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I get being tired of talking about simulation theory... Personally I think we are in a AI nursery. God is real. Heaven is real. Either we live a good life, an

I get being tired of talking about simulation theory... Personally I think we are in a AI nursery. God is real. Heaven is real. Either we live a good life, and get advanced to the next round of the simulation or we get thrown in the trash. OTOH, now that I understand the whole 'Grabby Aliens' thing; that's another solid solution to the Fermi Paradox. Hard to say.

jvanderbot 3y ago
You're discussing The Egg. I appreciate that. https://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html https://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html
b3lvedere 3y ago
I have always wondered why most religious people's counter argument of the Big Bang event usually is that one cannot create something from nothing, while most documentation about deities also do not explain where these deities suddenly came from.
- treprinum 3y ago
  Concept of time and eternity - we are in time that flows in one direction, everything has a beginning and end. A being in eternity outside time views all moments of time all at once (like all individual pictures of a movie), hence no origin is necessary/defined in eternity.
  - dleeftink 3y ago
    The viewer then, has infinite capacity at its disposal (according to texts of old). The question then is, where could this power be drawn from?
    - treprinum 3y ago
      Concepts of "capacity" and "power" could be another creations of that viewer, not existing in eternity per se, only in our universe.
    - KMag 3y ago
      Outside our universe, presumably. Perhaps where the physics of our universe does not apply.
      - b3lvedere 3y ago
        Something like Star Treks subspace?
  - exe34 3y ago
    A being with no time is unable to act.
    - jeremysmyth 3y ago
      > A being with no time is unable to act. This assumes a single linear timestream. If you're the "being", and you're running a simulation of some system, you can absolutely create many parallel timestreams with different initial conditions. You can even return to some point in the simulation and try several intermediate conditions, resulting in different causal outcomes. The many worlds interpretation would absolutely allow agency on the part of such a "being".
      - exe34 3y ago
        If you can create, then you are subject to time. This means you had a start. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
  - skhunted 3y ago
    Believing in the existence of such a being implies that one is comfortable with the idea that something exists without having been created. People who believe such a being exists should not then argue, “If there is no god then where did everything come from?”
    - prmph 3y ago
      Because we are arguing from the our experience in this universe. In a sense, a self originating physical universe would have to have infinite intelligence for it to be plausible, which we don't see. What we see is intelligence in human, who period and scope of existence is but a very tiny part of the universe. I guess this is why people think there must be something bigger than the physical universe out there, and I think it makes sense.
      - skhunted 3y ago
        I think you miss my point. There are those that find the notion that a being can have always existed without being created as plausible but not the notion that another type of "thing" could have always existed without further elaboration on why that "thing" could not have always existed. That you have a more nuanced view on the matter just means you are not in the group of people that I'm referring to. At any rate, you believe something can exist without being created and in this we are agreement. I too believe that something can exist without being created.
        skissane 3y ago
        > That you have a more nuanced view on the matter just means you are not in the group of people that I'm referring to. I don't think "the group of people" you are referring to actually have any significance. You are attacking a strawman version of the cosmological argument, which no philosophically sophisticated theist would defend – and if it so happens that a handful of philosophically unsophisticated theists actually believe your strawman (because they can't see the obvious holes in it), so what? There are philosophically unsophisticated atheists too, who argue for atheism on grounds that intellectually serious atheists find embarrassing. When evaluating any point of view, we ought to focus our attention on its most thoughtful defenders, not the thoughtless ones.
  - tkahnoski 3y ago
    Lately I've wondered... what if this flow of time wasn't true? at least not at universe scale? Messier than just gravitational affects but actual weird topography in time? There is nothing scientific about this conjecture, simply a thought I haven't had time to fully contemplate. What if there were loops and turns such that light and energy from distant galaxies would loop back around not just in space but in time creating weird feedback loops.
    - b3lvedere 3y ago
      Isn't it sort of not true at the extreme universal levels like black holes where spacetime gets incredibly weird?
      - prettyStandard 3y ago
        All SpaceTime curves start at the Big bang, and they all end at black holes. Also time and space get flipped inside a black hole. All of your futures point further into the black hole.
    - tkahnoski 3y ago
      A few quick googles... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_timelike_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_timelike_curve as usual early thinkers on General Relativity were already going down this road.
- tivert 3y ago
  > I have always wondered why most religious people's counter argument of the Big Bang event usually is that one cannot create something from nothing, while most documentation about deities also do not explain where these deities suddenly came from. How common is that though? I'm think your statement doesn't generalize very well, and probably only applies to a small subset of religious people (e.g. wacky young-earth creationist flat earther types). IIRC, the Big Bang is often embraced by religious people as (more or less) proof that the universe was actually created and that something can be created from nothing (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creatio_ex_nihilo#Creatio_ex_nihilo:_the_creation_of_matter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creatio_ex_nihilo#Creatio_ex_n...).
  - skhunted 3y ago
    The Big Bang Theory was the first time that there was a compelling scientific argument that the universe had a beginning and the response by some religious people was to rail against the theory on the grounds that the universe has to be 10,000 or so years old. It’s a strange response. Why they are obsessed so much with the idea that the universe is quite young is bizarre to me.
    - dcow 3y ago
      It’s not bizarre if you believe the bible is a reference manual to existence as some more literal religious types do. In that sense it’s pretty obvious why some people want the universe to be 10k years old.
      - skhunted 3y ago
        I do understand that there are those who believe in a so called literal interpretation and thus equate each day of creation in Genesis to a thousand years but I don't understand their response to the big bang theory. I would think they would proudly proclaim, "Science now agrees with what we said for thousands of years. Namely, that the universe had a beginning." Instead their response was to attack it vehemently. It's a strange response to me. I think St. Augustine's argument for why there is a God assumes that there was no beginning to the universe because he said that if the universe had a beginning then obviously there is a god. St. Augustine would have viewed the big bang theory as irrefutable proof that there is a god.
- dist-epoch 3y ago
  > where these deities suddenly came from There is a line of thought that the deities come from when humans "suddenly" became conscious. The creation of the world is the creation of the human mind.
- m3047 3y ago
  The mathematical derivative in its classic origin story comes from setting something paradoxically to zero. But it can't actually be zero, because then our math breaks: "the lingering essence of a departed quantity". The derivative is seen in the real world in things like motion. If we know something's position changes over time we can calculate its speed (over time), and acceleration (the derivative of speed over time). Motion is (kinetic) energy. Energy, manifested as motion, is transferred to an object not as force over time ('tis but a proxy) but as force over distance. This is why the continuous application of a fixed force to an object in motion transfers more energy to the object in a unit of time when the object is moving faster to begin with. (kinetic energy for an object of a certain mass is proportional to speed^2) But imagine that an object is truly "at rest". No motion. A force is applied. Why does it start moving in the first place?
ericmcer 3y ago
So after we die our “souls” are checked against some condition that we can’t comprehend and we get reincarnated based on pass/fail? Or is dying without passing on your genes the test?
- alafactor 3y ago
  I've always liked the idea that it's something like a state vector in a vector space with a "good" subspace and a "bad" subspace. There's a projection onto the good subspace to yield a (lower-dimensional) vector without the bad components, which is then perhaps embedded in another higher-dimensional state space associated with the afterlife. A fun toy model if nothing else. Clearly I spend too much time thinking about vector spaces.

