0blivion

• 0blivion 16 Aug 2026 13:05 UTC

  1 point

  0

  on: I’m scared.

  The problem is that pure rationalism isn’t an actual framework about what to do with one’s life.

  Rationalism is a scientific methodology applied to thinking. So, you applied that framework, and you found out that the state of the world was quite shitty. Well, congratulations for that.

  Now, as to the question of what exactly to do, I cannot tell you what to do in your stead, after all you are your own person. However, there is a category of thinkers who dealt exactly with the problem of what to do when the world is shitty and we have little power over it. They are called the stoicists.

  I suggest that you read classical greek philosophy. If you think the world today is shitty, imagine how the world was thousands of years ago. The apology of Socrates, Epictus’ manual, the Meditations from Marcus Aurelius. Those works are a lifeline exactly for the kind of people that rationalists are.

  You do not need to fix the entire world, that is impossible. To make the world a better place, the answer is far more simple, it’s to act at the local level yourself to improve things or to refuse to act in an unethical fashion. And, you will suffer. You will be treated like shit by those with no moral values. You will be mocked and hated. That is just how it is for people who care about doing good.

• 0blivion 10 Aug 2026 21:18 UTC

  2 points

  1

  on: 0blivion’s Shortform

  I will share criteria that I use in order to determine whether someone’s writings are intellectually honest or not.

  Firstly, intellectual honesty does NOT mean neutrality. It is perfectly possible to have a preferred position on a subject (it can be in the scientific minority or not, that doesn’t matter) without being intellectually dishonest.

  Here are the criteria.

  1)Transparency. Do they hide that they have an agenda/​preference or is it public knowledge? Do they hide behind scientific neutrality or do they openly admit that they are interpreting facts according to a philosophical/​religious position?

  2)The use of sophistry in their writings. Are their writings logically sound?

  3)Are the categories they use clear? Is the language understandable or is it purposefully obscure?

  4)Do they accurately represent the scientific opposition and answer to the real counter-arguments from the scientific opposition or do they tend to strawman their opposition?

  5)Do they use force or threats in order to neutralize scientific opposition?

  6)Is there a double-standards for what constitutes evidence? As an example requiring irrefutable proof for opposing positions but using shaky proof for their own position.

• 0blivion 7 Aug 2026 20:29 UTC

  −3 points

  −4

  on: Gen­er­al­ized athe­ism rules out “in­ac­cu­rate simu­la­tion”-ism.

  There are severe problems in your article that any philosopher worth his salt would notice. I’ll go through them one by one. I will not argue about the simulation part of your article, but about the very roots that you use in order to write this article.

  A)The existence of God isn’t the same as the correctness of a given religion. Most of your arguments deal with a benevolent God, but according to your own self-proclaimed definition of “benevolence”. You think we should use a 6 year old’s untrained moral values.

  That argument can easily turn against you, after all any 6 years old would refuse that his parents divorce and would refuse to have his mother replaced by another person. Theists will claim this is evidence of the existence of natural law and you would have no way to refute them since you used this hypothetical 6 years old as a moral compass.

  But, in reality there are thousands of reasons why a “good person” with the cure to malaria would not give it freely according to utilitarian ethics. As an example, perhaps they want to prevent an overpopulation problem. As an example, perhaps one of the people with malaria has a descendant that commits a genocide that kills 100 million people. Unless you are omniscient and you have access to all possible futures there is no way for an utilitarian to make the best choice.

  You cannot pretend that you have that omniscience. Only a child can pretend that they know all the consequences and that those consequences would all be good.

  Fundamentally, utilitarian philosophy collapses into nonsense because of the problem of qualia and the non-summation of qualia. It is impossible to sum pleasure and pain, it is impossible to pretend that every single human on earth is an interchangeable object with no individuality.

  B)No, a powerful and benevolent “God” would not necessarily stop earthquakes. Isn’t having an active planet as opposed to a dead planet a good thing? An active planet with a magnetic field, with moving crusts, and so on. Those are definitely useful for the sake of biological evolution. Moreover, the physical possibility of earthquakes can’t just be erased from reality without causing reality itself to collapse into being nonsensical.

