Dear Resident Theists

[robvalue]

It makes the most sense to me that the first cause, if there is one, would be the point in another timeline in another reality in which our reality manifested. This could be either this reality being switched on as a simulation with initial conditions, or else fracturing from another reality and becoming self-contained. Of course the first cause could instead be our reality popping up out of nowhere for no reason, but I'll focus on the previous idea for now.

I found it interesting pondering the simulation hypothesis. This would make the programmer (or perhaps even the computer) "god" as generally referred to. It's pretty obvious that none of the general amazing attributes that god seems to always get for free are necessarily true at all. Even if the programmer/computer has ultimate power with regard to this simulation, they have no such power in their own reality. I don't know how anyone can rule this possibility out as a "first cause" either, especially since it's one that requires a lot less assumptions than your usual ridiculous super-being.

What I found more interesting is the idea of "the supernatural", and this parent reality. What we have is a computer and a programmer who can affect our reality, but we can't affect them, or ever measure them. We are self contained (very much so if we don't literally exist) and so we can't ever "see" outside of our simulation. We could be fed information about it from within our reality, but we'd have no way to confirm what is true and what is not.

Assuming this parent reality is a standard one much like our own, and we're a simulation, does that make the parent reality supernatural in comparison to us? It's actually the best model I can think of to actually describe what the supernatural would be like. And yet I find myself thinking that they are just as natural as us, we just happen to be self-contained and have one-way interaction with this other natural world. So perhaps "nested realities" is a better term, especially since the parent reality could itself have one-way interaction with its own parent reality.

Interesting