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Comment by slowmovintarget | Hacker News Reader

I loved Stephen Wolfram's answer to that. He did a recent interview with Brian Greene and Brian asked him his take on the simulation question. Stephen replied that he always found it amusing that self-professed atheists would ask the simulation question because the next obvious question is "Who's simulation is it? Who's operating the computers running such a simulation?"

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I don’t find the general simulation question interesting nor have I listened to the interview, but from your description I don’t find that response interesting either. Why wouldn’t the answer be a trivial “people like us”?

We don’t know of anything in the natural world that would be able to create the necessary elements for the Universe to exist, but we do know how to create digital worlds even if digital consciousness is currently beyond our grasp.

Thus the difference between the God question and the simulation question is that in the latter there is a clear path to us recursively becoming the gods. Not so in the former.

Everything that you've seen over the last, eh, 15 years in the tech industry seems to be a bunch of rationalists (who often tend to be non-religious) trying to reconstruct the irrational institutions of spirituality.

Simulation theory is basically positing there's a higher power. Eternal life has been replaced with efforts to digitize the human consciousness for indefinite storage. Pilgrimages have been replaced with Ted Talks and conferences. Certain religious ceremonies that alter consciousness have been replaced with microdosing. Asceticism has been replaced by hustle culture. Saints have been replaced with entrepreneurs who have spent money to cultivate a favorable public image. Religious charity has been replaced with effective altruism.

If you're in a more irreligious region like SV or the Bay Area, it's apparently not as easy to suss out, but if you're from the Midwest, you can see it clear as day.

In what form does subscribing to the simulation theory imply "higher power"?

Oxford defines the term as "a god or divine being."

Why is it so absurd to think that there have existed or do exist beings with more intelligence and computational resources than humans?

It seems MORE absurd to me to think that, across all of the infinite universe(s), humans are the only intelligent, self-aware creature capable of scientific progress.

If there's a simulation and we as a species are living in it, and bound by its rules (laws of physics, etc.) then you get into the question of who made said simulation with the rules that constrain us. Since this simulator sysadmin has control over us in ways we cannot comprehend or push back against in a meaningful way, I'd say it counts as a higher power.

Since its existence cannot currently be proven false through empirical means, belief in its existence relies on faith.

A person who believes in simulation theory in which someone created and administrates the simulation can be said to believe in a higher power than humanity, on faith.

It's a creation myth as explained by a bunch of engineering majors who never bothered to pay attention during their anthropology classes as freshmen.

No, the origin beliefs in this case aren't really faith.

Let me frame that as questions: do you:

- Believe that we will be able to create a true AI, with self-consicousness?

- Believe that we will some day have enough energy and compute power to create a simulation that could contains billions of those consciousness?

- Believe that if we are able to do so, we will do it (aka no governmental body will prevent a simulation from happening because of ethical concerns, and if a ban happen, not all private entity will respect the ban).

If your answers to all 3 questions is YES, then you believe we likely live in a simulation. My only yes is to the question 3, because i'm cynical. The 1 is a big "i don't know", because i know enough to have no idea, and my answer to 2 is "no way" because i don't know the subject at all, but my brain think adjacent knowledge is enough to form an opinion this absolute.

I also don't have an absolute opinion, but the math of the simulation hypothesis does appear to check out and it's not difficult to believe, scientifically, that intelligences dramatically superior to human-level are possible.

(1) is likely achievable if we gain a better understanding of biology and the human nervous system, which seems likely given a timeline of continuous scientific progress. (2) is even easier for me to grasp as we already know how much energy the human brain uses and we have billions of them now. So far we're not aware of any serious show stoppers for this scenario, but we might be talking timelines of 100's of years.

- Believe that we will be able to create a true AI, with self-consicousness?

To believe this with any kind of certainty is no different from believing in deities.

Disagree. Its as unfalsifiable, but the opposite position is disprovable, at least (if we create a self-aware IA).

Hence why i wrote

> The 1 is a big "i don't know", because i know enough to have no idea

As far as I’m aware, we have no method by which to prove something is conscious. Self-awareness and consciousness (by which I mean qualia) are different.

Many believe that self-awareness implies consciousness, but I’m not aware of any method to prove that.

There are people who engage in the thought exercise without believing it's true, but there are definitely people who believe it's true. See: Elon Musk (at least he did a few years ago)

I mean an entity that created the coordinate system and all the constants and laws that allow particles to exist and move is effectively divine with respect to the lowly inhabitants therein right?

Simulation theory posits there might be an outside power.

Bostrom's version posits a "post-human" civilisation, but it might just as well be someone barely smarter than us.

For that matter, there are plenty of ways of positing simulation that does not require intelligence at all - computation is naturally everywhere, so if the "real" universe is infinite, and simulation is possible, then it is not unreasonable to consider the possibility that there might be an infinite set of "natural simulations" playing out in interplay between matter and energy in an "outside" world without anyone every doing anything for it.

If the "outer" universe is infinite, it only requires a non-zero probability and enough time.

