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Gods always seems to pop up in discussions about this topic, which I find glib and annoying.

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.

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Idk about your proposal of what makes one person right and another not.

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.

Exactly. If someone is physics PhD and makes the same conclusion as a random person, it's still the same abstraction, just that ones shows an implementation in physics while other in human words.

It's more like the simulation authors can influence population of different places to have different religions, ideals and rules, to see which one would win. If you look at it, it could be some kind of optimization, you put different ideologies together and see how they interact (commerce, wars). This also allows avoiding cultural degeneracy, i.e. seeing some prosperous society turning into something horrible (e.g. sacrificing humans daily to make sun rise), that would be then killed off by a competing culture in an inevitable clash of cultures, leaving the stronger/more viable alive. I worry about globalization as a single unified culture because of human tendency to degenerate; having a cultural competition seems to be needed for humanity to progress.

Or that Zeus had sometimes turned up and spoken to them.

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