We can exclude that possibility because itâs a possibility that we canât observe by any means. If what youâre suggesting is true, that a higher being is interfering and modifying our reality, then we should be able to test that assumption. Anything that can have a physical effect in our world is testable in our world. Since we donât observe that happening, and according to you canât observe it since doing so would end the simulation, itâs a possibility we donât have to consider because itâs impossible to prove it or test it or, most importantly, to falsify it.
Again, itâs the exact same argument as the one day old suggestion. Itâs ultimately meaningless.
Youâre conflating âpossibleâ with âprobableâ, and refusing to address possibilities you donât have proof of.
When higgs bosons were predicted they were untestable. When gravity waves were predicted they were untestable. When black hole rings were predicted they were untestable.
Then we discovered how to build the sensors and instruments to test them.
Youâre saying those scientists shouldâve dropped their ideas because at that point it was still impossible to test or falsify.
What scientists do instead is to develop many different alternative theories, then design tests and experiments, and then once data is in then they decide what do believe about the theories based on what the could prove or not.
Edit: why are people like this so aggressively wrong in the dumbest ways⊠Not only did they pick only one of 3 examples of mine to attack and ignoring the rest, they also did so maximally incorrectly all while failing to understand the consequences of their own policy of rejecting anything you donât know how to test.
The core of my argument is really just âsometimes scientists works on stuff nobody knows how to test, because maybe theyâll find out how in the futureâ, and this dudeâs argument is essentially âif you donât know how to test something itâs literally impossible for it to be true and therefore it shall be rejected, but also scientists always knows the path forward and therefore I donât have to reevaluate my understanding of scienceâ
No, Iâm not. Iâm really not understanding what this straw man is that youâre arguing.
When bosons were predicted, the method by which they would be measured was also predicted. Just because it took 40 years to do that doesnât mean that they were untestable. âUnobservedâ is not the same as âuntestableâ which is exactly the distinction that youâre missing with the simulation idea.
Iâm not saying anything of the sort. You suggested that it is possible for our reality to be a simulation where the creator of said simulation is actively making changes. Those changes would have to be observable by the people inside the simulation. You then retreated to the idea that the creators are perfect and simply stop the simulations where those changes are detected. Epistemologically, that idea is both untestable and unobservable because, according to you, any simulation where either of those things were true would have been stopped. That makes it impossible for our current reality to be one of those because it has not stopped and, again, any simulation that is indistinguishable from physical reality is pointless to discuss because itâs non-falsifiable. Itâs just like the one day old example Iâve given several times now that you keep ignoring and never addressing.
Besides the fact that it wasnât actually known if those tests would work, thereâs also hypothetical tests for simulation theory (eg. testing for pixelated resolution of spacetime, plus endless âconsistency testsâ) so doesnât that make it all the same thing anyway? Youâre making much too strong assumptions.
What do you mean? They knew, at the time that the particle was predicted, that if it did exist it would have to be within a certain range of mass and would have to be the result of particle collisions where decay or exchange cause the particle to be emitted. Saying that it wasnât known if those tests would work just isnât true. The tests would only work if their theories were correct. It wasnât the testing that was the issue. It was the very rare, specific conditions under which the particle could be observed that was the issue. If they were right, the tests would allow them to observe the particle and they knew this when they theorized its existence.
Doesnât what make it all the same thing? Youâre the one that said these beings could be changing things mid-simulation. If the boiling point of water was suddenly changed, weâd be able to tell. If the structure of carbon changed, weâd know. Then you walked that back and said that theyâd just stop the simulation if we noticed these things. But they havenât because you and I are still here discussing that. So the only options left over, if we assume they can make changes, is that either they havenât done that or the simulation is perfect and so the distinction between a simulation and a real, physical world is a moot point.
We should perhaps finish our paper with an apology and a caution. We apologize to experimentalists for having no idea what is the mass of the Higgs boson, âŠ, and for not being sure of its couplings to other particles, except that they are probably all very small. For these reasons, we do not want to encourage big experimental searches for the Higgs boson, but we do feel that people doing experiments vulnerable to the Higgs boson should know how it may turn up.
ââJohn R. Ellis, Mary K. Gaillard, and Dimitri V. Nanopoulos,
One of the problems was that at the time there was almost no clue to the mass of the Higgs boson. Theoretical considerations left open a very wide range somewhere between 10 GeV/c2[13] and 1000 GeV/c2[14] with no real indication where to look.[1]
So youâre literally as wrong as you could be. It wasnât until what once was a wild hypothesis had been explored more that they could start to make better predictions around where it might be, decades later, and after tests narrowing down where it wasnât.
