I just learned that von Neumann got… um, “wagered”. Considering von Neumann was clearly a transhuman this establishes a lower bound on how smart you can be and still accept Pascal’s wager.
It is quite fascinating how the belief in God does oscillate between intelligence (rationality?) levels. Chimpanzees are naturally atheistic. Average humans are religious. Above average humans are usually atheistic. High IQ individuals like Eliezer Yudkowsky tend to be agnostic, in the sense that they assign a nonzero probability to the existence of God and believe in the existence of natural or artificial Gods. And people on the verge of posthumanism like John von Neumann, of whom was said that “only he was fully awake”, are again leaning towards theism. I wonder if a truly posthuman AI would oscillate back to atheism while conjecturing that Omega is probably a theist.
It is quite fascinating how the belief in God does oscillate between intelligence (rationality?) levels. Chimpanzees are naturally atheistic. Average humans are religious. Above average humans are usually atheistic. High IQ individuals like Eliezer Yudkowsky tend to be agnostic, in the sense that they assign a nonzero probability to the existence of God and believe in the existence of natural or artificial Gods. And people on the verge of posthumanism like John von Neumann, of whom was said that “only he was fully awake”, are again leaning towards theism. I wonder if a truly posthuman AI would oscillate back to atheism while conjecturing that Omega is probably a theist.
Well, Omega would have to have a rather strange mind design not to believe in itself.
Like AIXI.