Argument from possible simulation

[excreationist]

A simulated universe implies an actual natural universe where someone is generating simulations....

Yes unlike typical "existence of God" arguments...

 

[excreationist]

I believe in a kind of God...

My personal reasoning:
1. It is likely we're in a simulation (according to Elon Musk's reasoning)
2. The simulation needs a creator
3. The creator could be called 'God'
Therefore it is likely there is a God.

Step 2? The creator of the simulation, what about their God? If they have a god, that god would be our god too! Unless we are going for the Futurama Bender is God episode, and we have localized gods. Of course, their religion could be their dimension's equivalent of Scientology! But their dimension could still have a creator (and our simulation designer is just an idiot about religion)... but if that is also a simulation, we have a third level for the creator/creator's god.

Nice. This shows that human knowledge has certainly advanced over the last thousand hundreds. Understanding has advanced from "turtles all the way down" to "gods all the way up".

If their godhood involves simulations I'd say it involves a finite amount of information. Basically each simulation they create would have less information than their universe... if information is an integer and must be at least one then there would be a limit of Russian dolls within their universe...
BTW the following is related to Jimmy Higgins' nested simulations idea:

In that Rick and Morty episode it seems like some of the aliens were the "god" of the simulations....

 

[excreationist]

It is possible that an intelligent force can intervene in a simulation. Something on its own is completely naturalistic....

I'm not sure what you mean but do you agree that if it is a simulation that it had a creator?

You are not catching the meaning.

You are still talking in terms of a "contextualized universe" rather than a universe irrespective of it's context.

Imagine an instance (and I really do mean just an instance) of the multiverse "Super Mario Brothers".

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 10⁵⁷ 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....

 

[Bomb#20]

....Another possibility is simply that God is dead. Not unlikely, since she must be fifteen at this point.

(Or in other words, how did you get from Step 3 to your conclusion? )

Yes the creator isn't necessarily still existing now....

That wasn't my main point. Your argument contains the steps

"3. The creator could be called 'God'
Therefore it is likely there is a God."​

That's invalid reasoning. Some guy's dog is likely to exist and could be called "God" too, but that doesn't make it likely there is a God. As Lincoln said, calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg; likewise, calling something God doesn't make it a god -- whether it's a universe-creator or just a man's best friend. So you still need a step in your argument explaining why creating a universe is sufficient to make you a god.

Some years ago I wrote an evolution simulation. (Some pretty nifty simulated organisms evolved -- one of the more successful species had two genes in its genome each of which would have been instantly lethal in the absence of the other, creating a nasty chicken-and-egg puzzle.) If somebody cares to invest the resources to leave my simulation running for four billion years, maybe intelligent life will eventually evolve in my simulated universe. Some of my simulated life forms might invent religious philosophy and claim I'm a god. They might reason as you do: that they're in a simulation, the simulation needs a creator, and the creator could be called 'God', and thus infer that God is real. But that will be a logic mistake. I am real, yes; but I'm not God.

It follows that creating a universe is insufficient to make you a god.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

....Another possibility is simply that God is dead. Not unlikely, since she must be fifteen at this point.

(Or in other words, how did you get from Step 3 to your conclusion? )

Yes the creator isn't necessarily still existing now....

That wasn't my main point. Your argument contains the steps

"3. The creator could be called 'God'
Therefore it is likely there is a God."​

That's invalid reasoning. Some guy's dog is likely to exist and could be called "God" too, but that doesn't make it likely there is a God. As Lincoln said, calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg; likewise, calling something God doesn't make it a god -- whether it's a universe-creator or just a man's best friend. So you still need a step in your argument explaining why creating a universe is sufficient to make you a god.

The punctuation is also wrong.

3. The creator can be called 'God'.
Therefore it is likely there is a 'God'.

That's better. Giving something a label, doesn't make it something else.

 

[Jarhyn]

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 10⁵⁷ 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....

I use the term "multiverse" because it is the integral of universe: it is all universes created by some defined set of physical relationships integrated across all "input scenarios", which is to say all probability wave collapse scenarios.

It is not to say there are many worlds, but rather to describe an integrated set.

It is not about possibilities, but about the fact that an instance of a universe does not have discrete creator, but is rather created by everything and nothing that does create it: that it is a definition of a series of states over some dimension of state transition, and "simulation" is not a part of that definition. "IsSimulation" is not a member of "Universe". Though List<Universe*> _simulations() may be.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

I think approximations, not emulation, is more relevant to our possible simulation. e.g. I don't think each of the 10⁵⁷ atoms in our Sun and similar star are always being explicitly simulated...

This is a very odd concession. If we must be a in simulation, why in the heck must we not be in a simulation where all atoms and subatomic particles are simulated? Why does your simulation require being shifted down in resolution?

 

[excreationist]

That's invalid reasoning. Some guy's dog is likely to exist and could be called "God" too, but that doesn't make it likely there is a God.

