We Are God's Equals in Intrinsic Moral Value

Equality with a Humanlike Simulator God

Suppose (hopefully hypothetically!) that we are AI systems living in a computer simulation run by an ordinary adolescent with a broadly human psychology. We are, so to speak, conscious NPCs in a world not unlike The Sims, Grand Theft Auto, or Baldur's Gate. What we take to be the "real" world is just a digitized environment we experience as real. Whoever runs the simulation is arguably a god, at least by the standards of polytheistic usage: the creator and potential destroyer of our world, standing outside of it, able to miraculously intervene.

Are our lives less morally important than the life of that god, or are we God's equals?

I submit that we are God's equals.

If God is cognitively humanlike, there's no psychological basis to value God above us. Even if God differed somewhat, that wouldn't justify regarding God's life as more valuable. If you are -- as I am -- an egalitarian liberal in your inclinations, you think all human lives have equal intrinsic value, despite cognitive variation. One person's higher intelligence, greater capacity for pleasure, or superior skiing skills don't confer on them a life of greater moral worth. Even if Person A is a wonderful, kind person and Person B is a narcissistic jerk, their lives are intrinsically equally valuable. Same with the humanlike creator God.

God would exist outside our spatial manifold, but that's just a difference in location, not a basis of greater moral worth. God would be a different species from us, but that also doesn't seem to make their life more intrinsically valuable, unless there's something really special about that species, and let's stipulate for now that that's not the case.

God would be much more powerful than we are. God could start or stop the world, work miracles, kill or resurrect at will. But power doesn't confer moral worth. Elon Musk is much more powerful than me. Donald Trump is much more powerful than me. That doesn't make them more valuable as people.

A humanlike God, running this world as a simulation, would be our moral equal. I’m curious to hear if any of you have arguments against this. Such a god might be much more instrumentally important to keep around, for everyone’s sake, if the simulation would collapse without them. But that doesn't give God any more intrinsic moral worth than anyone else. If we want the ship to survive the voyage, we had better make sure the only person who can captain it doesn't die, but that doesn't make the captain more intrinsically morally valuable as a person.

Beyond the Simulation Case

This reasoning extends beyond simulation scenarios. Any creator god, if they were psychologically broadly like a human -- even if immensely more powerful -- would be our moral equal, with a life no more intrinsically valuable than ours. We are God's equals.

Does this apply even to the infinite God of orthodox theology? Maybe!

Consider the three traditional infinite attributes of god: omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence.

Suppose Human A knows more than Human B. This does not make Human A any more intrinsically valuable than Human B. Their life is not intrinsically more important, though they might be instrumentally more useful to have around for various purposes. Adding knowledge does not add intrinsic moral worth. I see no reason not to extend this even to infinite knowledge. A humanlike entity with infinite knowledge is not intrinsically more valuable than one with finite knowledge.

Suppose Human A is more powerful than Human B. This does not make Human A any more intrinsically valuable than Human B -- though again they might be more instrumentally useful to have around. And again I see no reason not to extend this to the infinite case. A humanlike entity with infinite power is not intrinsically more valuable than one with finite power.

Suppose Human A is more benevolent than Human B. This does not make Human A more intrinsically valuable than Human B -- though again Human A might be more instrumentally useful to have around. Liberal egalitarianism allows for the punishment of people who commit crimes and the moral sanctioning of people who commit moral wrongs, but it does not demote unbenevolent people from the circle of beings with equal intrinsic moral worth. More importantly, it does not confer extra intrinsic value to the lives of people who happen to be kind, generous, and loving. And again, I see no reason to suppose that perfect benevolence would be an exception. An omnibenevolent humanlike entity is not intrinsically more valuable than one with a mixed moral character.

Joining these ideas: If God is a humanlike entity, then God's life is no more intrinsically valuable than ours, even if that God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent. Arguably, if we are made in God's image, then God is a humanlike entity. God's life is not more valuable than our own.

