And I Also Do Not Believe We Live in a Simulation

And I Also Do Not Believe We Live in a Simulation · My Reason Why I Think the Fix Stars are One Light Day Up

I came across this piece from CMI:

CMI : Is the universe a simulation?
First published: 25 February 2017 (GMT+10)
Re-featured on homepage: 9 July 2022 (GMT+10)
https://creation.com/is-the-universe-a-simulator

And it basically involves not just why they but also why I reject the idea of our universe being a simulation. Here is the paragraph:

And ask yourself, what is the simplest conclusion: that we’re a 5^th level simulation, or that we’re living in a real world? Clearly the latter. As such, without any evidence for being in a simulation, we have no reason to suppose that we are in one. After all, why should we think e.g. our sense and memory beliefs (by which we ‘know’ about the physical world) are untrustworthy? And I’m not talking about occasional failures in those faculties. I’m asking: why should we consider our sense perception and memory beliefs generally unreliable? See, to be able to judge them as generally unreliable, we need some means of doing so. But we can’t get outside of our own sense and memory beliefs to do so! So there’s no way to do that apart from using our sense and memory faculties. But if we do, we end up assuming the general reliability of our sense and memory faculties to deny their general reliability. So, such skepticism about the reality of the physical world by and large ends up having to presume what it tries to deny.

Fine and dandy ... why have people then suspected me of believing we live in a simulation?

Interestingly, several panellists pointed out that the designer of such a simulation, being outside and above the simulation, parallels the idea of God.

Yes, I do believe there is a God and that He wields powers over the universe similar to those a simulator would have over a simulation.

That's one of the reasons. And it is a bad one, since it encourages:

• a confusion between Christianity and a very wild and counterintuitive, hypersceptical idea
• and also a confusion between rejecting such an idea and rejecting any parts of Christianity that the enquirer thinks reminiscent of them, and therefore also between Christians rightly rejecting "the Matrix" and people who are not really Christians at all any more, since they have rejected parts of Christianity.

Here is another.

Some will claim that Earth having "millions and billions of years" in its history, stars being "billions of light years away" and "Earth orbitting the Sun" are gained by using sense data. Therefore, the rejection of these ideologemes would be a rejection of sense data, a disqualification of the reliability of senses and memory they are supposedly solely indebted to - along with, some would add "obviously" - good reasoning about these data.

I simply think such reasonings are bad, and not because our reasoning faculty in general is bad, I do not hold the least to "we are so corrupt we cannot even think straight" or similar things. I think such reasonings are bad because they presuppose incorrect premisses.

When a piece of matter that contains both lead and uranium is dated to 4.5 billion years, the incorrect premiss I most suspect to be such is "the only isotope of lead that does not always come from uranium or thorium is lead 204, while atom weights 206, 207 and 208 invariably come from decay" ...

When the Andromeda galaxy is described as 150 000 light years across (or in the English wiki 220 000 liht years across) and 2.45 million light years away, the incorrect premiss is likely to be "it consists of stars of the main series and therefore of sizes in the main series, i e roughly solar size" which combined with how it's analysed as consisting of so many stars involves these being very, very far away.

When it comes to the "main series stars are roughly solar size" the incorrect premiss is "we have seen this by comparing parallax and distance to apparent size" and this in turn from "parallax shows the distance" which is from "Earth orbits the Sun at a known distance and certain phenomena are correctly analysed as parallax - an inverse view of earth's movement" ...

Here is how parallax will not show the distance in a Geocentric universe, while it will show it in a Heliocentric one:

So, given my acceptance of Geocentrism, the rejection of parallax measures of distance is a matter of correctly analysed geometry. If a certain triangle involves Earth at two points and the star at one point, and the distance between the positions of the Earth known, we have two angles and a distance = enough to triangulate the triangle. If on the other hand it involves Earth at one single point and the star at two points with an unknown distance, we have exactly just one angle, and that is NOT enough to triangulate anything.

And when it comes to accepting Heliocentrism as "proven" the number one false premiss I come across again and again is, "Earth and Sun cannot have their relative movements determined by factors involving will, but need to have them determined solely by inertia and gravitation and these are determined solely by the Masses, and Sun fairly obviously has the greater one" - and the key problem is "Earth and Sun cannot have their relative movements determined by factors involving will, but need to have them determined solely by inertia and gravitation."

Here I can somewhat relate to how to some people the fact of believing stars and Sun to be moved around Earth each day by God and Sun also to be moved around the zodiac by an angel would recall "matrix" - the key similarity is that for phenomena spanning the whole sky we see, something is arranged by a will or by a hierarchy of more than one wills, God's will being over the angels and both being over matter - or the simulator's will being over any detail in the simulated universe.

However, we do have from our daily experience, and not at all by straining credulity in our senses or memory, indeed rather by strengthening them, the fact that wills do trump matter. The letters in this essay were not put together by complex configurations of either electricity or gravitation, but by my will to express certain truths.

My world view does not differ from materialism like the "matrix" by believing less than by senses, but unlike the matrix by believing my senses and more than them, like my introspective certainty I do have a will trumping the movements of my fingers.

"But can't we show that introspection is often wrong and unreliably?"

Here I give the word to Shaun Doyle, as he continues the above cited paragraph:

The fundamental mistake people tend to make with this extreme skeptical line is thinking that, just because sense and memory can be fooled, that means they are habitually fooled.

Dito for introspection, and I have just painted myself out of and my detractors into the same corner as the matrix believing ultra-sceptics. Thank you for your kind assistance, Shaun Doyle!

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
Sts Zeno and Companions, Martyrs
9.VII.2022

Romae, ad Guttam jugiter manantem, natalis sanctorum Martyrum Zenonis, et aliorum decem millium ac ducentorum trium.