It seems likely that when a simulation turns out to be especially interesting or unusual due to natural randomness, its simulator will decide to roll out that simulation more times. This wouldn't look like a measurable violation of the laws of physics from the perspective of the simulatees, as long as the simulators don't abuse their resampling power in extremely obvious ways.
Unpredictable simulation rollouts are more scientifically interesting, informative, and fun to observe. So simulatees can expect to live in an unpredictable world, whether their simulation is used for science, prediction, or entertainment.
For example, if someone simulated the entire universe millions of times and finally got a planet with life on it, surely they'd want to roll out that timeline many times, rather than throwing it away and starting from scratch.
Much more speculatively, you could imagine that in a civilization of aliens playing "Earth: The Video Game," one of the aliens happens to play out a timeline where Trump becomes president, they think it's so hilarious they share their checkpoint all over the alien Internet, and it becomes one of the most popular checkpoints to start a game from.
I don't necessarily think worlds where Trump becomes president are the particular kind of world that the simulators would prioritize running. But maybe? In any case, Trump's election hasn't noticeably affected my credence of being simulated (which is pretty dominated by my low starting prior).
In that case, I’d expect to be living in the early 20th century. Would you not say that WW1 & WW2 were especially random, unpredictable, and interesting? With the exception of AI development, I feel this time period was relatively more stable
I don't know, personally I'm much more interested in the ongoing history of AI development than WW1 and WW2, but I guess those wars are also pretty interesting.
If we're indeed living in the hinge of history, and humanity is about to create AIs that spread certain values throughout the universe, it seems very interesting and important to find out what the outcome is. I hear this is especially relevant for acausal trade.
Honestly, I don't think WW1 and WW2 were particularly random or unpredictable by the standards of human history; I think they felt that way because the development of technologies, and ongoing industrial revolution made them highly unprecedented, but I don't think the fact those wars occurred, or their results were particularly out of distribution.
I am super not a historian, so take my opinion with some salt, but I would guess the most unlikely things in history were the things that *could have happened earlier, but took a really long time to happen.
So in order of peculiarity:
1) Formation of Eukaryotic life; 1.4 billion years of prokaryotic life before this happened.
2) Formation of multicellular life; around 1.5 billion years of eukaryotic life before this happened.
3) Homo Sapiens level intelligence/civilization; we actually dont have a great way of knowing how rare this is, only that other civilizations are absent from the fossil record, and apparently absent in the cosmos, despite centralized nervous systems evolving around 540 million years ago (only 60 million years after multicellular life became a thing at all)
4) Development of agriculture; between 200 and 300 thousand years of homo-sapiens and similar species before we see permanent settlements really take hold.
5) Industrial revolution/enlightenment; this one feels like it should barely make the list, since there are only about 10,000 years of human agricultural civilization without it, and the absolute earliest ot could have happened was probably 2000-3000 years ago. Actually, now that I think about it the iron age and the development of bloomeries was actually the unprecedented event that led to the industrial revolution, since it seems likely we had other metals like copper and bronze going for about as long before iron processing as we have since.
6) Not blowing ourselves up (so far) since developing and stockpiling a massive amount of nuclear weapons.
Anyway, these are the events I would guess most likely to be candidates for "makes our simulation more interesting, so run lots of versions of it", and events like D-Trump getting elected feel pretty tame in comparison, IMO.
Things are stable now, but we are in the prequel to the singularity war. In 5,10,20 years' time I expect we will be playing through the most unstable & consequential era of human history before or since.
If there was a simulation you were in that was being run multiple times, you would not notice, because it would be the same outcome repeatedly.
Maybe if worlds where a peculiar set of circumstances tend to lead to a particularly interesting set of peculiar results down the line? So the prediction from this hypothesis would be that we live in a timeline/simulation where we are heading for a particularly unlikely final result.
If we all survive the rapid development of ASI in some particularly undignified and unlikely way, that might be relatively strong evidence for a simulation, given that we are pretty confident after the fact that it was in fact insanely unlikely, and the particular set of coincidences that led to us escaping various filters were selected in form Ina sort of simulation equivalent of quantum immortality.
More likely though (under this hypothetical theory, which my gut says is still all very silly) is that the entity simulating us is more interested in the particularly peculiar ASI/mind that ends up succeeding us due to our particular set of muddled interventions in it's development.
I don't think this affects your central point, but I'd expect a fairly large class of simulations to have exactly one miracle in them, and I don't think your argument weighs against this.
For example, someone with a question like "what if technology X had been discovered 100 years earlier?" might run a simulation with exactly one miraculous intervention to cause technology X to be discovered at the time of the simulator's choosing. Or "what if WW2 had ended differently?" could lead to a simulation with exactly one miraculous intervention to change the outcome of the war, etc.
Similarly, simulations about alternate rules ("what if humans had psychic powers?") might choose to start when things are getting interesting (e.g. when humans evolve, or when civilization kicks off) rather than starting with the big bang, and might fill in the history before that point from some other data source (e.g. basement reality), and then the simulation will have exactly one miraculous discontinuity in its history (at the moment the simulation started). h/t to (major spoilers)
the novel Ra by qntm
(It has occurred to me that "that's when the simulation started" is a possible explanation for (at most one of) various historical discontinuities like the year the singularity was canceled, though I don't give it much credence.)
This doesn't change your take-away that you shouldn't expect miracles in the future.
(Reposted from Facebook, on January 17, 2017.)
Is there any reason you reposted this to LW now?
This recent viral post of an old Scott Alexander blog led to a bunch of people posting on the topic(I believe): https://x.com/zagrebbi/status/2083733217173983303
"What if we're in a simulation that I can discern to be visibly unusual" discourse popping up again.
4The argument here is tautological.
You are saying that the state of the world as you see it is what a perfectly normal world would look like and so if a world looks that way even if simulated it must be being simulated to be indistinguishably normal. But it only looks normal because it's your only reference frame.
If an AI agent were 'born' into Minecraft they might make a similar argument that because everything is made of giant blocks — just like 'normal' — that they must be in a sim of a realistic world.
But we can consider that we have discovered over the years a great many things that were very much not considered 'normal' about our world until discovered… and then normalized.
It was a great surprise to many when QM was discovered. One might think that the world's most famous physicist at the time debating whether or not the moon was there if no one was looking at it is exactly the kind of surprising thing that would occur in a simulation. But then the people responsible adopted the phrase "shut up and calculate."
So Bell's paradox about how maybe things aren't real until stateful, the Frauchiger-Renner paradox where maybe relative frames have sync errors, the way the black hole information paradox has led to calculating how closed universes would have a one dimensional Hilbert space without interior relative observer frames — we have several things even in just the last few years (since the formulation of the Simulation Hypothesis even) that have been measured which were quite surprising to people when discovered and have now become normal to our universe, but also happen to be similar to the behavior one might expect of a simulated universe.
