Even adjusting for all the arguments provided here, only the probability given the other premises that the simulator would chose to represent itself through Christianity is on the same order of magnitude of what I would assign.
I don’t understand at all why you lump entertainment and religious purposes into a single hypothesis and treat evidence for one as evidence for the other. If we accept that our universe is being simulated for entertainment purposes, it would still not give us significant reason to believe that it’s being simulated for religious purposes.
If the person running the sim wanted to be personally glorified within it, I would expect them to do a much, much better job of arranging it. I would adjust this one down several orders of magnitude.
The numbers I’d assign would be more like
P(sim) < .001 (I find it doubtful that, should it be possible to simulate a universe such as our own, a civilization capable of doing so would chose to simulate our universe; should we ever gain the capability to do so I suspect it would be regarded as ethically impermissible to simulate a universe with such a degree of suffering.)
P(rel|sim)< .00000001 (I find it much more likely than this that if our universe is being simulated, it’s being simulated for entertainment, although the proportion of computing power we devote to entertainment cannot reasonably be substituted for this. How well optimized does the universe look for entertainment for an external witness? But our universe looks much worse optimized for religious veneration of a particular simulating entity than for generalized entertainment value.)
P(ego|rel, sim)<.00001 (All the available candidates simply do such an atrocious job compared to what I would expect of a simulator’s lone avatar that I would give over the vast majority of the probability space to the hypotheses that the simulation is either not like a game with player avatars, but a piece of spectator entertainment like a movie, or numerous people have been used as player avatars.)
P(chr0|ego, rel, sim, Earth) = .5 (On the one hand, I would strongly expect that if the simulator wanted veneration from a particular religion and promoted that religion via an avatar, that religion would be the most popular one on Earth. On the other hand, I would expect it to be minimally ambiguous and factionalized. I’d assign most of the remaining probability mass to Islam.)
P(follow-thru) < .01 (Unless a civilization full of people with unmodified human-like psyches lets just anyone simulate universes for their amusement, I think this would probably be regarded as impermissible, and I don’t think most people would be quite that capricious even given the opportunity. I would assign a higher probability of a utility dominating afterlife contingent on behavior rather than belief.)
I don’t understand at all why you lump entertainment and religious purposes into a single hypothesis and treat evidence for one as evidence for the other. If we accept that our universe is being simulated for entertainment purposes, it would still not give us significant reason to believe that it’s being simulated for religious purposes.
Talking about religious purposes was an afterthought. Nobody does that today. It’s conceivable that religions in the future could tell people to run simulations. I wasn’t really thinking of a player who wanted to be God; I was thinking of religions that might work things out in simulations for some reason, or have some occult beliefs about the relationship between the world and simulations, or believed it was their moral duty to emulate the Creator.
If the person running the sim wanted to be personally glorified within it, I would expect them to do a much, much better job of arranging it. I would adjust this one down several orders of magnitude.
I think you’re saying something like, “What is the probability that we are in a simulation whose purpose is for the player to be a religious figure whom we worship and glorify?” Whereas I lumped that case in there as an afterthought, and am more interested in the higher-probability scenario that we are in a simulation that is supposed to be fun for the player, where the player get credit for playing well, but getting credit/glory is not supposed to be easy. It wouldn’t be fun then.
If we imagine this is sim after the style of a game like Civilization, where the player is measured along multiple metrics of success and has competition from multiple other factions, I would substitute P(rel|sim) with P(rel|gamesim), the probability that religious veneration is one of the metrics in the game, but I would assign P(gamesim) a much lower probability than P(sim), because it occupies a very small part of the probability mass that I assign to a simulation. As before, a large part of the improbability would come from locating that particular type of sim in possibility space.
I would also have to revise P(follow-thru) way down, because more than in the other scenario, it seems like it would be a complete waste of time, completely tangential to the purpose of the simulation and not at all worth the computation time it would take.
Even adjusting for all the arguments provided here, only the probability given the other premises that the simulator would chose to represent itself through Christianity is on the same order of magnitude of what I would assign.
I don’t understand at all why you lump entertainment and religious purposes into a single hypothesis and treat evidence for one as evidence for the other. If we accept that our universe is being simulated for entertainment purposes, it would still not give us significant reason to believe that it’s being simulated for religious purposes.
If the person running the sim wanted to be personally glorified within it, I would expect them to do a much, much better job of arranging it. I would adjust this one down several orders of magnitude.
The numbers I’d assign would be more like
P(sim) < .001 (I find it doubtful that, should it be possible to simulate a universe such as our own, a civilization capable of doing so would chose to simulate our universe; should we ever gain the capability to do so I suspect it would be regarded as ethically impermissible to simulate a universe with such a degree of suffering.)
P(rel|sim)< .00000001 (I find it much more likely than this that if our universe is being simulated, it’s being simulated for entertainment, although the proportion of computing power we devote to entertainment cannot reasonably be substituted for this. How well optimized does the universe look for entertainment for an external witness? But our universe looks much worse optimized for religious veneration of a particular simulating entity than for generalized entertainment value.)
P(ego|rel, sim)<.00001 (All the available candidates simply do such an atrocious job compared to what I would expect of a simulator’s lone avatar that I would give over the vast majority of the probability space to the hypotheses that the simulation is either not like a game with player avatars, but a piece of spectator entertainment like a movie, or numerous people have been used as player avatars.)
P(chr0|ego, rel, sim, Earth) = .5 (On the one hand, I would strongly expect that if the simulator wanted veneration from a particular religion and promoted that religion via an avatar, that religion would be the most popular one on Earth. On the other hand, I would expect it to be minimally ambiguous and factionalized. I’d assign most of the remaining probability mass to Islam.)
P(follow-thru) < .01 (Unless a civilization full of people with unmodified human-like psyches lets just anyone simulate universes for their amusement, I think this would probably be regarded as impermissible, and I don’t think most people would be quite that capricious even given the opportunity. I would assign a higher probability of a utility dominating afterlife contingent on behavior rather than belief.)
Which gives a probability of < 5x10^-19.
Talking about religious purposes was an afterthought. Nobody does that today. It’s conceivable that religions in the future could tell people to run simulations. I wasn’t really thinking of a player who wanted to be God; I was thinking of religions that might work things out in simulations for some reason, or have some occult beliefs about the relationship between the world and simulations, or believed it was their moral duty to emulate the Creator.
I think you’re saying something like, “What is the probability that we are in a simulation whose purpose is for the player to be a religious figure whom we worship and glorify?” Whereas I lumped that case in there as an afterthought, and am more interested in the higher-probability scenario that we are in a simulation that is supposed to be fun for the player, where the player get credit for playing well, but getting credit/glory is not supposed to be easy. It wouldn’t be fun then.
If we imagine this is sim after the style of a game like Civilization, where the player is measured along multiple metrics of success and has competition from multiple other factions, I would substitute P(rel|sim) with P(rel|gamesim), the probability that religious veneration is one of the metrics in the game, but I would assign P(gamesim) a much lower probability than P(sim), because it occupies a very small part of the probability mass that I assign to a simulation. As before, a large part of the improbability would come from locating that particular type of sim in possibility space.
I would also have to revise P(follow-thru) way down, because more than in the other scenario, it seems like it would be a complete waste of time, completely tangential to the purpose of the simulation and not at all worth the computation time it would take.