  If you want “God” to magically intervene every single time there’s an earthquake to stop deaths, then your idea of “God” does not correspond to any known religion. If you argue that such a “God” does not exist, then, all religious folk would have to agree with you that indeed, such a “God” does not exist. In the paragraph above I dealt with physical evils. It applies to illness as well and it applies to basically all “natural causes” of death.

  Secondly, for the case of human-caused evils, that is a logical consequence of the ability of humans to do either good or evil. If millions of sentient beings exist, some will statistically choose to do evil actions, such as murder, rape and so on. For those things to not happen, it would require that humans don’t have free will and can only choose to do the right action (that is the fate of an automaton, I don’t think most people would agree that it would be a good thing to erase their sense of self)

  C)If you were to read any serious religious texts, as an example the Tanakh, there are countless examples of injustice being unpunished. If God directly and immediately rewarded those who did good things and punished those who did bad things, then it’s no longer a free choice, it’s simply an optimization problem. Why should humans, who are sentient beings, be reduced to merely be multi-objective optimization machines?

  Reducing human free will to nihil would be a great evil. Would you want a girlfriend who cannot leave you because she doesn’t have a choice? Would you want to be forced to work rather than freely choose your occupation? Most of what is valuable in this world is only truly valuable because it is freely chosen.

  In the book of Job, the view that God immediately rewards good and immediately punishes evil is completely refuted. The friends of Job claimed that the reason he lost his sons and that he became poor and ill was that he sinned greatly and that God punished him. They mocked him, insulted him, and told him to repent or else. However, that view is explicitly denied in the Tanakh and Job defends himself and is vindicated. You are arguing against a non-existing strawman.

  Your view of God exists neither in christianity, nor in judaism or in islam. Perhaps your view of “God” is compatible with that of the gnostics who think the demiurge is only one very powerful entity among many, but that’s not what most people mean when they talk about God.

  Your entire position consists in creating a strawman about what you think “God” is and then declaring that this strawmanned version of “God” doesn’t exist. But no serious theologian or philosopher has argued for the existence of such a “God”. The Jews do not argue for the existence of such a “God”, you will not find a single rabbi that claims those things. How can you claim to have refuted judaism or any religion at all if you invent a “God” they don’t even believe in?

  D)When calculating the probability that any event such as atom splitting occurs, God’s existence doesn’t allow anyone to say “that atom is more likely to split”. Likewise, God’s existence doesn’t allow one to predict “This tree should fall”, wouldn’t that be entirely nonsensical?

  Classical theism says that God created the universe, with all the laws of physics. God doesn’t usually intervene to make one atom split rather than another, miracles are exceptional by their nature they are not something God does all the time.

  E)You have gratuitously affirmed, in your text, that miracles do not exist. You have ignored countless historical testimonies, not only from the Bible but from other sources. You have also ignored the Turin’s shroud (which has been scientifically investigated so many times that there’s a whole specialized literature on the subject), you have ignored scientific investigations into the phenomenon of reincarnation (we do have a scientific litterature on the subject even if we don’t have any absolute proof that the afterlife exists), you have ignored scientific investigation of eucharistic miracles (heart tissues and blood found in pieces of bread), etc. Any one of those phenomenons can refute the atheistic materialist framework.

  Don’t you think it is saddening for a Bayesian to simply ignore evidence and do as if it did not exist? Then you pretend that atheists somehow won thanks to a careful investigation of the matters. They did no such thing, they simply buried all the evidence and ignored it. The reason atheists are more numerous in our current society is sociological rather than scientific. Atheism is encouraged, religion is ridiculed. That has nothing to do with truthfulness, after all religion was once revered and atheism ridiculed.

• 0blivion 26 Jul 2026 16:42 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Bistrofan’s comment on: Sur­pris­ing facts about the slave trade

  I agree with what you have said. I want to elaborate on factors that you have not talked about, because they are important in order to understand why slavery was beneficial in the short term.

  The positive economic impact from slavery comes from the fact that, in the USA, natural ressources (land, seeds, etc) were not the bottleneck for agricultural production. Labour was.

