[Buddha-l] ARE YOU LIVING IN A COMPUTER SIMULATION?

[ralf.steckel at online.ms]

Dear Michael,

as anybody who loved to read science fiction as a boy i liked the Matrix triology as well. Nevertheless the idea that the world is a computer simulation by a "posthuman" entity fails in my opinion the principle of Occam's razor 'that the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible, eliminating, or "shaving off," those that make no difference in the observable predictions of the explanatory hypothesis or theory' (quoted from Wikipedia).

I think that buddhist explanations about the quality of illusion in the world aware to our senses require less assumptions than the computer simulation by a "posthuman" entity and therefor is to prefer.

Best Regards,

Ralf Steckel

> Is the world an illusion, or a simulation? 
> 
> Or are we in the improbable position of living in the vanishingly short time 
> period before massive world-simulations begin?
> 
> See philosopher Nick Bostrom's argument below.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Michael LaTorra
> 
> mlatorra at nmsu.edu
> 
> Department of English
> New Mexico State University
> PO Box 30001 MSC 3E
> Las Cruces, NM 88003-8001
> 
> http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html
> 
> ARE YOU LIVING IN A COMPUTER SIMULATION?
> BY NICK BOSTROM
> 
> Department of Philosophy, Oxford University
> 
> Homepage: http://www.nickbostrom.com
> 
> [First version: May, 2001; Final version July 2002]
> 
> This is a preprint of the final version which appeared in Philosophical 
> Quarterly (2003), Vol. 53, No. 211, pp. 243-255.
> 
> [This document is located at http://www.simulation-argument.com]
> 
> 
> ABSTRACT
> 
> This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) 
> the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a �posthuman� 
> stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a 
> significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations 
> thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It 
> follows 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. A number of other consequences of this 
> result are also discussed. 
> 
> ...
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