u/ima_mollusk

Most people in this sub seem to subscribe to the 'ancestor simulator' idea - the creators of the simulation are technologically-advanced humans on Earth running simulations of past Earth (our present).

But this is only one possible reason or source for the simulation, and it's not even the most likely one.

For examples:

Alien-run simulation
Not our descendants at all but a totally different (alien, perhaps) species simulating a galaxy, a species, a history that happens to include us, for reasons as hidden from us as our reasons for running SimCity are to the sims. No reason to think the simulators resemble us, care about us, or even know of us individually. Basically, we could be background rendering.

Self-simulation / bootstrapping
The universe simulates itself, recursively, with no external substrate at all.
This is like Wolfram's computational-universe idea or "it from bit" more than a Sim City-like simulation. There's no "outside" running the program; the program is all there is.

Training environment / test
We're not entertainment or research, we're a training run for an AI, for the simulators themselves, for something being evaluated on how it performs inside the scenario.

"Escaping the Simulation"
This idea presumes there's somewhere better outside to go. If simulations are possible, they are certain to outnumber 'real' universes. Any universe you find yourself in - even a universe that hosts a simulation - is likely to be a simulated reality itself.

If you 'escape the simulation', you probably just escape to a higher-level simulation.

And possibly the most likely situation, if our reality is simulated:

Physics-as-side-effect
The simulation is meant to simulate something else, like a physics experiment or a universal weather model, and our consciousness/observer state is an unintended emergent byproduct which could be unnoticed or even undesirable for the simulators. In other words, our existence is a byproduct, an accident, a leftover process nobody is watching.

On the topics of: Epistemology, Metaepistemology, Infallibility, Knowability, Skepticism

The Epistemic Incompleteness Principle - PhilPapers

No system can represent every truth in its domain - Gödel proved a version of this for formal systems, and it shows up again in different ways in computability theory and AI self-modeling. That's not really what this paper is about.

This paper's claim is a level up from that. Even setting aside whether you're missing something, you have no way to certify how much you're missing, using only your own resources. Any internal procedure you build to estimate the size of your own blind spot is itself just another piece of your knowledge - so it needs its own check, which needs its own check, and the chain never bottoms out in something self-certifying. You can be warranted, reliable, even right - none of that is in dispute. What's not available is a certified verdict on your own completeness, arrived at from the inside.

This isn't Gödel's theorem generalized to everything - The paper says it doesn't depend on formal systems, arithmetic, or even propositions at all. It applies to any system whose states can distinguish one thing from another, discursive or not.

Two places it bites hard:

AI self-assessment - a model can produce calibrated uncertainty estimates, but it has no internally certifiable way to know whether those estimates track its real limits or are just an artifact of how it was trained.

Classical theism's doctrine of omniscience - It argues there's no route (self-report, external verification, revelation, even the idea that God's creative act is self-evidently real rather than imagined) that gets you a certified claim to complete knowledge rather than an asserted one.

Latest draft (v5) is up on PhilPapers. Where do you think the argument is weakest? The load-bearing step is premise (4) in the formal regress (a procedure doesn't certify itself just by running), and I'd like to hear about any cracks if you can find them.

The Epistemic Incompleteness Principle - PhilPapers

No system can represent every truth in its domain - Gödel proved a version of this for formal systems, and it shows up again in different ways in computability theory and AI self-modeling. That's not really what this paper is about.

This paper's claim is a level up from that. Even setting aside whether you're missing something, you have no way to certify how much you're missing, using only your own resources. Any internal procedure you build to estimate the size of your own blind spot is itself just another piece of your knowledge - so it needs its own check, which needs its own check, and the chain never bottoms out in something self-certifying. You can be warranted, reliable, even right - none of that is in dispute. What's not available is a certified verdict on your own completeness, arrived at from the inside.

This isn't Gödel's theorem generalized to everything - The paper says it doesn't depend on formal systems, arithmetic, or even propositions at all. It applies to any system whose states can distinguish one thing from another, discursive or not.

