If you posit an omnipotent god, last Thursdayism makes as much sense as anything else. He can create the universe atom by atom, no problem, and it addresses the problem of evil: how could a just God allow the holocaust/9/11/mongol invasions/anything else bad to happen? Well, he didn’t - he just created a world where people remembered those things!
He’s still on the hook for evil that happened since last Thursday, like the terrorist attack last night. Also I don’t know if creating someone with the memory of having gone through the holocaust is much less evil than actually allowing someone to actually go through it. On a philosophical level, what is even the difference?
I am aware that Last Thursdayism originally came up in the context of argument ad absurdum pertaining to various creation “models”. e.g. if starlight was created en route, why not fake memories too?
However, the argument itself doesn’t require the existence of a creator. It’s simply a point about doubting our memories. If you prefer, I can switch to calling it the five-minute hypothesis, which is explicitly separate from any religious baggage.
For example, it’s often used as a counter argument to concepts like Boltzmann brains. If I’m a Boltzmann brain, then all of my memories are false, including the knowledge of the universe that might lead me to conclude that Boltzmann brains are feasible. This kind of reasoning is entirely orthogonal to religion.
But if you posit an omnipotent god who can hand-place every atom in the universe without being insane (if not when he started, when he ended) you’re being silly. Remember, you’re not talking about something you can handwave - all this information had to be created by manually and deliberately, each and every individual and solitary thing.
Seriously, this makes model railroading look like playing with children’s toys. (More than usual, I mean.)
Speaking as a writer of fiction who has put their characters through horrible things, there is a substantive difference between something happening ‘now’ and something happening in backstory. Not that remembering bad things is great, but I bet you’d rather remember it than go through it again.
That said, having posited how my characters would react if they knew that I was responsible for everything, they’d still be pretty pissed either way.
Would it be pointing out that Boltzmann brains aren’t simulations? A simulation has to iteratively run forward and change through natural/automatic processes as time goes on. A spontaneously appearing brain would probably notice the lack of things like sensory inputs and bloodflow pretty quick.
Of course if you’re positing that the entire universe simply popped into existence completely at random five minutes ago, well, I did say that “It happened randomly” is a possible source of things. However I’m thinking the odds are stacked pretty high against it, to the degree that “implausible” is an understatement.
I rather like the Boltzmann brain analogy. Rather than assuming that our experience is the result of random chance, the ‘last Thursday/simulation’ concept assumes that there is a entity with agency behind the sequence of events we are experiencing. That entity need not be ‘sentient’ in the way that we generally imagine ‘sentience’, but so long as it has a set of goals and the capability to achieve them, then it could simulate the last few days of a particular human’s life (or maybe the last few days of a population of humans who can interact with one another) for an arbitrary period of time.
Artificial entities which have been specifically designed to simulate a particular segment of history seem much more likely to happen than the spontaneous emergence of a human mind complete with memories and sensory input, no matter how brief. In short; in my opinion, intelligent superobjects are more likely than Boltzmann brains.
This is nothing whatsoever to do with religion, in my opinion; the possibility that we might be fleeting subroutines in the processing substrate of a deliberately designed entity does not imply the existence of a god. Unless you think any such entity would be a god by definition.
I can think of no better applicant for the title “God” than an entity that is literally responsible for the creation and continuing operation of a universe, with absolute control over everything that occurs within.
Such an entity would be as close to omnipotent as it is possible to be without getting silly.
(And yes, to the characters in my books, I am literally god. Unfortunately for them…)
When you write characters, you are performing ‘secondary creation’, according to Tolkien. Predators and prey of all species and domains do the same, and populate their world with imagined enemies/victims.
In due course we’ll have automated systems capable of doing the same, and we’ll be on the way to the ancestor simulation as imagined by Bostrom.
As best I can tell Tolkien was simply assigning ‘N-ary’ levels to how deep you are in the simulation tree; he presumed (for no reason) that God was at the root, in the real reality, and that his creations were one level down at secondary, and his creation’s creations would be ternary, and so on. The simulation argument presented by the OP of this thread presumes that there would N-ary levels going arbitrarily high; I think that that is impossible unless your simulations at all levels are instantiated entities of infinite size. (Which I don’t believe is mathematically possible because that’s not how infinity works.)
At least one other source I read would categorize the creation of a fictional universe squarely as primary creation. Secondary creation would be when a creature within the universe/story/simulation reshapes it to their will via reality-warping power (presumably while laughing manically) and tertiary creation is when somebody builds a house.
That assumes the simulation is for our benefit, which is quite pre-Copernican.