  Forcibly migrating hundreds of thousands of people to work in cotton fields was a more efficient way of quickly increasing the labour force rather than having people migrate freely. Industrialized slavery increases the labour force at a much faster speed than letting the free market solve the problem.

  What is the cost of production of a slave, for a slave dealer? Who shoulders the production cost of a human? It’s the families of slaves, the communities those slaves lived in, etc. None of those costs were paid by slave dealers, after all slave dealers merely had to abduct existing people.

  Those people were treated like a natural ressource to be exploited. A hunter doesn’t have any idea how to raise a deer, does he? The market value of a deer will reflect the labour cost of a deer, unless deers become rare enough.

  Likewise, the market value of a slave didn’t depend on how much value and labour was necessary to produce that person. It was based on how much labour (war, pillaging, building ships) and capital were necessary to exploit that ressource. The market cost of a slave is therefore lower than even the cost of reproduction of labour. In a system where money is the only value of things, then the fate of such a ressource is to be exploited until oblivion. The slave dealers only stop doing slave dealing if it becomes unprofitable. As an example, if in the country which was the source of slaves the people stop having children at all. Before contraception existed, children would keep coming into existence no matter if their parents actually had the means to raise them.

  Once contraception became widespread? That natural ressource which was source of free profits was gone.

0blivion’s Shortform

• 0blivion 23 Jul 2026 16:09 UTC

  −2 points

  −3

  on: 0blivion’s Shortform

  I am thinking about writing a series of essays for the sake of apologetics.

  I need people who are interested in the topic of metaphysics and who would like to exchange with me in order to improve my essays before publishing them.

  I was an atheist during most of my life, specifically a materialist and reductionist. First I discovered that God’s existence was necessary for reality itself to exist. Then I investigated religions historically and philosophically in order to verify which ones can be obviously refuted and which ones remain as candidates to possibly being true.

  Then it became clear that Christianity was the winner from the point of view of someone rationally investigating the truth of religion and admitting that religion is possible.

  If there are people who are interested, I would like to see if there are mistakes that I have made during my quest towards Truth.

• 0blivion 22 May 2025 19:06 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: interstice’s comment on: The Crawl­ing Chaos, or why im­mor­tal­ity is both in­evitable and a curse

  It seems we are done for this particular debate. I would like to thank you for all your thoughts, which have been a precious help, and for giving a chance to my essay despite its negative karma.

  If anyone has good counterarguments, on failures from my reasoning, I would gladly take the time to see if they are valid or if they can be refuted.

• 0blivion 22 May 2025 1:50 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: interstice’s comment on: The Crawl­ing Chaos, or why im­mor­tal­ity is both in­evitable and a curse

  The first part of my answer will answer your point about Bekenstein’s limit. The second part of my answer will concede your point, and look at the logical consequences.

  In our assumptions, the Bekenstein’s limit theorem is false. This theorem fundamentally assumes that the universe is pixelated, that it is possible to separate it into finite parts. But, in Proposition 5 bis, I assume that real numbers exist. It is basically a limited version of platonic realism. I consider the universe to merely be a mathematical structure. In the end, there is a fundamental chasm between reality itself, and the theories we can make about reality. My opinion is that physics is not the study of reality, but rather, the study of what we are able to measure and the informational patterns we are able to infer from those measurements. That would make the Bekeinstein’s limit a fundamental limit on physical epistemology rather than on ontology.

  The hypothetical aliens wouldn’t need to merely flip a quantum coin a bunch of times. They’d need to do that across all the spacetime they are simulating. I think that, because quantum states involve uncountable infinities rather than countable infinities, that it would not be possible for a quantum computer to calculate “more” than a linear sum of infinities that depends on the volume of spacetime/​energy that defines the computer’s upper limit of computation. By using a binary computer it is fundamentally impossible to simulate those things, because binary computers can only calculate “countable infinities”. However, my reasoning is shaky, because I do not have the mathematical prowesses necessary to, actually calculate all those things. Basically, aliens would be using some kind of analogical computers in order to force the universe to do the dirty work of calculations for them rather than trying to create an algorithm that does it.