Also, I'm skeptical of how heavily you should be weighting your "well obviously the sim should behave as X." This framing seems to adopt the Baysean weakness of hand waving away unknown unknowns. Just because you, at this moment, can't see other likely possible reasons for a realistic sim to be running doesn't mean not to leave room for them in one's reasoning.
For example, an especially surprising outcome to many after the point the Simulation Hypothesis was proposed was finding themselves in a timeline where AI is at its current trending state. My guess is that in 2003 the majority of domain experts would have had an avg of single digit percent estimates for this outcome taking place within 25 years.
So, relative to the widely held expert world models before each were discovered to be true: we find ourselves in an abnormal timeline of AI capabilities in an abnormal universe where attention/interactions apparently turns probabilistic distributions into stateful shared values for overlapping relative frames without which the universe would be empty of information.
TL;DR: The argument that clearly the simulation hypothesis isn't worth thinking about because of how normal of a universe we are presented with forces adopting a view of normality that only appears in a post-selected hindsight.
I think he meant something like that:
Reality is quite large and detailed. It’s so large and detailed that it contains a plausible explanation for how the AI itself came to be. It’s so large that it contains radically more computing resources than it takes to run the AI (compared to most games and simulated environments, which are much smaller than the AI). The laws of physics and the evolved primates in the AI’s environment are the kinds of things that could actually yield a real AI at scale, unlike (say) the laws of the computer game Minecraft.
(from https://ifanyonebuildsit.com/5/what-if-we-make-it-think-its-in-a-simulation)
Wouldn't every ancestor simulation at a representative fidelity necessarily contain the building blocks needed to locally produce simulations?
There's even an argument to be made that relatively rare things in the universe which our world has and do not seem necessary for life (such that the Anthropic principle would explain) which contributed at all to producing simulations would be frequent features in the simulated worlds a world like ours produces. An example is the perfect eclipse of the sun, which made for visible phenomenon that led to Saros cycle discovery and tracking that in turn contributed to the first 'computer' of the Antikythera mechanism.
Indeed, we now add eclipses to the virtual worlds that we produce at a much higher rate than they occur in what we've detected of solar systems.
We should expect that simulations converge on recursive capable worlds, even to the point of including otherwise rare qualities that would contribute to that capability.
Also technically for Minecraft, while not especially scalable, the simulated world we produced loosely modeled on our own can in turn run a GPT text model within it: https://www.techspot.com/news/109666-gamer-builds-functional-version-chatgpt-inside-minecraft-using.html
(Yet to be determined is if some sort of self learning agentic minds born into it as NPCs/players and knowing nothing outside it would eventually converge on the knowledge of how to do so, nor how those minds would philosophically rationalize their world and existence once doing so — though perhaps we will one day run the simulations to find out.)
I don't see how saros cycle and Antikythera mechanism are at all related to likely features of simulation? In the scape of billions of years of evolution difference in a few thousands of years means nothing. I would rather expect no dinosaurs than some little strangeness like that.
I have seen that example. And I am not arguing that Minecraft with Redstone circuits or command blocks can't be Turing complete. I am saying that how in fact humans and agents implemented into Minecraft is not command block or redstone, but Steve mob. And it's mechanics aren't natural for Minecraft world. They are a complicated set of crutches. And then comes even bigger problem. Gpt staying in Minecraft doesn't have compact history, like in our world there is creation by evolved humans. And then even more problems, like that in Minecraft all blocks don't have internal structure. Not talking about mobs. While our world consists from, say, wood which consists from cells which consist from organoids which consist from molecules which consist from atoms which consists from quantum particles which seem to be just presence of fields which are completely encoded inside the space. No hidden parameters. Worlds of video games have fundamentslly different, heuristical, easily tweakable, top down structure unlike real world where physics is weaven very tight on the smallest level with no exceptions. And also there are addional problems with Minecraft. For example, it has 1norm, taxi cab metric, which seems incompatible with complex numbers which seem to be natural for the math, and as result also as i know incompatible with unitarity and quantum mechanics in general. (And to me it seems that qm obeys predictions of Tegmark 4 for base layer, as I point in another comment to that post: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KgwQchapx4vJDhfYC/generalized-atheism-rules-out-inaccurate-simulation-ism?commentId=eidgejPrbs3ExJxKJ)
Generally, our world seems as very much opposite of what you expect from simulation. Laws are universal so much that we have only two main theories now. Instead of enormous set of crutches which happens in video games. And quantum mechanics seems to behave exactly like particles follow all possible paths between two points. And relativity theory instead of binding everything to one system of coordinates, tracking distances only between each object and one point, says that there is no priveleged reference frame and you should rather thing about position as distances to all the other objects. Which doesn't seem at all as a way you would effectively use computation power for your simulation.
So our universe seems very normal for a world governed purely by simple physical laws with unlimited computational power. And those laws don't even seem to explain some simple objectives. They are more universal laws like Noether Theorem.
The point of the eclipses and Antikythera mechanism is that similar to how "things alive to see a thing" can be used to explain otherwise rare features that "things being alive to see" depends on, that "things which contribute to simulation" renders those things expected within a simulation.
So while it's an otherwise rare detail that standing on our planet's surface the moon creates perfect eclipses, within a simulation this should not be regarded as all that unusual given its partial load-bearing effects on that dependency chain.
This doesn't mean that eclipses prove we are in a simulation, but it addresses the idea that "but the world looks like it could produce the simulations and tech we are currently producing all on its own" isn't all that significant. Yes, we should expect a simulation to carry forward features that contributed to the parent's developing simulations into the child worlds.
As for games mechanics vs physics mechanics, it's not a static field. Things have advanced a lot from Minecraft. For example, you might find it interesting to look more into how Epic is trying to solve massive multiplayer worlds by building from the bottom up around relative frames with transactional mechanics built into the programming language and lazy loaded assets based on what any given relative frame needs built even into their VC. Also, transformers and how superimposed probabilities of state collapse into specific values might also be relevant as a post-2009 consideration.
And yes, in terms of the physics, we have two major theories that are famously not very compatible. One at macro scales that models things as if continuous, the other at micro scales that has some curious behaviors with state management.
Hypothetically, what are the constraints that a continuous universe with access to real computing might face with self-simulation? Would there be a meaningful difference if run as a truly continuous substrate vs run as a discrete substrate that mostly behaved as if continuous outside very small scales?
His point isn't we aren't in a simulation, but that we're not in an interventionist simulation, therefore evidence from improbable events can't be used to boost the credence of a simulation.
The same argument could be made about Minecraft world, and would be right (seeing odd things happen in Minecraft world shouldn't boost your credence that you're simulated, because the simulators clearly aren't generally intervening).
It's still not a particularly strong case.
For example, even if a non-intervening sim, it may be that the technology of the sim causes a higher than expected rate of coincidences.
