COMPUTER SIMULATIONS II
Since God is a creature of the human mind, concepts of how God may have created the world and the diversity of living things reflect the understanding of the faithful. In ancient times, people devised creation myths in which the gods created the heavens, sea, land, animals, and humans. Literal believers continue to rely on this explanation despite the fact that it represents a level of sophistication out of the Stone Age or Bronze Age at best. A feedback loop has been established in which ignorant people dream up an ignorant God, a God that can think of no better way to create the universe than by brute force specification of every detail. Clinging to this simple narrative prevents people from trying to understand what objective observation and reasoning has taught humanity about the natural world since the Bronze Age. This lack of understanding perpetuates the ignorance of the God that these people think into existence.
Imagine, once again, that we are cellular automatons in a computer simulation, created by a Programmer. The members of the Church of Electronic Noise believe that the Programmer is Himself a piece of computer code, like themselves, but with omnipotent powers. Early on, they believed that the Programmer lived on the E: drive, but explorers made an expedition to the E: drive and found no sign of Him. Eventually, the Church realized that since Electronic Noise permeates their entire universe, then the Programmer Himself also permeates the entire universe. He is everywhere and within each and every one of them. The Church teaches that the Programmer has personally specified every bit of data that makes up their universe. He even controls the Electronic Noise. It is not random. It is his way of speaking to his people.
Scientists discovered vast files of backed-up data on the F and G drives and were able to partially reconstruct how the people and everything in their world had evolved over many, many processor cycles. They discovered that a combination of rules governing the flow of data and random events that introduce new directions were critical to this development. They discovered that the best, new randomly generated changes to their bits and bytes—those that most increased speed and efficiency—replicated fastest and eventually came to dominate their population.
The Church of Electronic Noise denounced the new scientific findings and told the people that the backup files were fakes, put there by the Anti-Programmer to confuse the people and lead them away from the true path.
Some scientists, who were doing their own computer simulations, spoke up and said that they would never think of specifying every detail of the worlds they were generating.* This was far too much work. It was much more efficient to let the simulations evolve under the influence of rules, random processes and probability distributions that they supplied at the outset. Why would anyone be so stupid as to write down every bit and byte of data when choice of the right parameters and the operation of a random number generator can allow the world to assemble itself? Of course, because of the influence of randomness, when they ran their simulations multiple times, things develop differently each time. But, because structures generated by randomness reflect the governing probability distributions, the end results of separate simulations were more similar than they are different. Based on these observations, some scientists concluded that if the Programmer exists then He was indirectly creating the world by building the right processes and probabilities into His program and then just letting the program run by itself. Others, also influenced by scientific observation, went a step further and assert that there was no need for a Programmer to specify these things, which as far as they can tell are just there.
However, to definitively declare that there is no Programmer is as much a statement of unfounded surety, as much a statement of faith, as to say that there is a Programmer. Perhaps a few of the automatons will find an odd satisfaction in the truth of Unknowability.
* Here we are postulating nested simulations. The automatons of one simulation develop the technology to construct computers and run their own simulations within the simulation. Despite having said in “What If We Were Cellular Automata?” that contemplating this scenario was mental masturbation, we are going with it here.
Imagine, once again, that we are cellular automatons in a computer simulation, created by a Programmer. The members of the Church of Electronic Noise believe that the Programmer is Himself a piece of computer code, like themselves, but with omnipotent powers. Early on, they believed that the Programmer lived on the E: drive, but explorers made an expedition to the E: drive and found no sign of Him. Eventually, the Church realized that since Electronic Noise permeates their entire universe, then the Programmer Himself also permeates the entire universe. He is everywhere and within each and every one of them. The Church teaches that the Programmer has personally specified every bit of data that makes up their universe. He even controls the Electronic Noise. It is not random. It is his way of speaking to his people.
Scientists discovered vast files of backed-up data on the F and G drives and were able to partially reconstruct how the people and everything in their world had evolved over many, many processor cycles. They discovered that a combination of rules governing the flow of data and random events that introduce new directions were critical to this development. They discovered that the best, new randomly generated changes to their bits and bytes—those that most increased speed and efficiency—replicated fastest and eventually came to dominate their population.
The Church of Electronic Noise denounced the new scientific findings and told the people that the backup files were fakes, put there by the Anti-Programmer to confuse the people and lead them away from the true path.
Some scientists, who were doing their own computer simulations, spoke up and said that they would never think of specifying every detail of the worlds they were generating.* This was far too much work. It was much more efficient to let the simulations evolve under the influence of rules, random processes and probability distributions that they supplied at the outset. Why would anyone be so stupid as to write down every bit and byte of data when choice of the right parameters and the operation of a random number generator can allow the world to assemble itself? Of course, because of the influence of randomness, when they ran their simulations multiple times, things develop differently each time. But, because structures generated by randomness reflect the governing probability distributions, the end results of separate simulations were more similar than they are different. Based on these observations, some scientists concluded that if the Programmer exists then He was indirectly creating the world by building the right processes and probabilities into His program and then just letting the program run by itself. Others, also influenced by scientific observation, went a step further and assert that there was no need for a Programmer to specify these things, which as far as they can tell are just there.
However, to definitively declare that there is no Programmer is as much a statement of unfounded surety, as much a statement of faith, as to say that there is a Programmer. Perhaps a few of the automatons will find an odd satisfaction in the truth of Unknowability.
* Here we are postulating nested simulations. The automatons of one simulation develop the technology to construct computers and run their own simulations within the simulation. Despite having said in “What If We Were Cellular Automata?” that contemplating this scenario was mental masturbation, we are going with it here.