… The The The God Delusion Delusion Delusion …

This text goes through some recent technological developments which indicate the existence of God under well accepted atheist reasoning. (written by a well contented sinner, don’t get all defensive)

A classic Atheist argument is the Flying Spaghetti Monster argument, where belief in God is compared against belief in an invisible flying spaghetti monster.

FSM, whether it exists or not, is quite instrumental in battling the argument “you can’t prove there’s no God”. Because in that, God is quite similar to FSM, and obviously this is no reason to believe FSM does exist.

“OK, but why do we state God (or the FSM) doesn’t exist?”, one may ask.

Some atheists will be confused by this question, and respond with statements such as “the burden of proof lies on the one making claims”. This is indeed expected of intelligent discourse. Nevertheless, we must remember: as far as logic goes, an existence claim (“God exists”) is entirely equivalent to an inexistence claim (“God doesn’t exist”) at least in the sense that they’re both claims. So, citing the above statement, the burden of proof should lie on one making any of them.

In the absence of an inexistence proof, atheists turn to a far more elaborate argument: Occam’s Razor. Occam’s Razor is a part of the scientific methodology, and a property of human reasoning. It basically states that (quoting Wikipedia) “among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected”. So Occam’s razor encourages us to choose simple explanations to the encountered phenomena (when the correct explanation is unknown). It is (debatably?) easy to get convinced that the assumption about the existence or inexistence of God are both equally unnecessary to explain the perceived reality, and thus equally redundant. However, the clever atheist would say, the very fact that the existence of God is redundant concludes my argument.

This is best visualized: we have two realities. One with God and one without Him.

Above we can see the two imaginable realities. Both contain the observed phenomena (world) and all of its innerworkings. The one which contains no God is obviously simpler than the other, so Occam’s razor dictates choosing it as the dominant hypothesis.

We should stress that Occam’s razor is not a means of selecting the actual true hypothesis, but a heuristic method, an inaccurate rule of thumb, to obtain “the most probable one”. The selected hypothesis is thus only heuristically probably true. Moreover, this heuristic works for sciences and human reasoning in general, but its applicability to figuring out the nature of transcendental realities is unclear at best. The crux of Atheism is this: is the choice to apply Occam’s razor with regard to God’s existence “objectively correct”? Moreover, is it legitimate, or well advised, to coerce this choice in a way, and condemn religion for its “irrationality” as manifested in its noncompliance with The Razor? Some (who must hold Occam’s Razor to an extremely high regard) say “yes”.

Leaving behind the debate about The Razor’s applicability and whether or not its results can be considered The Objective Truth, we must admit that The Razor is a very elegant argument. And the philosophy of things that don’t actually have an impact on life (such as God’s existence as a completely abstract deity) is all about elegant arguments rather than absolute truths, anyway.

However, surprisingly and interestingly, recent technological developments seem to turn this argument against its maker.

Many years ago the notion that we all live in some sort of simulation (or that reality is “a dream”, or a Matrix, …) was proposed. 17th century philosophers’ dialectic endeavors to doubt all which is known about the world using also this experimental thought, managed to debase most well accepted facts and, well, flip many people out. These arguments were finally held back by Descartes’ observation, “I think therefore I am”. I won’t get into why, but this is actually a truth that is very hard to argue with (and different, in a sense, than most things people hold as truths). Later, some other “aprioric truths” were presented, considered and accepted, and Immanuel Kant argued that some of them are even synthetic rather than analytic. This is all besides the point, though, which is that the idea of the world existing as a simulation is not new. The probability that this is true, however, has recently increased dramatically (in a sense).

Here’s what Elon Musk, a Hi-tech CEO and engineer famous for his aspirational approach and grandiose achievements, said this year in an interview, which inspired the writing of this text.

“Forty years ago we had pong. Like, two rectangles and a dot. That was what games were. Now, 40 years later, we have photorealistic, 3D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously, and it’s getting better every year. Soon we’ll have virtual reality, augmented reality.

“If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality, even if that rate of advancement drops by a thousand from what it is now. Then you just say, okay, let’s imagine it’s 10,000 years in the future, which is nothing on the evolutionary scale.

So given that we’re clearly on a trajectory to have games that are indistinguishable from reality, and those games could be played on any set-top box or on a PC or whatever, and there would probably be billions of such computers or set-top boxes, it would seem to follow that the odds that we’re in base reality is one in billions.”

A link is missing, or too implicit, in Musk’s argument. A probability distribution for “the correct transcendental reality” does not actually exist, and thus the “odds” cited are not even well defined. In order to reason about such probabilities, one has to first go through some heuristic such as Occam’s razor (which, being a mere rule of thumb, allows us to make “irresponsible” statements about probabilities, without defining their distribution and performing careful analysis). When you do apply Occam’s razor, however, an astounding possibility is brought to light.

We will now reiterate Musk’s argument, again using advanced visualization techniques and further explanations to clarify it.

It begins with a technological (non philosophical) observation about how the world will look in the future.

The observation is that our world contains more and more virtual realities, and that these realities become more and more complex, until they are on par with our own. Sentient beings could exist as part of those realities (note that they still do exist even if they are virtual, conveniently not contradicting Descrates). One day, we ourselves could construct a simulation of a world very similar to our own. This is recursive: the residents of such a world will themselves attain advanced simulation abilities. And the simulated worlds spawned off of them, and so on. Thus, infinitely many virtual realities will be born out of our own.

So far, this prediction has remained well within Musk’s domain — technology. He is in fact one of the most authoritative people in the world to make such predictions. Even though technology is a notoriously shifty ground and the truth in his projection is far from guaranteed, it may be worth exploring the “what if” of it.

Now turning away from his own domain, to the realm of philosophy, Musk asks: given that my technological prediction is indeed true, are we living in a simulation? Musk (implicitly) considers two possible realities; again we turn to visualization of those realities.

Applying Occam’s razor, we ask, “which reality is more simple”? The one where our world is one in a long chain of simulated worlds, or the one where our world is the unique world that initiated the chain? Moreover, is there even one world which initiated the chain?

Well, the simplest reality turns out to be the one where there isn’t. We only know (under Musk’s technological projection correctness assumption) that the chain exists, with an infinite amount of worlds, but there is absolutely no reason to assume that it even contains a unique “initial” world. Among these two realities, the simplest one is one with no initial world, in which we are definitely living within a simulation. This may be hard to digest, since a reality with no initial world “contains more worlds”, and in it our own world has infinitely many ancestor worlds. This may seem… non-simple. At least to a mind unadjusted to thinking in terms of combinatorial structures over an infinity of elements.
However, the reality in which we’re in a simulation does entail less assumptions, removing those that state that our own world is unique in some way (it being the ancestor of all worlds), and that there even exists such a unique world. If you’re gonna assume that, why not a flying spaghetti monster… This basically wraps up Musk’s argument.

One thing that Musk didn’t say stands out from this discussion: if we are living in a simulation, then… we were in fact created by a sentient being.

It follows from all of this that, if we’re believing Musk’s prediction and applying Occam’s Razor, it turns out that God actually exists, and even made us in His image: sentient, virtual, and creators of worlds.

Personally, I think we’re most probably a “memorial simulation” exhibited at the Yad Vashem memorial museum, aimed at capturing the Holocaust down to miniscule detail. That would resolve yet another issue: “if there’s a God, how did he allow the Holocaust?”