Apply this reasoning to a contemporary computer game of quest or combat. In a medieval setting, you might have good guys, bad guys, and extra background characters. Our discussion is like being a character in such a game, trying to guess what it’s all about; and your proposition amounts to saying that the intentions and interventions of The Players are just as likely to be centered on the second cow from the right in scene 4, as they are to be centered on one of the obviously major factions of opinion whose struggles define our history and tear our world apart.
So no, it ought to be a few orders of magnitude more likely that one (or even all) of those big civilizational blocs on our planet is puppeted by hidden intelligences, than it is likely that a character from a minor French fable is the unique signature-within-the-sim of our creator-artist.
I think we can at least agree that our world, and manifest human nature, have the capacity to produce the world’s religions, and the histories they have engendered, without any external intervention. So judged according to the absence of obviously beyond-the-world or beyond-the-sim information, in texts like the Bible, the Quran, etc, one should indeed demote the probability that these religions are cosmologically, ontologically, or nonmetaphorically true. But how much demotion of probability, that’s the question.
The big bad wolf, as described in the story, doesn’t have the ability to create a stimulation (or do any programing whatsoever), whereas God, as described in the bible, does.
The simulation implies the Bible God as strongly as it implies the Little Red Riding Hood. How probable is that the naughty wolf is our simulator?
Apply this reasoning to a contemporary computer game of quest or combat. In a medieval setting, you might have good guys, bad guys, and extra background characters. Our discussion is like being a character in such a game, trying to guess what it’s all about; and your proposition amounts to saying that the intentions and interventions of The Players are just as likely to be centered on the second cow from the right in scene 4, as they are to be centered on one of the obviously major factions of opinion whose struggles define our history and tear our world apart.
So no, it ought to be a few orders of magnitude more likely that one (or even all) of those big civilizational blocs on our planet is puppeted by hidden intelligences, than it is likely that a character from a minor French fable is the unique signature-within-the-sim of our creator-artist.
I think we can at least agree that our world, and manifest human nature, have the capacity to produce the world’s religions, and the histories they have engendered, without any external intervention. So judged according to the absence of obviously beyond-the-world or beyond-the-sim information, in texts like the Bible, the Quran, etc, one should indeed demote the probability that these religions are cosmologically, ontologically, or nonmetaphorically true. But how much demotion of probability, that’s the question.
Are you telling me, that the LRRH is 1000 times less likely the Creator’s word to us, than let say the Bible?
I don’t see a good justification for this. But even if it is, 10^-50 or 10^-53 is all very small. It is deep down somewhere, near the zero.
The big bad wolf, as described in the story, doesn’t have the ability to create a stimulation (or do any programing whatsoever), whereas God, as described in the bible, does.
Oh no. The story deliberately hides the Wolf’s powers. THAT is not very unlikely compared to the rest, is it?