A good example would be transformers. If you were to build a sim that was non-intervening intentionally, but used transformers to augment any static data with dynamic generation, what you'd end up with would have higher than normal rates of non-locally derived overlapping coincidences, particularly around semantic superpositions.
So unusual coincidences could be evidence of being more likely to be in a sim running on architecture more prone to generating coincidences unintentionally (or even non-intervening intentional coincidences).
The epistemic problem with that approach is more that without other points of reference and a complete picture of alternative outcomes it's not really possible to determine the base rates for how likely an observed coincidence was compared to the non-observed coincidences that didn't happen, so the "look at the coincidence, we must be in a sim" is a weak argument as an argument, independent of the propensity of a simulated world to have more or unusual coincidences.
But even taking Minecraft as an example, while the game is mostly non-intervening, the chests periodically all turning into gift boxes for a while (coordinated with non-local to the game world Dec 25ths) or finding blocks with faces of mobs on them do represent intentional efforts of a simulator even if those do not materially change the outcomes of any given game world.
I'd even argue that it's entirely probable given the frequency in most virtual worlds I've seen that if we are in a simulation, there'd be a significant chance of things like Easter eggs somewhere out there.
It's just that even if you found a plausible example, it would not be able to prove that we are in a simulation because of the base rate point above, not anything to do with what someone envisions of what a simulator would or would not do.
(That said, considering striking coincidences or Easter egg-like material from the reverse angle of "if we are in a simulation, is there plausible significance to X" doesn't struggle with the same issues.)
(Also, technically the Epicurian paradox falls apart with recursive creation due to introducing faithfulness to an emergent original as a valid out, and it was a weak choice to try to generalize from.)
I agree that semi interventionist Sims are reasonable to hypothesise, but unless you have strong priors over what rare interventions are most likely, by conservation of expected evidence it's almost impossible to get any evidence your in one (when looking at everything as a whole, not isolated events).
It's hard for me to address ambiguously as I've already had priors based on seeing a trope often in virtual worlds with complex lore, checked against our own lore for the same pattern through the lens of sim theory to rule out the existence of significant hits, and then was very surprised when I did actually find a hit much more significant than I'd ever expected to surface.
Separately, from a Baysean perspective, I'll also point out that when it comes to metaphysical 'truth' it's probably worth weighing the discovered property of things which are immeasurable from a given relative frame not necessarily having binary objective mutually exclusive truth values.
At best, we should probably only look at the question of immeasurable metaphysics via a Baysean lens through a more relativistic QBism-ish formulation. The question of whether or not the metaphysics governing one person are the same as the ones governing another is its own unknown. The physics must be shared across any interactive decoherence, but the metaphysics may be relative beyond that.
That a closed universe may of necessity have a one-dimensional Hilbert space is surprising (with normal quantum mechanics only arising for internal observers, relative to the unique total wavefunction of such a universe). But why is it what you'd expect of a simulation?
Because it's how a lot of our own simulated worlds behave?
For a game like Minecraft or No Man's Sky with procgen or a transformer's world model like Genie 3 or Seedance 2.0 the information of the world generates based on the relative frame intersecting it. There's the latent potential for generation, but the inner world model only fills out with actual data based on the need to render.
If you load up a Minecraft world with no players visiting it, it's very small. As you add players into the game, it's at that point that the engine is populating it with state that needs to be tracked and managed, based on each relative frame within it.
Convergence here is not "Q.E.D. we're in a simulation" — these approaches could have occurred in parallel due to just how efficient systems organize information entirely separate from simulation and recursive containment.
But it's not surprising through a simulation lens given how common the paradigm is of a virtual universe whose information increases lazily based around relative inhabitation.
I don't think it should be particularly surprising that physics gets more weird and unintuitive to humans the more we inspect it at scales further and further away from the ones we evolved to operate in. And domain experts being wrong about AI timelines is, to me, not surprising whatsoever, both because of technological advancement timelines being notoriously hard to predict and AI itself being a difficult subject.
More generally, how exactly would we differentiate human error because of a task or subject being difficult and human error because of living in a simulation? I feel like in the case of the second one, it would be more like having a completely inconsistent hole in our world. Like, if everything else played out the same before November 3, 2020 but Kanye West got elected instead, every domain expert, even after the fact, would still be absolutely baffled.
In the case of AI and physics, so far, we seem to be able to readjust our internal knobs into something consistent (because, as expected, no matter how outlandish the rules of the micro world are, they still need to add up to what we experience in the macro world).
The Minecraft thought experiment is interesting, but you would have to play by the actual rules of the Minecraft world, so whatever intelligent agent is born there would have to be instantiated according to those rules.
I'm not really sure how life could begin naturally by Minecraft rules. If an intelligence just sort of pops in there suddenly, then I feel like, to it, that would be good evidence of outside interference once it learns more about standard Minecraft world rules.
It's not simply being weird and unintuitive.
It's that they are repeatedly weird and unintuitive in ways that converge with ways we're addressing challenges in simulating our own worlds.
For example, sync errors with local state between different clients has been an issue multiplayer games have around for decades before Frauchiger-Renner or Bong et al. found reasons that maybe in QM there's local observer independence where different relative frames might disagree about local facts. And one of the newest ways of dealing with it in video games (see UE 6) is building things from the ground up around relative frames that have transactional fallbacks before state changes. So behavior like a quantum eraser where the absence of persistent information unwinds the stateful shift from wave behavior to particle behavior is convergent with approaches to solve the relative frame information conflicts in games… that we seem to have discovered in our own substrate through two different approaches in just the last decade.
A good counterexample would be if we had discovered matter was continuous. That would have surprised the people who were betting it was discrete. But I'd also be having a much harder time right now arguing that we might be in a simulation if matter were composed of uncountably infinite parts.
That's not how things landed. (At least, not in the micro scales. The cosmic scales work very well with continuous theory like GR.)
Does the surprising convergence prove we are in a simulation? No. But had many of those surprises gone in different directions, the case for a sim would be weaker.
Something overlooked in discussing Bostrom's take is that his argument was substrate agnostic. The statistical argument was just that if sims could be built they'd outnumber an original. But what we are actually looking at, especially in the ~25 years since, is a universe where the direction the tech is heading in how it manages state and relative frames is strikingly similar to aspects of how our own universe behaves. Not because the former is trying to replicate the latter from a fidelity standpoint. But because simulating worlds is hard, and the efficient solutions are landing on convergent behavior.
(Again, it's possible this just reflects some meta-universe trend in how information is efficiently handled or something and doesn't prove we are in a sim. But the convergence is notably more than it was in 2003 on both sides of the aisle.)
