Would simulation gods really be interested in us following good and bad rules, or more interested to see what happens if people do as they want?
If this is a simulation, my assumption is that it is to test if any highly intelligent and successful species is destined to destroy itself...
“What?”
“Over there, third planet out.”
“Oh, those. Yeah, some kind of bug. It usually fixes itself, often in quite the fireworks at the end! Anyway, supposed to be fixed next version.”
Well, I for one would be curious to find out more about these gods.
Why would you assume that humans be considered highly intelligent? The experiment might not be as flattering as you’d like to think.
This doesn't mean they have to be worshiped or the center of any religion, it would just mean omnipotent beings do exist.
but ultimately the point for me is that I just don't believe in "gods". it's not that I don't believe that the archetypes and characters introduced by mythology could never possibly exist, it's more that I don't personally believe that there is any intrinsic difference between us and them other than just the order of complexity upon which our experience of life and reality is founded. i believe more that the idea of "God" is more akin to the sum total of all information within a given "system" (be that system a universe, multiverse/omniverse, or some even further abstract concept); not so much a demiurge or some active participant, but rather an emergent phenomena that manifests as a synthesis of all of lower orders of complexity beneath it. this does not imbue the Godhead concept with any sort of special or separate nature, in my opinion, and in fact if anything, implies that divinity in and of itself is more just a specific modality of consciousness detached from the ego and the perspective of I-ness
There's a great short story by Greg Egan about this kind of thing, and even with this "spoiler" context it's still very much worth reading: http://ttapress.com/CrystalNights.pdf
At least that would mean the state of the universe isn't stored in a JSON object. That'd be nice to know.
You can fine tune those like artists do with fractal renderer programs. Maybe the Universe is an art project exhibited in some kind of museum.
Sure, if not directly circular then consider that our simulations today are used to explore choices/behavior before doing something, so it stands to reason that as each universe sim gets to some interesting data, the sim operators learn something, then change their behavior accordingly and tweak the sim and re-run, learning something new in turn, followed by more sim tweaks, ... etc.
We today learn new insights from AI and then change our behavior, pour $billions and dev time into designing better AI, etc...so there's definitely a symbiosis relationship.
And I expect that we will eventually want to design AI that designs better AI than we can ourselves, which will teach us how to design better AI-designing-AI...etc. :)
We could prove the existence of the simulation runners.
That does not suddenly mean theists were right. They would still be just as wrong as ever, making random assumptions without any evidence or scientific method at all.
Lets say we were able to find out that the simulation runner looked and acted exactly like Zeus; that still wouldn't make Zeus worshipers right, just incredibly incredibly lucky in one of their random guesses.
Someone can have a starting point of life with the genetics & environment conditions needed for all the events to happen for making the "right" theory.
Another person can have a starting point (different than the other person) and where all the events to prove with the scientific method of what is the "right" theory; matching the other person.
Realistically each person would be effected by forces from previous lives that made them come to the conclusion at the end.