The example of a simulation and an Admin entity was discussed some days ago at #hard-light, and there's nothing fundamentally divine about such an Admin entity.
The interesting thing here is that it's a (very strange and particular) example of a nested universe, in which an universe (simulation) exists within a bigger whole. But of course, the actual universe (etymologically, everything-that-exists) includes both the parent and child realms.
From the point of view of the parent universe, yes. But from the point of view of the simulation, no. The parent universe is completely closed off to us. There might be no way to even know it exists. As far as the simulation is concerned, the simulation is the entire universe because there is nothing else that can be observed.
But is supernatural and divinity truly a relative term?
In my view, the parent and child universes are not truly separate. The child universe is a virtualization running on parent universe's hardware, and yes - it is possible for the parent universe to be unobservable from the child universe.
This is exactly the point I've been trying to make - even if something seemed supernatural or divine to us at first inspection, I truly don't think that kind of classification makes any sense.
Because in this kind of situation, the concept of "natural" simply expands to include the parent universe, admin-entity, and the simulation.
Meanwhile, in parent universe, the admin entities can argue about whether the simulation counts as part of "reality" or whether the simulated child universe is "real"...
For the parent universe, we can make a statement that clearly in that universe, laws of nature allow for running a simulation that is in fact our world. The same laws of nature in that universe also clearly allow for the existence of the Admin entity, and the server infrastructure, and what have you.
This doesn't make the parent universe in any way fundamentally supernatural in my view. And it certainly doesn't make the Admin entity "divine". This, regardless of the level of interaction between the running simulation and admin personnel.
What makes them supernatural and divine is the fact that
a) The parent universe is unobservable from the point of view of the simulation.
b) The scientist can affect the simulation without leaving any trace of how it was done. To all intents and purposes, a miracle.
Ah. Pardon me for moving the goalposts a little at this point.
There's been a little mix-up between being un-observable, and being "beyond scientific method".
There
are things that are - to our best physical understanding - un-observable. These include event horizons - two main examples are the expansion event horizon of the universe, and of course the gravity event horizons of black holes - and certain quantum phenomena in which observing something changes end result, so we literally cannot observe how a photon or electron behaves as it travels through a double slit in an experiment.
But even though there are these un-observable things, they are not truly "beyond scientific method". We can make rational hypotheses about what happens beyond these limits of observability, and although these suggestions and guesses are not quite as valid from scientific perspective as empirically confirmed theories, it doesn't mean they can't be right.
For something to be truly beyond any means of scientific method, they would have to be not only un-observable (so that we can't make any measurements of them) but they should also be fundamentally incomprehensible, without any logic, and beyond any attempts to formalize a scientific hypothesis about it. And I'm seriously drawing a blank page trying to figure any example of what that could be.
You've claimed that since any deity/supernatural entity's effects on the natural world can be studied with science. I pointed out the nested universe as an example of a time when it can't. It's not simply that we can't understand the results of trying to do science on the parent universe, it's that we physically can't do science on it.
If you say science can measure everything, you're obviously incorrect. So the only scientific possibility is to say that "Maybe there are some things which science can't measure" which is pretty much what everyone but you has defined as agnosticism.
There are things that cannot be observed, but in my view there's a difference between rational hypothesis and supernatural hypothesis about these gaps.
Good examples of rational hypotheses are:
-Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics
-Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics
-Singularities as physical entities within event horizons of black holes
-Einstein-Rosen bridges
-Simulation hypothesis
-other nested universe hypotheses (such as black holes containing child universes)
These are all rationally describeable hypotheses. They can be understood, even if - at the moment - there's little in the ways of verifying or falsifying them. However, they are not fundamentally incomprehensible as supernatural should be.
Good examples of supernatural hypotheses:
-God did it (god remains an inexplicable primus motor)
-souls go to other realm after their physical host dies (never been any suggestion as to what is a soul, how it exists without physical hardware, etc.)
-miracles/magic (divine/arcane influence causing physically measurable events)
"Irrelevant" is something that does not equate to "unreal". It's also a bizarre qualification, since I did not say that the entirety of "miracles" would occur in a non-observable way. I did take my time explaining how the supernatural portion of a miracle is precisely the surplus that goes beyond material explanations, or scientific probing. It does not mean that the entirety of such miracles must be unobservable.
I completely disagree. If science witnesses a phenomenon which has a component that goes beyond material explanations or scientific probing, that doesn't mean it's supernatural or a miracle or any such thing.
I can think of several cases where exactly this happened, and now it's just part of science. How about observations of Moons of Jupiter, or more recent examples of Mercury's perihelion precession and photoelectric phenomenon?
The fact that we still don't clearly understand and can't explain gravity and quantum phenomena doesn't even mean they're supernatural. We've made tons of observations about them, and we have pretty good models about how they work, so we have reasonably good scientific understanding about them - but we can't claim to fully understand how they work, and therein come the different hypotheses for the deeper intricacies of the universe.
I can really easily imagine a miracle that just goes against any fundamental law of the universe, its fundamental properties unavailable to any observer, however they give rise to really big observable phenomena. Kara's analogy is perfect as an illustration on how this is possible as a proof of concept. The admin decides to change parts of a simulated world by his own whims, and to the conscious observers inside this simulation it appears as if things came out of nowhere without any intrinsic logic, going against any laws they were aware of that ruled their world.
If, using this example, we observe a phenomenon which seemingly has a "foreign influence" as its primus motor, it would certainly be an event of great interest, and we should hope that it would be repeatable. But as soon as it can be documented and accepted as a thing that happens, to me it simply stops being supernatural in any way.
If Admins can change properties of simulation, or add things, then yeah that can happen. Does that make it supernatural or miraculous?
In my view - no. If the admins start poking around the simulation, then at some point we can measure the changes, and at such point in time we can start hypothesizing about the origin of these changes.
And even if we may not come to the right conclusion about the nature of the admin-beings, we can make rational hypotheses about what is beyond these seemingly mysterious changes. A simulation-admin hypothesis is one such thing.
To call these "miracles" supernatural is to forgo any chance of even pondering what it's about, or a chance of guessing right.
A few more things about the simulation hypothesis, since I personally find it very fascinating.
It may be that the "parent universe" and its ruleset are beyond our means of measurement. However, the fact that we would be running in a simulation might, in some ways, be demonstrable. We could start looking for anomalies, floating point errors, signs of digital computation, bugs, glitches, div by zero, any seemingly strange thing that would make sense if we were in a simulation. It wouldn't PROVE that we are in a simulation, though.
Conversely, to falsify simulation hypothesis we would need to try to figure out something that would be fundamentally impossible to do in a simulated universe. However this is easier said than done, since arbitrarily powerful computational system running the simulation would in theory be capable of simulating anything. But we can try and look at some things that would, at least, be very difficult to do correctly in a simulation. Time dilation effects, for example, would require quite a bit of flexibility from the simulation - and other effects of relativity such as constant speed of light would likewise be
challenging to simulate. Basically you would need the simulation to run every observer in its own inertial frame. Another curious effect would be simultaneity - there should in theory be a global reference timeframe in the simulation, and if admin were to make a global change in simulation - such as changing some natural constant - would it be instantaneous throughout the universe... or would it be applied on different observer frames depending on their individual timeframe?
By the way, there are some suggestions that some natural constants may not be quite constant. Fine structure constant in particular is of interest, because small changes in it can change other natural constants such as speed of light or gravitational constant. But whether the possible changes in it are simply results of universe's different stages of life, or result of "outside influences", I would still refuse to call the hypothetical "outside influence" divine or supernatural.