As for the ontology from within a Minecraft world — any NPC could point to the existence of diamonds and how they don't form no matter if you wait for years, so clearly the world is many years older. The apparent formative process of a virtual world at the moment it is being examined from within does not necessarily correlate with the state by which the world actually formed. (If you're interested in the thought experiment, do check out some of the existing experiments developing models that play Minecraft with no outside knowledge other than exposure to the game. It's neat stuff and accelerating in surprising ways.)
Ok, I see what you're saying. If our world's rules align with what we consider to be computationally efficient, then that is at least moderate evidence for living in a simulation. I'm not sure whether that is consistently the case, though.
As for your Minecraft point, what I was saying was that you would have to instantiate the intelligence within the Minecraft world, running by its rules. And I can't see how anything like that could arise naturally in there. It would have to just sort of appear suddenly.
I guess you could also have it running externally and only feed it input from Minecraft, but that seems like even further evidence for a simulation from its perspective ("everything else in the world fits into relatively simple rules, but I'm a super complex black box that also just suddenly popped in here").
Actually, that’s an interesting thought. The usefulness of the notion The Tao of Physics implies EITHER that there actually is some underlying distribution from which possible physical laws were sampled for our universe, OR (perhaps as a subset of the first horn of this dilemma?) that there is an intelligent designer with actual preferences over mathematical style of physical laws. The only non-infinitesimal scrap of evidence we have for a supposed creator with any preferences at all beyond our universe’s mere existence.
So much of the discussion and thought ends up being in debating "are we in a simulation?"
But a significantly more interesting discussion is "if we are in a simulation…"
Because unlike with magic where infinite turtles are a valid conclusion or adversarial tricksters can be accused of hiding dinosaur bones to fool the faithful, simulation has anchored principles that can be applied to better reverse engineer what's more or less meta-plausible if we are in a sim.
We may never be able to concretely know if we are in a sim, but we can very plausibly rule out aspects of what kind of sim it would be if it is a sim, and this rarely gets seriously engaged with as the debate stops at sim vs no sim.
The recent discussion here has me thinking about working on a piece about this.
Chains of arguments like these are why the scientific method demands that one makes a claim which is capable of being falsified. If the outcome of a failed test is capable of being the same as the outcome of a successful test, you've engineered a bad test. I believe this is the gist of the argument here?
The actual problem with simulation hypotheses in the most general case is that they are maximally non-predictive, in the sense that they'd always be right, no matter what evidence you get, especially for people who want to rescue theism, and thus by conservation of expected evidence, cannot actually be a valid hypothesis for a Bayesian to have (which as a corollary of what's proven forbids hypotheses that can never be made less probable, no matter what evidence you have gotten)
And I think the theist in the conversation is likely trying to violate conservation of expected evidence, so they're making a mistake of reasoning.
Similar points apply to the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis, which with a broad enough definition of mathematics can be made into a trivially right hypothesis.
I think you're missing some key features of the religious argument in your gloss of it. It's not simply that God does low probability things for the lulz: it's important that Trump's opponents in the election (Clinton, the Democrats, etc.) be aligned with Satan, such that their victory would bring about the end of the world/human extinction. And God's intervention to make an exceedingly unlikely event happen, contrary to the predictions of ordinary natural law, to thwart such a victory – what one might term a miracle – is taken as evidence of His existence.
Isn't this in fact what you would predict we would observe under such stakes? That you might call it "anthropics" instead of "eucatastrophe" doesn't change much.
And the obvious reason why that some superintelligence would be rolling a realistic simulation, is that this is a simulation meant to gain information about a lower-level universe that is very similar to this one.
My bullshit detector is triggered by this.
Yes, sure, this is a hypothesis. A plausible-sounding just-so story. But why are we supposed to privilege it in particular, compared to all the other alternatives? What evidence do we actually have in favor of it?
So if this is a simulation, it's a realistic simulation. And the obvious reason why that some superintelligence would be rolling a realistic simulation, is that this is a simulation meant to gain information about a lower-level universe that is very similar to this one.
In which case there will be no miracles now or ever.
Hmm.
Have you ever been running a simulation — say when you’re playing a game like chess or risk or civ IV or whatever — and decided to, ahem, *adjust* the game state using your powers as an external entity unbeholden to the rules of the game? Perhaps it’s clear that you’re going to win in an uninteresting fashion, and you make the game more competitive by gifting your adversary some resources. Perhaps you just lost a game that seemed impossible to win, and you wonder if a small boost at a pivotal moment would have been enough to turn the tides... and you reload a save state midway through and nudge a few dice rolls (or perhaps you make do with just your seemingly *impossible* knowledge of your opponent’s base).
It's quite natural to intervene in simulations for the very purpose of gaining more information! In fact, it's very common for simulations to play out completely realistically with no miracles for the majority of the simulation and then suddenly have a few (often exactly one) miracles.
What kind of interventionist superbeing cares enough to intervene to make Trump win an election, and doesn't care about a million other aspects of the world that they could be intervening on?
One who is trying to learn as much as they can from this world! One who cares about entertainment value! One who wants to see if singular events or great men can change the course of the cosmos on the cusp of the singularity!
We don't see any sign of God's presence. Therefore there is no God.
But… my whole point is that we do see signs of [simulator/creator]’s presence!
I cannot help but wonder if you posted this in response to my August 4th post Why I think we live in a simulation. One thing I discuss there is the fact that our world is very interesting and entertaining and overall seems to be exactly the kind of world that all kinds of intelligent beings would be interested in simulating. I note that my post essentially never talks about God or religion at all. [1] Also of interest to me w/r/t that post is that despite me thinking it's very good, it's my lowest karma post ever on LW! 5 karma with 13 votes.
[1] The idea of God appears once. In my long list of possible kinds of 'simulation' that our world might be, I mention "Dream / fantasy of some higher being: - God entertaining themself. - God teaching themself."
This is a floor estimate of the abilities of superbeings. There could be such a thing as naturalistic traceless interventions by supersimulators in such a manner that the simulacra would be unable to notice, anticipate or even explain. Thus drawing distributions which rule the Donald Trump election in or out as evidence of a (bored to local heat death) simulator are both a little dubious (ie there is a simulacra frame of reference where it is not possible to tell apart whether "I don't care about Trump's election" is a local projection of "... I don't care about Donald Trump in this universe" or "Dude, I actually don't care about Donald Trump's election" ).
Worse, a caring simulator can easily traceless intervene (for example wagging some rando dinosaur's tail) such that "I don't care about Trump's election" is a local projection of "I care about Trump's election and I have made it happen". That is, we may never even be able to tell usefully that we are in an interventionist or non-interventionist universe.
Do you believe that God intervened in the 2016 election? All these arguments carry over identically to God.
Not really, I believe that it may be impossible to tell either way. This question is very similar to "what is it to be like a photon?". We just don't inhabit the frame of reference (that of a boundary condition preparer) which can answer this question, or even just litigate it.
One usually assumes that, for many simulations, various forms of entertainment (possibly including “immersive VR diving”) would be among the goals.
