he accepted that this was one possible conclusion from it. I think it is the right one.
That does not mean there are no simulations at all. As one example Walter mentioned, novels are simulations of worlds, but very different worlds. And likewise, there is no proof that we are not contained in another very different world that differs from our world as much as our world differs from novels.
I disagree. Something missing is different than a god. A god is often not well-defined, but generally it is assumed to be some kind of intelligence, that is it can know and manipulate information, and it has infinite agency or near to it. Something missing could be a simple physical process. One is infinitely complex (god), the other is feasibly simple enough for a human to fully understand.
I don’t think this is really what you wrote the first time, but the argument you’re presenting here doesn’t progress us anywhere so I won’t spend more time on it. I think we should drop this metaphor from the conversation.
Disagree again. First, “basically what our brains do” and “what our brains do” is almost certainly a non-trivial gap—if our brains are too complex for us to fully know every aspect of it at once, that is well enough to make precise predictions—then the jump to “basically what our brains do” introduces a difference in what we would predict. If we want to program all the neurons and neurotransmitters perfectly—have a brain totally modeled in software—then that brain would still need input like actual humans get or it may not develop correctly.
To the second point about ” a lot more minds in simulations...”, I also think this argument is fatally flawed. Let’s assume that a perfect human brain can be simulated, however unlikely I think this is personally. To convince that simulated mind that it is in a base reality, it would have to be able to observe every aspect of that reality and come to the conclusion that the universe can and does fully exist by it’s own processes. To be convinced it is living in a simulation, it may only need to see one physically “weird” thing; not a seemingly-too-improbable thing like no aliens, but an absolutely wrong thing, such as reversal of causality, that would be basically a glitch of the system.
Now some may argue that the simulators could “roll back” the simulation when these glitches occur, but I’m skeptical of the engineering feasibility of such a simulation in the first place that could, even for thousands of years, trick human minds. If we take a “lossy” simulation like video games now, it’s clear that besides obvious bugs and invisible walls that bound the world, there’s also a level of information resolution that’s low compared to our world. That is, we can explain the physics of modern games by their physics engines, while we still struggle to explain the physics of the whole universe. If you have any amount of “lossiness” in a simulation, then eventually minds capable of finding that lossiness will—a brain in a vat will discover that, actually, nothing is made of atoms, but instead have their textures loaded in. Even if the brains we make don’t have the ability to find this edge of resolution, we must assume that if we can create a superintelligent machine, and we can create a simulation of our own minds, then our simulated minds must also be able to create a superintelligence, which would either be able to find those lossy resolution issues or make a smarter being that can. Then the jig is up, and the simulations know they’re in a simulation.
To get around the inevitable finding of lossiness in a simulation, the simulation creators would need to make their simulation indistinguishable from our own universe. This implies two things: first that such a simulation cannot be made, because making a perfect simulation of our universe inside our universe would take more energy than the universe has (see the Second Law of Thermodynamics if this doesn’t make sense right away); the second is that if we could make a simulation indistinguishable from our universe, then we would know all the secrets of our universe, including whether or not we were in a simulation.
In physics, the answer to the question of “what’s the something missing?” is not god, it is “we don’t know yet.” The answer that physicists look for makes specific predictions about testable phenomenon, and so far it does not seem that there are even any good testable claims that we’re in a simulation.
What would those claims even be? Can we see where our universe is stored in memory on the machine we’re supposedly running on? Why or why not?
And it’s super arrogant for theists to believe that a god created them special. So your argument from distaste of the other is not helping you.
We still don’t know that we’re the lone planet with life. And maybe it’s too much of a giveaway to you, but it means almost nothing to me besides “the conditions to create life in the universe are rare even under arrangements where it is possible”. Seeming like a score counter is not evidence it is a score counter. Only observing life on Earth is not a prediction about anything, it is not an explanation of anything—it is merely information, and the fact that you’re twisting that information to give you a conclusion only says something about what you want to believe.
It feels like you’ve gone from asking for an explanation to resisting a conversion effort that I’m not making here.
Minds simulatable:
It’s kind of weird that I’m the one saying that there is nothing magic about a mind, and you are the one basically adding souls, yet we are theist and atheist respectively, but surely if minds are unable to be simulated that would be a blow ‘against’ your beliefs, yeah?
Doing that being hard:
That doesn’t seem knowable. Like, yeah, it seems like faking five senses would be hard, but that’s just from our perspective. We can make much simpler minds than ours easily, presumably whatever made us is far enough beyond us that this isn’t a big deal.