I didnât âwalk backâ either. Exploring multiple possibilities is called hedging, not walking back (since that means you retracted something which I didnât do), and scientists does it too. I didnât say either one option is more likely, I told you there are many possibilities and then you insisted on calling several of them impossible not because any mechanics exclude itâs possibility but because you canât see it. Thatâs plainly wrong. You can definitely argue itâs improbable, but you donât get to call it impossible without proving it impossible.
LOL. Are you seriously trying to claim that you disproved my point by providing a citation that literally proves what I said? You just provided a range of masses within which they knew the Highs Boson particle would be. They predicted that range and they were right. How is that an example of âno ideaâ?
Direct quote from CERN, where they both predicted and discovered the boson (emphasis mine):
Since every particle can be represented as a wave in a quantum field, introducing a new field into the theory means that a particle associated with this field should also exist.
Most properties of this particle are predicted by the theory, so if a particle matching the description would be found, it provides strong evidence for the BEH mechanism â otherwise we have no means of probing for the existence of the Higgs field.
The properties they were looking for were predicted by Higgsâ initial theory. The only unknown property was the specific mass but, as Iâve mentioned and you confirmed, they knew a range. Every other property of it was already known. If he was wrong, they wouldnât have found anything. They knew what tests they needed to do because they knew what properties they were looking for. In this case, a boson with a large mass, within a large range, that quickly decays. The only reason it took so long to observe using these tests was because the lifetime of the particle is so short which means it cannot be found in nature.
You did walk it back. Youâve walked back your original statement and are misrepresenting what I said. I never said that itâs impossible because you canât see it. I said that your suggestion that theyâre changing parameters mid-simulation is impossible because weâd be able to observe those changes. That doesnât mean we canât see them. It means we canât measure them or detect them using any of our senses. Then you moved the goalposts to them removing or ending any simulations where we did observe these things which makes that a meaningless scenario that is unfalsifiable.
Iâve only been making one point. Youâre the one that keeps moving the goalposts and changing the argument.
Physicists tends to work with precision in decimals, not multiple orders of magnitude. They didnât know it would be there either, all they knew is the theory they had would be simpler if it was there than not.
Your quote from the website is a bad attempt at backdating current knowledge from very recent research and experiments to the original discoverers
They had thousands of different predictions and couldnât know which were right until the data was in.
If, due to its mass, they could only observe the interplay between the Higgs boson on one hand and the W and Z bosons on the other, the puzzle of the fermion masses would remain unsolved. Discovering the particle at a convenient mass was an unexpected kindness from nature. If it were slightly more massive, above 180 GeV or so, the options to study it at the time of its discovery would have been more limited.
The variety of available transformation products means that data from the individual channels can be combined together through sophisticated techniques to build up a greater understanding of the particle. âDoing so is not trivial,â says Giovanni Petrucciani, co-convener of the Higgs analysis group in CMS. âYou have to treat the uncertainties similarly across all the individual analyses and interpret the results carefully, once you have applied complicated statistical machinery.â Combining data from the transformation of the Higgs boson to pairs of Z bosons and pairs of photons allowed ATLAS and CMS to discover the Higgs boson in 2012.
It was legitimately not known if we could find it. It could have been big enough that LHC wouldâve failed, and then it could have taken us 50 more years to build a collider large enough (mostly due to cost, but still)
In fact theyâre only mostly sure still
Yet, the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism remains among the least-understood phenomena in the Standard Model. Indeed, while scientists have dropped the â-likeâ suffix and have understood the Higgs boson remarkably since its discovery, they still do not know if what was observed is the Higgs boson predicted by the Standard Model.
You donât even understand what Iâm saying, how can you accuse me of walking back?
You keep making unjustified claims even now. What if a simulator knows what youâre looking at and simply donât mess with that? Clearly not impossible. Implausible? Absolutely, AND I KEEP SAYING SO, thereâs no reason to believe itâs happening, and yet itâs possible. Your inability to comprehend doesnât change the meaning of my statements.
Your persistence in calling it meaningless because itâs unfalsifiable with no further context is equivalent to you calling most theoretical physics meaningless. A ton of theories like string theory is by your standard equally unfalsifiable and therefore we shall declare it impossible and stop investigating.
Instead we develop endless hypothetical scenarios specifically so we can look for evidence when new tools for investigating fundamental physics become available.
