AI's don't just magically pop out of nothing. Like anything else under the sun, they systemically evolve from existing patterns. They will evolve from our existant technosphere/noosphere (the realm of competing technologies and ideas).
Again, you are assuming that the entities arise from human intervention. The Simulation Hypothesis does not require that.
Your insect example is not quite accurate. There are people right now who are simulating the evolution of early insects.
How is it not accurate? I fail to see how the presence of such research makes my point invalid.
However a general rule applies - the more dissimilar the simulated universe is to the parent universe, the vaster the space of configurations becomes and the less utility the simulation has. So we can expect that the parent universe is roughly similar to ours.
This does not follow. Similarity of the simulation to the ground universe is not necessarily connected in any useful way to utility. For example, universes that work off of cellar automata would be really interesting despite the fact that our universe doesn't seem to operate in that fashion.
Before the SA there was no mechanism for a creator, and so the prior for intervention was zero regardless of the evidence. That is no longer the case. (Nor is it yet a case for intervention)
This confuses me. Generally, the problem with assigning a prior of zero to a claim is just what you've said here, that it is stuck at zero no matter how much you update with evidence. This is bad. But, you then seem to be asserting that an update did occur due to the simulation hypothesis. This leaves me confused.
No. You are assuming that the simulators are evolved entities. They could also be AIs for example They will evolve from our existant technosphere/noosphere (the realm of competing technologies and ideas). Again, you are assuming that the [simulator] entities arise from human intervention. The Simulation Hypothesis does not require that.
Sure, but the SH requires some connection between the simulated universe and the simulator universe.
If you think of the entire ensemble of possible universes as a landscape, it is true that any point-universe in that ...
Many folk here on LW take the simulation argument (in its more general forms) seriously. Many others take Singularitarianism1 seriously. Still others take Tegmark cosmology (and related big universe hypotheses) seriously. But then I see them proceed to self-describe as atheist (instead of omnitheist, theist, deist, having a predictive distribution over states of religious belief, et cetera), and many tend to be overtly dismissive of theism. Is this signalling cultural affiliation, an attempt to communicate a point estimate, or what?
I am especially confused that the theism/atheism debate is considered a closed question on Less Wrong. Eliezer's reformulations of the Problem of Evil in terms of Fun Theory provided a fresh look at theodicy, but I do not find those arguments conclusive. A look at Luke Muehlhauser's blog surprised me; the arguments against theism are just not nearly as convincing as I'd been brought up to believe2, nor nearly convincing enough to cause what I saw as massive overconfidence on the part of most atheists, aspiring rationalists or no.
It may be that theism is in the class of hypotheses that we have yet to develop a strong enough practice of rationality to handle, even if the hypothesis has non-negligible probability given our best understanding of the evidence. We are becoming adept at wielding Occam's razor, but it may be that we are still too foolhardy to wield Solomonoff's lightsaber Tegmark's Black Blade of Disaster without chopping off our own arm. The literature on cognitive biases gives us every reason to believe we are poorly equipped to reason about infinite cosmology, decision theory, the motives of superintelligences, or our place in the universe.
Due to these considerations, it is unclear if we should go ahead doing the equivalent of philosoraptorizing amidst these poorly asked questions so far outside the realm of science. This is not the sort of domain where one should tread if one is feeling insecure in one's sanity, and it is possible that no one should tread here. Human philosophers are probably not as good at philosophy as hypothetical Friendly AI philosophers (though we've seen in the cases of decision theory and utility functions that not everything can be left for the AI to solve). I don't want to stress your epistemology too much, since it's not like your immortal soul3 matters very much. Does it?
Added: By theism I do not mean the hypothesis that Jehovah created the universe. (Well, mostly.) I am talking about the possibility of agenty processes in general creating this universe, as opposed to impersonal math-like processes like cosmological natural selection.
Added: The answer to the question raised by the post is "Yes, theism is wrong, and we don't have good words for the thing that looks a lot like theism but has less unfortunate connotations, but we do know that calling it theism would be stupid." As to whether this universe gets most of its reality fluid from agenty creators... perhaps we will come back to that argument on a day with less distracting terminology on the table.
1 Of either the 'AI-go-FOOM' or 'someday we'll be able to do lots of brain emulations' variety.
2 I was never a theist, and only recently began to question some old assumptions about the likelihood of various Creators. This perhaps either lends credibility to my interest, or lends credibility to the idea that I'm insane.
3 Or the set of things that would have been translated to Archimedes by the Chronophone as the equivalent of an immortal soul (id est, whatever concept ends up being actually significant).