I too, was once a staunch atheist. When I was a sophomore in college, I came up with the same theory as Nick Bostrom independently, and I thought that I must be extremely clever to have come up with something so clever. It did not lead to be becoming religious. Nowadays I am a religious, but that change did not result from this particular theory.
<bolding mine>
No - it does not follow that.
Secondly - if the simulations are advanced enough that the participants do not know the difference (no observation would ever show they are part of a simulation) - then what have you gained by this “belief” - what difference does it make?
How did the possibility of something that you don’t fully believe turn you from an atheist to a believer? The logic doesn’t flow. I can think of many things that are possible that don’t change my basic view of the world. What is it about this concept that stuck a chord with you.
I’m afraid I don’t see how this very basic and unprovable concept gains traction. It sounds like something a stoned college student would dream up.
There is no metaphysical power involved here once we know we are in a simulation. And those who run the simulator are not gods in any sense, any more than you would be if you wrote a simulator of a bouncing ball and changed the value of g in it.
Might I ask what reasons you used to have for being an atheist? This is a very poor reason to abandon that lack of belief.
IMfez, what form does your religious belief take?
How do you conduct your life that is different from how you conducted your life before?
Before I opened this thread, I was a staunch atheist.
Bolded the relevant phrases. Of course, your numbers are completely pulled out of midair, and you do nothing to demonstrate your premises, which many here will not simply assume to be true. And once you’ve made those assumptions, what does that tell you about the world? What door does that open, what useful information does it present? If we establish Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, or any major religion as true, it gives us a clear set of directions - what to do, what not to do, what we are working towards. Your “religion” offers nothing at all. We don’t know who made this simulation. We don’t even know if their society still exists. We have no known way of influencing them. We don’t even know if they have noticed us (given the size of our “simulated” universe). It’s a similar type of pointless philosophizing so well-characterized by things like hard solipsism. Yeah, maybe the universe is a simulation. We have no way of determining this (or even knowing what differences we would find between a “real” and a “simulated” universe given the computational power at work here), we have no way of testing this, and it tells us nothing. It’s a complete and utter waste of time.
(kicks a rock)
I refute it thus.
You were programmed to do that, thus fulfilling absolute decree.
In casual simplicity, yet.
How does this theory address a first cause?
Allow me to introduce you to Rosko’s Basilisk.
I am a stench atheist. (Gotta go shower.)
I think Voyager has the key points: why would a simulation bother with all of this spurious detail? If we’re doing a sim of the earth’s biosphere for global warming analysis, we don’t sim in every single strand of seaweed, every single jellyfish, every surfer dude, every individual styrofoam cup.
For them to simulate me and my life at the detail I observe, they would have to have a purpose. And my life simply isn’t that meaningful. Nothing I do couldn’t be simmed using the crowd-sim software that they used in Lord of the Rings to make up those giant armies of orcs.
“Ash Sim Durbatuluk…”
(Or “Pushdug bagronk IMfez glob.”)
Reality is not a simulation the mind is constantly running?
Your (quoted) conclusion reminds me very much of the standard creationist argument –
There is only a 1/10 zillion chance of a soup of amino acids spontaneously arranging itself into a functioning protein, and yet here we are. Therefore, proteins didn’t self-arrange, and God exists.
This argument is based on the faulty assumption that amino acids and base pairs “randomly” sort themselves. Similarly, your argument is –
There is only a 1/10 zillion chance of me being in the real universe, and yet here I am (i.e., I am self-aware). Therefore, I am not in the real universe, and godly aliens exist.
I strongly doubt your second assumption, even if I were to only consider the amount of stimuli that I myself experience. What I experienced just today is such a massive amount of self-consistent information that the idea that it could all simply be a simulation is unbelievable.
I was so clever that I thought of Captain Pike before Star Trek did. That’s how clever I am. So clever.
Re: the OP, I think I’m missing something between “alien races exist” so therefore computers.
It’s an extension of the Drake Equations: there are (per Drake) so many intelligent, technologically advanced civilizations in the cosmos. Of those, some will have supercomputing technology, sufficiently advanced (magic!) to sim a human mind. Or a community of human minds. Or a whole cosmos of intelligent minds. And, indeed, of those, some will actually have the computing capacity to simulate trillions and quadrillions of human minds, so many, in fact, that the odds of any given human mind not being simulated is infinitesimal.
Therefore…
The problem is the same as with the standard Drake equation: there is always the possibility that the number of intelligent species in the cosmos is exactly 1 (count 'em) one. Us. It might even be unlikely…but it’s possible, and that knocks the idea back to mere speculation.
There are some strong arguments for simulation theory, though to call it a “theory” is scientifically invalid because it can’t presently be proven or even tested. It’s more a way of filling in the holes left by our current scientific understanding.
For one, the Planck units are revealing: a fundamental unit of time, length, and energy.
If the universe were infinitely divisible (as one would think it would be), then you would need an infinitely powerful cpu to simulate that universe. However, having discrete variables that physics doesn’t allow to divide any further, seems a very convenient way to limit the cpu overhead for a simulation.
There’s also evidence ripe in quantum mechanics that the observer in fact changes the world around him. Heisenberg uncertainty dictates that the world is anything and everything it could be until we observe it, at which point it becomes concrete. If this is indeed true, then one could envision a simulation where the fine details that we see are only “rendered” when intelligence can observe them. Why would anyone know or care what happened for the first billions of years of the universe–they may have just sped up the simulation and set it to normal playback when we arrived on the scene!
And a very recent discovery, of sorts. A team of scientists working to develop string theory mathematics have discovered an equation that appears to be almost identical to the error-correction code embedded in human software like internet browsers. In other words, some believe the quantum foam in which particles appear and disappear is all being driven by a code inserted into the simulation to prevent instability from ramping up.
Once you go there, you’re turtles all the way and “simulism” falls apart. The final conclusion is a mathematical one:
If real universes and sim universes aren’t bound by the same laws then this conclusion does not follow from the perspective of the metaverse, because it is based on the laws of math in the sim universe.
Q: Given that sim universes outnumber real universes 10 billion to 1, what are the odds that a given universe is a sim universe?
A: No possible way of knowing, since we don’t know the rules of math.
If real universes and sim universes *are *bound by the same rules, then you either have to solve a major energy problem or else throw out the 2nd assumption as presented in the OP. If you want to be obstinate about holding onto the theory you can replace the 2nd assumption’s set of simulated universes with a set of simulated individuals and limiting the simulation of universes to only those individuals’ experiences of those universes, but are you still going to be able to reasonably assume the huge numerical advantage of sim beings over real beings in order to conclude a high probability of any individual being a sim being? Not without pulling a whole lot of new assumptions out of your assumption factory, and I’ve never seen a set that doesn’t go back into the territory of the rules between the universes being different.
Yes, but can we imagine a universe in which these fundamental units do not exist? Is it possible for a universe to exist without them? It’d be convenient, but we run into the same problem - we can’t tell if a universe which wasn’t simulated would look any different from our universe.
This screams of the typical mangling of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle that enables so much woo. And the conclusion doesn’t even follow - it just might follow.