Jesus may have been a real person, but real people aren't gods.We Christians like to believe that God is a personal God...Jesus was a real person that really lived and for which there's evidence as to the resurrection. You can believe it or not --- I'm not really here to discuss God.
If you really cannot know, how can you make such confident assertions that it even exists, particularly when no such force strong enough or long-range enough to be significant has been observed, and no evidence (or even definition) of 'spirit' has been found?But God is also a force,,a "spirit" which we cannot really know.
We don't know that "everything had to 'start'". We only know that the big bang is the earliest time we currently have access to. Current thinking based on the physics we understand today suggests that the universe we see is very likely to be the product of some previous state - either a different type of spacetime, or the more fundamental state that Krauss describes as 'nothing' (it's not his idea alone - Nobel Laureate physicist Frank Wilczek said, “The answer to the ancient question ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ would then be that ‘nothing’ is unstable.” - see Victor Stenger's article 'Why is there Something rather than Nothing'). When time itself is an emergent property, the concept of beginning and ending doesn't make much sense in more fundamental states.No matter where we go with scientific theories and analysis and proofs,,,we still have the problem that at some point everything had to "start".
I've said before that this problem, as far as I can understand, did not exist before because we always believed that the universe always existed. It's only after the Big Bang theory that the problem has surfaced precisely because scientists now state that the univers did NOT always exist -- so where did it come from? Hence Krauss' idea and all those that agree with him.
What would be the point of calling a physical process, be it a phase change, a quantum fluctuation, or whatever, 'God'? where does that get you?What I'm saying is that whatever STARTED the universe, or multi-verse, or whatever it'll turn out to be...THIS could be called God.
The idea of trying to remedy a lack of knowledge of the natural world by positing an entity that, by definition, solves the problem by being outside those constraints and therefore inexplicable and unknowable, is no explanation at all - again, I ask how it is in any way a better explanation than that other non-explanation, "It's magic!"?
To further anthropomorphise it into a 'personal' authority figure looks like wishful thinking - what's the justification?
Whitworth wasn't the originator of this idea (an argument can be made that even the Ancient Greeks had similar ideas), it was Nick Bostrom who, in 2003, wrote the 'Simulation Hypothesis' paper that became popular. Since then, there have been many criticisms and rebuttals, but fundamentally it was based on entirely speculative premises that could apply to any number of imaginative possibilities - the Boltzman Brain idea is along similar probabilistic lines (albeit with greater justification).I'm recently learning about the information that undergirds everything... I've been trying to explain this but can't in scientific terms.
This morning I watched this very interesting YouTube video on this very topic.
What do you think of it? This one has the word "God" in it, which is what attracted me to it, but it seems like a new idea that many are looking into --sans the god reason...
Whitworth suggests that the physical properties of our universe are consistent with the properties of a digital VR simulation - but this implies that hyper-advanced entities that can simulate entire universes happen to be using the same kind of computing technology we currently use (and even that is being replaced by quantum computing and neural networks). The claim is that everything is quantised, including space itself; last I heard, it's too early to say that space is quantised, but it is expected to be because of the physical problems with infinite divisibility.
It's worth considering why we see quantised phenomena - it's because, for example, matter can't exist if the energy of electron orbitals isn't quantised, they'd fall into the nucleus, and so-on. But if quantisation is the key indicator we're in a simulation, this raises the question of what kind of universe the hypothetical simulators exist in - if it has electrons and atoms like ours, then it too will be quantised - that would put them in the same situation as us - do they think that they are also in a simulation?
And if their universe is not quantised like ours, it must be very different - to the extent that it would be unlikely that they would have digital computing at all, and raises the question of why they'd simulate a quantised universe at all - certainly not for ancestor simulation, which was one proposed reason.
In other words, it's hard to imagine what a universe would be like if all the simulation indicators claimed by Whitworth for our universe were absent, whether it could support life as we understand it, and if it could support some kind of life, why they would simulate a universe utterly different from their own.
The video also invokes the much-hyped Holographic Principle as support. This is a mathematical equivalence arising out of black hole physics that asserts that the informational content of any n-dimensional volume can be fully represented on its n-1 dimensional surface, holographically. So the informational content of a 3D spherical volume (e.g. a black hole) can be holographically represented on its 2D surface. This mathematical equivalence doesn't mean our universe is a hologram, it just means it's mathematically equivalent. Carefully edited video snippets don't change physics in the real world.
I stopped watching halfway through.
Philosophically, whether we're a VR simulation or not is moot; for us, the world is what it is - we can investigate it to see how it works, and that is what we do.
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