There’s no hypocrisy here.
On one hand, the belief in a god doesn’t just end there. There are beliefs in what that god does and what he has control over. So it’s completely logical to believe that there’s no god (although, as someone else pointed out, it’s also not random arrangements of atoms).
On the other hand, simulation theory is a logical theory to rationalize the “purpose” of why we exist. It’s not a belief. The simulation doesn’t respond to prayers or requests. It’s simply conjecture or hypothesis to explain the “why” of the universe. No one who talks about simulation theory (much less who “believes” in it) pretends that the creator of the simulation is uniquely interested in them and responds to their requests and tells them how to live their life. In fact, that would go against the entire concept of simulation theory.
Religion and religious belief have specific definitions. This feels just as dishonest as people claiming that LGBTQ ideology is a religion or that evolution is a “belief”.
Even more importantly: God is omnipotent, which means they don’t make mistakes. A simulation doesn’t imply a higher power that is perfect in every way.
God is omnipotent, which means they don’t make mistakes.
Actually, no - the dictionary definition of omnipotent is literally being able to do anything. God being faultless is a different thing entirely and depending on how you interpret scripture, that is a false statement. He regrets making humans, so you could argue he sees humans as his own mistake - which is an entirely different kind of fucked-up for another day’s topic.
So whomever is running the simulation would be omnipotent, because they are literally making whatever happens in our universe happen by running a simulation of a universe.
EDIT: meant “everything” instead of “anything” but fuck it
“able to do anything”
I’m all set up right there, thanks.
Actually, yes. If they’re able to do anything then they’re also able to correct their mistakes. That’s not something that can be assumed about the creator of a simulation. Just look at the current state of our simulations.
It’ll be a new day in 30 minutes. Can you continue this thread?
How can a programmer or simulation operator have a mistake?
Great point. For all we know, we’re a simulation created by ancestors who are just as imperfect as we are.
What is religion, if not conjecture about the origin of mankind (and by extension the universe) that people believe without evidence?
I don’t think that religion is predicated on the answering of prayers, or in a Creator who takes a special interest in some particular human.
Also, I don’t think that either of those go against simulation theory; what if you’re a sim in some alien version of The Sims, and they’re going around fuckin with your life, removing ladders from your pools, etc.
What is religion, if not conjecture about the origin of mankind (and by extension the universe) that people believe without evidence?
Religion identifies the simulator and insists that its intermediaries can offer a liaison between you and them, and also that if you don’t believe in their particular simulator, you will be punished. It has been used for centuries to control the populace and to take their money.
A proponent of simulation theory isn’t likely to tell you that it solves any philosophical problems, or that they now understand the universe wholly. I’ve never heard anyone talking about it claim that they know who/what is behind the simulation.
So IMO the distinction between the two couldn’t be more clear.
I imagine there’s at least a couple wacko groups out of there trying to twist simulation theory into a purely religious endeavor, but that wouldn’t represent the mainstream conversation about it.
That’s an exceptionally narrow view of religion. There are plenty of religions that don’t threaten damnation for disbelief. They do what ST does and explain why humans exist (in this case because a simulation was set up such that they’d be created, intentionally or not).
And why can’t ST be used to scam people from money, like religion is?
This has the flavor of a true scottsman.
That’s exactly where religion falls apart, though. If the Creator can interfere with their creation or directly influence it, then the idea becomes inconsistent based on what we directly observe as happening. The answering of prayers was just an example since the image in the OP is an image of the god of the Bible that people do believe answers their individual prayers (and that some people believe they can speak to and through).
Simulation theory doesn’t really allow for that kind of intervention so your Sims example isn’t relevant. Ladders in pools and whatnot don’t disappear before your eyes.
But how you’re describing ST isn’t incompatible with religion, only some religions. Nothing about religion itself says that the creators or some higher power need to be an active participant in the human experience.
And how doesn’t simulation theory allow for the simulation creator/admin to interfere with the simulation? You don’t have scientific equipment recording data on everything, everywhere, for everyone, and people claim to see wild shit all the time. But even ignoring the wild shit, it could be as simple as tripping someone, moving their keys, giving them some disease or disorder, or any of a million things that we can’t accurately predict even when explicitly looking for it.