How could it be backdating current knowledge when those properties are literally in his paper where he posited the theory to begin with! Youâre either being disingenuous or intentionally misleading. The reason he didnât expect to find it in his lifetime was because the chances of observing the particle were infinitesimally small because of its short lifetime and the fact that it decays into other common bosons. It is not found in nature and can only be produced in a lab.
I really donât know how much clearer you can be about their ability to predict what they were looking for other than repeating the quote and linking the paper:
Most properties of this particle are predicted by the theory
Are you saying CERN is lying on their Highs Boson page?
And youâre also wrong about the idea of âvariantsâ that youâre claiming. The variants theyâre referring to are the byproducts of the decay. Since the Higgs Boson decays into the same products as normal Z and W bosons and photons.
Every type of particle is characterized by a set of properties: mass, electrical charge, lifetime etc. For the Higgs boson, mass was the only unknown. For a known mass, all the other properties can be calculated from theory. Measuring them experimentally and comparing them with the result of these calculations allows scientists to verify that they have really found the Higgs boson.
Youâre mischaracterizing what theyâre saying and arguing that what they are saying, and what Iâve quoted directly from their website where it says that all the properties except the mass were known, is not true. Youâre also confusing us having the capabilities, using technology available at the time, with the ideas underpinning how it would be observed and what would have been observed based on the theory associated with it. They knew what they were looking for but being able to observe a particle that decays immediately isnât easy. Your chart and quote are talking about the variations of interactions with other bosons and photons. How am I supposed to take any of your replies seriously?
Iâm not making unjustified claims. You keep moving the goalposts away from the initial statement and are now arguing probability instead of the actual argument. The fact is that it is impossible for us to be in a simulation where the creators can change conditions if they end any simulations where weâd notice them. Itâs not improbable. Itâs impossible. You can keep making more straw men all you want. It doesnât change the initial argument.
By this same logic we can exclude the possibility of simulation theory, no? By your own logic itâs not a stretch to âexclude the possibilityâ of something âbecause itâs a possibility that we canât observe by any meansâ. I believe goes back to the point of the meme: self proclaimed logical actors believing in something unprovable and thus proving themselves to be hypocritesâŠ
Itâs not unprovable, though. Thatâs where youâre wrong. A simulation can be provable so long as functions in line with its own internally consistent rules and what we observe about it.
For the sake of argument (this is an oversimplification but the point is the same), imagine that this simulation was running on a computer with 8MB of memory. Within the simulation (as in inside of it), we would be able to observe situations where things are not internally consistent as a result of, for example, running out of memory. Other observations we could make that would support the theory and be internally inconsistent would be things disappearing, as mentioned before, or moving without cause. Details could be internally inconsistent.
The only reason to exclude simulation theory completely would be if we have to assume that the simulation is perfect and, therefore, not distinguishably different from reality. This was the premise of the movie âThe Matrixâ in its initial concept when humans were used as computer brains to run the simulation rather than giant batteries (which makes no sense as our bodies are terrible energy storage mediums).
So, yes, there are situations where simulation theory could be excluded by the same premise but nothing that has been presented so far that would allow for the changes described to our current reality that would go unnoticed. The difference is that there is evidence (although not admittedly strong) that makes simulation theory more probable than any religion. Itâs not hypocritical to accept the possibility of something based on some objective evidence rather than something meant to be accepted without any evidence at all.
But by this same logic anything can be âprovenâ. If I see evidence of an abrhamic god, then I can prove its existence. This is not a novel or sufficient observation to meet the criteria that imperical based science is held to. The claim must also be falsifiable, just how a metaphysical God can always escape attempts to disprove it by relying on the imperical nature of science i.e. we canât really prove or disprove anything objectively, the counter effect is that it canât be proven under the scientific imperical framework either. I will admit Iâm not well versed in the evidence for ST which you have referenced, but how would it be falsifiable? It seems any attempt can always be handwaved away as itâs simply too complex a simulation⊠God works in mysterious ways right. To me this puts it squarely in the metaphysical realm, which isnât a bad thing per say, but again speaks to the intent of the meme.
How do you draw the conclusion that anything can be proven by that logic? The entire issue with religious gods is that there is no evidence nor logic which can be used to prove or falsify the hypothesis of their existence. You canât see evidence of an abrahamic god because it doesnât exist. If it did, he wouldnât be a religious god, he would be empirically proven to be god because there would be evidence that he exists that people could see or otherwise observe with their senses.
