[FRIAM] Divergent Optimism

[glen]

That's why I mentioned it, and focused on the word "simulation". To me, the parallel worlds conceptions are *covered* by David Lewis' possible worlds. When I said that in the pub the other night, some rando objected and claimed his PhD thesis (at St. Martin's) was on Lewisian possible worlds and modal logic. He was insistent that the many worlds stuff we get from QT was fundamentally different. Pffft. I shouldn't have (but did) taken his word for it there at the pub. I'm glad he stopped short of mansplaining the two, though. Nothing's more annoying than rando PhD candidates mansplaining their theses when you're just trying to quaff a pint or two. Now that I've had time to think about it, I think he was just posturing.

The important point is that simulation is not *really* about analogous reasoning. Sure that's a convenient lesson you might teach a budding simulationist in the early days. But it's really about, as Marcus put it, realizability ... or, maybe some might like "effective procedures" better. I prefer "numerical solution" or "equation-free model". To each her own. But in that sense, reality seems to me to *be* brute force solutions, space/niche-filling Twitch. Everyone runs around talking about beauty, efficiency, blahblah. But what I see are brute force solutions, trial and error ... computational indulgence. And that maps well enough to many worlds.

And to go back to Pieter's techno-optimism, Utopias obtain. And dystopias obtain. But the distributions are biased toward the latter. You can only hope that you're participating in those on the rarer side ... in the thin tail, I guess.

On 1/19/23 13:19, Steve Smith wrote:
> "Multiverse Analysis" in the Gelman sense is a new one for me... I'm (enjoying) struggling to compare/contrast this Multiverse Analysis <https://forrt.org/glossary/multiverse-analysis/> concept (if I understand it) with a more philosophical/cosmological superpositional Multiverse <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse> conception.  They seem to not be as distinct as I thought when I first started trying to parse your link.

-- 
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