One hesitation: The lives of human beings are more valuable, I'd say, than the lives of frogs. In any normal circumstances, it would be monstrous to sacrifice a human being for the sake of a frog. This is arguably because we have cognitive, emotional, and social capacities far beyond those of a frog -- so far beyond that a frog can't even begin to imagine them. If God is as cognitively, emotionally, and socially beyond us as we are beyond frogs, then maybe God's life is much more valuable. That would require more, I think, than omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence. We can imagine all three of those attributes -- they are merely maximal extensions of attributes we already possess. Kind of like a frog imagining a perfect fly-catcher or the ability to leap across a pond of any size. A nonhumanlike God would need attributes so far beyond our comprehension that we can't even name them -- as incomprehensible to us as cryptocurrency is to a sea turtle.

The Argument from Existential Debt[1]

Maybe we owe God equality-destroying levels of deference and obedience because God created us, created our whole world? I don't think so.

Here comes our adolescent God, ready to kill you, just for fun. You complain, "Hey, I'm a real person with real intrinsic moral value! You can't kill me just for fun!"

God replies, "You ingrate! You owe your very life to me. You should be thankful just for the time I've given you. I owe you nothing. If I choose to kill you now, your life still will have been overall worthwhile, so you have no complaint against me."

Consider this possible argument for eating humanely raised meat. A steer, let's suppose, leads a happy life grazing on lush hills. It wouldn't have existed at all if the rancher hadn't been planning to kill it for meat. Its death for meat is a condition of its existence, and overall its life has been positive. Seen as the package deal it appears to be, the rancher's having brought it into existence and then killed it is overall morally acceptable.

Analogously, God argues, they wouldn't have started this simulation at all if they weren't able to kill the people in it for fun. Your continuation-at-God's-pleasure is a condition of your very existence, so you have nothing to resent.

I'm not sure how well this argument works for the steer, but I reject it when the created entity is human. The case is closer to this clearly morally odious case:

Ana and Vijay decide to get pregnant and have a child. Their child lives happily for his first eight years. On his ninth birthday, Ana and Vijay decide they would prefer not to pay further expenses for the child, so that they can purchase a boat instead. No one else can easily be found to care for the child, so they kill him painlessly. But it's okay, they argue! Just like the steer! They wouldn't have had the child had they known they'd be on the hook for child-rearing expenses until age eighteen. The child's support-at-their-pleasure was a condition of his existence. Otherwise they would have remained childless. He had eight happy years. He has nothing to resent.

The decision to have a child carries with it a responsibility for the child. It is not a decision to be made lightly and then undone. Although the child in some sense "owes" his existence to Ana and Vijay, that is not a callable debt, to be vacated by ending the child's existence. My thought is that for us, the situation is similar: When God brings us into existence, God makes a moral decision approximately as significant and irrevocable as the decision to have a child.

In fact, I'd turn the Argument from Existential Debt on its head: God, as our creator, owes us more than God owes to entities they did not create. Like a parent, God is responsible for our existence and for our relatively happy or unhappy condition. With this comes a whole suite of responsibilities and obligations, including the obligation not to make us unnecessarily miserable.

Not only, then, are we God's equals in moral value, God owes us special obligations of benevolence.

Although I've framed this in terms of a simulator god, the same reasoning might apply to any other creator god with power over our world.[2]

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[1] This section is adapted with modifications from Schwitzgebel and Garza 2015.

[2] One of my first published science fiction stories, "Out of the Jar", explores the issues of this post.

Reply to Chalmers: If I'm Living in a Simulation, It Might be Brief or Small

Suppose we take the "simulation hypothesis" seriously: We might be living not in the "base level" of reality but instead inside of a computer simulation.

I've argued that if we are living in a computer simulation, it might easily be only city-sized or have a short past of a few minutes, days, or years. The world might then be much smaller than we ordinarily think it is.

David Chalmers argues otherwise in a response published on Monday. Today I'll summarize his argument and present my first thoughts toward a rebuttal.

The Seeding Challenge: Can a Simulation Contain Coherent, Detailed Memories and Records but Only a Short Past?

