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No.
Panic, Chaos, Destruction. My work here is done.
Drink. Get drunk. Fall over - P O'H
OK, I will win to day or my name isn't Ethel Crudacre! - DD Ethel Crudacre
I cannot live by bread alone. Bacon and ketchup are needed as well. - Trollslayer
Have a bit more patience with newbies. Of course some of them act dumb - they're often *students*, for heaven's sake - Terry Pratchett
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...and my headache is gone. Thanks.
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I've always said if there is a god then he is a software developer who had to hard code a couple of exceptions after his original model wouldn't let life develop in his test runs.
Every man can tell how many goats or sheep he possesses, but not how many friends.
Shed Petition[ ^]
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Most of the time our syntax is correct, but our logic is always flawed. God must have used the old waterfall development methodology. 
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That would explain the Deluge 
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Nature doesn't have pop-up ads every time you view a natural wonder.
That is how we know we aren't in a computer simulation.
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MehGerbil wrote: Nature doesn't have pop-up ads every time you view a natural wonder.
...Yet. Once they find a way... you'll be looking at Niagra Falls and suddenly an advertisement for toilet paper will appear in your sunglasses.
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...and those sun glasses will suddenly appear in a nearby trash bin.
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Ok, I admit it, it's been a while since I've been on the lounge. How do I give this 5?
Er, I can't think of a funny signature right now.
How about a good fart to break the silence?
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It made me laugh;
He also held that "the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation."
That's a spaghetti-monster 
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Sounds like a spaghetti monster, but that sentence is phrased kind of backward. The idea is that IF we are likely to become posthuman, and run simulations of ourselves, then the humans in those simulations are likely to do the same, and so on, until there is a large number of simulations. In that case, the probability of us being the very first simulators is very small, so we are almost certainly living in one of the simulations. So I think the point of the above statement is that you can't believe we are likely to become posthumans capable of simulating ourselves, unless you also believe we are almost certainly in a simulation.
Not saying there is any evidence either way, but neither is the quoted statement. It's not really a speghetti monster, more of a statement of the constraints of belief in such a speghetti monster.
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Like the Spaghetti-monster, it requires one to take an assumption as a starting-point. It's built on "what ifs". What if these supposed "posthumans" are apes? Like the movie "Planet of.."? They'd eventually be able to run simulations, wouldn't they?
What about the first bacteria? First one-celled life was immortal. Wouldn't it be more simple to deduce that they're the ones running simulations? Where does the idea of "symmetry" in the simulations come from, if not the human psyche and it's arrogance?
It reminds me of a compile-error in code; the classes are built on a circular reference.
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You may have replied before I added my edit:
Quote: Not saying there is any evidence either way, but neither is the quoted statement. It's not really a speghetti monster, more of a statement of the constraints of belief in such a speghetti monster.
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I am thinking the core assumption of these scientists is wrong:
Assuming that a highly developed race has the ability to start such a simulation, what would be the point of including the simulation itself, recursively? It would just be an endless recursion, and each recursion step would be less accurate due to resource constraints. I can think of some use to run a simulation of the past, but why run a simulation of the present?
Moreover, at the point the simulants... err, the simulated scientists set up the simulated simulation, they should be able to notice the restrictions of the simulation apply to their own universe. At which point the simulation cannot probably remain accurate, simply because at least some of those scientists will be more interested in contacting their "creators".
The only reason for the "creators" to keep a simulation running beyond that point would be that they're not actually running simulation of their own universe - more likely they're just running a game (maybe "The Sims CLXXII"?)
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Can we blame everything bad that happens on Will Wright then?
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Only if he's your descendant. Otherwise, blame your own kids.
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I read all the foundational literature on that one. Then I couldn't stop thinking about it, and rereading stuff, and forming ideas for adopting the point of view that we do live in a simulation. That fat question gets in the way of much more enlightening and constructive and very interesting thought experiments. I have a constant input into my thoughts on what is this all, and it allows a very patterned view of our experiences, making tweaking that into alternate experiences of reality.
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That is just regurgitation of a common and old philosophical view.
And result is that it just doesn't matter if it is or isn't. Because we can't prove it one way or the other. So we might as well just assume (believe) it to be false.
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jschell wrote: So we might as well just assume (believe) it to be false.
Why not assume it to be true?
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Kschuler wrote: Why not assume it to be true?
Because then nothing matters.
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Ian M Banks novel Algebraist has a religion called "The Truth" which says that the universe might or might not be a simulation but it we don't know so you have to treat reality as real and get on with it.
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In one of his Culture books called 'Matter' a character argues that we are not in a simulation because any entity advanced enough to able to host such a convincing simulation is likely to have an advanced moral ethic and could not be so immoral as to engineer so much suffering.
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Every society has to have at least one sadist...
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Bill Seddon wrote: argues that we are not in a simulation because any entity advanced enough to
able to host such a convincing simulation is likely to have an advanced moral
ethic and could not be so immoral as to engineer so much suffering
Which of course is a meaningless argument.
Intelligence has nothing to do with morality. And ability certainly doesn't.
And "suffering" is a moral choice not an absolute. Not to mention of course that there are quite a few moral argument one could make that completely removes any suffering for example that we do not feel it or that because we are a simulation it does not matter.
Additionally one could also argue that studying the suffering is exactly the point.
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