But is the dog the creator of a simulation? (see step 2 and 3)

As Lincoln said, calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg; likewise, calling something God doesn't make it a god -- whether it's a universe-creator or just a man's best friend. So you still need a step in your argument explaining why creating a universe is sufficient to make you a god.

The information in a simulation is basically created out of nothing... the time in the simulation is created out of nothing. The creator can be omnipotent and omniscient about the simulation. So I think the creator of the simulation could be considered a god.... I mean traditionally there are many gods that aren't omnipotent or omniscient or are a creator, etc. (like most Greek gods)

Some years ago I wrote an evolution simulation. (Some pretty nifty simulated organisms evolved -- one of the more successful species had two genes in its genome each of which would have been instantly lethal in the absence of the other, creating a nasty chicken-and-egg puzzle.) If somebody cares to invest the resources to leave my simulation running for four billion years, maybe intelligent life will eventually evolve in my simulated universe. Some of my simulated life forms might invent religious philosophy and claim I'm a god. They might reason as you do: that they're in a simulation, the simulation needs a creator, and the creator could be called 'God', and thus infer that God is real. But that will be a logic mistake. I am real, yes; but I'm not God.

It follows that creating a universe is insufficient to make you a god.

I thought within the simulation you could theoretically be omniscient, omnipotent, give people in it an afterlife, end the universe if you feel like it, etc. So within the simulation you are God.

 

[excreationist]

I think approximations, not emulation, is more relevant to our possible simulation. e.g. I don't think each of the 10⁵⁷ atoms in our Sun and similar star are always being explicitly simulated...

This is a very odd concession. If we must be a in simulation, why in the heck must we not be in a simulation where all atoms and subatomic particles are simulated? Why does your simulation require being shifted down in resolution?

Like Elon Musk I think simulations could run on small-scale computers and set-top boxes.

A theory I'm working on talks about top-down vs bottom-up simulations.

Top-down simulations start with the big picture then generate more and more detail when needed. This is known as "level of detail".

Bottom-up simulations start with everything built with the smallest building blocks and simulate them faithfully rather than approximate them when you get further away...

The problem with bottom-up simulations is that they require a lot more computing resources. An example of this game type is Minecraft and it can only handle a relatively small area of the world at once. On the other hand in games like Flight Simulator 2020 you can see a huge view of the world above the clouds and fly down to see blades of grass.... this is possible because the blades of grass aren't rendered if you're too far away but I don't think the "pop-in" is too bad.

To simulate 10^57 atoms faithfully would require a computer with more than 10^57 bytes of memory. It would also require an incredibly powerful CPU. So I think it uses AI and approximations.

 

[excreationist]

3. The creator can be called 'God'.
Therefore it is likely there is a 'God'.

That's better. Giving something a label, doesn't make it something else.

I'm saying the creator of a simulation could be considered a god....

 

[excreationist]

I use the term "multiverse" because it is the integral of universe: it is all universes created by some defined set of physical relationships integrated across all "input scenarios", which is to say all probability wave collapse scenarios.

It is not to say there are many worlds, but rather to describe an integrated set.

It is not about possibilities, but about the fact that an instance of a universe does not have discrete creator, but is rather created by everything and nothing that does create it: that it is a definition of a series of states over some dimension of state transition, and "simulation" is not a part of that definition. "IsSimulation" is not a member of "Universe". Though List<Universe*> _simulations() may be.

I don't really understand half of what you're saying. Is a "discrete creator" talking about having a single creator? Note my argument doesn't insist that there is necessarily a single creator - just that some kind of creator could be called a God....

Note that a lot of simulations would be unique... like Minecraft (using different seeds).... so that doesn't really have much to do with your example of a SMB multiverse.... (where there is a consistent origin state - like in MWI and the Big Bang)

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

3. The creator can be called 'God'.
Therefore it is likely there is a 'God'.

That's better. Giving something a label, doesn't make it something else.

I'm saying the creator of a simulation could be considered a god....

So should Alyson Hannigan.

 

[excreationist]

About the origin of God:

Traditional "Existence of God" arguments:

God always existed (including the Father and his "eternally begotten" Son)

This thread:

The creator was considered to be a god at some point in time...

 

[DBT]

3. The creator can be called 'God'.
Therefore it is likely there is a 'God'.

That's better. Giving something a label, doesn't make it something else.

I'm saying the creator of a simulation could be considered a god....

So should Alyson Hannigan.

Or Penn and Teller as God and Jesus.....miracles and all.

 

[Jarhyn]

I use the term "multiverse" because it is the integral of universe: it is all universes created by some defined set of physical relationships integrated across all "input scenarios", which is to say all probability wave collapse scenarios.

It is not to say there are many worlds, but rather to describe an integrated set.

