| > If you write a program to add a couple of numbers, it seems absurd to imagine some entity magically poofs into existence, imagines itself carrying out such, and then poofs back out of existence. It may be absurd, but we nevertheless can not rule it out, and so it means that our ability to know anything about existence for certain is limited to almost nothing. Note that I'm not saying I believe this to be the case. What I'm saying is that I see looking for "universal truths" to be entirely futile, because we can't possibly know much of substance with certainty. Instead we have to accept that unless someone "pierces a veil" and shows us that there's a reality past the one we observe, we are limited to talking about what is observable and measurable within our observable reality, knowing that we are dealing with assumptions and probabilities, not universal truths. > I find it no less absurd to imagine the same even if it happens to be 10^100 instructions. This seems fundamentally at odds with saying you were gradually pushed towards a simulation hypothesis... > if you die only to 'wake up' and discover it was all just a simulation, you're still back right where you started. A simulation hypothesis does not need to imply that there's anything to wake up from for anyone. Indeed, even if you were to wake up, by confirming that simulation is possible, this would seem to strongly suggest that you should consider the probability that the world you wake up in is simulated to be extremely high. > The search for natural explanations feels unsatisfactory because it will always come back to a question of what created that. It may feel unsatisfactory to you. It doesn't to me. I accept that whenever we push the horizon of knowledge, we're likely to discover more things that we don't know, and for the set of things we know we can't know to expand as well. > You basically have to do a whole bunch of hand waving and assumptions to the point that it starts to rapidly feel like religion for an atheist. You don't have to do anything. You can accept that we don't know. |
As for natural explanations - what I am saying is that the natural explanations for 'why' seem, currently, to be far weaker than other explanations. And in fact the natural explanations rely on various ad-hoc constructions (like inflation theory) that are completely unnatural. A simulation hypothesis is, to me, the only hypothesis that doesn't seem to have glaring holes in it and/or rely on defacto magic.
And obviously I understand that magic of one millennia is the mundane tech of another. But we do not live in that other era, and there's no guarantee that such an understanding will ever come to pass. Assuming otherwise requires having faith that such discoveries will come to pass in the future, and essentially assuming your own conclusion, instead of looking at the evidence as available. And that's why I referred to natural explanations as religion for an atheist.