But I’ll provide the same counter-argument to your sim-creator that I provide against theism and see how it stands. If this simulator is able to induce worship by, for example, occasionally creating miracles and inspiring avatars, then why doesn’t he do a better job of it? (Maybe this is a who-can-induce-the-most-vehement-worship tournament and the rules are very strict? For example, only 5 interferences in the first 5000 years?) Also, the Jesus avatar was very keen on human fellowship. If the sim-creator was keen on this, why did he instill such antagonistic human behaviors?
The Player plays in mysterious ways.
Interesting points. Hard, though, to have good priors for. My default assumption would be that the game imposes restrictions, such as the laws of physics and of game theory; and the Player tries to create an interesting world within those restrictions. The Player isn’t free to say, “Humans will all be nice to each other all the time!” That isn’t an evolutionarily stable strategy.
IMHO, given the laws of physics and what we know about game theory and evolutionary theory, it’s pretty amazing that we have creatures who care about each other at all, and art, and music. (It doesn’t contradict these theories, but it is counter-intuitive.) I would give the Player a pretty high score.
The advantage of the argument in my post is that it tries to make only simple claims about how a God should be expected to behave. “God made the universe for fun” is much simpler, and therefore has a higher prior, than “God should construct the universe to contain super-happy beings”, which embeds many assumptions about God’s circumstances, morality, energy budget, etc.
There is an apparent ‘force for good’ in the universe, which people can deify if they want (or externalize for convenience, as I do).
This is a digression, but: Suppose the universe has no force for good, and has an average goodness of zero. Would we not expect that the creatures that thrived best in that universe would perceive the universe as good?
The Player plays in mysterious ways.
Interesting points. Hard, though, to have good priors for. My default assumption would be that the game imposes restrictions, such as the laws of physics and of game theory; and the Player tries to create an interesting world within those restrictions. The Player isn’t free to say, “Humans will all be nice to each other all the time!” That isn’t an evolutionarily stable strategy.
IMHO, given the laws of physics and what we know about game theory and evolutionary theory, it’s pretty amazing that we have creatures who care about each other at all, and art, and music. (It doesn’t contradict these theories, but it is counter-intuitive.) I would give the Player a pretty high score.
The advantage of the argument in my post is that it tries to make only simple claims about how a God should be expected to behave. “God made the universe for fun” is much simpler, and therefore has a higher prior, than “God should construct the universe to contain super-happy beings”, which embeds many assumptions about God’s circumstances, morality, energy budget, etc.
This is a digression, but: Suppose the universe has no force for good, and has an average goodness of zero. Would we not expect that the creatures that thrived best in that universe would perceive the universe as good?