| That doesn't prove or disprove anything. The author assumes the simulation would have to simulate the entire known universe at the level of detail we observe. That is absurd. A simulation wouldn't need to simulate the entire universe, just what I am observing at that exact moment. Think of it is lazy evaluation. The rules are all known, but they are not evaluated until needed. If we have one single person, how hard would it be to simulate every single input to that one person? You wouldn't need to simulate an entire universe to do that. Going back to what the author had to say, you wouldn't have to simulate the state of every atom at every time. You only need to simulate when it is measured. Interestingly, this syncs up with what we know about the quantum world where measurement causes the state of the wave function to collapse. Additionally, the author seems to assume the universe exists outside of himself. He seems to trust the measurements and insights of scientific facts I doubt that he has confirmed via his own observation. Even if he did confirm all of them, this still doesn't prove the universe exists outside of what he directly observes with his own senses. By analogy, imagine you are a character in a video game. The video game doesn't render the entire universe of the game. Only the portion of the game the character is in at that moment. From the character's point of view, the laws are consistent. The character could even try to postulate some universal laws. Try to determine the size of their universe. I am not saying the philosophers are right or wrong. I'm just saying there is a lot more to the philosophy than the article covers. |
How do you know this? I've run a lot of simulations, and to get things exactly right anywhere you need to compute everything everywhere. That at least is my experience.
You've simply asserted that that is not the case, doing precisely what I'm critiquing the original argument for: imagining a case where there's no problem, and then asserting that case as a matter of fact.
As to Cartesian skepticism, it isn't even a self-consistent position: you want me to take your argument seriously while simultaneously asserting that I don't even know you exist.