In this instance it doesn’t. But in this universe almost every industry using simulations run many different ones with different parameters. It doesn’t make sense to assume simulation theory with only a single simulation without interventions, because that assumes the simulator already knew that what the simulation would produce would fit what they wanted and that’s not a guarantee (just for information theory reasons alone!)
I’m not sure where you came up with the assumption that there is only one simulation. No one said or inferred that.
What is the purpose of such a simulation if ST is “correct”?
The purpose is to observe our behavior and how we react to stimuli. And it’s not that it’s “correct”, it’s just that it requires no intervention. If it’s “real”, then it was started by an outside force and is being observed like a Petri dish amongst other simulations.
Do “they” ever intervene or do you think its strictly regulated, like double-blind or whatever?
Like do you think they actually do or can pick favorites (protagonists/main characters) or is it way more sterile?
If it’s truly meant as a simulation, then intervening in any way would go against the purpose of the simulation.
Just think about how we run our simulations. We give the computer parameters about the “real” world because we’re interested in the results. If our entire world is a simulation, amongst other simulations, then intervening would ruin the simulation.
Checkpointing interesting points in simulations and rerunning with modified parameters happens literally all the time
Especially weather / climate / geology and medicine
They’re re-run, though. You don’t change the parameters in the middle of the simulation. That goes against the point of simulating something.
You don’t rerun everything from scratch. Especially weather simulations can be checkpointed at places you have high certainty, and keep running forks after that point with different parameters. This is extremely common with for example trying to predict wind patterns during forest fires, you simulate multiple branches of possible developments in wind direction, humidity, temperature, etc. If the parameters you test don’t cover every scenario that is plausible you might sometimes engineer it into the simulation just to see the worst case scenario, for example.
And in medicine, especially computational biochemistry you modify damn near everything
Check out Ancestral simulation In a nutshell, it says that humans are living in far future and we are just a simulation from scratch so that they can study their origin, how they come to be etc
That is outside of our scope of vision and equally as unknowable as the true purpose of God.
I like the other answer betta no offence 🎅
Of course it’s a belief. Any position held as fact in the absence of evidence is a belief, and is irrational by definition.
It also absolutely does not provide an explanation of “purpose”. Someone else already wrote a good comment about why that is.
Your comment added nothing to the discussion and provided no counters to what was said. What was the point of writing it?
It’s not a belief because there’s not an absence of evidence. There’s quite a bit of evidence for it. Whether you agree that it’s compelling is another story. Also, no one “believes” in simulation theory. It’s simply a theory to explain our current understanding of the world. In the same way that no one “believes” in the theory of gravity. It’s just a possible explanation of what we observe.
Except it isn’t a theory then is it? It’s a hypothesis.
And belief in a hypothesis that has not reached the quality of scientific theory, is just that: belief.
And it’s grossly dishonest of you to argue otherwise, so take your wordplay and nonsense somewhere else.
No. That’s why it’s not called “simulation hypothesis”. It’s called “simulation theory”. The hypothesis is the original, untested idea. The theory is the idea after it has been tested that fits as a valid explanation. It has been tested.
To be fair, though, the actual idea is called “simulation hypothesis” in the real world for that reason but it’s not a hypothesis because it can’t come to a falsifiable conclusion. There’s literally no way of knowing whether we are or aren’t in a simulation.
It’s the same idea as a god that controls everything but doesn’t intervene at all, is invisible, and unknowable. It could be true but it’s a moot point since we could never know.
I’m not being dishonest. You are, however, being dismissive and rude.
If you find dismissal of your inability to coherently explain the concept you brought up rude, that’s your prerogative.
You’ve said enough to demonstrate you don’t understand basic empiricism, have not done sufficient reading on the topic that - again - you brought up, and have contradicted yourself in your own comment.
You are dishonest, and we’re pretty much done here.
