I was raised agnostic. To be more specific my father—who was a psychiatrist—always answered all my why question chains to the best of his ability, but was pretty adamant that nobody knows for certain what happens when we die: religious people believe in an afterlife, atheists believe there is probably just nothing after death, etc. He was also clear that science favored only the atheist position, religious belief in the afterlife was more about hope over evidence, etc.
I was later interested in religions, but interested in the analytic sense of finding them fascinating, wanting to understand why people believed what they did, how they evolved, etc.
But I still remember when I first heard the simulation argument, and I immediately said “that is the first and only convincing argument for god”.
There is pretty obvious alignment between the generalized abstract hope of Christianity and a positive singularity. Something very like the anticipated Christian god could be a very real entity in the future—an aligned superintelligence which expends some fraction of its immense compute on historical simulations for the explicit benevolent purpose of resurrecting the dead. If that is our future, then we already (probably) are in such a simulation now, and the afterlife is very real.
That type of god does exist both inside our physical universe in the future, and also outside of our (current simulated) universe in the present—both are true.
Of course that is no explanation for prayer—all that matters is participation in steering the world towards that positive trajectory (which the now and future ‘god’ could retroactively reward). It’s also not an argument for blind faith: one can hope for the bright future where we are already immortal in a sense, death is defeated, etc, but it is still very much something we have to fight for in the present.
I was raised agnostic. To be more specific my father—who was a psychiatrist—always answered all my why question chains to the best of his ability, but was pretty adamant that nobody knows for certain what happens when we die: religious people believe in an afterlife, atheists believe there is probably just nothing after death, etc. He was also clear that science favored only the atheist position, religious belief in the afterlife was more about hope over evidence, etc.
I was later interested in religions, but interested in the analytic sense of finding them fascinating, wanting to understand why people believed what they did, how they evolved, etc.
But I still remember when I first heard the simulation argument, and I immediately said “that is the first and only convincing argument for god”.
There is pretty obvious alignment between the generalized abstract hope of Christianity and a positive singularity. Something very like the anticipated Christian god could be a very real entity in the future—an aligned superintelligence which expends some fraction of its immense compute on historical simulations for the explicit benevolent purpose of resurrecting the dead. If that is our future, then we already (probably) are in such a simulation now, and the afterlife is very real.
That type of god does exist both inside our physical universe in the future, and also outside of our (current simulated) universe in the present—both are true.
Of course that is no explanation for prayer—all that matters is participation in steering the world towards that positive trajectory (which the now and future ‘god’ could retroactively reward). It’s also not an argument for blind faith: one can hope for the bright future where we are already immortal in a sense, death is defeated, etc, but it is still very much something we have to fight for in the present.