Both the Intelligent Alien and Simulation ideas just push the question of 'purpose' up a level. Sure, the aliens may have a purpose, but if they are themselves a cosmological purposeless accident then by extension it's arguable that so are we.
They do, but while the 'kid in his garage running the simulation' may have no purpose, I guess the article author is suggesting that in a simulation our 'purpose' is to let the experiment play out and entertain this transcendental 'kid'.
So in the end, what does it mean if the garage-kid created us to entertain him? Am I bound by that purpose? Does it somehow give my life more meaning?
A lot of interesting discussion centers on how to reconcile the generalized principle of mediocrity with the apparently low probability of a life-supporting universe existing (in terms of how fine-tuned basic constants have to be for it to happen). Some people try to end-run around this with anthropic arguments (which better writers than myself have pointed out are fallacious when applied this way); others try to build on QM and a many-worlds approach to posit that a universe like ours is possible and thus must exist (and in fact a large number of them, similar but each slightly different, must exist). And some turn not to the Judeo-Christian literal-biblical-reading everything-created-in-six-days idea of "God", but to the general idea that our universe might be the product of intelligence.
And a lot of that work focuses on simulation arguments, which solve the seemingly-improbable "tuning" of our universe's physical constants by saying that they were in fact tuned by some intelligence for a particular purpose. That purpose need not be to produce us, or anything resembling us (perhaps we are simply a side effect of a set of constants that produce some other result that's actually of interest to the simulators), and might be as banal as "to see what happens when you plug in these values for the constants", but the purpose would nonetheless exist.
There's also a line of reasoning which comes out of that and says that once such a capability exists, suddenly our own universe does not appear so unlikely. All it takes is one universe, somewhere, with constants providing the ability to simulate other universes (which is more general and thus more likely than constants providing the specific configuration of our own universe), and you get to add not just simulations running in that universe, but simulations running in simulations running in simulations... and so on all the way down. At which point the number of universes which exist and support intelligent life grows dramatically, possibly even rivaling the number of universes which exist and do not support intelligent life.
Though on a completely different tack there are people who've run with the idea that singularities fire off big bangs of their own, producing new universes not visible from ours, and posited a kind of natural selection principle based on that: universes which give rise to singularities will have more "offspring", so universes which give rise to singularities should be more common than universes which don't. And since one easy way to get singularities is through organized clumping of matter which can then undergo gravitational collapse, and that same thing is what allows us to exist, it's not so unlikely to see our universe.
The Many-worlds interpretation of QM does not mean that different universes have different fundamental constants. If that were the case, the fundamental constants could change in value each time a quantum measurement took place.
The universe might be infinite in extent (e.g. Einstein-de Sitter) even though at any time you can only see a finite part of it, so even though the probability of life in any galaxy might be vanishingly small, as long as it's finite you can expect life to emerge somewhere.
Supposing our universe is a simulation, possibly running inside another simulation, etc. At some level there still must be a ground reality in which the first simulation was made. So, there needs to be at least one level, which appeared out of nowhere, or always existed, in which computers can be built to run the simulation.
I'd rather not have to repeat the same points I made in an argument I had here previously, as no one seems to change their mind about these things, but I can't see any way that NPCs in a virtual reality/simulated universe can be conscious - even though they might appear to be - so I think that if we're in a simulation, consciousness must be based in the universe which is not a simulation.
It might be possible for the fundamental constants (and, indeed, the laws of physics) to be fine-tuned, but only in a simulation, by its programmers.
The idea of a creator God (of any non-simulated universe) has no explanatory power. All it does is hide complexity inside something supernatural. How would this god appear out of nothing?
It's more generally accepted now that the values of the constants were contingent on conditions in the very early universe. This doesn't mean that a fork off of, say, our world right now would get different constants, but that in the early-universe time period there would be forks getting different values, which then evolved completely differently. In this view we exist in one which happened to get the "right" constants.
