Damo

ok, my biology is really rudimentry, I have defer to anybogy with expertise to comment on if this is legit (I'm more of a dirt and rock guy), I'm just saying neurons are on the molecular scale and my baloney detector beeps more than a little when anybody applies buzz-words like 'quantum' to the human brain... but I think this is irrelevant to your argument... any sufficently advanced biological intelligence has the potential to develop technology, and if they are not self-destructive with it, that technology would probably get to the point where quantum computing is possible, whether or not the biological intelligence has anything quantum about it

agreed, my hunch is it would require a lot of advances in physics and cosmology before we could figure out any way to test it... assuming that we're even going to be allowed to test it...

Ok, i've read some Brian Greene, but absolutely Occam's Razor applies... what is the most simple explanation with the fewest unnecesary entites:

1. WYSIWYG: our universe (let us call it universe A) was formed by a natural process, inclusive of the inflationary model of the big bang theory, that for reasons that we don't absolutely know (yet, at least), is uncaused (if time and space, causality itself, were formed in the big bang, than asking what caused the big bang is a bit like asking what's north of the north pole) but has complexity as an emergent property

2. Our universe (universe A) is actually a simulation running in universe B, which is the top level universe (or "real" universe or "WYSIWYG" universe)

3. Universe A is actually a simmulation running in Universe B, which in turn is actually a simulation running in Universe C...

and so on...

by the most basic definition of Occam's Razor:

we would go with option 1, we are the real universe... unless you had a sufficent reason to believe otherwise, we don't say there is more than this universe... this could be wrong, maybe the membrane collision theory is correct, and would require us to recogonize entities outside the universe (at least as we've currently defined the universe)

I dare say it's more likely to be testable, if not today, then at some point in the future, than "we're all just in a computer simmulation"

I disagree. There are less exotic solutions to Fermi's Paradox (for example, gamma ray bursts as extinction-causing events effecting large areas of a galaxy, which would be more frequent in earlier epochs of the universe), and no reason to suppose that a universe that simmulates an inflationary big bang couldn't also support simmulating a commensurate number of simmulated biospheres on all those simmulated planets.

As far as I'm understanding, you're suggesting the solution to Fermi's Paradox is that we're in a simmulated universe that's something like the Holodecks in Star Trek: the Earth is simmulated in high-res (3-D hologram), and the whole wider cosmos we see beyond Earth is just a video displayed on the walls... and that despite appearances, the rest of the universe just isn't really there, even at the level of the simulated existence that we have on Earth... this strikes me as suspiciously anthropocentric... why not suppose that the universe is as big as it seems to be and the parameters of the simulation are such that a more prosaic explanation for Fermi's Paradox applies (like gamma ray bursts as mass extinction drivers)?

if the simmulated universe was all about us, then they might as well have made so that Ptolemaic cosmology was true.

For purposes of this discussion, I'll define God as an intelligent entity that created the universe. I define a Deistic God as one who does no more than create the universe and let it run according to the laws it defined for the universe. I see no real logical difference between a Deistic God and the Universe Simmulator in your scenario... and the same argument can be used against both:

"X caused the Universe" presupposes that everything must have a cause, so then, What Caused X?

Breath

There is a flaw in the grammar. The statement should be "are their flaws in the logic". But that is not important.

But until you give an indication as to what it would / could mean for a universe to be real or otherwise, it is not useful to proceed. That is important.