Wolfgang Schwarz

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The tyranny of the objective

A widely held view in philosophy is that ordinary information and ordinary belief are concerned with "objective" propositions whose truth-value doesn't vary between perspectives or locations within a world.

Some hold that all genuine content is objective, and that the appearance of counterexamples is an illusion that can somehow be explained away. (See, e.g., Stalnaker 1981, Magidor 2015, or Cappelen and Dever 2013.) Even those who accept that there is genuinely perspectival or self-locating information tend to treat it as a special case that requires special rules for integration with ordinary, non-perspectival information. (See, e.g., Bostrom 2002, Meacham 2008, Moss 2012, Titelbaum 2013, Builes 2020, or Isaacs, Hawthorne, and Russell 2022).

Are we living in a computer simulation?

I'm moderately confident that I don't live in a computer simulation. My reasoning goes like this.

  1. A priori, simulation scenarios are less probable than non-simulation scenarios.

  2. My evidence is more likely in non-simulation scenarios than in simulation scenarios.

  3. So: It is highly improbable, given my evidence, that I'm in a simulation scenario.

By a "simulation scenario", I mean a scenario in which a subject's experiences of themselves and their environment are generated by a computer program that simulates an ordinary (non-simulated) subject and their environment.

I assume that it is a priori possible for a computer program to generate experiences (and a "subject") by simulating an ordinary subject with experiences. I'm not 100% sure this is true. (If not, premise 1 can be strengthened: simulation scenarios have probability 0.) But it seems plausible, especially if we're liberal about what qualifies as a computer program and as a simulation.

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