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Feb 12, 2025
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This reminds me of the last paragraph of a philosophy essay I wrote in college:
" As such, this god could be "running" the universe on a computer--a four-dimensional kind of computer, with (to us) infinite storage capacity and processor speed. Or, the "god" could simply be the computer, "simulating" our universe (Except that it would be a perfect representation of our universe, so it wouldn't really be a simulation. Which implies that if you can describe something well enough, it no longer is simulated, but has "existence". Does this mean that we can imbue that which we have the ability to perfectly understand--say, a sphere, which has extent in the three dimensions we are able to simultaneously perceive--with the commodity of existence? The reader is encouraged to speculate.) This god, or computer, or god-cum-computer can shape our reality to anything it wants, simply by modifying our universe at different times and in different places. Therefore, it could make us believe that we had free will by making us think that we believe that we have free will. It is ironic that we could indeed have free will, but be deluding ourselves into thinking that a god could make us think that we believed that we have free will. This soon becomes a pointlessly recursive hypothesis, with the only possible conclusion being that we can't know for certain whether or not we have free will. "
