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Cakoluchiam comments on 2012 Survey Results - Less Wrong
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Would someone who created a computer that created the universe count as a god? I can easily write computer games with more complex behavior than I feel capable of fully comprehending, but I would not consider that computer program an intelligent entity. I can imagine that someone more educated and with a higher mental capacity than I could similarly write a computer program that is capable of creating and maintaining in simulation a universe with the global constants and initial conditions necessary to produce intelligent life without the program actually qualifying as intelligent itself.
My personal belief is that if there is a "god", he is quite probably much like a video game programmer, who can set up a universe like an MMO and let it run "infinitely" in "real-time", but, being constrained to a similar time-scale as the "players", is unable to make a large number of fine-grained adjustments to local variables at the immediate behest of said players (i.e. "answering prayers"). Someday we may get a version 2.0 release which allows third-party plugins so players can hack the universe to answer their own prayers, but I don't place a high conditional probability on that happening within my projected lifetime.
Given that all the 'players' are running in the universe in question, being able to make a large number of fine-grained adjustments to local variables in an instant (in-universe time) is simple; simply pause the simulation.
...unless some of you out there are actually players from outside the universe, in which case the rest of us would appreciate a hint.
What, the myriad prophets of revealed religions and cults aren't enough of a hint for you?
This seems to unreasonably deviate from the way almost every type of simulation I've ever heard of works. You can pause/resume, you can increase/decrease the "timesteps" to make the world go "faster" (with larger quanta levels though), or you could just arbitrarily increase the raw processing speed of the machine running the simulation to make the ratio of simulated vs external time proportionally higher.
Of course, if what you're proposing instead is that our "minds" are actually outside the simulation and sending input into it, rather than being fully contained within the simulation, then yes, the real-time constraint does apply.
ETA: In the latter case, I would argue that the term "Virtual Reality" is more appropriate and the use of "simulation" here is misleading and prone to conflating or confusing the two scenarios.
Hell, if the mathematical universe hypothesis is correct, then somewhere out there in the universe there is, with no intelligent priors, a collection of particles in the form of a computer, simulating a universe containing intelligent entities.
And the universe it is simulating itself contains an entity which created a computer which simulates a universe...
Given that the mathematical universe hypothesis is correct, what are the odds that the universe we experience
A- is the mathematical universe
B- is a computer analogue simulation which was generated spontaneously
C- is a computer analogue simulation which was created by an intelligence but is currently unattended
D- is a computer analogue simulation which is attended by someone who wishes to suppress the thought that the universe is atten---