In both his calculation of the nominator and the denominator of his anthropic reasoning. The nominator requires a definition of an "ordinary observer" of which humans supposedly count. But it's not clear what the boundaries of an ordinary observer are in the definition. I don't really have enough time before bedtime to write ten paragraphs on the problem. But to summarize it seems very humanistically chauvinist. (Maybe paste that into Bard or ChatGPT and I'm sure it will know where I'm going with this).
The second problem deals with the assumed boundedness of the number of simulations, which I find problematic. Mainly because Bostrom doesn't seem to be very careful about thinking about how conservation laws will place significant energy constraints on nested simulations.
I don't think a top-level universe lacking conservation laws would be the kind of universe that would permit the minds of physics for life to evolve and build computers with simulations makes any sense, either.
But basically, if you were simulating entire universes within universes, in an ad infinitum nesting as Bostrom suggests, you'd quickly run out of energy to advance the nested simulations in anything resembling an economical way. We're talking about simulating entire universes down to sub-atomic particles, here. There's a real upper bound on the computation-energy budget here.
It turns out, when you take conservation laws into account, we're actually most likely to be living in a universe where no further simulations are possible. And the likelihood we are living in a top-level universe is far higher than in Bostrom (and Musk's) formulation.
That's all assuming we get over the ordinary observer problem.
The Simulation Hypothesis, particularly Bostrom's anthropic reasoning for it, is complete nonsense. In my admittedly, not so humble in this case, opinion.
If you're so certain you know what is true about the world, and if you're so certain you know exactly what is wrong with the world, and you're so certain you know exactly what to do to fix it, from behind your sensory and informationally impoverished singular viewpoint, then you are out of touch with your own limitations.
When I think I'm starting to believe I know all the answers, I remind myself of this.
Explain how that possibly works?
No human has ever seen what the world really looks like. We've only seen how bundles of neurons make sense of the electrical impulses from the photons hitting the back of our retina, sending signals down the optic nerve.
If you saw the world the way it looks in totality, when you looked up in the night sky, you wouldn't see blackness. If your eyes were sensitive to infrared light, radio frequencies, microwaves, ultraviolet and the entire electromagnetic spectrum, you'd see a universe glowing brilliantly above you. Yet we see but a tiny sliver of what we call "visible light".
It is strange that our intuition is that the human eye is the gold standard for visual perception of reality, when it sees so little of it.
Coincidences are things that are statistically going to happen in any complex system at some frequency. Sometimes at unintuitively high frequencies, that leads to quite a bit of human confusion and misunderstanding about the nature of reality.
Sort of. But I think you might be getting hung up on the negative connotation of the word accident.
If you don't believe in the supernatural, it does!
But at this point I think we're wasting time wringing our hands around the category of things that count as "accidents" into a reductionist vortex. You can really do this with anything if you try. The point is, that most of what you think of as your self-directed subjective experience, is a product of things completely beyond your control.
Whether we live in a deterministic or stochastic universe is really completely orthogonal to that point.
Did you choose when you were born? Who you were born as? Where you were born? Why you were born? Did you choose every unfortunate turn in your life, that forced you to take a new path? Did you choose to know about me? Or did a serious of events, largely beyond your control, but fortuitously aligned, bring you to this very moment where you're typing words onto a device, that you didn't choose to be invented, or a vast computer network spanning the globe that you didn't choose to be part of your world? Most of our lives are a series of accidents. That doesn't have to be a bad thing!
It goes without saying there's a "reason" for everything. Otherwise we wouldn't have a cognizable universe and we wouldn't exist. But that we find ourselves here in this moment is an accident of biology, history, circumstance, timing, and opportunity. The vast majority of things that brings you to this very moment were completely outside your control.
We're all here by accident.
why did you read worry into me posting this without comment?
💯 to the point that a lot of what needs to be done right now is actually incredibly boring and unsexy.
I worry that high fees could be a major challenge for non-custodial bitcoin. Even with Lightning, the cost of opening a channel could become prohibitive, and this could significantly advantage custodial solutions that can offer the double-whammy of key management and free zaps.
There's quite a few people who argue this, yes.