Why, we could come up with abstract universes where the Magical Gods have exactly the powers and understanding of what's going on befitting Magical Gods. I wasn't thinking of normal and mundane things like superintelligent AIs or alien simulators. Take Thor, for example: he doesn't need to obey Maxwell's equations or believe himself to be someone other than a hummer-wielding god of lightning and thunder.

"Magical gods" in the conventional supernatural sense generally don't exist in any universes, insofar as a lot of the properties conventionally ascribed to them are logically impossible or ill-defined, but entities we'd recognize as gods of various sorts do in fact exist in a wide variety of mathematically-describable universes. Whether all mathematically-describable universes have the same ontological status as this one is an open question, to the extent that that question makes sense.

(Some would disagree with referring to any such beings as "gods", e.g. Damien Broderick who said "Gods are ontologically distinct from creatures, or they're not worth the paper they're written on", but this is a semantic argument and I'm not sure how important it is. As long as we're clear that it's probably possible to coherently describe a wide variety of godlike beings but that none of them will have properties like omniscience, omnipotence, etc. in the strongest forms theologians have come up with.)

I keep scratching my head over this comment made by Vladimir Nesov in the discussion following “A Rationalist’s Tale”. I suppose it would be ideal for Vladimir himself to weigh in and clarify his meaning, but because no objections were really raised to the substance of the comment, and because it in fact scored nine upvotes, I wonder if perhaps no one else was confused. If that’s the case, could someone help me comprehend what’s being said?

My understanding is that it’s the LessWrong consensus that gods do not exist, period; but to me the comment seems to imply that magical gods do in fact exist, albeit in other universes… or something like that? I must be missing something.