Two places it bites hard:

AI self-assessment - a model can produce calibrated uncertainty estimates, but it has no internally certifiable way to know whether those estimates track its real limits or are just an artifact of how it was trained.

Classical theism's doctrine of omniscience - I argue there's no route (self-report, external verification, revelation, even the idea that God's creative act is self-evidently real rather than imagined) that gets you a certified claim to complete knowledge rather than an asserted one.

Latest draft (v5) is up on PhilPapers. Where do you think the argument is weakest? The load-bearing step is premise (4) in the formal regress (a procedure doesn't certify itself just by running), and I'd like to hear about any cracks if you can find them.

I've played multiple Dynasty games with different schools and coaches. I've messed with the sliders a lot for obvious reasons.

There were hardly any defensive offsides being called, so I raised it. Now my players get called for it about 20 times a game and I have seen a CPU defender get called for it maybe once.

Any way to fix this, or better luck next year?

Can you know how much you don't know?

The Epistemic Incompleteness Principle says no, because it's structurally impossible.

In attempting to assess how complete your knowledge is, you come up with some estimate and a confidence level in that estimate.

Then you need some procedure for checking whether your estimate is accurate. But that checking procedure is itself something your mind produced, and your mind is the thing whose completeness you're trying to assess. Now you need another procedure to check that one. Regress ensues.

Any tool you use to measure your own ignorance is made of the same material as the ignorance it's trying to measure. You can't step outside your own mind to get an objective reading.

EIP says that no such estimate can be certified as accurate from the inside.

This applies to everything that counts as a knower: human minds, organizations, and artificial intelligence systems, e.g.

Any self-report is generated by the same system whose completeness is in question. EIP's distinctive claim is that no knower can certify, from within, how large the gaps are.

This is a big problem for classical theism, which holds that God knows everything with no gaps at all. EIP argues that the claim "God's knowledge is complete" cannot be internally certified by anyone, including God. God might be able to know everything except that God knows everything.

If a being asserts its own omniscience, that assertion is produced by the same knowing that's being assessed, and EIP applies: whatever grounds that self-assessment is either internal, which generates the regress, or external, which means it's not a self-certification at all.

Some theologians respond that God's knowledge isn't propositional in the first place. That it's a direct, "non-discursive awareness" rather than a set of represented facts. But this doesn't escape the problem. The claim "God's knowledge is complete" is itself a proposition, made by theologians using the ordinary tools of assertion and argument. The moment you assert completeness as a meaningful predicate, you're making an epistemic claim that's subject to EIP.

Michael Holton, The Epistemic Incompleteness Principle - PhilPapers

Can you know how much you don't know?

The Epistemic Incompleteness Principle says no, because it's structurally impossible.

In attempting to assess how complete your knowledge is, you come up with some estimate and a confidence level in that estimate.

Then you need some procedure for checking whether your estimate is accurate. But that checking procedure is itself something your mind produced, and your mind is the thing whose completeness you're trying to assess. Now you need another procedure to check that one. Regress ensues.

Any tool you use to measure your own ignorance is made of the same material as the ignorance it's trying to measure. You can't step outside your own mind to get an objective reading.

EIP says that no such estimate can be certified as accurate from the inside.

This applies to everything that counts as a knower: human minds, organizations, and artificial intelligence systems, e.g.

Any self-report is generated by the same system whose completeness is in question. EIP's distinctive claim is that no knower can certify, from within, how large the gaps are.

This is a big problem for classical theism, which holds that God knows everything with no gaps at all. EIP argues that the claim "God's knowledge is complete" cannot be internally certified by anyone, including God. God might be able to know everything except that God knows everything.

If a being asserts its own omniscience, that assertion is produced by the same knowing that's being assessed, and EIP applies: whatever grounds that self-assessment is either internal, which generates the regress, or external, which means it's not a self-certification at all.

