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.
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---