(Don’t you hate/love it when you find out that your big amazing groundbreaking idea has already been advocated by someone smarter and more important than you? It’s so disappointing/validating.)
Indeed! I haven’t read Tegmark’s paper yet (but I’ve resolved to do so now), and I sorta came to the same conclusion myself a while back. Here are some more thought-experiments that can be shortcuts to the idea you have described:
Zhuangzi didn’t know whether he had dreamt he was a butterfly, or whether he was a butterfly dreaming of being Zhuangzi. The two points of view are equally-privileged.
Tweedledee and Tweedledum told Alice that she was in the Red King’s dream, and if he were to wake up, she would cease to exist. Contrariwise, Alice would instead keep on existing, independent of whether anyone dreamed about her.
It is conceivable that if you converted the digits of pi into a digital video stream, it would show you images from another world. Would our world still be privileged with existence over that other one? (I find that Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind Of Science not only provides a pretty illustration of what simulating a universe could look like, but encourages one to think of the thing being simulated as an abstract mathematical object.)
What if there are two universes, and each one contains a simulation of the other? (Running very slowly, of course, and for an infinite amount of time.) Is one privileged over the other?
It’s a nice metaphysical idea, but I don’t see how it can tell us about the simulation argument or Boltzmann brains or anthropics if we don’t have a prior probability distribution over mathematical structures. I’ll see if Tegmark’s paper addresses this!
Indeed! I haven’t read Tegmark’s paper yet (but I’ve resolved to do so now), and I sorta came to the same conclusion myself a while back. Here are some more thought-experiments that can be shortcuts to the idea you have described:
Zhuangzi didn’t know whether he had dreamt he was a butterfly, or whether he was a butterfly dreaming of being Zhuangzi. The two points of view are equally-privileged.
Tweedledee and Tweedledum told Alice that she was in the Red King’s dream, and if he were to wake up, she would cease to exist. Contrariwise, Alice would instead keep on existing, independent of whether anyone dreamed about her.
It is conceivable that if you converted the digits of pi into a digital video stream, it would show you images from another world. Would our world still be privileged with existence over that other one? (I find that Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind Of Science not only provides a pretty illustration of what simulating a universe could look like, but encourages one to think of the thing being simulated as an abstract mathematical object.)
What if there are two universes, and each one contains a simulation of the other? (Running very slowly, of course, and for an infinite amount of time.) Is one privileged over the other?
It’s a nice metaphysical idea, but I don’t see how it can tell us about the simulation argument or Boltzmann brains or anthropics if we don’t have a prior probability distribution over mathematical structures. I’ll see if Tegmark’s paper addresses this!