I apologize that I came off as insulting and judgemental, I should have expressed myself better. It genuinely is not personal for me, and my criticism is for th

I apologize that I came off as insulting and judgemental, I should have expressed myself better. It genuinely is not personal for me, and my criticism is for the idea and not for you. Please note that I said, "the idea seems..." and not "you seem..."; I can understand how you would take that implication, and take responsibility for expressing myself badly, but I just want to demonstrate this wasn't my intention. I find the idea you expressed - specifically that godhood might be attainable and that it's a goal one could work toward - to be extreme and dangerous, and I have first- and second-hand experiences where I've observed similar ideas to be harmful. (It would be fair to ask that I share these experiences, but I am not comfortable doing so; I realize that's unfair to you because it denies you the opportunity to interrogate them, and I apologize for that, but they are personal and painful and not all of them are mine to share.) I have no judgement of you, but I have a distaste for this idea. The rest of the ideas you're expressing, about life being just as fulfilling in a simulation, seem to be an ecstatic and joyful response to nihilism, and if that is working for you, that's awesome. But surely you can imagine a circumstance in which the idea "godhood is attainable" causes harm. I think you're thinking that I just haven't thought this through properly and that if you just explained it better I would agree with you. But I have given this a lot of thought. I first encountered these ideas about 15 years ago, and your elaboration isn't really presenting anything new to me. We agree on what this thought experiment means and what the implications would be, we just interpret the results of the experiment quite differently. I do find it to be solipsistic, with some small concessions, like "okay, I admit that other minds exist as much as my mind does, so instead I hold that all of us are fictions." The idea that reality might be so malleable that we can "hack" it is, in my mind, inherently solipsistic, a natural consequence of centering one's ability to manipulate the universe as the most real thing.