

The Spoils of Happiness - ricaurte
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/06/the-spoils-of-happiness/

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jorleif
To me it seems not wanting to plug in has very little to do with what we
believe about happiness.

The most obvious reason of all to not plug in: That one actually cares about
something in the external world. Sure, the machine could give the experience
of parenting, but you know when choosing to plug in or not, that no child will
actually exist in the real world as a result. If anything you experience in
the machine will have no real world effects, then if you care at all about the
real world, that should be reason enough not to plug in.

Perhaps he is considering a somewhat harder case where the world within the
machine is "real" in the sense that anything you produce in the machine lives
on in the machine. So if you have a child in the simulation, that child is not
just in your simulation, but will live on after you are gone, just like a real
child. Then the question becomes more: Do you trust that the simulated world
is better than the real one? I wouldn't be an early adopter, but I'm sure some
people would be willing to make that jump.

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narrator
The "Suppose there was a" conversations get kind of annoying when they start
to talk about things that are not likely to exist anytime in the near future,
like a perfect virtual simulation of the world.

~~~
feral
Hmm, I'm not sure about that logic.

'Suppose we are currently in such a simulation' - does your objection still
hold?

~~~
narrator
My objection to the claim that we are in a perfect simulation of reality is
that that's not falsifiable.

Falsifiability is a really really interesting concept. It's not particularly
popular among mystics because it sort of invalidates the whole religion thing.

~~~
philwelch
The claim that we are in a perfect simulation of reality isn't a _scientific_
claim, hence falsifiability is not strictly relevant.

~~~
narrator
I think what I don't like about the "simulation of reality" proposition is it
implies that death does not have its normal negative consequences and thus
causes values to be not the same as they normally would be under not
"simulation of reality" circumstances.

~~~
philwelch
Death has the exact same empirical consequences--people you observe to die are
never seen again alive. The _subjective_ consequences of death are impossible
to know whether or not reality is simulated.

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zafka
Sometimes when I am feeling punky while talking to a creationist, I will tell
them that my belief is similar to theirs.....I believe we were all created ten
minutes ago, with all our memories.