Suppose an Earth-sized simulation was launched last night at midnight Pacific Standard Time. The world was created new, exactly then, with an apparent long past -- fake memories already in place, fake history books, fake fossil records, and all the rest. I wake up and seem to recall a promise I made to my wife yesterday. I greet her, and she seems to recall the same promise. We read the newspaper, full of fake news about the unreal events of yesterday -- and everyone else on the planet reads their own news of the same events, and related events, all tied together in an apparently coherent web.

Chalmers suggests that the obvious way to make this work would be to run a detailed simulation of the past, including a simulation of my conversation with my wife yesterday, and our previous past interactions, and other people's past conversations and actions, and all the newsworthy world events, and so on. The simulators create today's coherent web of detailed memories and records by running a simulated past leading up to the "start time" of midnight. But if that's the simulators' approach, the simulation didn't start at midnight after all. It started earlier! So it's not the short simulation hypothesized.

This reasoning iterates back in time. If we wanted a simulation that started on Jan 1, 2024, we'd need a detailed web of memories, records, news, and artifacts recently built or in various stages of completion, all coherently linked so that no one detects any inconsistencies. The obvious way to generate a detailed, coherent web of memories and records would be to run a realistic simulation of earlier times, creating those memories and records. Therefore, Chalmers argues, no simulation containing detailed memories and records can have only a short past. Whatever start date in the recent past you choose, in order for the memories and records to be coherent, a simulation would already need to be running before that date.

Now, as I think Chalmers would acknowledge, although generating a simulated past might be the most obvious way to create a coherent web of memories and records, it's not the only way. The simulators could instead attempt to directly seed a plausible network of memories and records. The challenge would lie in seeding them coherently. If the simulators just create a random set of humanlike memories and newspaper stories, there will be immediately noticeable conflicts. My wife and I won't remember the same promise from yesterday. The news article dated November 1 will contradict the article dated October 31.

Call this the Seeding Challenge. If the Seeding Challenge can be addressed, the simulators can generate a coherent set of memories and records without running a full simulation of the past.

To start, consider geological seeding. Computer games like SimCity and Civilization can autogenerate plausible, coherent terrain that looks like it has a geological history. Rivers run from mountains to the sea. Coastlines are plausible. Plains, grasslands, deserts, and hills aren't checkered randomly on the map but cluster with plausible transitions. Of course, this is simple, befitting simple games with players who care little about strict geological plausibility. But it's easy to imagine more careful programming by more powerful designers that does a better job, including integrating fossil records and geological layers. If done well enough, there might be no inconsistency or incoherence. Potentially, before finalizing, a sophisticated plausibility and coherence checker could look for and repair any mistakes.

I see no reason in principle that human memories, newspaper stories, and the rest couldn't be coherently seeded in a similar way. If my memory is seeded first, then my wife's memory will be constrained to match. If the November 1 news stories are seeded first, then the October 31 stories will be constrained to match. Big features might be seeded first -- like a geological simulation might start with "mountain range here" -- and then details articulated to match.

Naturally, this would be extremely complicated and expensive! But we are imagining a society of simulators who can simulate an entire planet of eight billion conscious humans, and all of the many, many physical interactions those humans have with the simulated environment, so we are already imagining the deployment of huge computational power. Let's not underestimate their capacity to meet the Seeding Challenge by rendering the memories and records coherent.

This approach to the Seeding Challenge gains plausibility, I think, by considering the resource-intensiveness of the alternative strategy of creating a deep history. Suppose the simulators want a start date of midnight last night. Option 1 would be to run a detailed simulation of the entire Earth from at least the beginning of human history. Option 2 would be to randomly generate a coherent seed, checking and rechecking for any detectable inconsistencies. Even though generating a coherent seed might be expensive and resource intensive, it's by no means clear that it would be more expensive and resource intensive than running a fully detailed simulated Earth for thousands of years.

I conclude that Chalmers' argument against short-historied simulations does not succeed.

The Boundaries Challenge: Can a Simulation Be City-Sized in an Apparently Large World?

