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Perhaps all religious and metaphysical argument can be abstracted away into the simulation hypothesis - i.e. that we all live in a perfect simulation, running o
by photochemsyn 3y ago
Perhaps all religious and metaphysical argument can be abstracted away into the simulation hypothesis - i.e. that we all live in a perfect simulation, running on a substrate somewhere else. The key point in this argument is that no experimental or observational evidence is capable of proving or disproving the existence of the simulation, since it is a perfect simulation.
This is logically equivalent to the statement that a supernatural being is continually intervening in the world, but only when nobody is watching, and only such that no evidence of intervention is left behind.
Similarly, nobody can prove that a person who claims to hear the voice of a supernatural being in their head (and that's the inspiration for writing a holy text which forms the basis of a religion) is actually just schizophrenic, rather than having had their neurons plucked like strings by said supernatural being.
This view seems to upset atheists more than anyone else, since it places their certainty about the fundamentally mechanistic and non-simulated nature of reality in the same bin with religious evangelicals, but the religious people don't like it much either as there is no clear basis to choose one religion as superior to another, other than the purely utilitarian arguments about which one provides the optimal moral basis for a healthy society.
Hence the mysterious unknowable nature of reality: some questions cannot be answered. Even the mathematicians agree on that these days.
- anonymouse008 3y agoWhat led you arrive at this? Would love to read these works
- NateEag 3y agoNot OP, but IIRC Jonathan Edwards held that the whole universe existed in the mind of God. This is functionally indistinguishable from the "perfect simulation" hypothesis. That was what leapt immediately to mind the first time I encountered the Simulation Hypothesis, as one raised on Christian theology.
- photochemsyn 3y agoA lot of the concepts about simulation and related things, are in Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas R. Hofstadter, although it doesn't go into theology much, though there are headings like "Articles of Reductionist Faith".
- haswell 3y agoThis is one of the reasons that I've mostly shifted to "agnostic" after many years of considering myself a hard atheist. The degree to which I still consider myself an atheist is mostly rooted in my belief that if some god-like entity or non-entity or whatever "exists", he/she/it/they is certainly not like the common conception of some "father god" figure in the clouds. It took me awhile to realize (after going down quite a few science and philosophical rabbit holes), that the atheist's position is untenable - not because I think there is a god, but because there seems to be no reason to believe we can actually know one way or the other. I'm not religious, but I do find myself spending more time contemplating this primordial unknown. I'm a strong believer in the value of science, but if for no other reason than our lack of progress on the hard problem of consciousness, I have to accept that it doesn't have ultimate answers. Maybe someday this will change.
- hackable_sand 3y agoPersonally I think it's untenable because you have to believe in a god to reject it which largely puts atheists and fundamentalists in the same bucket. They both believe in the same god but practice their faith differently. The root problem is that you can easily contest and rationalize anthropomorphic gods which kind of defeats the purpose of the discussion to begin with.
- haswell 3y ago> you have to believe in a god to reject it which largely puts atheists and fundamentalists in the same bucket How do you figure? Both positions are claims about absolute truth in a domain that is philosophically and scientifically impossible to make absolute truth claims about. If there is faith being practiced, it is in the holding of these opposed beliefs, but that is not equivalent to sharing a belief about god.
- hackable_sand 3y agoI also believe that no two people can have the same mental model of a god, just something very similar. Religious doctrine is useful for getting everyone "on the same page" so to speak. When comparing notes, the doctrines are that absolute medium. For the multitude of reasons, binary conclusions are easier. To say one does or doesn't accept the existence of a thing is to acknowledge that there is a model of that thing that does or does not exist. The model of that thing is what has to exist to rationalize a belief. -- The point I'm trying to make here is that the discussion doesn't end at binary conclusions of religious doctrine. The discussion of a god is continuous by nature in the same way science continuously models the universe. Faith here is engaging in the discussion knowing it doesn't end. It's really not about belief either way. We all share the same experience.
- adamsb6 3y agoThe leap from "we are in a simulation" to "some pieces of bread have a tag that marks them as belonging to the body of Christ" is rather small. That's not that much data. It's really not that remarkable once you've bought into the idea of your existence being a simulation.
- kayodelycaon 3y ago> nobody can prove that a person who claims to hear the voice of a supernatural being in their head (…) is actually just schizophrenic Bipolar chiming in. Personally, I find hallucinations and mood swings to be very different from God. The disconnect from reality caused by the former is very distinct, even though I’m forced to act as if they were real. God tends to come in the form of action, something tangible, something outside logic and emotion. I’ve never heard words or had feelings associated with it. It’s not part of any moods like everything else is. Of course, this is all impossible to prove. After all, I’m diagnosed with a mental illness which has delusional thinking as a common symptom. I wouldn’t trust me. :)
- zoogeny 3y agoI think this view is agnostic at its core but it requires each individual to make a choice between a simulation without an ultimate observer and a simulation with an ultimate observer. It can get even more tricky if you consider the multi-verse and the possibility that all simulatable realities exist simultaneously and completely. That give a new breadth, IMO, to the idea of omnipotence since one may feel compelled to assume that such an ultimate observer is aware of each of those possible universes/realities. If one makes the choice to believe in a God-like ultimate observer then one is required to confront the nature of their relationship between their own subjective experience and that ultimate observer. One of the consequences that I believe results from contemplating this with respect to multi-verses will be the necessity of rejecting the idea of revelation entirely. If that is a correct view, then it leaves the would-be believer in a paradoxical (or even absurd) condition. One is driven by the question of their relationship to some ultimate source while never being able to reconcile it. Of course, if you simply reject the ultimate observer, or even an ultimate source from which everything emanates, then you don't have anything to contemplate at all and any discussion on the matter would appear trivial and frivolous.
- card_zero 3y agoIt should upset, or rather irritate, anyone with a scientific mindset, because the idea of a perfect simulation is an untestable hypothesis, and an untestable hypothesis, listen carefully, isn't worth shit: and why don't you know this already? What makes you keen to promote an untestable hypothesis? The natural assumption to make is that you were bitten by the religion bug, and are seeking a way to sneak religion into cosmology through the back door.
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- asdff 3y agoWas gravity an idea not worth shit before we developed ways to empirically test it out?
- card_zero 3y agoI'm sorry: unfalsifiable, then. Fine distinction.
- asdff 3y agoEverything is unfalsifiable until we develop tests for it.
- knightoffaith 3y agoDo you have any thoughts on responses to Popperian falsifiability e.g. those from Kuhn and Feyerabend? The criterion of falsifiability doesn't seem to be a very popular idea in philosophy of science anymore.
- photochemsyn 3y agoWell, we often deal with untestable questions in science, such as: what was the molecular pathway that led to the origin of life? Time has erased the data we'd need to test any hypothesis, thus even if we do create a living cell from simple elements, there's no way at all to be sure that was the route that life took. Hence we can't rule out some supernatural being jiggling the atoms about just so at the origin of life. So, even if we choose to believe in a purely mechanistic universe, we can't definitively test that hypothesis using the tools and methods of science. Practically, this means that the scope of science as a means for discovering the nature of reality is limited. edit: note that a reproducible glitch in the simulation would be of interest, and one could even argue that looking for such glitches is in part what scientists do.
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