[ExI] A Simulation Argument

[Damien Broderick]

At 08:12 AM 1/17/2008 -0800, Ian wrote:

>  Let's look at a real tower-of-turtles problem. If I
>posit (the 'God' theory) that 'Something created
>everything that exists, and x created the universe',
>I've paradoxically placed x (at the level above) in
>the set of things necessarily created calling for
>something at a still higher level to have created x.
>'So then who created God?' Now that's a genuine
>tower-of-turtles problem

No it's not. In the usual metaphysical analysis, the question and 
answer go like this: We can see that everything in the world is 
transient, contingent, causally dependant on prior states that were 
or are themselves transient, contingent, causally dependant on prior 
states. This can't be tracked back to infinity, because things are 
running down. Some other class of explanation for a universe of 
contingent existents is needed--and that suggests a realm of Being 
that is categorically *unlike* the world we see and subsist in. That 
Being must be necessary of itself.

The subsequent steps that attribute purpose, timelessness, ubiquity, 
information processing, personhood, love, etc, to this disjunct state 
of being can easily be questioned (especially if those attributions 
appear to derive from states of being that are temporally sequential, 
spatially partitioned, etc). But it's simply missing the point to 
ask: Well, then, nyah nyah, *what created the uncreated*?

The way to get rid of an ontically necessary deity is to show how the 
universe, surprisingly, *does at its root embody these 
characteristics* and can be at once self-subsistent, entropic and 
evolving. The temptation in trying to meet this challenge is exactly 
to posit one kind of contingent turtle tower or another.

Damien Broderick