It's important to look at the arguments of "the other side" of an issue in order to understand what you really think about that issue. I would like to say that Kassan has given me a lot to think about but this article fails to really get to the heart of the issue and, thus, fails to strongly argue against the Simulation Hypothesis (SH).
Kassan is correct that many proponents of the Simulation Hypothesis use it as a convenient blind for their solipsism. "I don't believe anything is real" can just be a socially-acceptable way to say, "I don't believe you are real." Denying agency to others is the root of many evils, as history amply demonstrates. But this is a blatant strawman of the views held by actual proponents of SH - Bostrom, Musk, Gell-Mann, Chalmers (sort-of), Chaitin (sort-of) and many others. The SH is not about denying anybody's agency and it is not about providing a quick-and-dirty theory of conscious awareness.
Kassan misunderstands the field of information theory; I have found it to be a pattern that people who are suspicious of the SH or reject it outright tend to have a weak grasp on information theory:
In other contexts, physical properties have been intentionally set, directly or indirectly, by conscious agents (on our world that presumably means people) to be a signal—that is, they are intentional representations or transmissions. For example, the words I’m writing and you’re reading here are subject to your interpretation. To someone who’s never encountered written English, these words are just meaningless marks on paper (or screen). In fact, until the signs or signals are interpreted, they can’t be said to contain information at all—only data, despite the fact that the relevant field of study has been dubbed information theory (rather than, more accurately, data transmission theory or signal theory). In some cases, the question of whether or not a piece of data is a signal is a problem. For example, in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), it can be an open question whether a particular stream of electromagnetic radiation from a particular source actually carries any signals from an alien intelligence or is simply a natural phenomenon.In fact, the name "information theory" was carefully chosen and is no mistake. From Claude Shannon's foundational 1948 paper, A Mathematical Theory of Communication:
The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem. The significant aspect is that the actual message is one selected from a set of possible messages. [Emphasis mine]The semantic content of messages is irrelevant to the mechanics of information theory. The key to Kassan's misunderstanding is in Shannon's quote, "the actual message is one selected from a set of possible messages." Kassan has chosen to write his article in English and, thus, we can apply the tools of information theory to his article, even if it was semantically gibberish[1]. Kassan is trying to enforce an obsolete distinction between the words "data" and "information" such that the former refers to syntactic content while the latter refers to semantic content.
Kassan exhibits strongly binary thinking about the question of "simulation versus reality". "Either we're simulated or we're real." Note that it is intentionality, not simulated-ness that breaks reality, and Kassan himself seems to understand this. From the closing of the article:
If you believe you’re living in a computer simulation, then everything you think you know about the world—including its vastness, the probability of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, and even the very existence of computers—is part of that simulation, and so is completely worthless. The evidence on which the entire chain of reasoning depends, in short, is illusory—and so nothing at all can be argued from it.Kassan is right but he doesn't explain why. The reason that "being simulated" makes all evidence "illusory" is that we do not know the character of the conscious being(s) behind the simulation. If they are mad scientists (or, even, indifferent scientists) - alien or not - they have no reason to enforce a globally-consistent simulation. In the movie Dark City, for example, the main protagonists of the movie are unwitting victims of a grand scientific experiment in which their memories are tampered with and altered at will, leaving them unable to form any meaningful conclusion about anything at all, let alone "what is real". This is really the problem of the reliability of memory, in disguise.
The true value of the Simulation Hypothesis is not "deciding what's really real" - after all, if we are in a simulation, it is a simulation that exactly conforms to whatever we mean by the word "reality"! Rather, the value of the Simulation Hypothesis lies in learning to think about the data-as-they-are, without imposing a paradigm (eg Newtonian, Einsteinian, Hawkingite physics) onto the sensory world. There is no reason the world could not be simulated and, in fact, there are many good scientific reasons to adopt the Simulation Hypothesis, digital physics or an equivalent[2].
We have no foundation to assert that a computer running a program that simulates the brain would actually be conscious—what, in the days of GOFAI (good old fashioned artificial intelligence) used to be called Strong AI.
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[1] - English words are formed from an alphabet of 26 letters (27, counting spaces, or a few more if you count punctuation marks). On this basis alone, we can impose an a priori information content on each letter. Obviously, English does not use most combinations of the letters - e.g. "xyqjkyv" is not English - or even most combinations of words in the dictionary - e.g. "the the the" is not English. But these facts about the structure of English are just refinements of our initial, letter-based a priori. In other words, they do not constitute a qualitatively different information theory of English than our naive, 27-letter information theory. And that fact is what makes information theory so remarkable. The same theory can be used to analyze the information content of DNA-strands or the information-theoretic difference between Shakespeare and Chaucer.
[2] - Quantum physics offers prima facie evidence that the Universe is, at root, quantized (discrete). This suggests the mathematics of the discrete, including computational systems, is the fundamental mathematics of the Universe. Digital physics provides tools for understanding Nature from a thoroughly computational perspective - this perspective has the advantage of demystifying certain features of the physical world - such as quantum tunneling (in space and time), quantum information theory, quantum computation, and so on. None of these benefits are tantamount to proof but they form a metaphysical basis for science that is as good as any of the orthodox approaches.
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