The main reason to consider we're not in a naturally occurring simulation in some soup of matter is that it seems more likely, albeit a total guess, that more intentional simulations would have a higher probability of existing.

But arguing gods might be running a simulation, to me, seems borderline arrogant. Why "gods", and not a bored teenager playing a game? Who would those gods be anyway that'd make us consider them gods, rather than just another species?

The simulation hypothesis is not really about whether or not there is a master programmer but rather a consequence of a computational universe. The more interesting question is whether we live in a digital (computational) universe or not. Wolfram thinks that if we do then there should be a corresponding digital (computational) physics. He also hypothesizes that a universe's complexity should then arise from simple computational processes.

Doesn’t matter. Atheists are generally comfortable with the concept of a fully external deity concept because who gives a shit.

That's not an atheist. That's an agnostic theist (aka deist).

Gnostic Theist: My God exists.

Agnostic Theist: I accept the concept of deity(ies), but it's not relevant to me

Agnostic Atheist: I don't accept the concept of deity(ies), but it's not relevant to me.

Gnostic Atheist: Deities do not exist.

Atheism does not mean that you believe deities do not exist. It means you do not have the belief that they do. The absence of a belief in something does not imply a belief in the absence it.

A definitive belief that deities do not exist is sometimes called strong atheism.

> A definitive belief that deities do not exist is sometimes called strong atheism.

Yes indeed!

My variation of atheism is often called "ignostic" -- that is, I can't tell you if I believe in god or not until you tell me what, exactly, you mean by "god".

The more proper name for this is "incompetent atheism", but I dislike that name because it implies a different meaning than it has.

Philosophy is fun!

Ignostic, nice, I like it. That's a new one for me :)

> Atheism was first used to describe a self-avowed belief in late 18th-century Europe, specifically denoting disbelief in the monotheistic Abrahamic god. In the 20th century, globalization contributed to the expansion of the term to refer to disbelief in all deities, though it remains common in Western society to describe atheism as "disbelief in God".

-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheism

The complication of the term for debate purposes only seems to come up in intellectual circles like ours, here.

And the very first sentence of the Wikipedia article says "Atheism, in the broadest sense, is an absence of belief in the existence of deities.".

I first understood atheism to mean an absence of belief in god as a child, and I wasn't hanging out in intellectual circles at the time!

But it is certainly true that the meaning of it has shifted over time.

I wouldnt say that the complication is for debate purposes only. It is a rather fundamental difference to me.

Much cleaner versions is:

Atheism is lack of beliefe in deity due to lack of evidence of any such/any deity.

This pushes the burden of proof onto believers.

As an atheist, I don't actually care where people think the "burden of proof" lies, honestly.

I have seen no evidence that there is a god, and that's all that matters to me. I have no interest in debating the existence or nonexistence of a god, so I have no need to prove or disprove anything.

Strictly speaking, no. There does not have to be any reason to not have a belief, although the one you cite will be common among those who have considered it.

And you could still be an atheist even if there was evidence of a deity.

> And you could still be an atheist even if there was evidence of a deity.

Ummmm,sure maybe proof is a better word than evidence.

But if there was, it would be hard to justify staying atheist.

This line of thinking is useful for rejecting others who are pushing specific beliefs, but is demonstrably flawed for making conclusions about things that are intrinsically impossible to observe.

> impossible to observe.

Meaning those things don't exist. If a thing makes no interactions with our universe by definition it doesn't exists

The thing is that it isn't a conclusion at all -- it's more of a suspension of arriving at a conclusion due to a lack of evidence supporting one.

It “should” be

The operators of a computer simulation are not deities in the sense that most atheists would say they could prove didn't exist.

I thought it was “gnostic P-ism” : “P, and I know (or am rather unlikely to be incorrect) in believing that P”, “agnostic P-ism” : “I think that P, but idk, maybe not P, who can say?” ?

Is that not it?

Eh, no. There’s an important semantic distinction between an external deity and an internal deity. An external deity is not present. It is not knowable. It is for all practical purposes, irrelevant. An internal deity is like Christian god. Perhaps you consider it to be the originator of the universe, perhaps you don’t. Perhaps they’re “in” the universe or not. But the important bit is that it’s “there”, with the power to influence or at least to justify a sense of spirituality.

There’s no form of rational thinking that confidently concludes there’s no external deities. If you peel back the layers of agnosticism and atheism, they’re concerned with internal deities. Entities that are aesthetically deity like and have some sort of relevance that presents structure beyond observable physics.

Typical atheism, even if not often articulated as such, believes that the world is what it is. External deities are intrinsically a toss up and acknowledging that does not make one conventionally agnostic.

and the next question is "how do I build a device that breaks out of the simulation and lets me interact with the operators" even if, conceptually, it's more likely we are but ants to giants and cannot concieve of the meanings behind their activities.

To escape just create a new simulation with admin privileges and the host file system mounted inside, and use that to escape the first simulation to the host.

Is this a rhetorical question formulated by a near-self-aware A.I.?

no, it's the plot of nearly every science fiction book about the singularity.

Or, it could be a subtle call out to Roko's basilisk.

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