Ha, I wrote a comment like yours but slightly worse, then refreshed and your comment appeared. So now I’ll just add one small note:
To the extent that (1) normatively, we care much more about the rest of the universe than our personal lives/futures, and (2) empirically, we believe that our choices are much more consequential if we are non-simulated than if we are simulated, we should in practice act as if there are greater odds that we are non-simulated than we have reason to believe for purely epistemic purposes. So in practice, I’m particularly interested in (C) (and I tentatively buy SIA doomsday as explained by Katja Grace).
Edit: also, isn’t the last part of this sentence from the post wrong:
SIA therefore advises not that the Great Filter is ahead, but rather that we are in a simulation run by an intergalactic human civilization, without strong views on late filters for unsimulated reality.
Re your edit: That bit seems roughly correct to me.
If we are in a simulation, SIA doesn’t have strong views on late filters for unsimulated reality. (This is my question (B) above.) And since SIA thinks we’re almost certainly in a simulation, it’s not crazy to say that SIA doesn’t have strong view on late filters for unsimulated reality. SIA is very ok with small late filters, as long as we live in a simulation, which SIA says we probably do.
But yeah, it is a little bit confusing, in that we care more about late-filters-in-unsimulated reality if we live in unsimulated reality. And in the (unlikely) case that we do, then we should ask my question (C) above, in which case SIA do have strong views on late filters.
Ah, I agree. I misread that bit as about filters for us given that we are non-simulated, but really it’s about filters for non-simulated civilizations, which under the simulation argument our existence doesn’t tell us much about. Thanks.
Ha, I wrote a comment like yours but slightly worse, then refreshed and your comment appeared. So now I’ll just add one small note:
To the extent that (1) normatively, we care much more about the rest of the universe than our personal lives/futures, and (2) empirically, we believe that our choices are much more consequential if we are non-simulated than if we are simulated, we should in practice act as if there are greater odds that we are non-simulated than we have reason to believe for purely epistemic purposes. So in practice, I’m particularly interested in (C) (and I tentatively buy SIA doomsday as explained by Katja Grace).
Edit: also, isn’t the last part of this sentence from the post wrong:
Re your edit: That bit seems roughly correct to me.
If we are in a simulation, SIA doesn’t have strong views on late filters for unsimulated reality. (This is my question (B) above.) And since SIA thinks we’re almost certainly in a simulation, it’s not crazy to say that SIA doesn’t have strong view on late filters for unsimulated reality. SIA is very ok with small late filters, as long as we live in a simulation, which SIA says we probably do.
But yeah, it is a little bit confusing, in that we care more about late-filters-in-unsimulated reality if we live in unsimulated reality. And in the (unlikely) case that we do, then we should ask my question (C) above, in which case SIA do have strong views on late filters.
Ah, I agree. I misread that bit as about filters for us given that we are non-simulated, but really it’s about filters for non-simulated civilizations, which under the simulation argument our existence doesn’t tell us much about. Thanks.