Rollback:
Same as above? LIke, maybe this is happening constantly, maybe not. No way for us to know.
We might find aliens one day!:
Sure, I’ll change my mind when that happens. For now the evidence is that we are a special case, which implies a hidden variable. That hidden variable is most likely a mind, since that’s what it would be if any simulated intelligence asked what it was.
The earth is unlike the rest of everything we’ve observed. That’s weird. One potential reason is that a mind we cannot observe arranged things that way. That will be the right answer for any of our fictions that we give the ability to ask this question in the future, so it is probably the right answer for us.
First, I’m not “resisting a conversion”. I’m disagreeing with your position that a hidden variable is even more likely to be a mind than something else.
I absolutely am not adding souls. This makes me think you didn’t really read my argument. I’ll present this a different way: human brains are incredibly complex. So complex, in fact, we still don’t fully understand them. With a background in computer science, I know that you can’t simulate something accurately without at least having a very accurate model. Currently, we have no accurate model of the brain, and it seems that the first accurate model we may get is just simulating every neuron at some level. What I’m saying is that unless that level we simulate neurons on is sufficiently small, there will be obvious errors. Perhaps this is feasible to simulate some human minds, even at the level of quantum mechanics.
My claim against a simulation being run in our universe that could sufficiently trick a human is this: There is not enough energy. This can be understood by thinking about the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and recognizing that to fully simulate something would require giving that thing the actual energy it has; to simulate an electron, you would need to give it the charge of an actual electron, or else it would not interact properly with its environment. Then it follows, if everything is simulated with its actual energy, it would take more energy than the universe has to simulate, because practically we lose energy to heat every time we try to fight entropy in some small way. The conclusion is that the universe is precisely simulating itself, which is indistinguishable from reality.
The need for this perfect simulation is a consequence of maintaining the observable complexity that is apparent in the formulations of these hypotheses by people like Bostrom. I wouldn’t claim humans being in a simulation is impossible—my claim is that our own civilization cannot perfectly recreate itself.
So there’s no actual good reason to believe we’re in a simulation of ourselves, unless you take Bostrom’s arbitrary operations on even more arbitrary numbers as evidence. Which I obviously don’t think anyone should.
Finally, as I said before, the claim of a simulation makes no predictions, and we can’t even know a way, if any, of proving we’re in a simulation—except by construction, which seems impossible as outlined above. So, with no way to prove we’re in a simulation, no way to prove a god exists, and no decent way to even make a reasonable estimate of the likelihood of either, the potential mechanisms that created the universe should be part of random distribution until we can sufficiently understand and test physical processes at a deeper level.
It feels like you are answering the old question of whether God could create a rock he couldn’t lift by explaining that lifting is hard.
Like, the idea that an entity simulating our universe wouldn’t be able to do that, because they’d run out of energy doesn’t pass even the basic sniff test.
Say ‘our’ universe, the one that you and I observe, is a billionth the size of a real one. Say they are running it so that we get a second every time they go through a trillion years. Say that all of us but me are p-zombies, and they only simulate the rest of y’all every time you interact with my experiences. The idea that there aren’t enough resources to simulate the universe isn’t even really wrong, it just seems like you haven’t thought through the postulation of us being a simulation.
Even the invocation of our laws of physics as applying to the simulation is bonkers. Why would the reality where our simulation is run in have anything resembling ours? Our creations don’t have physics that resemble ours. Video game characters don’t fall as per gravity, characters in movies and books don’t have real magnetism. Why would you imagine that our simulator is recreating their home conditions?
Lastly, you need to either fish or cut bait on the humans being possible to simulate. If you aren’t postulating a soul, then we are nothing but complicated lighting and meat, meaning that we are entirely feasible to simulate. If you do think there’s something about the human mind going on that God’s computers or whatever can’t replicate, then I’ll certainly cede the argument, but you don’t get to call yourself an atheist.
It’s even more bizarre to see you say that the claim of simulation makes no predictions, in response to me pointing out that it’s prediction (just us in the observable universe) is the reason to believe it.
Walter if no aliens: Simulation/creator of some kind Walter if aliens : Real
Denim if aliens: Real Denim if no aliens: looks really hard away from how monstrously unlikely our situation is.
I’m convinced you are not actually reading what I’m writing. I said if the universe ours is simulated in is supposed to be like our own/we are an ancestral simulation then this implies that the universe simulating ours should be like ours, and we can apply our laws of physics to it, and our laws of physics say there’s entropy, or a limit to the amount of order.
