Stupidest Anti Evolution Argument Ever.

[robvalue]

Wow, he can prove all that with a banana? I wonder what I could prove with a pineapple.

I've just been reading and watching stuff about simulations and.. I have to honestly concede that intelligent design could turn out to be true (no sarcasm this time), but not in the sense that any religious person wants it to. In fact the opposite. The argument goes something like this, someone correct me if I've misunderstood:

We are fast approaching having the technology to be able to simulate something as complex as our universe. It could contain "artificially conscious entities" or ACES, which are as complex as humans. So if we have managed to reach this level of simulation (assuming it does actually happen) then it's quite possible another civilization in another reality has done the same. So the question becomes, are we in reality, or in a simulation?

Being in a simulation makes a fucking lot of sense to me. It makes sense of the fact that nothing make any sense at all. Douglas Adams may prove to be somewhat of a visionary, if you are familiar with his view of the Earth. What I think of as "me" is... what the hell is it? What am I? I can only say that I am my DNA. I am not the cells that make me up, as they get replaced all the time. My whole body has been replaced. What is the constant? My DNA. My programming? Am I an object in some object-based program, my cells being the medium through which I manifest? How odd that humans could come to understand that they are not real. It may be possible to prove this is a simulation by the breakdown of our "laws" at an artificial "border" of the universe.

So are we in one, or not? I was watching the video below and it kind of stunned me. If we get to the point where we can make simulations, you can expect we're going to make billions of them. So the ratio of simulations to reality is going to be virtually infinite : 1 . So... if any other reality exists and has reached the simulation stage as well, that means that statistically the odds of us being in one of those simulations rather than in the/one of the reality/realities is virtually certain. And... now it gets real messed up.

Say this is right and we're a simulation. The civilization that is simulating us... could also be a simulation. In fact, by the same reasoning, they almost certainly are. And so it goes on backwards... And forward, through our own simulations. A fucking next of simulations within simulations.

OK this can't be real, right? It's science fiction gone mad. Part of me thinks this is just not going to hold up somewhere, and it's all speculation. Part of me thinks this makes more sense than anything I've heard before. And weirdly, it pulls together lots of religious type ideas.

Intelligent design... check. But instead of giving us meaning, we have fuck all meaning, we're a program. And our creator could be the biggest dumbass in his reality, which may itself be a simulation. We could be a forgotten experiment.

Deism... check. There's something out there that made us. It's not a god, it's a computer being operated by some nerd.

Solipsism... check. Everything we see could me unreal, generated just for us. We either don't exist, or we're a program object.

Religion/god... check. If we are indeed a program, then I would argue that the nerd who made us could BE a god in terms of our universe. He could tweek anything he liked, at any time. He could make changes at any time. Now, I argue as much as anyone else that we have natural laws that explain what has happened and there is no reason to believe anything has been tweeked after the big bang. But get this: the programmer could change things to another "state" at any time, and retroactively change all our memories and evidence to be in line with the "natural" way we got to that state. And we wouldn't know it had happened. It could happen all the time. We don't know it because our memories are seamlessly reprogrammed. Heck, we could even all be switching bodies. Anything could be going on. It just seems like things have been this way since the big bang because that's what our memories and evidence tell us. But in a program, anything can be manipulated.

The practical upshot of all this is... nothing really. But it's very interesting. So am I a "simulationist" now? I see it as the most likely position, if I'm going to take any at all other than atheism. I'm not saying I am totally convinced that this is more likely than not, but I think it's more likely than any other "explanations" anyone has ever come up with. So yeah, here's the video. The technical stuff comes in towards the end.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mb6IjGYmjDA