I find the term "multiverse" confusing. In MWI (many worlds interpretation) every possible parallel universe in the multiverse is "real". e.g. say the spin of a billion particles were checked and all one billion of them were the same...
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2+to+the+power+of+a+billion
That's 1 in 10
300,000,000 but according to MWI that literally happened in one of the universes... and every other possibility is also "real".
In SMB most of the hypothetically possible games will never happen. (assuming the SMB game possibilities didn't involve MWI) Also many "possible" games can't be physically played by normal human players... e.g. pressing left then right then left, etc, for each individual frame (1/30 second), for the length of the game.
I'm saying that the SMB games that are simulated are "real" in some sense but the hypothetical ones that are never simulated are not "real" to the same degree.
Now, this multiverse is fairly simple. It has very few particle types, those particles have very few interactions, and they can occupy a fundamentally discrete number of positions in the fields that exists.
There are many universes that exist in this multiverse, infinite in fact (owing to the fact that "lives" are available within it's physics).
I wouldn't say that these are all "real" though.... I don't think the set of all possibilities is very relevant to the simulation we might be in....
Now, to make this easier to "grok", imagine just ONE universe of all that multiverse, wherein the series of observable "interaction events" is "<event A> at 6 frames past <start event time> + delay, repeated three times".
This universe is not a simulation, specifically. It may be simulated on a nintendo platform. It may be simulated on a PC emulator.
I think approximations, not emulation, is more relevant to our possible simulation. e.g. I don't think each of the 10
57 atoms in our Sun and similar star are always being explicitly simulated... Also I think this machine learning based game has some relevance to our simulation....
I could create this universe.
You could create this universe.
"Which of us is the creator" of that universe is now exposed as a bad question,
My initial post is that it appears that something called "God" seems likely to exist.... I'm not too worried about their precise identity.... after all there could be a deceptive force a bit like the one in Descartes' thought experiment....
because it begs the question of whether this universe had to be "created" at all, or whether it is merely a point on which the SMB multiverse can fall. In fact, I can describe a universe with no instantiation within our own universe. Does that make it any less "of" the SMB multiverse?
Perhaps you're saying the SMB multiverse exists eternally and individual games in it were "discovered"?
Even if a god came down and did some magic, making a bunch of magical events, there is still only the text of "what happened". Let's say an entity appears in front of every human on earth and says "I'm god, I created you", there's still no actual proof that this entity IS god or that it did in fact create us.
Yes we can't know the identity of the possible God... this could be a deliberate deception by a malicious intelligence.
All it is proof of is that entities can appear in this way, and that they can make such utterances. There is still only the text of "what happened" with no reality of "why".
As far as the "why" of the simulation my favorite theories are entertainment and personal growth....