On whether we're living in a simulation

I don’t find the general simulation question interesting nor have I listened to the interview, but from your description I don’t find that response interesting either. Why wouldn’t the answer be a trivial “people like us”?

We don’t know of anything in the natural world that would be able to create the necessary elements for the Universe to exist, but we do know how to create digital worlds even if digital consciousness is currently beyond our grasp.

Thus the difference between the God question and the simulation question is that in the latter there is a clear path to us recursively becoming the gods. Not so in the former.

Only if “god” is a computational or mathematical system that leads to clearly defined and testable predictions. That isn’t typically consistent with most religious concepts of God.

I can surely imagine an intelligent design advocate trying to formulate a testable physical prediction inspired by theology, but if done rigorously, they are going to be disappointed in the result. And I’ll venture to guess that’s why you are equating the two- you are so certain we are not in a simulation that you think the concept of exploring it scientifically is absurd, and you would not accept any result conflicting with your prior belief, regardless of the evidence, am I right? That kind of certainty without evidence sounds kind of like religious faith to me ;-)

Just so we're all on the same page, I am not the person who made the first comment ("Which sounds as unlikely as Jesus dying for my sins on the cross..."):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39301776

> Original assertion - belief that we are in a simulation with 100% certainty is no different than a religious belief in a deity.

> You: "What evidence do you have that there is no evidence though?"

If we're being "pedantic", there are ~~two~~ THREE claims that "have" a burden of proof:

1. Original assertion - belief that we are in a simulation with 100% certainty is no different than a religious belief in a deity. [Was this actually the original assertion?]

I don't believe this assertion occurred - rather, I think you may have misinterpreted "are in the same ballpark"?

2. belief that we are in a simulation with 100% certainty is no different than a religious belief in a deity

Ontologically + algorithmically, "is not different" is a bold claim.

As an ~analogy, see: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2363143/whats-the-best-s...

3. "You cannot claim no evidence is a meaningful assertion here, its not"

a) One can actually, but not in an epistemically & logically sound manner (and you have a few challenges of your own on that front).

b) "meaningful" is a very tricky word; it is also a subjective word (so, conducting logic upon it is going to produce strange, misleading results like "its not", which is an opinion that has the appearance of being a fact. Unless I am completely misunderstanding you, here we do not disagree (you do believe it to be true, no)?)

>> I'd also like to know why the grandparent post has no burden of proof

> The OP made no claims.

Again, if we are referring to "Which sounds as unlikely as Jesus dying for my sins on the cross...", I believe you are incorrect, there are several claims in there ("pedentically", even an expression of one's opinion and predictions are claims).

> An 'opinion' without an evidence is a belief.

While technically true, this seems like one of those "not wrong" truths:

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=you%27re%20n...

>>> "you're not wrong" = "you're right", however phrasing it as "you're not wrong" usually that there's more to it -- either there's some missing nuance....

In this case, substantial problems derive from the multiple differing meanings of "is a", which is often mixed up with equals at runtime (under certain conditions).

But also, importantly (maybe even more importantly): this cultural norm where on certain topics of conversation, it is acceptable to simply play the ~"it's just an opinion, everyone is always only expressing their opinion..." as a sort of rhetorical get our of jail free card is (imho) not only annoying, but a giant source of unrealized (recursively compounding, etc) harm in the system. I often wonder what would happen is some set of people in this system were to "do otherwise" (in a comprehensive manner), at substantial scale.

tl;dr: probably just an honest mistake, cheers!

That doesn't address what I said at all. If you assert dualism, like what you did here as an attempt to inject "non-computation" all you do is give rise to infinite regress. E.g. how do you propose this "consciousness" would decide in a way that is not itself computation?

The question was:

> What's the reason for the simulation to be smaller than the simulator?

And the answer to that is that there's no reason. There's no reason to assume the state of a simulation isn't compressible, because have no knowledge about whether or not it is, and we do have plenty of knowledge of how to create simulations that appear complex but that reduces to easily computable sequences "from the outside".

The more restricted question isn't meaningful because we have no basis for assuming we can restrict ourselves to consider incompressible state, because we have no way of determining if the state is incompressible.

There would be any number of sets of possible simulations that would indeed be smaller than their simulators, but given that within two similarly sized universes, you would be able to fit more simulations that are reducible, the probability that any given simulation is an approximation that allows for shortcuts ought to be higher than that it is a simulation of an irreducible set of data.

So much so, that perhaps if we were able to somehow demonstrate aspects that would prove incompressibility (and I'm not convinced that is possible, or even meaningful) that might indicate that we're more likely to be in the "outer" universe. Conversely, the more compressible our universe looks, the more we might want to consider that it's an indication that we're more likely to be in a simulation.