Proving that the Universe is a simulation would be proving the existence of gods. Considering how much effort humans have dedicated to this question over the millennia, and the various consequences, and the continuing influence on the lives of the majority of people, I would say it matters.
So what would it mean if there are gods of simulation? Most religions and gods purely exist as a way to implement law and order: define what is good and bad, and to manipulate people to behave accordingly (otherwise you will be punished in hell).
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...
Well why wouldn't they be consistent? Just as you would add another column to an existing database table and run a data migration so that the new column makes sense in the context of the old and no one is the wiser, so can our simulators adjust the simulation as well as our understanding of the laws of physics in a manner that we could not discern. That is, if they are indeed able to pause and change anything.
Simulation gods would most likely be gods of chaos as that is what simulations are generally used for: to test the behaviour of a system in diverse and often adverse conditions.
i don't think that proving reality to be a simulation would necessitate the proof of any divine beings. all it would really prove is that we are within a simulation that was put into place by something capable of doing such. there is no reason to ascribe "divine" or "holy" traits to those potential creators. granted, i operate under the ideology that there is no distinction between "divinity" and mundane reality itself. i more or less believe that religions were created to establish a schism between those two ideals and to set the divine aside because most people just cannot handle the true power of the infinite potential that lies within their conscious awareness. arbitrary power structures put in place so humans can point to something else and say that that something else is separate from us and better than us, instead of seeing that that something else simply is us— or more appropriately, the sum of us altogether. the way I see it, even if you are just a single lonely gear within a machine, connected within countless others, in being part of the machine, you represent the machine as a whole itself just as much as you represent your perspective as an individual gear.
i suppose that's a fair assessment to make, but for me personally that isn't how I define a God, as there are several deities within older mythologies and religions that weren't exactly omnipotent (and even mortal ones such as the ones in Norse mythology). to me, the only real quality that endows one with the aspect of Godhead is the abstract concept we refer to as "divinity", or rather some intrinsic separation of the creator from the created, as it were. now, certainly, if some higher order lab tech created the simulation, you could argue that they are indeed separate from it, and in having the power to create it, they do have the power to modify any aspect of it, but I still don't believe that imbues them with any sort of divinity. as far as I can see it, they could likely just be the same as us: a simulated being under the purview of an even higher order of complexity.
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
I develop physically-based renderers, the output of which is easily mistaken for photographs. I don't presume myself to be a god of course, but it does make me think... what if you piece together enough specialists for this that and the other aspect of a simulation, and run them on a freakishly powerful computer, with a sort of genetic algorithm simulating virtual beings...
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
I didn't like one aspect of the book, when he was trying to show that what simulated people feel doesn't depend on the way simulation runs, he was mainly focusing on computing later timeframes of the simulation before earlier ones, which is not possible.
Not just any simulation, but only a simulation with thinking creatures would imply that god exists. And not in a sense that our universe is created by a god, but in sense that creator of the simulation would be the god of the simulated universe.
It would not be proving the existence of gods, because it would lead to the question of why is there a reality wherein a being could create a simulation (which requires ordered laws of physics etc.).
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. :)
In philosophy, there's also the idea of cognitive closure where, at a certain point, humans are bounded off to these issues. It could be that we don't possess the vocabulary yet.
Why Gods? Aren't Gods somehow directly involved and often omniscient? Our universe could be a side effect of a machine learning algorithm and quite incomprehensible to it's own creator who only care about the output. This is more akin to the computer in Hitchhiker's Guide to Galaxy.
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.
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.
