Are We Living in a Simulation? No, we aren't.

Anyone who has listened to the latest Infinite Monkey Cage (BBC Radio 4) and is worried that we might live in a simulation can relax. Anil Seth was talking bollocks. He and a lot of other bad philosophers have this method that is mostly hand-waving. It breaks down like this:

To yourself
1. State your belief.
2. Derive assumptions from this belief
To others
3. State your starting assumptions as axioms.
4. Use straight-line deduction to produce a paraphrase of your starting assumptions.
5. Claim that *logic* supports your conclusion.

Assumptions are propositions that you believe in the absence of evidence or things you take on faith. Axioms are propositions stated as universal truths. If you are reduced to stating assumptions as axioms, you're already floundering. Far from being "logical", this is completely irrational.

And then deduction is a very weak logical operation. All you can do with deduction is draw out the implications of your starting axioms. And what this usually boils down to is a paraphrase of your axioms.

All of the assumptions that Anil Seth stated last night struck me as demonstrably false or at best highly questionable. Here is his "logic".

1. Assume we live in a simulation
2. State some fact consistent with living in a simulation
3. Restate that fact as a universal truth
4. Deduce from this that *must* live in a simulation
5. Therefore it is only logical that we do live in a simulation

For example, he glibly stated that it would be possible to replace a neuron with an electrical device in such a way as you would not notice. For a start to do this you'd have to crack my skull open and I promise you I'd notice! Second, this is a bold claim for which there is absolutely no empirical evidence. No one has ever accomplished this or anything like it and had the recipient *not notice*.

The surgical techniques currently do exist to operate on the molecular level. And really there's no plausible way to do this type of surgery - our synapses are chemical, not electrical. It's not remotely plausible to transplant an identical neuron, let alone some electrical device that imitates one. So Anil Seth is asking us to take a science fiction idea as a universal truth. And he can just fuck off as far as I'm concerned. He's just making shit up and giving public intellectuals a bad name.

Furthermore, there is a 1mm long round worm called C. elegans. We know that it has exactly 280 neurons with  6393 chemical synapses, 890 electrical junctions, and 1410 neuromuscular junctions. It's whole brain has been mapped out in exquisite detail at the cellular level. So you'd think that we'd be able to exactly simulate the worm. Yes? No. Not even close. Else modelling the brain of C elegans would be easy and you'd be able to buy scaled up working models that had all the same behaviour by now.

So Seth takes this idea as trivial and true, but in fact, it is very, very complex and almost certainly false. His starting assumption is nowhere near plausible, let alone "true". And if this is so, then his subsequent "logic" is dubious at best.

I call bullshit. This is bullshit philosophy. And it's not the only bullshit philosophy I've seen associated with Anil Seth. He is a bullshitter and no one need be perturbed by anything he says.