  In such a case, simulating a whole person… Could be possible. With a big enough quantum computer that would neutralize infinities using other infinities. In all honesty, you may have gotten me with this. There is no way for me to prove that broken simulations would vastly outnumber the “normal” ones. But, in that case, “waking up again” after your death is still inevitable from your own perspective. You’d have a random mix of both (infinite?) alien simulations (both broken and unbroken. But you’ll be at their complete mercy, if they want to torture you for fun they can) and infinite disembodied reincarnations of a few yottoseconds.

  Now, I’ll look a the consequences if I concede your point. Here is the massive problem : as your simulation “ages”, in order to compute the older version of yourself accurately with all the memories it’ll take more and more computing power until it will eventually exceed what any civilization is capable to do. However, the universe is not bound by those limits, since it is infinite. Therefore, as you get reincarnated more and more, the odds that an alien civilization happens to reincarnate you become more and more impossible. Because everyone has eternal life (from the point of view of a deceased time does not pass), the more time passes, the worse the conditions for reincarnating get.

• 0blivion 21 May 2025 20:42 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: interstice’s comment on: The Crawl­ing Chaos, or why im­mor­tal­ity is both in­evitable and a curse

  Edit : I am adding a better answer to your argument of equivalent classes. I do not deny that such equivalence classes exist for some phenomena, however, if everything else requires perfect precision… Then we have some margin for error in some unimportant parts and have absolutely zero margin for error in the other parts, which would mean those equivalent classes would not help making the probability of simulating you higher than 0. To illustrate, if P(A)=X, and P(B)=0, P(A and B)=0.

  We are not our brain, though. Consciousness does not only come from the brain, as an example we have quite a lot of neurons in our stomach, and even worse, the intestinal flora is known to have an influence on behaviour and thinking. That means that in order to reproduce you exactly, you have to reproduce the whole body, not merely the brain, and even possibly the bacteria inside your stomach… Information about who you are is not only contained in the brain, it is contained in the whole body. It can be argued that the brain would be sufficient to recreate someone, but I have extreme doubts over such a hypothesis, someone who only had a brain and not a body would go insane from the complete absence of stimuli from their body, and any partial copy would not truly be you but only an inferior copy. Assuming such an inferior copy can be considered to be you, then every broken copy arising from randomness is also yourself, so there’s no escaping the statistical hell.

  Secondly, you still don’t understand the problem of simulating one individual. We are the product of so many random events that it is not possible to find out exactly how one particular individual came into existence. Aliens would need to use a rational and deliberate computation process in order to reproduce a conscious being. If you think aliens could recreate you by using enough random coin tosses to get to you, then you’re only recreating a Boltzman brain but unlike the universe aliens do not have infinite ressources. The worst thing of them all, and the biggest dealbreaker, is the problem of chaos and the butterfly effect. Even an inaccuracy over a single cell of your body could lead to as an example a cancer killing you before making children and therefore completely changing the whole timeline of events by making people that would have existed in our universe disappear. If, say, your mother has a stray thought and decides to abort you, you simply won’t exist. Now, imagine this at every instant of the world you’re simulating. A single error can completely change the timeline.

  If we look at proposition 1, the weakest form of my argument would be one where the universe has infinite time, but not infinite space nor infinite matter. In such a cyclical universe, I think your point about aliens being overwhelmingly more likely to simulate than random statistical noise is one I would entirely agree with. Because, in such a scecnario, we are not merely talking about one alien civilization, we are talking about potentially infinite alien simulations randomly recreating us over and over and over again.

  If, however, the universe is “strongly infinite”, (Infinite time + infinite space + infinite matter), then no matter what aliens do, there is no way to surpass statistical hell. Every alien civilization would have finite ressources, whereas the universe has infinite ressources. No matter how efficient aliens would be with their technology, I don’t think it is possible to beat a “cubic infinity”. The aliens would have access to infinite time, with finite ressources in space and energy. Whereas, the universe has access to infinite time*infinite ressources*infinite space.

