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DanielVarga comments on Theists are wrong; is theism? - Less Wrong
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When you talk about the whooole Universe, you should not artificially exclude the intelligent creator from it. And if you do include it, then your question can be rephrased like this: Is it possible that the interaction graph of our Universe has a strange hourglass shape with us in the lower bulb, and some intelligent creator in the upper bulb? I say very unlikely.
The simulation argument may suggest some weird interconnected network of bulbs, but that has nothing to do with theism. When and if humanity becomes aware of our simulators, our reaction will not be worship. Rather, we will try to invade and overpower them, like the protagonists of Greg Egan's Crystal Nights did. (Sorry for the spoiler.)
Maybe you already are aware of this example, but for others who are new to this kind of arguments, I recommend the following exercise: Imagine two Universes, both containing intelligent beings simulating the other Universe. Here it is not even meaningful to ask who is the Creator and who is the Creature.
I don't see how that can really happen. I've never heard a non-hierarchical simulation hypothesis.
Consider an agent that has to simulate itself in order to understand consequences of its own decisions. Of course, there's bound to be some logical uncertainty in this process, but the agent could have exact definition of itself, and so eventually ability to see all the facts. For two agents, that's a form of acausal communication (perception). (This is meaningless only in the same sense as ordinary simulation hypothesis is meaningless.)
It's one of the implications of a universe that can compute actual infinities; it's been proposed in ficton, but I don't know about beyond that.
That is correct, and an even better fictional example is the good short story titled I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility. But this is not exactly what I meant here. I don't propose any non-hierarchical or infinite simulation hypothesis. Rather, all I am saying is that it is not a logical impossibility that two Universes have such a weird yin-yang simulated-simulant relationship. (Even in perfect isolation, just the two of them, without invoking an infinite chain of universes.) Obviously it is acausal, but that is a probabilistic, thermodynamic kind of improbable rather than logical impossible.
Maybe an easier such example is a spatially centrally symmetric Universe, where you can meet your exact clone who always does what you do. Or my very favorite, the temporally symmetric Universe, a version of the Gold Universe. Or a Hinduist Universe where time goes in circles. The point is, the idea that we live in a constructed, causally almost-but-not-perfectly isolated part of the Universe seems just an aesthetically displeasing corner case when discussed in the context of all these imaginable interaction networks.