Simulations, God, and all that Jazz
For the past week I’ve been thinking about simulations of universes, and the weird situations they give rise to. Some of the thoughts about religion and God in this article were explained/inspired by the Selwyn College Christian Unions text-a-toastie (which I also got a lovely free toastie out of).
You may have already heard of the theory that says we are all probably living in a simulation, if you haven’t, it goes like this. First you have to accept the axiom that it is possible for sentient life to create a simulation (or, in my point of view, an AI capable of creating such a simulation being created by sentient life). By a simulation I mean some form of program that in essence is a hyper detailed model of our universe, complete with planets, stars, and even ants, pens and sand. I believe this is possible as I think we can create an AI smarter than us (see article linked at bottom), and once we do that, the AI can then create/become an even smarter AI, to the point where it can easily run such a simulation. If you don’t believe in the possibility of AI smarter than humans, then consider a game like Minecraft, it runs on a home PC, and is already relatively realistic, imagine it getting exponentially more realistic as the years go by (this being the rate that computing power is increasing), eventually having blocks equivalent in size to the plank length, or, as we could call them, subatomic particles.
If you accept the axiom above it seems to follow that, once you create one simulation, you would create more (we don’t just have one computer, but we originally made only one). It also seems to follow that, if you can create a good enough simulation, and it gives rise to ‘life’, what is to stop that life from creating another simulation. All this results in a massive tree of simulations from what is a single physical universe, all supporting/containing life (But by no means infinite, just an awful lot). From there it is just basic probability, we’re probably not at the top, so we’re probably in a simulation.
I promised god, where does he fit in? Well, imagine for a second that we happen to be the top universe, created by physical processes, that, for the sake of argument, we will assume to have been started by a higher power (i.e. God exists). But then imagine we succeed in creating a simulation, who is God in that simulation, is it us? We have absolute power in the simulation, we could randomly part a sea on some planet in some corner of the universe to let a group of people walk across. We can advise the life in our simulation of a good moral code to follow, tell it what is right and wrong, and watch as they write it down in a plethora of books.
At which point, lets flip the roles, imagine we are in that simulation, who is our god now? Is it the technologically advanced beings who created our universe, who guided us, or is it the being right at the top of the tree, or is it both, is there a hierarchy of gods? I would answer these questions as follows, the being (AI or otherwise) who created our universe is, to all intents and purposes our God. However, our Gods God, it would stand to reason, can influence our Gods decisions (as he is their God), making him also our God, although (presumably) more hands off and aloof. The same holds for Gods Gods God, and so on, resulting in the God (or not, I am still on the fence) at the very top being our true God. But the true God in all religions offers people free will, so, assuming this is the case, although we would ultimately be cared for by the top God, we would be at the mercy of the free will of all the other ‘Gods’ down our branch of the tree.
An interesting counter argument that was presented to me went like this, when God was dissatisfied with mankind, he decided not to destroy his creation and start from scratch (which would be easy if our universe were a simulation), he instead chose to let mankind right its own wrongs (through the ‘flood’, whichever form you believe it took). My counter to this would be simple, if God can create a universe, it would be just as easy for him to start from scratch than if it were a simulation. From this I guess he must have had some higher reason for not starting again (and had maybe already started again many times, we wouldn’t know).
So, we seem to be left with a list of Gods, with increasing power but decreasing direct influence, all presumably waiting for us (or an AI we create) to become Gods in the future.
You may ask, why does this matter, is a God not a God? The answer is twofold, either the true (‘top’) Gods message has been diluted by his many sub Gods (and their free will), or the God we are obeying is potentially no different to us. With either of these standpoints we are either, merely the recipient of diluted divine instruction, or the recipient of undiluted non-divine instruction. If it is the former, religions of the world have a great challenge to sort the wheat from the chaff, if it is the later, should we seek out our own moral values, or are we wise to trust our potentially flawed creator? However, I personally believe that, either, our ‘local’ God is more preoccupied with somewhere else in the universe, because we are just a planet of undeveloped barely spacefaring slightly sentient beings, or potentially even just a by-product of what this God created the Universe to study. Or our God is a benevolent AI, letting us be whilst he learns something, what he learns however, we shall probably never know.
But then again, I only study Computer Science,
Oliver Black
Please let me know if you think you can take this further, or feel like I got a step wrong, I would be really interested to talk to you.
Thanks again to Selwyn text-a-toastie for helping me flesh out some of the ideas here
If you want a better understanding of the points about AI I briefly make here, this is an excellent article: http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html