I donât understand your line of reasoning when youâve just confirmed how metaphysical gods can escape any attempt to falsify them. If we live in a simulation, then that wouldnât be the case. Weâd be able to prove we are in a simulation by exploiting the limits of the simulation. If it doesnât have any limits, then itâs a moot point since itâs perfect and we wouldnât have the capacity to distinguish that from any other layer of abstraction of simulation. What if weâre living in a simulation thatâs being run inside of another simulation? What if this reality is a simulation running in a VM running on a host machine? At some point, if we canât objectively tell a difference then itâs a moot point as I would compare it, yet again, to the one day old world hypothesis. If we canât tell the difference (meaning we are unable to or incapable of distinguishing), then it doesnât matter how many layers of abstraction there are. If we have the ability to know that and just havenât observed it yet, that still makes the other options impossible since our very existence predicates a simulation that is still ongoing and that we are a part of.
What am I conflating?
We can exclude that possibility because itâs a possibility that we canât observe by any means. If what youâre suggesting is true, that a higher being is interfering and modifying our reality, then we should be able to test that assumption. Anything that can have a physical effect in our world is testable in our world. Since we donât observe that happening, and according to you canât observe it since doing so would end the simulation, itâs a possibility we donât have to consider because itâs impossible to prove it or test it or, most importantly, to falsify it.
Again, itâs the exact same argument as the one day old suggestion. Itâs ultimately meaningless.
Youâre conflating âpossibleâ with âprobableâ, and refusing to address possibilities you donât have proof of.
When higgs bosons were predicted they were untestable. When gravity waves were predicted they were untestable. When black hole rings were predicted they were untestable.
Then we discovered how to build the sensors and instruments to test them.
Youâre saying those scientists shouldâve dropped their ideas because at that point it was still impossible to test or falsify.
What scientists do instead is to develop many different alternative theories, then design tests and experiments, and then once data is in then they decide what do believe about the theories based on what the could prove or not.
Edit: why are people like this so aggressively wrong in the dumbest ways⊠Not only did they pick only one of 3 examples of mine to attack and ignoring the rest, they also did so maximally incorrectly all while failing to understand the consequences of their own policy of rejecting anything you donât know how to test.
The core of my argument is really just âsometimes scientists works on stuff nobody knows how to test, because maybe theyâll find out how in the futureâ, and this dudeâs argument is essentially âif you donât know how to test something itâs literally impossible for it to be true and therefore it shall be rejected, but also scientists always knows the path forward and therefore I donât have to reevaluate my understanding of scienceâ
No, Iâm not. Iâm really not understanding what this straw man is that youâre arguing.
When bosons were predicted, the method by which they would be measured was also predicted. Just because it took 40 years to do that doesnât mean that they were untestable. âUnobservedâ is not the same as âuntestableâ which is exactly the distinction that youâre missing with the simulation idea.
Iâm not saying anything of the sort. You suggested that it is possible for our reality to be a simulation where the creator of said simulation is actively making changes. Those changes would have to be observable by the people inside the simulation. You then retreated to the idea that the creators are perfect and simply stop the simulations where those changes are detected. Epistemologically, that idea is both untestable and unobservable because, according to you, any simulation where either of those things were true would have been stopped. That makes it impossible for our current reality to be one of those because it has not stopped and, again, any simulation that is indistinguishable from physical reality is pointless to discuss because itâs non-falsifiable. Itâs just like the one day old example Iâve given several times now that you keep ignoring and never addressing.
Besides the fact that it wasnât actually known if those tests would work, thereâs also hypothetical tests for simulation theory (eg. testing for pixelated resolution of spacetime, plus endless âconsistency testsâ) so doesnât that make it all the same thing anyway? Youâre making much too strong assumptions.
What do you mean? They knew, at the time that the particle was predicted, that if it did exist it would have to be within a certain range of mass and would have to be the result of particle collisions where decay or exchange cause the particle to be emitted. Saying that it wasnât known if those tests would work just isnât true. The tests would only work if their theories were correct. It wasnât the testing that was the issue. It was the very rare, specific conditions under which the particle could be observed that was the issue. If they were right, the tests would allow them to observe the particle and they knew this when they theorized its existence.
Doesnât what make it all the same thing? Youâre the one that said these beings could be changing things mid-simulation. If the boiling point of water was suddenly changed, weâd be able to tell. If the structure of carbon changed, weâd know. Then you walked that back and said that theyâd just stop the simulation if we noticed these things. But they havenât because you and I are still here discussing that. So the only options left over, if we assume they can make changes, is that either they havenât done that or the simulation is perfect and so the distinction between a simulation and a real, physical world is a moot point.