The universe might be infinite in extent (e.g. Einstein-de Sitter) even though at any time you can only see a finite part of it, so even though the probability of life in any galaxy might be vanishingly small, as long as it's finite you can expect life to emerge somewhere.
We don't have evidence of the universe being infinite in extent, though.
So, there needs to be at least one level, which appeared out of nowhere, or always existed, in which computers can be built to run the simulation.
Again, the claim in the simulation argument is not "uncreated universes are impossible". It's that "an uncreated universe capable of giving rise to simulations is a less specific requirement and therefore more likely to occur".
The idea of a creator God
Which I explicitly said I wasn't talking about. For someone who's tired of repeating himself you sure seem fine with making me do it.
Cite? I'm unaware of any such consensus.
> We don't have evidence of the universe being infinite in extent, though.
The universe's density seems to be very close to the critical density:
http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/cosmos/C/Critical+Density
But at any rate you seem not to be a particularly pleasant interlocutor, and like you I'm tired of repeating myself.
Paul Dirac, and a few others argued that the relative strengths of the electromagnetic and gravitational forces between elementary particles (e.g. within the hydrogen atom) is directly related to the age of the universe, i.e. that gravity is still becoming weaker, rather than acquiring its current strength close to the big bang.
I'm interested in this subject - in particular the proposed mechanism and dimensionless constants involved, but can't find any papers arguing the conditions in the early universe determine their values.
If in the future we have even faster computers, and ability to scan all the molecules in your brain (at good enough resolution, but not beyond Heisenberg). Then we simulate the chemistry going on. Do we now have consciousness in a computer?
It is hard to see how billions of neurons together create consciousness. Just like how it hard to see how computer can be conscious. But claiming "impossible" is quite a strong claim. How do you support it?
If our universe is a simulation, it is one of atoms or quantum fields/gravity or something that gives rise to those. Anything else we see is build from those things. Therefor consciousness seems like an effect grounded in this universe.
At this point I have nothing further to add.
At least not in the way you might imagine. Consider where your consciousness goes when you fall asleep and aren't dreaming. Or when you're put under for surgery. I don't know if you've been put under, but for me one moment they were putting the mask over my face, and the next moment I awoke and the surgery was finished. I didn't experience any passage of time. You could say I wasn't here or didn't exist during that period.
It seems like certain things have to be occurring in the brain to say that you are awake, conscious and here. So this consciousness has certain dependencies, now what are they? Can we deactivate certain parts of your brain and you still feel here? I think so, but if we take away enough, you're no longer here. And I think if we add them back, your experience becomes more vivid and here, like slowly coming to in the morning, or when a deaf person has a hearing implant added so they can hear again.
So having the feeling of being here is a higher order thought, depending on the hardware faculties to be functioning. And that hardware can be substituted for non-biological equipment and you can be conscious of the readings of the sensor. It also comes in degrees, meaning we can be more or less here.
Which is to say, maybe the NPC doesn't have to be biological. It just needs to have the same dependencies to exist that exist now for you. You couldn't be reading this in your sleep, you read it when all the dependencies exist to say, "hmmm, that's interesting but my left frontal lobe says..."
PS. I hear you have nothing further to add, but my own left frontal lobe was compelled to chat. Apologies if it disturbed you, have a good one.
My position can be summarized thus: if someone made a Sonic the Hedgehog toy which could interact meaningfully with its environment I would entertain the possibility it had some rudimentary consciousness. But unlike the character in the computer game, that wouldn't be a simulation. Could the character you see on the screen in the computer game be conscious? I don't think so.
You can replace Many-Worlds with Eternal Inflation and you get an infinity of bubble universes, and my understanding is those universes would span every possible set of constants:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_inflation
> In 1983, inflation was shown to be eternal leading a multiverse in which space is broken up into bubbles or patches whose properties differ from patch to patch spanning all physical possibilities.
My interest in the subject predates this - when actively researching the subject I developed a scalar-tensor theory consistent with Dirac's Large Number Hypothesis, and preferred the idea that there's only one possible set of physical laws. I was never happy with the Anthropic Principle.