(September 5, 2013 at 12:41 pm)apophenia Wrote:
What if's are generally only interesting if they lead to interesting questions, which this does not appear to do so.
Max's simulation of the universe hypothesis, I believe, refers to a speculation by a philosopher that we might live in a simulation, and that certain observable aspects of the universe might be artifacts of certain necessary properties of the simulation. (There's a thread on that around here somewhere.)
An important question is whether the mind of such a computer would be qualitatively different than our own, and if so, in what way. I think you meant to imply that it was qualitatively different by specifying it as a computer, but this is not necessarily the case. It's possible that a computer could have a mind that is qualitatively like our own, in which case the question becomes considerably less interesting. If you're suggesting that the mind of God is qualitatively different than our own, I don't see how that differs from much contemporary speculation that we can't "know the mind of God," only differing in the practical explanation of how that is. If that is your intent, it would help if you specified in what way you consider or hypothesized it being different than our own.
Some have asked how the computer came to be, and that appears to be the second dimension of your question, independent of the quality of mind question. The "what if God is a natural artifact instead of a supernatural artifact" question. I'm not sure that leads anywhere, but one of two videos recently posted by MindForgedManacle made the case that for many biblical stories, a being that is superhuman but not supernatural explains the story as well as a being that is superhuman and supernatural. ()
Actually my original source was a physicist who has proposed that some of the background noise of the universe resembles jitter in a digital system. I think he has an ongoing experiement to measure it.
Further, at this stage I am not implying the computer in question has a mind at all - its just a massively powerful laptop of the future running a program in the same dumb way that ours do today.
The user's universe, however, would have to be assumed to be virtual too - and identical to our own. I should have put that in before but I didn't want to make too long a post.
Whoever runs the computer here to make our virtual universe is doing it in every universe in the chain. We really will get to meet God after all.