I’m not dishonest and I haven’t said anything that suggests I’m not arguing in good faith. I’ve sufficiently explained the concept and the idea that our observations can only extend to what we’re capable of. I also don’t see where I’ve contradicted myself but I’m sure you’ll point that out instead of being nebulous and ignoring the points actually demonstrated…
I completely agree that’s what this basically boils down too. ST was an interesting concept I read about once and only briefly recalled twice since. Nothing more. This could be a valid criticism of individuals putting more stock into the idea but for anyone else it’s a reach.
The belief system built around God affects me every single day of my life. I have family that are hardcore Christians that pester me about it regularly. Approximately half of the political ideologies being pushed in my country center around Christian dogma.
Honorable mentions: Foreign and domestic terrorism threat and future wars being incited.
I don’t see the hypocrisy. If the universe is a simulation, that wouldn’t make whoever built the universe a god. There would be no analytical reason to conclude that, unless we started from the specially-crafted supposition that any being capable of creating something like the observable universe had to be equivalent to God, but at that point, you’re just defining your way into theism. If the universe is a simulation, which is not a terribly interesting thought experiment tbh, then it could be a simulation for any reason. The simulators could have been interested in the dynamics of gas and dust dispersion within galaxies and just so happened to create a sophisticated enough simulation that it could simulate the evolution of natural life. If the entire Universe had been “created” (although the point of defining it as a simulation is to point to how it doesn’t really exist, ipso facto if God is a simulator, then God is not a Creator in the sense theists mean) to study dust dynamics at the galactic scale, somehow I think theists would be dissatisfied and not feel like they had really found what they meant by “God.”
In theory, any type of Boltzman Brain could assemble itself at any time and start processing information, so in theory, a simulation could also be an entirely natural phenomenon occurring in a higher-order reality. The two ideas are different, even though Christians like to claim everyone is a theist and everything is theism even when they aren’t and it isn’t.
Anyways, the simulation hypothesis is sort of fun to think about sometimes, while “I invoke supernatural powers to explain phenomena I don’t understand” isn’t all that interesting.
that wouldn’t make whoever built the universe a god.
Well yeah they would have to open the console and type in.
sv_cheats 1
god
Then they would be god.
No I think the point is more or less how do you define the word “God” is this a living creator, or a living being that can perform complex simulations, and if so, what are we, relative to this being?
Tbh if got was real I think we would just be left in a closet as some kind of hobby
Or perhaps some kind of faith farm
Over all not as important as people think we are so overall would have the same effect
I just wish god’s mom would hurry up and plug a vacuum cleaner into the wrong outlet and pop a breaker already…
The hypocrisy is in claiming to know the truth from a hypothesis with (currently) unknowable factors.
Can we possibly test for the simulation hypothesis? Not at the present. Thus, to say that it’s true is just as bad as claiming a sky fairy made the world in seven days
But no one believes simulation theory on faith so it makes no sense
I’ve literally never met someone who claimed we actually live in a simulation though
yeah its a strawman (checkmate athiest)
I cast ignite.
Strawman rolled a nat 20 on its DEX save, takes no damage sorry
I light our table on fire I hate this DM
Natural 20s don’t matter except on attack rolls RAW
I saw a theory by some physicists that there is some evidence we may be a hologram but I’m not smart enough to understand exactly what that means. Sounds neat
I’m also not smart enough to understand it completely but I think they meant something strange could be happening with dimensions (think Flatlanders) rather than us being a computer program. anyone with more understanding please elaborate tho
There’s an argument that because some of the physical limits we see around entropy density (due to singularities) are proportional to the area of a sphere around the volume, together with math indicating it’s possible to translate physics in a 3D volume to a 2D surface, the whole universe might be a projection from the 2D surface of a sphere
It’s a hell of coincidence that this is the second time I heard of this, the first being 2 days ago in a video game. Said video game is full of crackpot conspiracies though.
You have a level of happiness most of us can only briefly imagine as being possible.
Musk said it in Rogan a few weeks ago, and it became a justified belief overnight. It had huge flaws in logic when he said it, and no one who is parroting the talking point today is thinking beyond “the real life Ironman says we live in the matrix”.