Then, on one hand, one would expect lazy rendering of simulation to save resources, adding those resources only as needed (this is compatible both with the Fermi paradox and with subsequent “discoveries” that other civilizations “actually” exist).
And on the other hand, the level of ridiculousness in having a president with this kind of last name, this kind of behavior, and this kind of ridiculous circumstances of his recurrent coming to power is highly entertaining (at least to those not directly affected by the consequences).
And… this is not the only thing which seems to be rather ridiculous in a somewhat entertaining fashion about our reality. What we should really ask: is what we observe “unnaturally ridiculous” altogether or is it within reason for a “naturalistic reality”?
The conceit of imagining yourself to be Top-Tier Entertainment for a god. Why, there's not just many possible things to imagine, so why wouldn't it imagine you, amirite?
Not quite.
The most typical entertainment mode people consider in this case is that a “god” (a being from an outer reality) goes for an adventure of being a lesser being for a subjective life of that lesser being while forgetting who they are for that subjective period (without any particular assumption of how that period corresponds to temporal duration in the outer reality in question, but the outer duration can potentially be very brief).
This is a rather typical scenario in some “mystical” literature (they try to tell their readers that those readers “came from somewhere, but don’t remember”, and that this is being done “as a quest of some sort”), although that literature usually presumes that everyone is a “playing character” and does not typically consider potential existence of NPCs.
Another entertainment mode would probably be writing the scenarios (can be a form of art) or otherwise interfering just for kicks, or for some tests, or using the simulation as a playing field for some games (which can have some rules).
Many people find it worth their while to spend some time in VR, which is generally substandard compared to what we have here in our life (at least in terms of resolution and of available sensory channels, at least today), but sufficiently different to make it interesting. So the assumption that something similar might still be of interest to more powerful beings is not too improbable, I would think…
(But in general people often enjoy comedy of not exactly “high brow nature”.
If one abstracts away from the tragic aspects of all this, the whole “Trump thing” does qualify as a “comedy of not exactly high brow nature”.
Yes, I think being way more powerful than humans does not necessarily make one above entertainment of “not exactly high brow nature”.)
And whatever the utility function of gods, you imagine (1) there's not much they could possibly find any more entertaining than that, and (2) there's not that many other possibilities for things that would be equally entertaining?
There are plenty of opportunities, but “gods” don’t have to be super, super intelligent, they just should be able to run a decent simulation with consciousness inside. We don’t know if it’s all that difficult.
If you want a chess analogy, it’s not a world champion choosing to spend time playing a weaker player, it’s a world champion going to a night club on the seedy side of the town to unwind and to tickle some unsatisfied urges.
Does not the world champion have some better things to do? I am sure the answer is “yes”, but I am also sure that things like “a night club on the seedy side of the town” happen way more often than the frequency we usually assume by default…
Also, there can be plenty of simulations and other opportunities, but there can also be plenty of “gods”. The problem with the word “god” is that it creates this impression of rarity, and then one gets the impression that this requires something improbable to happen, but an “outer reality” might be really well populated (many orders of magnitude more populated than our little planet). That’s not an exotic assumption. We are not so large and important that the G-d has chosen us, but if a few of a few quintillions of “gods” have chosen to spend some time here, this does not make us improbably important.
I am skeptical of how well calibrated your "ridiculous" meter is. Like if you lived in the past most kings were corrupt and ridiculous like Trump. Perhaps the last 30 years or so were anomalously normal seeming. A brief look at history makes it seem that way.
My reference class is US Presidents (and, more generally, elected leaders of democratic countries). One requirement for quite a long time was “being proper”, “demonstrating some kind of externally visible conformity with conventions”, this kind of things.
OK thats a pretty narrow reference class. For example I am not even from USA so I wouldn't choose it or be convinced by it would I? Seeing as >95% of the world dont live in the USA it's not going to convince them.
And if you expand it, then Putin and many dictators start off being at least somewhat democratically elected. Conformity with conventions, is also pretty vague, like being ridiculous is seen as more unlikely than being a dictator? This all seems a bit arbitrary and post hoc.
Well, I am an immigrant from the Soviet Union to the United States, and for me the evidence is strong. And about Putin being “democratically elected”, at least initially, I… well, “politics is a mind-killer”, so I am not going to expand in this direction ;-) But he was relatively normal, he was not a weird outlier (even with what’s going on now; it’s very unpleasant, but it’s not strange, it’s “traditionally bad”). So he would not be a counter-example.
But I don’t claim that the evidence is universal. (In some sense, the whole point of having this many people is to maintain a healthy diversity and non-uniformity of views. After all, certainties are rare, and here we are not discussing a subject where one would expect certainty, so why would one aim for a universal evidence here… The discussion here is whether it’s reasonable for some rationalists to update based on this, not whether it’s a “cognitive sin” not to update.)
If you look at my initial comment, I am not even saying that I should update. All I am saying is that this is an extra motivation to try to evaluate whether the overall level of weirdness is above of what should be expected of a “naturalistic reality”.
I like to joke that the reason quantum mechanics and general relativity are incompatible is that the universe is running on buggy code. ;)
It reminds me about later post about Why Biological Anchors Never Work where was the moment with "imagine how funny it could be for aliens to choose this exact moment when you say your phone won't hover, to make it hover" and that in fact it won't hover. In a sense, it is dictated by priors. There is some giant number of universes where just one miracle happens. But all of them diverge, all of them are different. And amount of universes where miracles are regular is less than that, but they converge. So all the universes where just one miracle happens generally look like perfectly regular universes.
That reminds me of question "if we live in Tegmark 4, why there aren't irregularities like clothes turning into a crocodile". The answer to me seems that there is no reason to prioritize human concepts like cloth or crocodile. Most of bitstrings of irregularities will look completely random to humans, like quantum noise. Which, we actually observe. So it seems to me like an evidence that we actually do live in Tegmark 4. If we lived in classic deterministic universe where there is no quantum randomness, it would be evidence against us being in Tegmark 4. But it ends up that all possible programs with irregularities which diverge from regular laws of physics sum up to being random in each particular universe. (Which also seems to me as evidence that quantum mechanics isn't some high level physics law, but rather bottom level result of how programs are structured in Tegmark 4.)
What I infer from that is that if we were to expect some miracles we would have already seen them, and since we haven't seen them, then we should expect miracles which are on average not different from randomness.
Or to pose in the god framework, then as I now understand, the main problem of God hypotheses is "which one", all the excuses like "divine ways are mysterious" don't allow you to determine whether it is Yhwh, Allah or Zeus, and unless all of them exist simultaneously, you need to distribute probability among all of them, and so each one of them becomes unlikely already on priors, even if you take only socially established Gods, not just all descriptions of Gods. It doesn't make sense to argue with concrete religion, because first you need to choose why even that religion.
