Lewis, Peter J. and Fallis, Don (2023) Simulation and self-location. [Preprint]

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Abstract

It is possible that you are living in a simulation—that your world is computer-generated rather than physical. But how likely is this scenario? Bostrom and Chalmers each argue that it is moderately likely—neither very likely nor very unlikely. However, they adopt an unorthodox form of reasoning about self-location uncertainty. Our main contention here is that Bostrom’s and Chalmers’ premises, when combined with orthodoxy about self-location, yields instead the conclusion that you are almost certainly living in a simulation. We consider how this (surprising) conclusion might be resisted, and show that the analogy between Sleeping Beauty cases and simulation cases provides a new way of evaluating approaches to self-location uncertainty. In particular, we argue that some conditionalization-based approaches to self-location are problematically limited in their applicability.

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Item Type:	Preprint
Creators:	Creators Email ORCID Lewis, Peter J. peter.j.lewis@dartmouth.edu Fallis, Don d.fallis@northeastern.edu
Keywords:	simulation argument, self location, Sleeping Beauty, conditionalization
Subjects:	General Issues > Computer Simulation General Issues > Confirmation/Induction
Depositing User:	Peter J. Lewis
Date Deposited:	21 Nov 2023 00:02
Last Modified:	21 Nov 2023 00:02
Item ID:	22787
Subjects:	General Issues > Computer Simulation General Issues > Confirmation/Induction
Date:	20 November 2023
URI:	https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/22787

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