They are similar in that neither are scientific theories, as they are equally non-falsifiable. We may live in a universe where it is impossible to see the face of god or a glitch in the matrix by construction.
Given that impossibility, how then could you perform an experiment or make an observation that contradicts the theory? To be reductive, science isn’t about proving. It’s failing to disprove. If there isn’t a set of circumstances in which a theory can be disproven, it isn’t scientific.
Unless you are a string theorist. Then you just say whatever the hell you want.
Could (a) god(s) exist? Possibly, it’s hard to rule out the supernatural in natural terms since it’s SUPERnatural
Could the universe be a simulation? Possible too, but also on of those things that’s almost impossible to prove.
At the same time, it could be that your e a Boltzmann brain, and that literally nothing existed before and that your brain just kinda formed together spontaneously with all your memories.
All those are possible options that are over 99% likely to be false, but their cooouuullldd be true.
Point is not to rearrange your life on the off changlce that one of those are true. Especially religion, since religions tend to be “believe our particular god(s) or you go to hell for eternity” followed closely by “if you don’t believe our particular god(s) we will help you go to hell right now”. Nearly all human conflicts in Earth’s history were either based on religion or used religion as a tool to whip up the masses to go kill the others.
There are also hundreds of Gods and over 3000 different religious figures out there and they’re all pretty much exclusive or, they all claim to be the right one and the rest is wrong. Bold claim to make when it’s all based off goat herders texts that were first abused for a completely different god (hello, Christianity!) and constantly conflicts with each other.
Simulation theory and Boltzman brain ideas are fun to entertain and talk and think about, but they’ve never been used to control who can love and have sex with who, they’ve never been a used whereas religion just IS abuse and control in every way possible.
I do not like religion
I don’t think anyone actually believes the latter except room temperature IQ tech bros. It’s mostly just a hypothetical.
One of those is a belief and the other is a theory.
One requires the absence of evidence and the other requires evidence.
Okay. But no. You can find evidence of god or a simulation the same way. Confirmation bias. There is no way to prove either belief.
If you try to prove the existence of a god then you do not have faith so you are not a believer. Having faith in itself means evidence has no value for you.
Every time someone doubts the Simulation Theory in a big way, we change one letter of a major fast food franchise. :)
Enjoy your Chic-Fil-A.
Beans. That explains my MacDonald’s yesterday.
Does it also explain why I’m wearing a Taco Belt?
You mean Cosmcs?
It’s disturbing how much I wanna try this.
Idk what’s the exact purpose of this meme but I really do see a lot of similarities between God creating the world and simulation theory. Obviously ST and religion are wildly different in their impact on society and how many people genuinely believe in them, but ST is pretty silly too.
It’s just a “what if” scenario, one that’s potentially possible but wouldn’t change or explain anything if it was true. All you’re doing is moving the existential problems up a layer and forgetting about it, it’s the same as saying God made us: at the end of the day both the beings in charge of the simulation AND God have to come from somewhere, they live in a “real” universe, and you’re not explaining that.
Why can’t it be that we simply live in a real universe? That’s the simplest answer, the one that requires the fewest assumptions. It doesn’t have a convenient, satisfying reason as to why we’re here, or how reality came to be, but it’s easily the most plausible.
Why can’t it be that we simply live in a real universe? That’s the simplest answer, the one that requires the fewest assumptions.
The argument goes that: a sufficiently technologically advanced society would run ancestor simulations. Those simulations may also run simulations. There’s no ceiling on the number of nesting simulations. It’s the height of conceit to think we’re the top level when there are squillions of simulated universe.
“there are squillions of simulated universe.”
Huge assumption there lol, but I guess I see your point. If you assume simulations of this scope and quality are possible (again HUGE assumption), then your odds of being in one go up a lot, obviously.
Again though, at some point you have to hit actual, non simulated reality, and when everything seems to point towards that being the case for us, and absolutely nothing hints at a simulation, I don’t see why we couldn’t just be in that actual reality. I can’t help but see that thought experiment as just an attempt to answer “the big question” in some way, even though in actuality it just moves it out of view.