Found via Wikipedia. From the 70âs:
ââJohn R. Ellis, Mary K. Gaillard, and Dimitri V. Nanopoulos,
So youâre literally as wrong as you could be. It wasnât until what once was a wild hypothesis had been explored more that they could start to make better predictions around where it might be, decades later, and after tests narrowing down where it wasnât.
I didnât âwalk backâ either. Exploring multiple possibilities is called hedging, not walking back (since that means you retracted something which I didnât do), and scientists does it too. I didnât say either one option is more likely, I told you there are many possibilities and then you insisted on calling several of them impossible not because any mechanics exclude itâs possibility but because you canât see it. Thatâs plainly wrong. You can definitely argue itâs improbable, but you donât get to call it impossible without proving it impossible.
LOL. Are you seriously trying to claim that you disproved my point by providing a citation that literally proves what I said? You just provided a range of masses within which they knew the Highs Boson particle would be. They predicted that range and they were right. How is that an example of âno ideaâ?
Direct quote from CERN, where they both predicted and discovered the boson (emphasis mine):
The properties they were looking for were predicted by Higgsâ initial theory. The only unknown property was the specific mass but, as Iâve mentioned and you confirmed, they knew a range. Every other property of it was already known. If he was wrong, they wouldnât have found anything. They knew what tests they needed to do because they knew what properties they were looking for. In this case, a boson with a large mass, within a large range, that quickly decays. The only reason it took so long to observe using these tests was because the lifetime of the particle is so short which means it cannot be found in nature.
You did walk it back. Youâve walked back your original statement and are misrepresenting what I said. I never said that itâs impossible because you canât see it. I said that your suggestion that theyâre changing parameters mid-simulation is impossible because weâd be able to observe those changes. That doesnât mean we canât see them. It means we canât measure them or detect them using any of our senses. Then you moved the goalposts to them removing or ending any simulations where we did observe these things which makes that a meaningless scenario that is unfalsifiable.
Iâve only been making one point. Youâre the one that keeps moving the goalposts and changing the argument.
Physicists tends to work with precision in decimals, not multiple orders of magnitude. They didnât know it would be there either, all they knew is the theory they had would be simpler if it was there than not.
Your quote from the website is a bad attempt at backdating current knowledge from very recent research and experiments to the original discoverers
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-the-higgs-boson-ruined-peter-higgss-life/
Itâs not even known if thereâs more than one Higgs boson, because the theory allows multiple variants.
Look at that graph of how many different variants would decay differently;
https://home.cern/news/series/lhc-physics-ten/higgs-boson-revealing-natures-secrets
They had thousands of different predictions and couldnât know which were right until the data was in.
It was legitimately not known if we could find it. It could have been big enough that LHC wouldâve failed, and then it could have taken us 50 more years to build a collider large enough (mostly due to cost, but still)
In fact theyâre only mostly sure still
You donât even understand what Iâm saying, how can you accuse me of walking back?
You keep making unjustified claims even now. What if a simulator knows what youâre looking at and simply donât mess with that? Clearly not impossible. Implausible? Absolutely, AND I KEEP SAYING SO, thereâs no reason to believe itâs happening, and yet itâs possible. Your inability to comprehend doesnât change the meaning of my statements.
Your persistence in calling it meaningless because itâs unfalsifiable with no further context is equivalent to you calling most theoretical physics meaningless. A ton of theories like string theory is by your standard equally unfalsifiable and therefore we shall declare it impossible and stop investigating.
Instead we develop endless hypothetical scenarios specifically so we can look for evidence when new tools for investigating fundamental physics become available.
How could it be backdating current knowledge when those properties are literally in his paper where he posited the theory to begin with! Youâre either being disingenuous or intentionally misleading. The reason he didnât expect to find it in his lifetime was because the chances of observing the particle were infinitesimally small because of its short lifetime and the fact that it decays into other common bosons. It is not found in nature and can only be produced in a lab.
I really donât know how much clearer you can be about their ability to predict what they were looking for other than repeating the quote and linking the paper:
Are you saying CERN is lying on their Highs Boson page?
https://home.cern/science/physics/higgs-boson/what
https://journals.aps.org/prl/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevLett.13.508
And youâre also wrong about the idea of âvariantsâ that youâre claiming. The variants theyâre referring to are the byproducts of the decay. Since the Higgs Boson decays into the same products as normal Z and W bosons and photons.
