2 Answers

  1. I will allow myself to build my answer around the answer of Konstantin Orlov.

    A good example of solipsism. … Since it is impossible to come up with an experiment that would refute this assumption, we state that it contradicts the Popper criterion, and therefore is not of interest as a scientific hypothesis.

    This short argument contains three problems at once.�

    First, what is described in the question is not solipsism. Solipsism in the strict sense of the word is the concept that there is only your consciousness and nothing else. If we put the question as ” What if I was near death, frozen, uploaded to the cloud and didn't even notice it?”, then this implies the existence of some physical substrate external to me, and probably also those who uploaded me (and it is possible that other consciousnesses as well) there, etc. In other words, this is not solipsism, but a special case of Descartes ' demon.

    Second, it is not true that Descartes ' “demon” in the form of a computer simulation hypothesis is non-falsifiable. More precisely, not everyone agrees that this hypothesis is unfalsifiable. In particular, if it is shown that the world or some part of it/level of reality (for example, consciousness-as, say, Roger Penrose believes) is fundamentally unrepresentable as a mathematical model, this will probably prove that we cannot be a computer simulation. A similar argument was made back in 2012 by David Tong, for example.

    Third, let's assume that the idea of simulation is not falsifiable (this will be the case, for example, with the classical “Descartes demon” – i.e., literally an evil and omnipotent demon who created our reality). But this makes this judgment only unscientific, i.e., it says that the indicated problem cannot be solved within the framework of scientific methodology. This, however, does not make it a legitimate metaphysical question. And any model of the world still refers us to some kind of metaphysics: a statement like “matter objectively exists” is no less metaphysical and unfalsifiable than the statement “the world is an illusion created by an evil demon”.

    Summing up, we don't really have any decisive arguments at this stage to assume that we are not in some kind of computer simulation. The question of whether such arguments are possible is, in principle, open and partly depends on the given parameters of the simulation. Another question is: what does this change? Let's say that we live in a computer simulation: does it change anything for us, for our behavior, for our relationships with other people? Does it matter if it's a computer simulation or not? Some discussions in this direction were described a year ago in an article in Scientific American (in English).�

    Agreeing with the physicistBy Max Tegmark, we can say that if we live in a computer simulation, it's time to go and start doing something interesting, so that those who run the simulation do not turn us off because we are too boring. The same advice, by the way, is also suitable if the world is not a computer simulation.

  2. A good example of solipsism (Abram Kassil would add “snotty”, but we will not follow his example). Since it is impossible to come up with an experiment that would refute this assumption, we state that it contradicts the Popper criterion, and therefore is not of interest as a scientific hypothesis.

Leave a Reply