From: Phillip Huggan (cdnprodigy@yahoo.com)
Date: Tue Mar 07 2006 - 20:57:48 MST
If consciousness is actually the spooky interaction of EM phenomena and brain chemistry (a thesis I'm still a year or two away from developing or defending), don't all laws of physics which permit conscious actors also necessarily encapsulate properties reminiscent of computer simulations?
I ridiculed the SA and lumped it together with unicorn dreaming because both aren't 100% disproveable in the way Jeff Herrlick requested be demonstrated. Occam's Razor still allows either to be tenable to an infinitesimal degree. But an additional deductive source of info we possess is that we are conscious actors like a simulator would be. Our universe is not in agreement with what a simulator's motivations would be. It is not good. It is not evil. Why would the simulator bother running an EARTH 2006 program in the first place? There should be a Moral Law (karma), or good, or evil. I hate deducing from philosophy on sl4, but it is the most powerful argument against SA.
Ben Goertzel <ben@goertzel.org> wrote:
So, regarding the hypothesis that the universe is just a dream of the
Cosmic Unicorn, my question to you is: Can you make a plausible
argument that the laws of physics have some specific properties that
are generally associated with the dreams of unicorns? If not I don't
see what evidence you could raise in favor of the hypothesis, and then
Eliezer's rejection based on Occam's Razor would seem to reject the
hypothesis soundly.
In this sense, I find the "universe as computer simulation" hypothesis
much more plausible than the "universe as unicorn dream" hypothesis,
because the universe appears to have more properties reminiscent of
computer simulations than of unicorn dreams.
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