Some theologians respond that God's knowledge isn't propositional in the first place. That it's a direct, "non-discursive awareness" rather than a set of represented facts. But this doesn't escape the problem. The claim "God's knowledge is complete" is itself a proposition, made by theologians using the ordinary tools of assertion and argument. The moment you assert completeness as a meaningful predicate, you're making an epistemic claim that's subject to EIP.

Michael Holton, The Epistemic Incompleteness Principle - PhilPapers

The comment section is made for marching.

I hear many atheists argue : “If God existed and wanted me to believe, He’d know exactly what evidence would convince me. The fact that I’m unconvinced is itself evidence He doesn’t exist.”

It’s not a bad argument and I used to make it. But I strive to be properly skeptical and a proper skeptic wouldn’t be convinced of any theistic claim - because there’s no evidence-type that would constitute proof - because a proper skeptic knows that any experience, however overwhelming, is still being processed by their own finite, potentially-deceivable cognitive machinery.

A sufficiently advanced deceiver (an advanced technology, mind control, or any non-god being beyond our explanation) could produce results some might attribute to “God”.

“God would know what would convince me” only works if you’re convincible. And if you’re convincible, you’re not a proper skeptic.

To make a believer out of a proper skeptic, God would first have to make them not a proper skeptic. What you’d have at the end isn’t a rational believer. It’s a former skeptic who “God” has used mind control on.

### EDITS for Clarification ###

The "God" in question, as I am using the term, is the Supreme being. The specific being which billions of theists worship and obey because they believe it is the most powerful being that can possibly exist in the cosmos.

This is not radical skepticism. I'm not claiming nothing can be known. Claims that make specific, differential predictions like germ theory, evolution, or the age of the universe can be provisionally justified through triangulating independent lines of evidence.

This argument applies specifically to claims constructed to be compatible with any observable state of affairs, like the "God" hypothesis in many common forms.

This is also not the Problem of Divine Hiddenness. I'm not arguing "God's" silence is evidence against "God's"
existence. I'm arguing that no evidence any being could present could structurally solve the impostor problem. The impostor problem applies to any being capable of knowing.

"No evidence would suffice" is not stubbornness. It's simply saying that there are some questions that cannot be answered with evidence.

"Is this being Supreme?" is one of them.

For example:

The Prodigy - Girls (Rex the Dog remix)

https://youtu.be/MnDDy\_W3tH4

-Cries shadowy billionaire as he retreats to his secret underground city and demands a protective force field.

Even better - what movie makes men cry and women don’t know why?

We are ultimately “sock puppets of physics” - my view on that has not changed. But

here’s my new position as clearly as I can state it:

I do not think humans possess magical, acausal, libertarian free will. Every thought, preference, instinct, and decision arises from prior causes.

But the traditional framing of the debate is confused.

A sufficiently recursive system that makes decisions, understands what decisions are, and models itself as an agent, but cannot fully calculate or inventory all the variables causing its own decisions, will necessarily experience its decisions as internally unresolved until the moment of choice.

That experience is what I now think “free will” actually is.

Not freedom from causality.
Freedom from complete self-transparency.

Humans cannot fully derive their next thought before thinking it. If they could, the thought would already exist. A mind is part of the causal system it is trying to model, and complete self-modeling is computationally impossible.

From the inside, our decisions appear open or 'free', but that is because the system cannot fully access the causality generating itself.

In other words, determinism is true at the physical level and free will emerges phenomenologically due to the epistemic limitations on self-awareness.

"Free will" is simulated by humans - the experience is real and part of the conscious process.

And if this is correct, sufficiently advanced AI systems may eventually experience the same thing.

At this point I’m not even sure “free will vs determinism” is the right debate anymore.

I think there are systems capable of recursive self-modeling under uncertainty, and systems that are not.

A hurricane follows physics.
A human follows physics while also experiencing itself as choosing.

That is the difference.