I also believe that if we’re a simulation, then the universe simulating ours must be very different than ours in fundamental ways, but this tells us nothing specific about that universe. And it implies that there could be no evidence, ever, of being in a simulation. Just like there could be no evidence, ever, of a god, or a flying spaghetti monster, or whatever other thought experiment you have faith in.
What I am trying to say is that you need a level of complexity to sufficiently trick intelligent beings in to not thinking they’re in a simulation, and that humans could not create such a simulation themselves.
Key word: complicated. Wrong word: feasible. I think you mean possible. Yes we are possible to simulate, but feasible implies that it can readily be done, which is exactly what I’m arguing against. Go read up about computer science, how simulations actually work, and physics before you start claiming things are feasible when they’re currently impossible and certainly difficult problems that may only be feasible to the entirety of humanity working together for centuries.
The prediction something makes is never the reason to believe something. The confirmation of that prediction is the reason to believe something. You cannot prove that whatever prediction the simulation makes is true, therefore there is not a rational reason to believe we are in a simulation. This is the foundation of logic and science, I urge you to look into it more.
The lack of aliens isn’t proof of anything (absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence).
It’s super aggravating that if you already understood that we can’t know anything about the (universe simulating ours / the mighty God who created us / the inscrutable machinations of the Spaghetti Monster who cooked the broth of our creation) you go on these long tangents about what they could and could not do.
You do it again with regard to simulating humans. Yes, it would be tough to do now. Easier in the future. By definition a cakewalk for the unknowable entity responsible for doing it right now with me and you. Since you understand that we have no knowledge of the mind responsible for our creation, why do you go on about how tough it must be for it?
Look, in regards to evidence, you get this in your day to day life. You must, you are a living being. If there are no muddy footprints in your hallway then your toddlers didn’t run down it.
Earth’s complexity in a vastly more simple universe is the same as the coin that flips heads a googleplex times. Earth is weird (should I steal your cool habit of using italics on important words for weird?). The absence of other things like it in our light cone is evidence that there is a hidden variable. (In the same way that me guessing your card more than 1⁄52 of the time is evidence that you are missing the trick)
In every other case we can set up or find where this situation is roughly analogous (watchmaker is the classic), the answer is that the experimenter is to blame. He put the watch in the desert, the other rocks are less complicated not because of chance, but because they weren’t put there by a civilization that can make watches.
If you are still hung up on how hard it will be to simulate our minds, then just imagine that our simulations are simpler than us, ok? They can only hear, and time goes slower. There are only ten people in their whole universe, whatever. Point is, that when they ask this question, the ‘right’ answer for them to come to is that they have a creator. That’s also the right answer for us to come to.
So far you’ve told me to read up on computer science, and ‘the foundation of logic and science’. My turn I guess? Keep a diary for a day or two, you’ll be surprised at what you already know. Don’t fence off your common sense from your commenting. You know how evidence works.
I mostly agree with this, except for argument that we are in a simulation based on the non-existence of aliens, since I have no reason to believe that it is easy to get life from non-life in the first place. There may be one civilization out of every ten thousand spaces the size of our visible universe. This could change, of course, if it turns out that abiogenesis is extremely easy. Such a fact would actually support your position (which falsifies the implied claim in this thread that there cannot be evidence for it in principle.)
I definitely agree that it is a mistake to assume that an external simulating universe should have the same physical laws, or to argue that we are not in a simulation because it is “hard,” or that it would use too much energy.
Could you give an actual criticism of the energy argument? “It doesn’t pass the smell test” is a poor excuse for an argument.
When I assume that the external universe is similar to ours, this is because Bostrom’s argument is specifically about ancestral simulations. An ancestral simulation directly implies that there is a universe trying to simulate itself. I posit this is impossible because of the laws of thermodynamics, the necessity to not allow your simulations to realize what they are, and keeping consistency in the complexity of the universe.
Yes its possible for the external universe to be 100% different from ours, but this gives us exactly no insight at all into what that external universe may be, and at this point it’s a game of “Choose Your God”, which I have no interest in playing.
I agree that no one is ever going to run any ancestor simulations in our world. When Bostrom made his argument he accepted that this was one possible conclusion from it. I think it is the right one.
That does not mean there are no simulations at all. As one example Walter mentioned, novels are simulations of worlds, but very different worlds. And likewise, there is no proof that we are not contained in another very different world that differs from our world as much as our world differs from novels.