Ambig.uous.Info

So here it is. You’ve probably heard it before, but may not have realized it’s significance. The universe may be a simulation. In other words, we might be living in something like the Matrix. OK, so what. Why would some crazy sci-fi plot be any more convincing than any other religious argument you’ve ever heard? The reasoning comes from this paper or this simplified version by Nick Bostrom. The gist of the argument in the paper is that at least one of three possibilities must be true. Those three possibilities are paraphrased as:

1) Advanced civilizations destroy themselves before they can build universe simulations

2) Advanced civilizations don’t run simulations of universes like ours

3) You are almost certainly living a simulation

You can read the paper to see Bostrom’s defense of the three possibilities. In any case, he argues that we can’t reject any of these 3 possibilities outright. So we can assign some probability to each of them. He doesn’t suggest specific probabilities for each of the three but instead suggests that we ultimately need more evidence to assign accurate probabilities.

I haven’t spelled it out yet, but you probably now see the obvious argument for God. If we are living in a simulation, then there must be a simulator (note that this is not a rehashing of the old watchmaker argument). Granted, if God (or Gods) is just a simulator then he may be a little different from the God you learned about in Sunday School. Then again, it could also explain a few things. Like the whole idea of a “personal” God who is interested in relationships. If we’re running on a machine in some lonely guy’s basement then maybe relationship really is the point of our world. Or consider the old mythologies of Gods coming down to interact with mortals. Maybe these were the simulation’s administrators interacting with the world for one reason or another.

Anywho, this argument certainly doesn’t prove the existence of God. Instead, I think it’s something interesting to consider and a possible reason why strong atheists may want to downgrade to a weaker form of atheism. If you are curious about this topic, there is a lot of additional information on the web. Nick Bostrom has an entire website dedicated to the topic. I would recommend reading the FAQ on this site before making any knee-jerk reactions to the argument. He answers a couple of questions that initially came to mind for me. You can also get more information on related topics at this wiki or on wikipedia itself.

I think what might be the biggest objection to this argument for many folks is the assumption in the paper of “substrate independence”. This assumption essentially means that human consciousness can be achieved on any sufficiently powerful computer rather than specifically requiring a human brain. Restated, this means that a sufficiently powerful computer could become self aware if it implemented the appropriate algorithms. Of course, I suppose most of the people that would object to this assumption are probably not atheists anyway and therefore don’t need arguments for God. But I’m just guessing about that.

In any case, I’m becoming more convinced that I’m living in a “me-simulation.” The rest of you are all bots. Since I’m aware of the fact, why don’t you make things easier for me and give me all that gold you’ve been farming.