Mark, until I read Kurzweil's interesting argument that we're most likely living in a simulation (within a simulation, etc. -almost all the way down) I thought there was more likely than not no intelligent creator of our apparent reality. Now it seems to me the stronger argument that our apparent reality is a simulation of some other intelligence's reality, with some abstractions/reductions of their more complex reality. Just like we've already filled the Earth with various (and increasingly better) simulations of the universe and our own apparent reality).
By request of the community, an Open Thread for free-form comments, so long as they're still related to the basic project of this blog.
A word on post requests: You're free to ask, but the authors can't commit to posting on requested topics - it's hard enough to do the ones we have in mind already.