The simulation argument is exploring the likelihood that post-humans would simulate humans. Both post-humans and humans inhabit a universe with the same laws, so this isn't a fictitious universe created by a deity.

> Also, why the assumption that post-humans are running the simulations (as in the paper)? Couldn't it be any ultra-advanced civilization that's playing with an evolutionary simulation?

Sure, potentially. The paper makes no assumptions about the existence of other life forms, it instead extrapolates the likelihood of a simulation given the only intelligent life we know to exist: us.

Therefore you can see the simulation argument from that paper as a lower bound on the probability we live in a simulation. Positing the existence of other life forms that run random simulations can only increase the probability we're living in a simulation, assuming one of the other outcomes isn't more likely.

The problem with theistic hypotheses is that they start from the idea that a humanoid god is a simple explanation (since our brains devote a lot of effort to understanding humans, so humans seem misleadingly simple). The simulation hypothesis treats the idea of an intelligent entity running a simulation as a starting point, and the details of how such an entity would come to exist are taken as a serious point that needs to be explained, whereas with god hypotheses the matter of how that god exists in the first place is generally just waved away.

If a simulation exists, and there is evidence of it, then sure we could surmise that someone created the simulator - and would have some evidence of such?

I think the parent poster was noting that it is a pretty fundamentally different argument than say, positing the existence of a creator, because we exist at all - and that said creator has certain specific requirements of us regarding what we do on Sundays, for instance, or with whom and when we have kids.

> and that said creator has certain specific requirements

Is that a requirement of every flavor of creationism? Actually, maybe I shouldn't use 'creationism' in this context because that's a loaded term with a lot of baggage at this point. What else to call a hypothesis that asserts there's some kind of intelligence behind the universe that we see? Simulationists would seem to fall into that broader category as would old-school creationists.

Well, there are Simulationists which start going on wild flights of fancy about what said simulation creator intended/created it for, which yeah would start going into that territory pretty quickly.

Seems like first you'd need to have some kind of falsifiable evidence that we were in a simulation first before jumping there? Plenty of folks trying to do that though, without falling into the first case.

Personally it seems to have little to no real impact on anything I care about one way or another, so filed in the 'cute but who cares' bin.

It is. That's why the Big Bang is the scientific consensus.

Assuming any kind of simulation at all leads to more questions than answers - simply delegating the creation of the universe to the next turtle down. It's not a matter of how "persuasive" an argument is or isn't. It is the evidence the scientific method has produced from which we draw our conclusions.