I think a step from a lawful universe to an arbitrarily programmable universe would be fairly big. We exclude miracles in principle, for ems, miracles would be possible. If ems would agree the universe has a Programmer who is allmighty (can simulate what he wants), omniscient (can look at any part of the source code) it would be a big step.
So it would be relevant to the meta step “are miracles possible?” and not to the more object level step “is this X miracle report for reals?”
Also a uniform prior would be useful for the more syncretic approaches—it would not be so useful for primitive kind of religious approaches like “thing X is written in my holy book while some other holy books writes something totally different” but it would be more useful for the kind of “unified theology/philosophy” that the best minds in Islam (Avicenna) Judaism (Maimonides) Catholicism (Aquinas) were developing.
My point is not the veracity of each religious claim but the veracity of living in a kind of universe where religious claims are possible, even likely that something like those happens (the Programmer plays around with stuff, tests ideas, throws a bunch of tablets on a desert tribe to experimentally test some sociology theories of ems) and then all we had to decide is which ones.
Essentially, you assume here that the distribution of “universes someone bothers to simulate” is different from the Solomonoff priors in a way that makes universes where religion is true more likely.
May be. If the simulators are humans, some of them would enjoy playing gods; and even if it is a small minority, it would still be a larger fraction than universes where gods “naturally” exist as complicated laws of physics. If the simulators are alien intelligences… well, I would be less certain about those, but still seems like the fraction of situations where the simulator decides to personally interact with the simulation should be larger than universes where an intelligence is “hardcoded” into laws of physics.
But there would still be many simulated universes where the simulator is not interested in interaction with sentient beings, and all religions arise naturally for reasons unrelated to their correctness. Or the simulator would interact with the world, but in a manner totally different from what religions talk about; imagine for example that our world is just a computer game played by a bored teenager who once in a few millions of years clicks a mouse button to drop a huge meteor and change ecosystem; the individual humans are too small and short-lived for him to even notice. Maybe the simulator completely ignores humans, and is only using this universe as an incubator for an AGI that he will later ask to compute some mathematical problem.
So, the probability of some religion being true could be greater, but still relatively small. Not sure if large enough to excuse Pascal’s wager.
I think a step from a lawful universe to an arbitrarily programmable universe would be fairly big. We exclude miracles in principle, for ems, miracles would be possible. If ems would agree the universe has a Programmer who is allmighty (can simulate what he wants), omniscient (can look at any part of the source code) it would be a big step.
So it would be relevant to the meta step “are miracles possible?” and not to the more object level step “is this X miracle report for reals?”
Also a uniform prior would be useful for the more syncretic approaches—it would not be so useful for primitive kind of religious approaches like “thing X is written in my holy book while some other holy books writes something totally different” but it would be more useful for the kind of “unified theology/philosophy” that the best minds in Islam (Avicenna) Judaism (Maimonides) Catholicism (Aquinas) were developing.
My point is not the veracity of each religious claim but the veracity of living in a kind of universe where religious claims are possible, even likely that something like those happens (the Programmer plays around with stuff, tests ideas, throws a bunch of tablets on a desert tribe to experimentally test some sociology theories of ems) and then all we had to decide is which ones.
Essentially, you assume here that the distribution of “universes someone bothers to simulate” is different from the Solomonoff priors in a way that makes universes where religion is true more likely.
May be. If the simulators are humans, some of them would enjoy playing gods; and even if it is a small minority, it would still be a larger fraction than universes where gods “naturally” exist as complicated laws of physics. If the simulators are alien intelligences… well, I would be less certain about those, but still seems like the fraction of situations where the simulator decides to personally interact with the simulation should be larger than universes where an intelligence is “hardcoded” into laws of physics.
But there would still be many simulated universes where the simulator is not interested in interaction with sentient beings, and all religions arise naturally for reasons unrelated to their correctness. Or the simulator would interact with the world, but in a manner totally different from what religions talk about; imagine for example that our world is just a computer game played by a bored teenager who once in a few millions of years clicks a mouse button to drop a huge meteor and change ecosystem; the individual humans are too small and short-lived for him to even notice. Maybe the simulator completely ignores humans, and is only using this universe as an incubator for an AGI that he will later ask to compute some mathematical problem.
So, the probability of some religion being true could be greater, but still relatively small. Not sure if large enough to excuse Pascal’s wager.