If the universe was fine tuned for our life...

[Heywood]

-Because you don't understand how computers work. You see the pretty pictures and fail to realize that this is -not- whats actually happening in the "sub reality", that all of the pretty pictures the artists have plugged in are the product of an intelligence, whereas the game world is a product of a computational system running a procedural generation: the "creation" or existence of which (in both cases) depends on an environment with rules, not intelligence. Additionally, these things are designed to fool you, in a sense, and they certainly seem to have done so - in that you imagine that there are feet and inches "in there" - there aren't. That's not how these things work.

Help me to explain this to you, what is it that has you hung up..why can't you accept something that is both plainly demonstrable and true -by definition?

(now heres something I find mystifying. In all of this, I haven't even touched the idea that our reality is a simulation - perhaps not the same as second life but using the same principles, a different implementation of similar machinery. Maybe not even the world exterior to us, just the one we percieve - hell maybe it's turtles all the way down as well. That would be an "oh shit" sort of concept - all by itself...it's not good enough for you though, because it doesn't yield a "god". What if we -are- in a simulation? What if we -are- computational systems (or simulations ourselves)? Wouldn't all of that be amazing..even though nothing we've observed implies that there would be any creator, or any requirement thereof if this were the case....wouldn't that still be amazing?)

Digital Physics suggests that the universe is, if not a computer itself, computable. Seth Loyd takes it to another level and proposes that the universe is a giant quantum computer.

http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Univer...e+universe

I think a good case can be made that our reality operates just like a reality contained within a computer. This whole idea that the universe is essentially a computer is a mainstream scientific idea and not some fringe notion. Perhaps the problem is not me not knowing how computers work but rather you don't understand just how much our reality operates like a computer.