Bustr Bensn

Simulationism

The best case I can think of against the existence of God is that the universe doesn’t seem to have very many other examples of a single point of failure, top-down, authority. Even “queen bees” and ants and those things are not so much in charge as specialized to a particular task (which isn’t management). In general, queens and kings are just too vulnerable to survive very long. God (king of kings and lord of lords) appeared to humans during a period in human history when top-down single points of failure were invented (along with empires and conquest and all that fun stuff) and it would be my guess that that model will be retired soon.

Democracy, wisdom of crowds, peer-to-peer networks, networks in general seem to be a better model for creation, destruction, and general progress at this point in time.

As technology and society learn from nature and the universe that distributed power and emergent intelligence is not only smarter, but more sustainable and reliable than the top-down approach, it gives us an opportunity to invent a new anthropomorphism for the beauty and mystery of the complexities of the universe.

What’s it gonna be?  The universe as simulation?  God as a team of video game creators taken to the extreme?  How long again is it until a computer is powerful enough to create a simulation of the universe?  Even if that’s a million years away, it still seems unlikely that we’d be the first (or the trillionth) universe to create a simulation of another universe.  But that’s subject to all the same biases that backed up the watchmaker analogy in the age of watches.