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by vidarh 1703 days ago
Falsifiability does not work that way.

To avoid hypotheses that are unfalsifiable is good practice absent evidence because you can construct an infinite number of such hypotheses. That does not mean that a given unfalsifiable hypothesis can not be true, however, just that pursuing it is generally likely to be a waste of effort.

Asserting that simulation is definitely true absent evidence would be unjustified, but very few people would make that claim, so it's not very relevant.

However the inverse - the hypothesis that we're not in a simulation - is falsifiable by proving that we are in a simulation. And any number of variations over the idea that we might be in a simulation can also be testable and falsifiable in various ways.

The original point of contention was that QM and non-determinism proves we're not in a simulation, however, and that is not a viable way to falsify the hypothesis that we're not in a simulation. The hypothesis that non-determinism proves we're not in a simulation is falsifiable by coming up with a way wherein non-determinism can be accommodated.

If the world the simulator runs in has access to non-determinism this is trivially done by simply forwarding non-determinism into the simulation (many other approaches to attack that hypothesis are possible, e.g. using a additional simulations as oracles to determine if supposedly non-deterministic events would be revealed as such, and use that to pick values that ensures a failure to simulate non-determinism never gets detected, so access to a source of non-determinism is not necessary to falsify that hypothesis either, though it would complicate matters). As such the hypothesis that non-determinism alone proves we're not in a simulation is false.

1 comments

If unfalsifiable simulation is unjustifiable, that's bad, isn't it?
I have no idea what you're trying to say. Why would it be bad? It makes no sense. All it means is insisting it is true without evidence makes no sense. But nobody here is making that claim.
Unjustifiability means unfathomability; unfathomability suggests impossibility. And if simulation theory is impossible, its unfalsifiability is of no help.
This makes no sense to me whatsoever. You're using these words to means things entirely different from how I use them. Going by your use of them, simulation theory can not be proven unjustifiable, because that would make it falsifiable.
I don't have a rigorous proof that unfathomability implies impossibility, it's just a strong suggestion and demonstration that you incur a high risk of assuming an impossible thing into existence.