Youâre mischaracterizing what theyâre saying and arguing that what they are saying, and what Iâve quoted directly from their website where it says that all the properties except the mass were known, is not true. Youâre also confusing us having the capabilities, using technology available at the time, with the ideas underpinning how it would be observed and what would have been observed based on the theory associated with it. They knew what they were looking for but being able to observe a particle that decays immediately isnât easy. Your chart and quote are talking about the variations of interactions with other bosons and photons. How am I supposed to take any of your replies seriously?
Iâm not making unjustified claims. You keep moving the goalposts away from the initial statement and are now arguing probability instead of the actual argument. The fact is that it is impossible for us to be in a simulation where the creators can change conditions if they end any simulations where weâd notice them. Itâs not improbable. Itâs impossible. You can keep making more straw men all you want. It doesnât change the initial argument.
By this same logic we can exclude the possibility of simulation theory, no? By your own logic itâs not a stretch to âexclude the possibilityâ of something âbecause itâs a possibility that we canât observe by any meansâ. I believe goes back to the point of the meme: self proclaimed logical actors believing in something unprovable and thus proving themselves to be hypocritesâŠ
Itâs not unprovable, though. Thatâs where youâre wrong. A simulation can be provable so long as functions in line with its own internally consistent rules and what we observe about it.
For the sake of argument (this is an oversimplification but the point is the same), imagine that this simulation was running on a computer with 8MB of memory. Within the simulation (as in inside of it), we would be able to observe situations where things are not internally consistent as a result of, for example, running out of memory. Other observations we could make that would support the theory and be internally inconsistent would be things disappearing, as mentioned before, or moving without cause. Details could be internally inconsistent.
The only reason to exclude simulation theory completely would be if we have to assume that the simulation is perfect and, therefore, not distinguishably different from reality. This was the premise of the movie âThe Matrixâ in its initial concept when humans were used as computer brains to run the simulation rather than giant batteries (which makes no sense as our bodies are terrible energy storage mediums).
So, yes, there are situations where simulation theory could be excluded by the same premise but nothing that has been presented so far that would allow for the changes described to our current reality that would go unnoticed. The difference is that there is evidence (although not admittedly strong) that makes simulation theory more probable than any religion. Itâs not hypocritical to accept the possibility of something based on some objective evidence rather than something meant to be accepted without any evidence at all.
But by this same logic anything can be âprovenâ. If I see evidence of an abrhamic god, then I can prove its existence. This is not a novel or sufficient observation to meet the criteria that imperical based science is held to. The claim must also be falsifiable, just how a metaphysical God can always escape attempts to disprove it by relying on the imperical nature of science i.e. we canât really prove or disprove anything objectively, the counter effect is that it canât be proven under the scientific imperical framework either. I will admit Iâm not well versed in the evidence for ST which you have referenced, but how would it be falsifiable? It seems any attempt can always be handwaved away as itâs simply too complex a simulation⊠God works in mysterious ways right. To me this puts it squarely in the metaphysical realm, which isnât a bad thing per say, but again speaks to the intent of the meme.
How do you draw the conclusion that anything can be proven by that logic? The entire issue with religious gods is that there is no evidence nor logic which can be used to prove or falsify the hypothesis of their existence. You canât see evidence of an abrahamic god because it doesnât exist. If it did, he wouldnât be a religious god, he would be empirically proven to be god because there would be evidence that he exists that people could see or otherwise observe with their senses.
I donât understand your line of reasoning when youâve just confirmed how metaphysical gods can escape any attempt to falsify them. If we live in a simulation, then that wouldnât be the case. Weâd be able to prove we are in a simulation by exploiting the limits of the simulation. If it doesnât have any limits, then itâs a moot point since itâs perfect and we wouldnât have the capacity to distinguish that from any other layer of abstraction of simulation. What if weâre living in a simulation thatâs being run inside of another simulation? What if this reality is a simulation running in a VM running on a host machine? At some point, if we canât objectively tell a difference then itâs a moot point as I would compare it, yet again, to the one day old world hypothesis. If we canât tell the difference (meaning we are unable to or incapable of distinguishing), then it doesnât matter how many layers of abstraction there are. If we have the ability to know that and just havenât observed it yet, that still makes the other options impossible since our very existence predicates a simulation that is still ongoing and that we are a part of.