271–280 of 285 posts
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Who is to say that God and the sim operators aren't one and the same?
The sim operators would be gods. It is gods all the way up, but not the sort of gods that most religions imagine.
I am not sure what to make of the whole universe-is-a-simulation argument. The problem is that, this is as far as I know, not an hypothesis we could ever hope to prove. Not any more than we can proof that a diety exists outside of this world. I highly doubt that there is a higher creature, whether that would be a God of some kind, or a whole civilization outside of our universe that somehow simulates us. But let's fo…
I think it's interesting to speculate what the simulation argument means for religion. The existence of a simulation creator doesn't actually disprove the existence of an ultimate god, after all the beings running the simulation might have a divine creator, so it just pushes the question up a level. But it does pose a problem for imminent religions that believe that god intervenes in the world to cause miracles. How…
Not much; from the perspective of anyone in our universe, someone running the simulation is a god, and could quite reasonably have many of the specific attributes of gods envisioned by particular religions (including running "after-dinner" with different attributes from the universe someone to which intelligences from the universe someone are transferred after death.)
OTOH, the situation the ultimate "ground" physical universe may or may not be the creation of a dod, who may or may not have the attributes attributed to God by existing religions.
More to the point, the existence of the argument doesn't do anything to religion because religion can simply dismiss the argument; were it a testable hypotheses, it might be more challenging to deny (but then, religions deny empirical results all the time, too.)
> How do you know that any given miracle was caused by the ultimate god and not the simulation sysadmins editing the simulation?
Attribution of alleged miracles is not a new problem for religions, or one that they fail to acknowledge; after all, many don't hold one God out as the sole supernatural entity, and they often believe that one or more of the others are decievers.
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The sim operators would be gods. It is gods all the way up, but not the sort of gods that most religions imagine.
Perhaps- but most Christian sects consider God to be 'incomprehensible" or something similar- so it would not surprise them if God was different from what they imagined.
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Perhaps- but most Christian sects consider God to be 'incomprehensible" or something similar- so it would not surprise them if God was different from what they imagined.
Religious believers believe certain things about god and the human-divine relationship. Anything that isn't consistent with those beliefs simply isn't god, from their perspective.
But even within that framework, there is room to have things that one 'imagines' about God, that one doesn't necessarily 'believe' as a part of ones core beliefs about God. Certainly various religious sects have core beliefs about the human-divine relationship- however, within most belief systems, there remains a great deal of speculation and room for 'imagination'. For example, within the LDS(Mormon) sect, a core belief is that this life is a testing grounds- and a place to learn. That would fit very well within the context of this life being a simulation, of sorts.
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If by objective you mean it is an object that exists independently of our perception of it, quantum mechanics, like Kant, also assumes that a reality independent of our perception exists. Otherwise it wouldn't be a scientific theory at all, because what would it be about? The idea of superposition prior to measurement is different than an objective reality not existing at all. In quantum mechanics prior to measuremen…
If you come at it in terms of distributions and information, some information (the observed) has a distribution over possible states, and some other information (the observer) has a distribution over possible states. When you transition from two systems to one system by interaction, these distributions are no longer independent. As a result, if your definition of objective is that something has a definite state indep…
So the definition of objectivity I'm using does not contain a notion of determinacy, of having a 'definite' state. I'm saying that we know reality exists, but nothing at all about the indeterminate or determinate nature of that reality.
So in a way, Kant's philosophy harmonizes with quantum mechanics instead of contradicting it. In Kant's proof, in fact, we know that independent reality exists while simultaneously limiting what we can know about it - much like QM.
I don't understand why is simulation even necessary. Simulation argument says that our universe and consciousness is pretty much just some sort of mathematical structure, that is being manipulated according to some simple laws as it evolves through what we call time. But then, isn't the only requirement for beings inside this structure to perceive it as such that the structure exists? Do you need to really physically…
That's intersting. If the universe could be simulated, you could, in theory, run that simulation on a (very large) piece of paper by hand. Running the simulation would then be equivalent to calculating some numbers and writing them down. Basically, if I wrote down the correct sequence of numbers, I could simulate you. But is calculating those numbers actually necessary? Is it enough to just have the result of that co…
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The sim operators would be gods. It is gods all the way up, but not the sort of gods that most religions imagine.
Perhaps- but most Christian sects consider God to be 'incomprehensible" or something similar- so it would not surprise them if God was different from what they imagined.
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> There are many questions in life that are interesting to consider, independent of whether they're falsifiable. It tends to get boring to consider only questions that can be experimentally proven... You say "boring", I say "ruthlessly pragmatic." It could be argued, crudely, that the non-verifiable questions are akin to epistomatic masturbation. We are drawn to them, and debating them makes us feel good, but the res…
I don't see any particular reason to subscribe to pragmatism; epistomatic masturbation sounds good, and from a hedonistic perspective I think I'd rather take that. You say "ruthlessly pragmatic", I say "boring".
Reason #1: it works. I've never needed a reason #2.
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Perhaps- but most Christian sects consider God to be 'incomprehensible" or something similar- so it would not surprise them if God was different from what they imagined.
I don't think it is a stretch to say that all Christian sects have some definite ideas of what God is like. For some, the 'God is incomprehensible' claim is their motte in a motte-and-bailey fallacy, to which they temporarily retreat when faced with questions like "if God is omniscient, omnipotent and loving, why was there smallpox?"
If you want to have a more personal theological discussion, including a possible answer or two to the question about disease you pose above, feel free to reach out to me, my contact info can be found via my profile. :)
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Like I said, I don't accept this physicalist assertion, because it ignores the problem of qualia and the Penrose-Lucas argument (which demonstrates quite clearly how the human mind is able to violate Gödels incompleteness theorems, and therefore is not equivalent to any purely computational system).
>the human mind is able to violate Gödels incompleteness theorems This is why philosophy majors should lay off the math and biology arguments.