But the "fun" for which the simulated universes are optimized must be of variety likely to arise from the same natural selection. Which doesn't seem to apply at all to what we see. The universe created for its fun value is not at all the same as the ancestral universe, natural selection is an enemy.
I'm not talking about playing cops and robbers or going on a roller-coaster, I'm talking about a kid playing with a chemistry set. When I was 12, I had an a-life simulator called Prokaryote that I used to play with for hours, setting up some interesting initial condition and then seeing what would happen. Having been a theist at the time, I promptly decided that God was playing with us in the same way. Why else start three contradictory religions on the same spot? Why else temporarily give humans the ability to explore a continent, then isolate them for millennia?
In retrospect, I'm not sure how I squared this away with the idea of a benevolent deity I was supposed to be praying to.
I would like to argue that there could be a more tolerant view of religion/theism here on Less Wrong. The extent to which theism is vilified here seems disproportionate to me.
It depends on the specific scenario how terrible religion is. It is easy to look at the very worst examples of religion and conclude that religion can be irrational in a terribly wrong way. However, religion can also be nearly rational. Considering that any way we view the world is an illusion to some extent. Indeed the whole point of this site is to learn ways to shed more of our illusions, not that we have no illusions.
There are the religious beliefs that contradict empirical observation and those that are independent of it...
A) Could it be rational for a person to hold beliefs that are independent of empirical observation if (a) the person concedes that they are
irrationalnot empirically based and (b) is willing to drop them if they prove to not be useful?B) Could it be rational for a person to hold unusual beliefs as a result of contradicting empirical observations?
As a least convenient world exercise, what is the most rational belief in God that you can think of?