  The reason disembodied individuals win, is because they can simulate one person perfectly without having to simulate their surroundings perfectly. Statistical noisy random processes do not need to retrieve ANY information about your past to remake you. Meanwhile, aliens have to somehow find your information again and reproduce it exactly, through a computation process. There is an asymetry. Aliens need to retrieve information that is impossible to get, whereas the universe doesn’t need to care about that.

• 0blivion 20 May 2025 21:28 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: interstice’s comment on: The Crawl­ing Chaos, or why im­mor­tal­ity is both in­evitable and a curse

  You raise a valid point about simulating species or even simulating life on a planet. However, my argument still stands, because I am specifically talking about simulating an entire individual rather than a planet or a star system.

  In order to simulate a particular individual, it would require far more than merely simulating the species homo sapiens. It would require recreating the whole history of earth (and even of the universe, because we’d need the history of asteroids and of sun activity and so on and so on) completely identical to our own. The hypothetical aliens would need to care specifically about YOU, and decide to recreate the whole history of how your parents met, how the environment shaped your epigenetics, how the environment shaped your ideas and way of thinking, etc. They’d need not only to simulate quantum states, they’d need the whole list of all quantum events and their results in the spacetime they are simulating in order to reproduce you perfectly. To simulate you, specifically, would require information that is completely impossible to get, and any approximations of you would not truly be you.

  It is impossible to simulate an individual without simulating their entire history. It may sound counterintuitive, but it would be simpler to simulate a whole world rather than reconstruct perfectly a single individual and the history of the whole universe around him.

  The margin for error, in order to simulate you (on purpose) is ZERO. [I put zero in capital to mean that its not 0.00000(arbitrary number of 0) then 1. It’s 0.] It would require unimaginable computing power (and when I say unimaginable, I mean literally mathematically unimaginable, a number so big you couldn’t even think about it even spending your entire life counting it). That’s not something I think any civilization could ever do. So, while aliens could simulate human life, and could simulate countless individuals, there is no conceptual way they could simulate you particularly. Unless some alien civilization ascend to godhood, but that’s not how the rules of the universe we live in work. Because of quantum indeterminacy, how would a civilization ever achieve such a thing ? If they want to perfectly reproduce you, the only way to achieve such a thing would be omniscience. That’s not something any physically bounded intelligence could ever do. Even with access to entire galaxies of ressources, even with access to supercomputers which would make ours look like a Babbage machine.

  But , yes , there is a possibility that instead of reincarnating as a disembodied brain we get to reincarnate inside a simulation instead. But, there’s no escaping reincarnating as disembodied brain, that just means we get to live some normal lives among all the chaotic broken ones.

  I heard of the grabby aliens argument because I follow the PBS space time channel. However, I find it fundamentally unconvincing to explain our current observations. I think the probability of life itself isn’t low. However, the leap from unicellular organisms to what we can see on earth… Anyone who studied the histories of mass extinction events on earth would know how absurdly low the probability of getting intelligent life is. In fact, the probability of life still existing despite all those mass extinctions is already quite low. But, if those mass extinctions are NECESSARY to produce intelligent life, imagine the consequences on the likelihood of alien life. All of this is another can of worms, that would require several articles to explain.

• 0blivion 20 May 2025 18:37 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: interstice’s comment on: The Crawl­ing Chaos, or why im­mor­tal­ity is both in­evitable and a curse

  I am not making a statement on our current conscious experience, but on life after the death of our “real” body. Basically, what is more likely, being resurrected fully and accurately ( considering how difficult such a task would be, it would take many failures before getting it right...) or having broken remnants that form the pattern of yourself randomly happening across spacetime ?

  If we take into account the Drake equation, and take into account all of our past observations of space, and take into account that if a civilization advanced enough to build dyson swarms/​spheres existed or to conquer entire galaxies existed we should have seen evidence of it by now, we can conclude that the rarity of conscious life is extremely high. We can even infer that it is likely we are the only conscious beings in the entire observable universe.

  That makes the possibility of our consciousness being simulated correctly… Zero. Like, actual zero.

  Even if a civilization decided to simulate humans on a massive scale, the probability of getting someone identical to you through a NON RANDOM process… Is nihil. If a process is completely random, it will eventually produce something like us given infinite time. But if it’s NOT, then, it’ll NEVER produce something like us , no matter how many quadrillion years we wait.