And the same prior argument works for optimization targets. You can't avoid improbability by saying it was being optimized, because you now just need to prove the improbability of some optimization target among all optimization targets.
The phrase "inaccurate simulation" led me to expect discussion of the possibility of a nonmaterialist nonagentic substrate -- a simulation where errors look less like random bitflips and more like AI confabulations. Random, non-goal-oriented, semantically meaningful deviations from a purely mechanistic universe, like the result of an LLM (maybe from 2023 or so) fed a description of history and asked to extrapolate the next decade.
>A certain key atheistic argument is so obvious as to be boring, which is of course a good sign for its validity:
>"We don't see any sign of God's presence. Therefore there is no God."
I just watched "Silence of the Lambs"--what a nice coincidence.
"We don't see any sign of Buffalo Bill's presence (apart from all the evil things he's done). Therefore there is no Buffalo Bill."
Is this a valid argument?
I mean if there is a God/ Godlike being but he's truly evil, then this argument goes out the window, and so does "The Problem of Evil". He doesn't want to be found because, being evil, that might lead a critical number of people to want to overthrow or kill him (if there are other more benevolent entities that have any means of doing so in principle, and that can recruit any intelligent mind such as a human to help them do so).
A generalized Roko's Basilisk on this issue is that Earth is a safe-ish place precisely because the evil God can't blackmail atheists (or indeed Christians) when they are sufficiently unaware of his existence. Benevolent simulating entities that do know all about Him would not want to tell the majority of human beings that He exists, or they would only do so indirectly.
Also a little rationalist principle I want to throw in here: haven't you made a big assumption that "we" (every reader) has seen no sign of God (or any such being)'s presence? Would it not have been better to say ask yourself, dear reader, whether you have seen any sign of God's presence?
You never know who is reading your blog posts, after all :-)
There are severe problems in your article that any philosopher worth his salt would notice. I'll go through them one by one. I will not argue about the simulation part of your article, but about the very roots that you use in order to write this article.
A)The existence of God isn't the same as the correctness of a given religion. Most of your arguments deal with a benevolent God, but according to your own self-proclaimed definition of "benevolence". You think we should use a 6 year old's untrained moral values.
That argument can easily turn against you, after all any 6 years old would refuse that his parents divorce and would refuse to have his mother replaced by another person. Theists will claim this is evidence of the existence of natural law and you would have no way to refute them since you used this hypothetical 6 years old as a moral compass.
But, in reality there are thousands of reasons why a "good person" with the cure to malaria would not give it freely according to utilitarian ethics. As an example, perhaps they want to prevent an overpopulation problem. As an example, perhaps one of the people with malaria has a descendant that commits a genocide that kills 100 million people. Unless you are omniscient and you have access to all possible futures there is no way for an utilitarian to make the best choice.
You cannot pretend that you have that omniscience. Only a child can pretend that they know all the consequences and that those consequences would all be good.
Fundamentally, utilitarian philosophy collapses into nonsense because of the problem of qualia and the non-summation of qualia. It is impossible to sum pleasure and pain, it is impossible to pretend that every single human on earth is an interchangeable object with no individuality.
B)No, a powerful and benevolent "God" would not necessarily stop earthquakes. Isn't having an active planet as opposed to a dead planet a good thing? An active planet with a magnetic field, with moving crusts, and so on. Those are definitely useful for the sake of biological evolution. Moreover, the physical possibility of earthquakes can't just be erased from reality without causing reality itself to collapse into being nonsensical.
If you want "God" to magically intervene every single time there's an earthquake to stop deaths, then your idea of "God" does not correspond to any known religion. If you argue that such a "God" does not exist, then, all religious folk would have to agree with you that indeed, such a "God" does not exist. In the paragraph above I dealt with physical evils. It applies to illness as well and it applies to basically all "natural causes" of death.
Secondly, for the case of human-caused evils, that is a logical consequence of the ability of humans to do either good or evil. If millions of sentient beings exist, some will statistically choose to do evil actions, such as murder, rape and so on. For those things to not happen, it would require that humans don't have free will and can only choose to do the right action (that is the fate of an automaton, I don't think most people would agree that it would be a good thing to erase their sense of self)
C)If you were to read any serious religious texts, as an example the Tanakh, there are countless examples of injustice being unpunished. If God directly and immediately rewarded those who did good things and punished those who did bad things, then it's no longer a free choice, it's simply an optimization problem. Why should humans, who are sentient beings, be reduced to merely be multi-objective optimization machines?
Reducing human free will to nihil would be a great evil. Would you want a girlfriend who cannot leave you because she doesn't have a choice? Would you want to be forced to work rather than freely choose your occupation? Most of what is valuable in this world is only truly valuable because it is freely chosen.
In the book of Job, the view that God immediately rewards good and immediately punishes evil is completely refuted. The friends of Job claimed that the reason he lost his sons and that he became poor and ill was that he sinned greatly and that God punished him. They mocked him, insulted him, and told him to repent or else. However, that view is explicitly denied in the Tanakh and Job defends himself and is vindicated. You are arguing against a non-existing strawman.
Your view of God exists neither in christianity, nor in judaism or in islam. Perhaps your view of "God" is compatible with that of the gnostics who think the demiurge is only one very powerful entity among many, but that's not what most people mean when they talk about God.
Your entire position consists in creating a strawman about what you think "God" is and then declaring that this strawmanned version of "God" doesn't exist. But no serious theologian or philosopher has argued for the existence of such a "God". The Jews do not argue for the existence of such a "God", you will not find a single rabbi that claims those things. How can you claim to have refuted judaism or any religion at all if you invent a "God" they don't even believe in?
D)When calculating the probability that any event such as atom splitting occurs, God's existence doesn't allow anyone to say "that atom is more likely to split". Likewise, God's existence doesn't allow one to predict "This tree should fall", wouldn't that be entirely nonsensical?
Classical theism says that God created the universe, with all the laws of physics. God doesn't usually intervene to make one atom split rather than another, miracles are exceptional by their nature they are not something God does all the time.
E)You have gratuitously affirmed, in your text, that miracles do not exist. You have ignored countless historical testimonies, not only from the Bible but from other sources. You have also ignored the Turin's shroud (which has been scientifically investigated so many times that there's a whole specialized literature on the subject), you have ignored scientific investigations into the phenomenon of reincarnation (we do have a scientific litterature on the subject even if we don't have any absolute proof that the afterlife exists), you have ignored scientific investigation of eucharistic miracles (heart tissues and blood found in pieces of bread), etc. Any one of those phenomenons can refute the atheistic materialist framework.
Don't you think it is saddening for a Bayesian to simply ignore evidence and do as if it did not exist? Then you pretend that atheists somehow won thanks to a careful investigation of the matters. They did no such thing, they simply buried all the evidence and ignored it. The reason atheists are more numerous in our current society is sociological rather than scientific. Atheism is encouraged, religion is ridiculed. That has nothing to do with truthfulness, after all religion was once revered and atheism ridiculed.
