Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Actually, that was a Twitter question. I’ll go ahead and ask it. Are we living in a simulation? This was prompted by the David Deutsch conversation. I’m never sure what it means to be living in a simulation. If there’s a high school kid with a project, and the project is to simulate a lot of beings, then it’s well defined. But is the universe as a whole a simulation, I don’t think has a comparably clear answer. If you view the universe as somehow just being about computation in the broadest sense of the word, it seems under all scenarios, the universe as a whole, properly construed, is a kind of simulation. In that sense, are we living in a simulation? Almost certainly. Are we the product of somebody’s experiment? That seems less likely to me. I simply think that civilizations tend to perish before they can create these truly grand simulations. The Bayesian reasoning of “Well, each civilization creates so many civilizations, you need to reason backwards and assume you’re in one,” I don’t think that works, so basically, no. But the medieval point that, in some sense, the universe is a simulation in the mind of God — can you treat the mind of God as a simulation, and so on. At the macro level, people, I think, are confusing those two questions rather too quickly. Has Robin Hanson’s paper on grabby aliens influenced you at all on this, in terms of civilizational collapse and things like that?…

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