A recent article in The Guardian reported some scientists’ beliefs that we may, like the folks in The Matrix, be living in a simulated universe. A couple ideas put forth by one of those scientists as reported in the article were, for me as a freethinker, particularly troubling.
One idea tendered in the article appears to support a sort of creationism: “That we might be in a simulation is, [NASA JPL scientist Rich] Terrile argues, a simpler explanation for our existence than the idea that we are the first generation to rise up from primordial ooze and evolve into molecules, biology and eventually intelligence and self-awareness.” While I won’t assume that Terrile himself subscribes to creationism per se (and a previous quote of his in the article refutes the need for supernatural involvement for this simulation to be possible) , I do think that the lay reader could easily walk away from the article with the idea that creationism can be easily supported by current science.
Further, the possibility that we’re living in a simulation “provides a scientific basis for some kind of afterlife or larger domain of reality above our world. ‘You don’t need a miracle, faith or anything special to believe it. It comes naturally out of the laws of physics,’ [Terrile] said.” Again, the same problem as before: the lay reader may presume that “heaven” as conceived by various religions is an idea supported by mainstream science.
To its credit, the article does provide quotes from other scientists refuting these claims. But will the reader seeking justification for believing in an afterlife and a creator take these as seriously as the quotes above? And if we do accept that we may be living in a simulation, should we view the “advanced humans” who may have created it any differently from gods? Human-generated technology will, one hopes, continue to move forward. If we (even inadvertently) deify those who create and have access to it, don’t we strip away some of the humanity that we have in common with those who live in that future?
Such a silly conceit!
No, it’s not a simpler idea — it posits an entire super-reality of which ours is but a limited subset, the which supposedly needs no explanation.
Expanding the domain of enquiry is the opposite of a simplification, and it runs into precisely the same problem as the putative “first cause” explanation — to avoid claiming that reality “just is”, it posits an uncaused cause that “just is” for that reality. Infinite regress FTW!
Anyone who imagines that it’s scientific purely because it’s something proposed by a scientist is already too obtuse to grasp the philosophical concepts at hand.
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BTW, the late Iain M. Banks’ novel Surface Detail explores some of the ramifications of this conceit, were it real.
There’s also another Iain M. Banks novel that deals with the concept: The Algebraist, which portrays a galactic society in which the dominant religion is a particularly aggressive and evangelical form of the simulation hypothesis, whose adherents believe that they can end the simulation if they can convince a sufficiently large proportion of its inhabitants that they are living in a simulation (as this will render the simulation invalid). It contains my favourite quote on the subject: “Any theory which causes solipsism to seem just as likely an explanation for the phenomena it seeks to describe ought to be held in the utmost suspicion.”
… the idea that we are the first generation to rise up from primordial ooze and evolve into molecules, biology and eventually intelligence and self-awareness.
From unconnected atoms to modern humanity in one generation? Please, Rich Terrile, who says that (besides you & Genesis literalists)?
Yup, I’m with John. Positing a simulation logically requires all the structure needed to run it. I don’t mind conjecture, but it should be presented as such. Like priests and other con-men, they’re just making shit up and trying to make money off of it.
How is it supposed to be simpler for this to be a simulation?
If this is all there is, it’s way simpler than the hardware infrastructure required to run a simulation.