Published on January 6, 2025 9:27 PM GMT
This is my first post ever on LessWrong. Let me explain my problem.
I was born in a unique situation — I shall omit the details of exactly what this situation was, but for my argument's sake, assume I was born as the tallest person in the entire world. Or instead suppose that I was born into the richest family in the world. In other words, take as an assumption that I was born into a situation entirely unique relative to all other humans on an easily measurable dimension such as height or wealth (i.e., not some niche measure like "longest tongue"). And indeed, my unique situation is perhaps more immediate and obvious to myself and others than even height or wealth.
For that reason, I've always had an unconscious fear that I'm living in a fake, or simulated world. That fear recently entered my awareness. I reasoned a couple days ago that the fear is motivated by an implicit use of anthropic reasoning. Something along the lines of, "I could have been any human, so that fact that I'm this particular one, this unique human, means there's 'something wrong' with my world. And therefore I'm in a simulation." Something like that. I read through various posts on this site related to anthropic reasoning, including when to use SSA and SIA, but none of them seem to address my concern specifically. Hopefully someone reading this can help me.
To be clear, the question I want answered is the following: "Based on the theory of anthropic reasoning as it is currently understood, from my perspective alone (not your perspective, as the person responding to me, but my own), is my distinctiveness strong evidence for being in a simulation? And if it is, by how much should I 'update' my belief in the simulation given my own observation of my distinctiveness?"
Please let me know if you need any clarifications on this question. The question matters a lot to me, so thank you to anyone who responds.
Edit: In particular, I wonder if the following Bayesian update is sound:
As rough estimates, let Pr(I'm in a simulation) = 0.01, Pr(I'm distinct | I'm not in a simulation) = 0.0001, Pr(I'm distinct | I'm in a simulation) = 0.5 — a high probability since I assume simulated observers are quite likely to be 'special' or 'distinct' with respect to the class of other entities in their simulated world that appear to be observers. (Though perhaps this assumption is precisely my error. Should I be applying SIA here to argue that this latter probability is much smaller? Because simulated worlds in which the other observers are real and not 'illusory' would have low probability of distinctiveness and far more observers? I don't know if this is sound. Should be using SSA instead here to make an entirely separate argument?)
From these estimates, we calculate Pr(I'm distinct)=0.0060, and then using Bayes' theorem, we find Pr(I'm in a simulation | I'm distinct) = 0.98. So even with a quite small, 0.01 prior on being in a simulation, the fact that I'm distinct gives me a 98% chance that I'm in a simulation.
Discuss