The six-year-old is RIGHT.
If there is no universal source of morality, then the six-year-old is tautologically right, because "good" just means "does what the six-year-old wants or would want", but if there IS such an entity that defines morality (or some other universal morality), then the six-year-old may or may not be right, but the answer depends in part on whether God exists.
(Reposted from Facebook, on January 17, 2017.)
I am concerned about the number of people I've heard joking about Trump's election being evidence for the Simulation Hypothesis.
Yes, I know it's a joke. I'm still concerned.
Warning: #Essay, #LongEssay
So as not to engage in Logical Fallacy: Appeal to Consequences, before I talk about why this joke is worrying, I shall first discuss why Trump's election does not in fact mean we are living in a simulation. And neither does the Berenstein/Berenstain Bears thing, etcetera.
Because atheism generalizes.
No, I'm not about to commit the Noncentral Fallacy (aka The Worst Argument In The World) by yelling "The Simulation Hypothesis is religious!"
But once upon a decade, there was a time when lots of people believed in God. A time when atheism had to be argued, not just taken for granted. There was a time when believing in atheism made you one of those weird, loud people with arguments that only people with unusually good epistemology could follow, and other people talked about you exactly the way that the anti-LessWrong tumblrsphere now talks about LessWrong.
Today, of course, atheism is just something that everyone in your filter bubble believes. But back then atheism had to be argued, and assessing the validity of those arguments required unusually good epistemology that left a lot of the audience behind, and other people laughed at those weird atheists and their snooty yet flawed epistemology on their primitive equivalents of Tumblr.
A certain key atheistic argument is so obvious as to be boring, which is of course a good sign for its validity:
"We don't see any sign of God's presence. Therefore there is no God."
"Ah," says the theist, retreating to their motte, "that's because God doesn't usually intervene in His creation. Now go away so I can resume telling people to pray for earthquake victims."
"Okay," says the atheist, "I'll be more precise: the argument shows that there's no interventionist God. And if we're not playing motte-and-bailey then that kicks hell out of most religions. All the scriptural religions record interventions. If we're not inventing elaborate excuses, then yes a powerful and benevolent God would stop earthquakes that randomly kill lots of innocent people in developing countries."
"Maybe He wouldn't," says the theist. "Who are we to know the mind of God?"
"You can only avoid that conclusion by overcomplicating things," says the atheist. "Ask a six-year-old whether a good person with superpowers would cure malaria. The six-year-old will say yes. The six-year-old is RIGHT. Since malaria is still here, there is no good person with superpowers who can act on our Solar System; and this argument doesn't suddenly go away when somebody invokes the word 'God'." The atheist pauses, thinking. "In fact, this argument generalizes to many other hypothetical entities with desires and superpowers. If there are potatoes in the world, we can rule out the existence of a sufficiently powerful comic-book supervillain who hates potatoes. If to every appearance our world just follows simple mathematical laws, this is strong evidence against every class of superpowered being whose utility function wants anything more than It wants our universe following simple mathematical laws. If there are other places, other parts of Reality, under the dominion of superpowerful beings running around optimizing those places to meet various desires as much as possible, those places really don't look like our part of the universe! The six-year-old knows that, and the six-year-old is right."
"Ah," the theist says wisely, "but what if God wants the world to look exactly like it's following mathematical laws?"
"Well," says the atheist, "as an instrumental strategy, I can imagine that we are figments of the imagination of some superbeing who for whatever reason wants to know a more exact probability distribution about what happens in universes like this one. Say, somebody in a universe like this one has hidden a buried treasure, and the superbeing is mentally simulating many different imaginary versions of our universe to refine its guess as to where the treasure might have been hidden. In this case, to intervene inside the imagined universe would make the imaginary world unrealistic, and thereby invalidate the imagination's information-value for the real-world question the superbeing is trying to answer. This would produce a superbeing that was consistently noninterventionist with respect to its imagination of our dreamed universe; and we must also suppose that the superbeing doesn't care when imagined people die of malaria. This hypothesis is compatible with our observations. In fact it is exactly as compatible with our observations, as our universe not being imaginary. And it is no coincidence that this story consistently implies that we will also not observe any miracles in the future."
"Well, what about the election of Donald Trump?" says the theist. "It's not proof, I know, but isn't that at least some evidence that there's an interventionist God?"
"Why on Earth would it be?" says the atheist.
"Because God could have made Trump be elected," says the theist, "and therefore, worlds in which Trump is elected are more likely given the God Hypothesis."
"A person with superpowers who cares about electoral results also could have made Hillary Clinton be elected," says the atheist. "The superbeing hypothesis class can't make every outcome more probable. The probabilities still have to sum to one."
"Okay," says the theist, "but the prediction markets thought that Trump being elected was unlikely, presumably under the implicit assumption of our universe running under mathematical laws. If the universe doesn't have to follow those strict mathematical laws, if those laws can sometimes be violated, doesn't that move the extreme probability of Trump not being elected back toward the middle? Then Trump's election is more probable given the God Hypothesis than not."
The atheist throws up their hands. "What kind of interventionist superbeing cares enough to intervene to make Trump win an election, and doesn't care about a million other aspects of the world that they could be intervening on?"
"Truly the ways of Heaven are mysterious," the theist says.
"The ways of science are not mysterious," says the atheist, "and they say that we don't just get to throw up our hands and say 'the ways of the experimental apparatus are mysterious' when observation fails to accord with the obvious prediction. It's just a generic excuse to blur out all the failed predictions of the theory, and if you apply it evenhandedly, you shouldn't be using that theory to predict anything else either."
"Anyway," says the theist, "I'm asking if you agree that the God Hypothesis predicted with at least slightly greater probability that Trump would be elected."
"I'm frankly not sure of that in this case," says the atheist. "When I actually try to envision that tiny fraction of weird possibilities in which some superbeing who never intervened on any definitely visible occasion, cares enough to intervene in the US Presidential election, it's not clear to me that they favor Trump over Clinton."
"I'm not saying that God, as I understand Him, would favor Trump over Clinton," says the theist. "It's just that I, in my mortal limitation, don't have reason to believe that the ineffable God is 4 times as likely to favor Clinton over Trump. If in my own imagination God would be twice as likely to favor Clinton over Trump in his ineffable plan--that is, given that God intervened, I would have guessed 2:1 odds for Him intervening for Clinton--then to the extent one believes God might intervene in the US election, and that prediction markets have not already taken this into account, one ought to shift the market odds of 4 : 1 for Clinton : Trump towards the less extreme 2 : 1 odds of God favoring Clinton over Trump. Maybe just a little, but even so, it would be some little bit of evidence."