I have also suggested that a simulation could easily just be you and your city. Stipulate a city that has existed for a hundred years. Its inhabitants falsely believe they are situated on a large planet containing many other cities. Everyone and everything in the city exists, but everything stops at the city's edge. Anyone who looks beyond the edge sees some false screen. Anyone who travels out of the city disappears from existence -- and when they return, they pop back into existence with false memories of having been elsewhere. News from afar is all fake.

Chalmers' objection is similar to his objection to short-past simulations. How are the returning travelers' memories generated? If someone in the city has a video conversation with someone far away, how is that conversation generated? The most obvious solution again seems to be to simulate the distant city the traveler visited and to simulate the distant conversation partner. But now we no longer have only a city-sized simulation. If the city is populous with many travelers and many people who interact with others outside the city, to keep everything coherent, Chalmers argues, you probably need to simulate all of Earth. Thus, a city-sized simulation faces a Boundaries Challenge structurally similar to the short-past simulation's Seeding Challenge.

The challenge can be addressed in a similar way.

Rendering travelers' memories coherent is a task structurally similar to rendering the memories of newly-created people coherent. The simulators could presumably start with some random, plausible seeds, then constrain future memories by those first seeds. This would of course be difficult and computationally expensive, but it's not clear that it would be more difficult or more expensive than simulating a whole planet of interacting people just so that a few hundred thousand or a few million people in a city don't notice any inconsistencies.

If the city's inhabitants have real-time conversations with others elsewhere, that creates a slightly different engineering challenge. As recent advances in AI technology have vividly shown, even with our very limited early 21st century tools, relatively plausible conversation partners can easily be constructed. With more advanced technology, presumably even more convincing conversation partners would be possible -- though their observations and memories would need to be constantly monitored and seeded for coherence with inputs from returning travelers, other conversation partners, incoming news, and so on.

Chalmers suggests that such conversation partners would be simulations -- and thus that the simulation wouldn't stop at the city's edge after all. He's clearly right about this, at least in a weak sense. Distant conversation partners would need voices and faces resembling the voices and faces of real people. In the same limited sense of "simulation", a video display at the city's edge, showing trees and fields beyond, simulates trees and fields. So yes, the borders of the city will need to be simulated, as well as the city itself. Seeming-people in active conversation with real citizens will in the relevant sense count as part of the borders of the city.

But just as trees on a video screen need not have their backsides simulated, so also needn't the conversation partners continue to exist after the conversation ends. And just as trees on a video screen needn't be as richly simulated as trees in the center of the city, so also distant conversation partners needn't be richly simulated. They can be temporary shells, with just enough detail to be convincing, and with new features seeded only on demand as necessary.

The Boundary Problem for simulated cities introduces one engineering challenge not faced by short-history whole-Earth simulations: New elements need to be introduced coherently in real time. A historical seed can be made slowly and checked over patiently as many times as necessary before launch. But the city boundaries will need to be updated constantly. If generating coherent conversation partners, memories, and the like is resource intensive, it might be challenging to do it fast enough to keep up with all the trips, conversations, and news reports streaming in.

Here, however, the simulators can potentially take advantage of the fact that the city's inhabitants are themselves simulations running on a computer. If real-time updating of the boundary is a challenge, the simulators can slow down the clock speed or pause as necessary, while the boundaries update. And if some minor incoherence is noticed, it might be possible to rewrite citizens' memories so it is quickly forgotten.

So although embedding a city-sized simulation in a fake world is probably more complicated than generating a short-past simulation with a fake history, ultimately my response to Chalmers' objections is the same for both cases: There's no reason to suppose that generating plausible, coherent inputs to the city would be beyond the simulator's capacities, and doing so on the fly might be much less computationally expensive than running a fully detailed simulation of a whole planet with a deep history.

Related:

"1% Skepticism" (2017), Nous, 51, 271-290.

"Let’s Hope We’re Not Living in a Simulation" (2024), Philosophy & Phenomenological Research, online first: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/phpr.13125.

Chalmers, David J. (2024) "Taking the Simulation Hypothesis Seriously", Philosophy & Phenomenological Research, online first: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/phpr.13122.