Ok, thank you very much. But why then do so many people take the argument seriously? Is it surprising that the peer reviewed process didn’t pick up this problem?
I think most people would probably regard the objection as a nitpick (e.g. “OK, maybe the Indifference Principle isn’t actually sufficient to support a tight formal argument, and you need to add in some other assumption, but the informal version if the argument is just pretty clearly right”), feel the objection has been successfully answered (e.g. find the response in the Simulation Argument FAQ more compelling than I do), or just haven’t completely noticed the potential issue.
I think it’s still totally reasonable for the paper to have passed peer review. (I would have recommended publication if I were a reviewer.) It’s still a groundbreaking paper that raises new considerations and brings attention to a really important hypothesis. It’s also rare for a published philosophical argument to actually be totally tight and free from issues, and the issue with the paper is ambiguous enough and hard-to-think-about enough that there’s still no consensus about whether it actually is a real or important issue.
Ok, thank you very much. But why then do so many people take the argument seriously? Is it surprising that the peer reviewed process didn’t pick up this problem?
I think most people would probably regard the objection as a nitpick (e.g. “OK, maybe the Indifference Principle isn’t actually sufficient to support a tight formal argument, and you need to add in some other assumption, but the informal version if the argument is just pretty clearly right”), feel the objection has been successfully answered (e.g. find the response in the Simulation Argument FAQ more compelling than I do), or just haven’t completely noticed the potential issue.
I think it’s still totally reasonable for the paper to have passed peer review. (I would have recommended publication if I were a reviewer.) It’s still a groundbreaking paper that raises new considerations and brings attention to a really important hypothesis. It’s also rare for a published philosophical argument to actually be totally tight and free from issues, and the issue with the paper is ambiguous enough and hard-to-think-about enough that there’s still no consensus about whether it actually is a real or important issue.