The atheist crosses their arms, looking skeptical. "I'm a little suspicious that you would maybe have given God stronger odds than 2 : 1 of favoring Clinton over Trump, if asked in advance. But I suppose, when I envision weird beings with superpowers intervening there and nowhere else, I don't imagine them swinging strongly for Clinton. So the point carries for me, if not for you."
"So you agree, then," the theist says, "that Trump's election was to some small degree evidence for the existence of God."
The atheist thinks. "I'm not sure that's valid reasoning," the atheist says slowly. "To get a higher predicted probability that Trump wins the election, it's not enough to hypothesize a superbeing. We have to hypothesize a superbeing that cares about Trump winning the election, but doesn't care about malaria, and doesn't care about making planets move in perfectly circular orbits instead of elliptical orbits, and so on. I'm worried that you're pulling some equivalent of seeing a coin come up heads-heads-tails and saying, 'Ah, that's evidence that a superbeing made the coin come up heads-heads-tails, because the coin would be more likely to come up HHT if a superbeing wanted it to.'"
"But we're not talking about a random-looking bitstring," says the theist. "Let's say there's some event which has as simple description, but is incredibly unlikely assuming the universe runs on physics as we know it. Like, you flip a coin 1024 times and the resulting bitstring has a SHA256 hash of exactly zero. Would you not agree that this result is much more probable given the God Hypothesis?"
"Okay," the atheist says after a moment, "I think I accept that, and in that sense, I accept that the Exists Some Rarely Interventionist Superbeing Hypothesis nudges extreme probability assignments over any simply describable outcome back toward 50-50. Now conversely, by the law of Conservation of Expected Evidence, we must say the Superbeing Hypothesis is disconfirmed to some small degree every time we see a rock fall down. After all, a superbeing could have made the rock fall upward, or hover in the air; and if that did happen you would no doubt shout 'Ah, that is more likely in worlds where there is a God!' So when it does not happen, that is a tiny little bit more evidence against an interventionist God."
"So you do concede that Trump's election is evidence for God's existence!" the theist says, smiling.
The atheist throws up their hands. "There ought to be a name for the fallacy of taking a coin that comes up heads-heads-tails, looking at just the tails coinflip, and saying, 'Aha, that's evidence for the coin being biased towards tails!' Yes! Yes if you consider just that single coinflip as an isolated event, it is from a strict Bayesian standpoint a small unit of evidence for the coin being biased tails! But when a prediction market says something has a probability of 20%, it ought to happen around one time in 5! If we're all inside the strictly realistic imagination of a superbeing who is imagining many different versions of universes like this one in order to gain more information about some real-world variable, then most of those worlds, just like the real world, look back and see a big class of events in which 20%-probable events are happening about 1 time in 5. And 4 times out of 5 they don't happen. Trump's election was not so unlikely that it outweighs every other dog not barking, every other observation of the world following strict physics. Trump's election was not the sort of thing that only ever happens in the unfettered imaginations of superbeings who don't care about strict realism. It doesn't happen only in worlds with active superpowered villains."
"But it is more likely if the God Hypothesis is true," says the theist.
The atheist sighs. "By every rule of the ordinary meanings of ordinary words, and irrespective of some technical interpretation you could make of the Bayesian import of isolated events, we do not say that Trump's election shows there is a God--at least, no more than a flipped coin coming up heads three times in a row shows there is a God."
===
No, the Simulation Hypothesis is not just the revenge of religious reasoning.
But the reasoning against interventionist supernatural deities goes through unchanged for interventionist naturalistic simulators, and I'm a little bit worried about this not being obvious.
You know how it's a bad sign when scientists leave the laboratory and suddenly forget that beliefs require evidence?
I'm worried if the anti-interventionist-superbeing argument suddenly isn't obvious, once the argument is no longer about that God thingy that nobody inside your filter bubble believes in anyway, and is instead about that cool-sounding simulation thingy.
Epicurus (or whoever) was right to deduce the absence of an interventionist benevolent God by observing suffering. Later atheists were right to further to deduce the absence of any kind of interventionist God with desires such that the world could obviously be improved further with respect to those desires. Atheists were right to look around them and see a world where, so far as they could tell, no verifiable miracle had ever occurred. Naturalistic philosophers were right to see a world where, so far as they could tell, improbable things happened around as often as they should, and no more often than that. And it was valid reasoning to conclude by induction that we shouldn't expect miracles, or disproportionately frequent improbabilities, in the future.
There are arguments against noninterventionist Gods that don't go through for noninterventionist simulators, such as "God sure sounds like an ontologically basic mental entity, and minds are made of parts", or "This does not sound like a hypothesis we would naturally trip over by starting from only the observable world and extending our generalizations from there."
But all the arguments against interventionist Gods--every way the universe does not look like there is a God running around inside it fiddling with things--that all goes through without a hitch for any other kind of interventionist being with superpowers. If there are perfectly normal interstellar aliens watching us from Jupiter, they're noninterventionist aliens; they didn't intervene on Earth and they also didn't enclose all the stars in Dyson shells. Not all of the arguments against God are arguments against the existence of naturalistic aliens; but the arguments against interventionist Gods are arguments against interventionist naturalistic aliens being here in this Solar System.
So if this is a simulation, it's a realistic simulation. And the obvious reason why that some superintelligence would be rolling a realistic simulation, is that this is a simulation meant to gain information about a lower-level universe that is very similar to this one.
In which case there will be no miracles now or ever, nor is it a coincidence that this is what the obvious hypothesis ends up saying.
As we once looked around ourselves and saw a universe that runs only on math, we should, by the same and unchanged eyes, look around and see a simulation that is perfectly faithful to the kind of universe that runs only on math.
Regardless of the absolute proportion of people in simulated universes, and people in basement universes, I think we are licensed to expect that the vast majority of simulated universes where the simulators are messing around with the simulation or filtering its conditions in weird and unrealistic ways, do not look like this seemingly untouched universe. It also seems probable that there would be a large class of simulated universes which are trying to gain information about an object of simulation, and which are therefore realistic up to the limits of realism. So whatever proportion of people like you are in simulations--whether that proportion is large or small compared to the proportion in basement universes--among the versions of you that are simulated, the vast majority of people exactly like you are in realistic simulations. These proportions are not nudged more than infinitesimally by conditioning on Donald Trump having been elected President.
Similarly, the hypothesis of a realistic simulation does not even help explain anything that still seems weird and mysterious. The Fermi Paradox is that we look around and see an empty universe with seemingly uninhabited stars and frequent planets, even though the stars are old enough for life to have evolved long before now. Well, the Realistic Simulation Hypothesis doesn't help explain the Fermi Paradox any more than it explains Trump's election. If this is a sim, it's a realistic one meant to gain information about a similar basement universe, so why would that universe have a Fermi Paradox?
It must all add up to normality in the end. And the normality that it must all add up to hasn't changed since someone thought up the Simulation Hypothesis.