It is not about possibilities, but about the fact that an instance of a universe does not have discrete creator, but is rather created by everything and nothing that does create it: that it is a definition of a series of states over some dimension of state transition, and "simulation" is not a part of that definition. "IsSimulation" is not a member of "Universe". Though List<Universe*> _simulations() may be.

I don't really understand half of what you're saying. Is a "discrete creator" talking about having a single creator? Note my argument doesn't insist that there is necessarily a single creator - just that some kind of creator could be called a God....

Note that a lot of simulations would be unique... like Minecraft (using different seeds).... so that doesn't really have much to do with your example of a SMB multiverse.... (where there is a consistent origin state - like in MWI and the Big Bang)

Like, the difference not between "one and several" but "the difference between 1 and non-ordinal infinity.

Further, the point I am making is general, about universes in general. (Algorithm) + (seed) = result. MC multiverse(initial) is just an integration of (algorithm) from -SEED_MAX to +SEED_MAX. That said, there is a much greater degree of freedom in the interface there. The varying extent of the degrees of freedom do not change the underlying facts of the math. From (initial), it is a function of the intersection of the control vector and the state.

In fact while our universe is very large, there are still a finite number of states possible of it, as well.

It's still just the algorithm, against some specific seed, and if there were a constrained control vector, nothing can be said of "outside" the bounds of "this happened along the control vector". The state of the universe itself is independent and free of how that state was generated. It merely IS, and it is implemented by all things that implement it, and is itself "a shape things may be of".

 

[Jarhyn]

I short, I'm turning multiverse theory/MWI on its head: perhaps it is this universe that is singularly itself (not of a "branching multiverse"), and that if there is a multiverse, it is the multiverse of contexts which may instantiate this universe.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

About the origin of God:

Traditional "Existence of God" arguments:

God always existed (including the Father and his "eternally begotten" Son)

This thread:

The creator was considered to be a god at some point in time...

Creator? As in the OP? You labeling yourself a god?

 

[abaddon]

Surely by "creator" he means world-creator, not OP-creator.

But can a human be considered a god? I wonder "Why not?"

The simulation I'm most familiar with is the one that I myself make. After all, the eyes aren't windows through which "the world" simply comes through and displays itself "as is" to a little homunculus sitting inside the skull.

Created "in me" makes it my creation. So if world-creators or simulation-makers are gods, then I'm a god.

The problem that I see with this, is simply that the word-choice of "god" is needless. It carries a lot of mythological baggage with it. IMV it's not necessary to take up 'theism-speak' to describe any of this.

So anyway... Why is ANY creator called "god"? But then again, if world-makers are gods, then what being with an "inner world" isn't a god?

 

[Jarhyn]

Surely by "creator" he means world-creator, not OP-creator.

But can a human be considered a god? I wonder "Why not?"

The simulation I'm most familiar with is the one that I myself make. After all, the eyes aren't windows through which "the world" simply comes through and displays itself "as is" to a little homunculus sitting inside the skull.

Created "in me" makes it my creation. So if world-creators or simulation-makers are gods, then I'm a god.

The problem that I see with this, is simply that the word-choice of "god" is needless. It carries a lot of mythological baggage with it. IMV it's not necessary to take up 'theism-speak' to describe any of this.

So anyway... Why is ANY creator called "god"? But then again, if world-makers are gods, then what being with an "inner world" isn't a god?

Also a valid point.

Like, I am.... Maybe I will judge myself for this, but I spun up a new instance of Dwarf Fortress a bit ago. It is a simulation game that simulates a whole world, a pocket universe. People, places, things. Sometimes awful things happen to good people. Sometimes things are just legitimately off the rails fucked up. Like the fact that I create these worlds in the hopes that they contain truly awful things that I can magic a new individual into existence, possess, and reshape into a killing machine (or die trying) for the sake of pointing said killing machine at said monstrosity and enjoying watching the fallout.

The fact is, I created this world of living stories to use it for a D&D campaign. I've already mismanaged a population of 20 individuals into nearly dying of thirst and hunger.

So, there's that. The fact that I am in fact "a creator" and I'm a really shitty god. If I was the people of that world, I might want very badly to kill me. If I behave badly there, generally that approaches certainty. I mean if you knew I was the one that decided giant beasts made of rock intent on going on murderous rampages would exist when I could have made them just not... Well, I would probably throw me in a giant pit with one of said rock beasts.

Anyway, I digress. the point is, yes, creators can be gods, but they are gods around a universe not of it, usually.

And even as a god, more powerful than most, there's a lot of shit I can't fix.

 

[excreationist]

About the origin of God:

Traditional "Existence of God" arguments:

God always existed (including the Father and his "eternally begotten" Son)

This thread:

The creator was considered to be a god at some point in time...

Creator? As in the OP? You labeling yourself a god?

I'm comparing arguments for the existence of God in relation to the God's origin.

In traditional arguments God always exists.

In my simulation argument in my thread the godhood has a beginning....