Worse than that, the simulation of interstellar and inter-galactic space circa 1500 could be very simple, but as we observe more it must become more detailed, like when we observe extra solar planets and gravitational waves from collisions of bodies that people back then had no concept of. Does it get refined as time goes on? When does it stop. Seems simpler to do it right the first time.
More to the point, for the simulation to even know that it needs to refine things as human telescopes get better that means that it has to have planned for things to be more complicated going forward. And depending on how broadly you define the simulation, that plan means that the increased complexity was there in the simulation to some degree the whole time.
This approach works best with things that we previously couldn’t observe because they were distant and our telescopes weren’t good enough; such things can be tacked on like adding new lands to an RPG via an expansion pack. Trying to add more complexity to things we couldn’t see because our microscopes weren’t good enough doesn’t work so well, because it amounts to adding game mechanics to the area we’re already playing around in, and players are sure to notice that sort of thing.
We don’t know whose benefit the simulation is for. All we know that it is meant to appear real to at least one of us. I mean maybe we are characters in some sort of game or story? Your referencing a history and astronomy of what we know as “Earth”, but if it were a simulation, that history could be just as fictional as the backstory and astronomy of Tatooine, Arrakis or Middle Earth. For all you know, the simulation could have just turned on 5 minutes ago and loaded all the necessary memories into your brain.
Point is, once you accept the conceit that the world as you perceive it isn’t “real”, the logical conclusion of that is that you have no way of knowing what, if anything, is “real”. And maybe it doesn’t matter.
Yeah, but so many people complained about the whole “quadratic wizard/linear fighter” balance issue that the devs finally nerfed wizards to shit in the Renaissance patch (now they’re called “magicians” and they can’t cast spells, just do tricks) and introduced the scientist class. Scientists are also broken as hell so now the devs are introducing Global Climate Change as an endgame crisis, but only the scientist classes have what it takes to run endgame content nowadays, so everyone is super jealous and sabotaging the Global Climate Change event on purpose just to mess things up.
It may be worth noting the difference between a book and a game or simulation. In a simulation, the simulation needs to be on the ball, prepared to fill in the details of anything a character looks at. If the character goes to a library, it has to come up with titles for all the books on the shelves. If the character opens one of the books, the simulation needs to fill it with words. If the book was in the nonfiction section, the simulation needs to make sure the words in the book are consistent with all the facts it had previously come up with. It’s s a lot of work, with the amount of information the simulation has to track ballooning unpredictably over time.
By comparison, an author of a book can make sure that the character never goes into the library at all, or if they do the character isn’t allowed to notice that only two of the books have titles. Still not trivial, and worse if the world you’re building is dissimilar from regular reality, but still way less stuff to track.
Games are in the middle - the character has some freedom, but there are still limits that the character doesn’t question. Pac-man never tried to leave his maze, and if he does he doesn’t question why he reappears at the opposite side. And if the characters have more will, and aren’t quite so amenable to restrictions or vagueness on the part of the gamemaster, there’s always the option to Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies.
What if the simulator is just a really really good seat of their pants DM? The speed of light is the limit of information traveling through the universe because it represents how quickly the Great DM can make shit up as you explore the blank part of his map. Light lag is the DM frowning and saying “let me check my notes”.
(Clearly this thread has drifted quite far from its origins…)
Keep in mind that the notes are part of the simulation; if something has already been noted the DM isn’t making it up.
And as I’ve said, I’m willing to accept arguments that the universe gets expanded whenever we wander closer to the edge of the map. What I’m not particularly amenable to are rule changes being made to the areas that are already live - either “we’re going to enable molecular oxygen now, so if you’re underwater, get to the surface quick” or “we’re now deprecating dragons; sorry Fred, your dragon zoo is likely to lose business” seem like things people would write about in the history books.
Well, for the simulation theory to be plausible it has to be possible to create simulations ‘all the way down’, and it’s a fact that complete universal simulations at each level will quickly force the sub-simulations to create simpler and simpler simulations until there’s no way the agents within their simulations are clever enough to make simulations of their own. So if there are ways to cut down on the space it would take to make simulations without compromising those simulation’s ability to make their own simulations, then it becomes possible to make more and more levels of simulations, increasing the ‘strength’ of the “there will be so many simulations, we’re probably in one” argument.
Thats why the Boltzman Brain argument is better. Besides, even if Simulation Theory is true, assuming the top universe is like ours, it will eventually die a heat death, at which point botlzman brains dominate the probability sphere of the rest of eternity.
I don’t think I really understand the Boltzman Brain argument. I’m of the opinion that cognition takes time, and by the time a randomly-generated brain floating loose in a sea of nothingness managed to light up enough neurons to form a thought it would be super-dead.