It’s Russell’s teapot, impossible to disprove and theorically possible, but there’s nothing backing it up besides fantastical assumptions. In that regard yeah, I think the comparison with God is warranted. The creators of our simulation, and especially the ones up above that are actually real would need such absurd levels of technology so far beyond our comprehension that it would be magic to us, and they would absolutely be our Gods.
I don’t see much of a difference, it’s kind of just a tech themed spin on it, with the same fallacies plaguing the whole concept, IMO. It’s cool to think and write scifi about, but that’s about it.
Yeah I don’t like simulation theory because it assumes that technologically advanced societes would run simulations. It’s not guaranteed at all, it’s a weird assumption to make in the first place given that the best thing we have, which is VR, is not a simulation of any universe, it just tricks us (not the simulation itself) into thinking there is one.
I’ve always thought that reality is something that just is, because if this were a simulation then there must be a true reality outside this one, which begs the question why ours wouldn’t be the one true reality.
We, or at least I, don’t know why there is a reality in the first place and why we get to experience it. I think that reality is either 1. something that just is and life is just a random coincidence, which will later end and will never recover, 2. an almighty god just exists and created us for some purpose, or 3. there is a circle of life, people living out lives and being reborn, the universe living a life and being reborn, for reasons nobody can explain.
In conclusion, reality is weird because we are conditioned to always expect there to be something (how can there be literally nothing?), but also that something to be somewhere. We are on Earth, Earth is in our galaxy, our galaxy in a cluster and so on. Therefore we expect the universe to also be somewhere, created by something, and that brings out interesting theories.
Huge assumption there lol, but I guess I see your point.
It’s not an assumption, it’s a conclusion based on the premises laid out in the previous sentences.
Everything seems to point towards that being the case for us, and absolutely nothing hints at a simulation
Maximum speed, minimum length, light is only a particle when we’re looking at it…
Like there are other things that definitely point away from it being a simulation (eg gravity waves). But there’s not nothing pointing towards simulation.
Lmao why would gravity waves point away from the universe being a simulation? Also you put a comic strip as your source, you have less than zero credibility in anything.
Lmao why would gravity waves point away from the universe being a simulation?
Sorry what I meant is miniscule gravitational forces across billions of light years.
Because of the ridiculous cost of calculating the force of gravity between every water molecule on neptune and carbon atom on exoplanet xjwhatever. Gravity waves suggest this is actually happening.
Also you put a comic strip as your source, you have less than zero credibility in anything.
What community are we in? I don’t actually believe simulation theory… it’s a concise explanation.
There is a cieling though. A computer made of matter of one universe cannot simulate an entire universe at the same speed. It’s like installing a VM on a computer: the VM is always slower. Each layer would then become exponentially slower with a limit of 0 speed.
Having said that, combined with the fact that our Universe is 13B years old, it would make the age of our root universe exponentially larger than 13B years.
It could maybe feasible if we live in the first layers, but beyond that our root universe would have died from Heat death long ago.
The simulations could be imperfect simulations. So, each nested simulation would lose fidelity, simulate a smaller universe, or simulate a universe with less life. I think one hypothesis I’ve heard is that wave functions are an approximation, and the simulation only fully simulates particles when they are observed. Kinda like how games do level-of-detail optimizations when you are further away from objects.
Edit: Another possibility is that nothing says the simulation we’re in started at the beginning of the universe, it could’ve just been given initial conditions and started yesterday for all we know.
I don’t know if we are in a simulation, but I think it’s plausible. I think a God (at least of the religions I know of) is implausible, but possible. I kinda like the many-worlds hypothesis better than simulation theory, but I guess they’re not exclusive.
There are indeed ways you could make it work, but then you add more hypothesis and thus the cost of the simulation hypothesis increases.
Optimizations are indeed necessary, but just like the player is something special in a game, the observer would need to have a special status in the universe. I don’t like this idea because the history of science always moved in the direction of making us the observers less and less special.
Moreover if life spreads in the universe, the simulation would encounter a scaling issue with an exponential growth of the numbers of observers.