  The probability of such a civilization even existing before killing itself is so low that, if we take their entire lifetime into account, it’s not even a blip compared to the potential quadrillion years of “computation” done randomly by the universe.

  I am dealing with approximations, as calculating those probabilities is not possible, so there could be a mistake hidden somewhere I didn’t see.

• 0blivion 20 May 2025 15:42 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: interstice’s comment on: The Crawl­ing Chaos, or why im­mor­tal­ity is both in­evitable and a curse

  You are making very interesting points. It is possible that the vast majority of conscious beings are like us, at least in the sense you are talking about. However, even if I assume that you are correct, it still has no consequence on my reasoning and I’ll explain to you why in the next paragraph.

  I am talking about a particular individual, that is, you or me. Are most instantiations of you the current you ? (By current you, I mean the full past-present future integral of the possibilities function that defines who you are as a person, think of it like the set of all possible yous across a hypothetical multiverse.) By you, I mean a being that has a continuous function rather than an erratic one being interrupted over and over again. Are most of “yous” on planet earth, living in 2025 ? Once you die, what are the odds that a being identical to you with your memories arises on earth, knowing that the sun will die in a few billion years ? Essentially zero, because a few billion years is far, far too short a timescale for you to be alive again in roughly the same circumstances. Unless you can prove that this is still far more probable than what I described which would mean that, most of your conscious time would be spent in conditions similar to our current conditions right now.

  So, basically, once you are dead, I think it is far more likely that you will be instantiated again in broken circumstances rather than in normal ones. So, basically, since it’s not possible to feel time passing when not conscious, we should have most of our experienced subjective time being in pain and discontinuity, with perhaps some pockets of happiness and sometimes being incarnated properly with full functions of a “real” living entity (I include simulated ones in this “real”).

  I’d love to write more articles to go into more far more details, but because of my negative karma I can’t.

• 0blivion 20 May 2025 13:55 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: interstice’s comment on: The Crawl­ing Chaos, or why im­mor­tal­ity is both in­evitable and a curse

  First thank you for your feedback. I will answer your point.

  Most conscious beings in the universe would be simulated, in this scenario. Moreover, most would simply be what we can call “abominations”, because they would have some mental illness or some fundamental problem making them broken shells. Most of the time , they would be simulated only for a few seconds before collapsing into nothingness.

  They do not have any real influence on their surroundings, because a few seconds between incarnations is not enough. Also, even assuming the simulation of their consciousness is correct, if the simulation of their surroundings is not (which should be the vast majority of cases), then they would be in some kind of dreamlike state with the world around them not really existing.

  I will have to write another article to explain all this step by step

• 0blivion 20 May 2025 0:19 UTC

  −1 points

  0

  in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: The Crawl­ing Chaos, or why im­mor­tal­ity is both in­evitable and a curse

  Infinite time by itself implies nothing. It is simply one of the necessary conditions.

  As for repeating the same few trillion years over and over again, that is extremely unlikely because the random quantum fluctuations just a few instants after the Big Bang have a massive effect on mass distribution across the universe and possibly on dark energy.

• 0blivion 19 May 2025 23:29 UTC

  −1 points

  −2

  in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: The Crawl­ing Chaos, or why im­mor­tal­ity is both in­evitable and a curse

  My point was never to “judge”. As for suffering being “bad”, I am not making such a claim, however I can say with confidence that the fate I described would not be one I would like to go through.

  I possess enough knowledge of mathematics to know the differences between infinities. I cannot quantify the % of incarnations where we would be in pain and the % where we would be in happiness. However, by proving that the order of magnitude of one is vastly superior to the other, I make the other one irrelevant in my argument.

  Even if the universe is finite, if as an example it is cyclical and goes through phases of big bang=>increase in size=>gravity overwhelms dark energy=>big crunch=>big bang, then the universe basically has infinite time to run.

The Crawl­ing Chaos, or why im­mor­tal­ity is both in­evitable and a curse

How I found mean­ing in sav­ing oth­ers. A sum­mary of my life goals.