If one's religious belief is that we are living in a computer simulation, what would this religion be called?
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Why would you call that a religion?
Didn’t they go over this in The Matrix?
Actually, it was first covered in Tron, soon to be reconfirmed in the sequel, Tron: Legacy.
@wildpotato
Not Platonism? He was the guy with the cave analogy after all, and he was a lot earlier with it.
Newest Age Religion. Get it? New Age. Newest Age.
ha ha. I crack me up
I know there are Mac, PC, iphone and Linux owners who speak of their OS choice in words often used to describe religions.
I can see it now. One hundred years from now there will be shrines built in the shop where the first DEC computer, or Univac or whatever, was built and there will be annual pilgrimages to see the birth place of the patent holder. A certain group might even be caught installing EMP devices in the road to disrupt the services.
Sounds like an idea for a story.
Apparently (according to Wikipedia) this is the belief of some Christian anarchists. The idea seems to be to escape the simulation through enlightenment and say Jesus, John the baptist and Moses are escapees.
Of course the Godelites would never get along with the Jobites and Wozniakers. We’d have to build a wall around a section of Silicon Valley and limit entrance and exit to four toll-collecting Gates.
The Babbages would wear long black coats and wide brimmed hats and would eschew clock speeds greater than 1 MHz.
@Lupin – Haven’t you seen that Intel ad about the guy who co-invented the USB port? The one that says “Our Rock Stars Aren’t Like Your Rock Stars.”?
What cha wanna bet he’ll be one of the Silicon Saints?
@Darwin Great Ad! That’s what I’m talkin’ about.
I think it’s take more than a belief in computer simulation to make a religion. But if you want to make up a religion based on that idea, just invent a god, give it any name you want, register with the government, and live tax free forever. If L. Ron Hubbard can do it, so can you.
I would say that if we were a simulation, we were not to know and if we were to know we would. So any religion such would be a fluke in the system.
To me it seems like the god wold be named after the one that has supposedly written the program. The big programmer outside the machine, also known as The Author.
I think it should be called Authorism.
@Fyrius you’re right, actually – they would both be iterations of idealism, which would actually be the more accurate term, I think.
Simism, if we were all basically parts of some incredible SimCity.
How would you test the theory that we are living in a computer simulation? If it can’t be tested then what difference does it make?
@tinyfairy, never register your religion with the government. You want it to spread via grass roots means, (or maybe virally, via YouTube). Besides, being tax free comes with its own problems.
L. Ron Hubbard was a kook. Never follow in the footsteps of a lunatic. That’s what Evelyn told me, and I’m willing to bet she is right. =)
@LostInParadise
Well, if it’s supposed to be a religion, that sounds about right.
@Thammuz Their untestability is the problem. Of course you could plug any holes with ‘faith’!
If it makes you feel better.
@lloydbird I know, that was supposed to be sarcasm…
Even accepting that religions are inherently untestable, what about being a simulation differs from not being a simulation. Having a God who can defy the laws of physics to create miracles is equivalent to having a God as a master programmer running a simulation who can change the code at any point. To put it more compactly, how does the simulated differ from the real? And where is the reality behind the simulation?
When God created the universe he deployed the code to His secured production system. For the past 13.7 billion years He’s been running the Universe 1.0 program without code changes. Hackers are unable to crack the system. If God wants to try new code he will use a different universe in the multiverse.
We should be glad about the absence of permanent upgrades. Windows is giving us enough trouble. Imagine a physics curriculum that has to be changed all the time, because the physical laws are different every 6 months. I have faith that God keeps our Universe orderly and predictable.
@mattbrowne
Maybe each update also rewrites our memories and documentation to suit the new rules.
DUN DUN DUUUN
Heck, Big Brother could do that.
@mattbrowne: So you think god is some kind of supernatural Bill Gates?
@Darwin Gee, i hope not, i don’t want a bug to make me impotent or some shit.
Life is plenty buggy, so I don’t think we can use bugs or the lack thereof as evidence either way.
Well, when God created Linus Torvalds I guess He did it in His image. Not so sure about Bill Gates when it comes to stable universal systems. But Bill might pass as a Good Samaritan and get Jesus Christ’s blessing.
I don’t know. I recall mention of camels passing through eyes of needles with more ease than rich people getting into heaven. If that’s true, Bill Gates would be the last person ever to get up there.
Linux is based on Unix, by the way. Torvalds didn’t write the kernel himself. That credit is due to Macintosh.
Torvalds genius is only partly related to creating a new Unix derivative. His real genius is related to sparking joint work over the Internet which represens a breakthrough of the open source model. You probably know the ‘Cathedral and the Bazaar’ essay by Eric S. Raymond on software engineering methods, based on his observations of the Linux community.
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