I agree with you that in the end we just don’t know, it’s fun to push ideas to their limits!
There is a ceiling though. A computer made of matter of one universe cannot simulate an entire universe at the same speed.
Right but we don’t know what the real universe’s limitations are, and I’m geostationary to speak too authoritatively of the capabilities of an arbitrarily advanced civilization.
I don’t think simulation theory is true. Eg calculating gravitational forces between everything in the universe would presumably be extraordinarily cost intensive, but essentially irrelevant (I mean like gravitational waves, not the moon).
Even though our knowledge of physics is incomplete, a VM running a faster simulation of its container would be a paradox. You could stack successive layers of reality that would go faster and faster reaching eventually Infinite processing speed, allowing the computer from the root layer to perform an Infinite amount of computation in a finite time.
You may say that this could be possible as our understanding of physics is lacking. And that’s fine! But I think this paradox shows that the VM can only run slower than reality
Yes for anyone interested
https://simulation-argument.com/simulation.html
This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed.
Nah fourth possibility, we get to space and have alien skin-suits with silicon chips in our brains to make complex calculations for vectors, directions, etc while we’re moving around in space
No it’s called deep derealization upon your logic hitting a ceiling lol
Not sure what part of the message you’re responding to, what do you mean?
Are you a farmer? Because you have an awful lot of straw!
Does anyone base their lives and their worldviews around the simulation theory?
Its such a philosophical dead end. I know a few people who really want the world to be a simulation but I cant understand why. I think they want an excuse to have nothing matter and be shitty.
But i would not live my life any differently if we found out that this is a simulation. Because its still real to me and there’s no reason to believe I can exist outside the simulation any more than my sims can exist outside the game.
I know one person who does. And, of course, everyone thinks he lost his marbles.
How does that person’s behavior differ from “normal”?
For example, a Christian would go to church, probably believe in hell, and pray.
I don’t even know what one would do differently if they truly believed we’re in a computer.
Well, he constantly wears what I can only describe as an attempt to make a power armor straight from a 2000s live action sci-fi, constantly screams that everyone is dumb and that “The Great Observer” will free believers from this simulation, believes that if he remains hidden for a couple of minutes, police will simply lose him like this was GTA, and other dumb shit.
I dunno man
We do live in a simulation and I can prove it.
Stick your whole hand up your ass and push the secret eject key.just did this. didnt work but i learnt something about myself.
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Makes me miss my old roommate, who didn’t believe in God but believed this all could be a simulation. Hope you’re doing well buddy, wherever the fuck you’ve wandered!
both have people believe humans are part of a greater design
both include some otherworldly figure either observing or mandating how we live our lives
both reject the idea that maybe we’re just fuckin’ here because we are just fuckin’ here
Love how some people are legitimately proving this meme in the comments.
I don’t think there’s a significant number of people who believe in a specific simulation scenario the way so many people believe in a specific religion.
Sure, some dumb tech bros believe “i think we live in like, a simulation, dude”, which would correspond to “there must be some higher power out there for sure”. Both beliefs are irrational, but more likely than “the Matrix is real, just like in the movies” or “this specific codex got it all right and we should live our lives after the thousands of unclear moral teachings that can be extrapolated from it by untrustworthy human preachers”
Agreed
Dr. Blitz called Simulation Theory religion for tech bros and I can’t get it out of my head 😅
Both are just as unlikely as the other and have as much evidence, I’d find anyone who possesed both beliefs to be weird.
One is obviously made-up by ancient peoples who knew fuck-all about the world, but insists it’s eternal truth beyond debate. Even the parts that contradict the other parts.
The other is an openly hypothetical idea based on what we expect is just beyond our current capabilities… and it relies on that we’re-just-atoms materialism.
That’s not true
- We have no evidence about either and both are non-falsifiable
- Living in a simulation is one idea. Each individual religion is a whole bunch of assumptions rolled into one system.
Therefore “we live in a simulation” is just as likely as “there’s some higher power”, while “the Matrix is a documentary, everything will happen exactly like in the movie” is as likely as “the Christian god is real, just as described in the bible”.