jvanderbot 3y ago

You're discussing The Egg. I appreciate that. https://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html https://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html

b3lvedere 3y ago

I have always wondered why most religious people's counter argument of the Big Bang event usually is that one cannot create something from nothing, while most documentation about deities also do not explain where these deities suddenly came from.

treprinum 3y ago
Concept of time and eternity - we are in time that flows in one direction, everything has a beginning and end. A being in eternity outside time views all moments of time all at once (like all individual pictures of a movie), hence no origin is necessary/defined in eternity.
- dleeftink 3y ago
  The viewer then, has infinite capacity at its disposal (according to texts of old). The question then is, where could this power be drawn from?
  - treprinum 3y ago
    Concepts of "capacity" and "power" could be another creations of that viewer, not existing in eternity per se, only in our universe.
  - KMag 3y ago
    Outside our universe, presumably. Perhaps where the physics of our universe does not apply.
    - b3lvedere 3y ago
      Something like Star Treks subspace?
- exe34 3y ago
  A being with no time is unable to act.
  - jeremysmyth 3y ago
    > A being with no time is unable to act. This assumes a single linear timestream. If you're the "being", and you're running a simulation of some system, you can absolutely create many parallel timestreams with different initial conditions. You can even return to some point in the simulation and try several intermediate conditions, resulting in different causal outcomes. The many worlds interpretation would absolutely allow agency on the part of such a "being".
    - exe34 3y ago
      If you can create, then you are subject to time. This means you had a start. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
- skhunted 3y ago
  Believing in the existence of such a being implies that one is comfortable with the idea that something exists without having been created. People who believe such a being exists should not then argue, “If there is no god then where did everything come from?”
  - prmph 3y ago
    Because we are arguing from the our experience in this universe. In a sense, a self originating physical universe would have to have infinite intelligence for it to be plausible, which we don't see. What we see is intelligence in human, who period and scope of existence is but a very tiny part of the universe. I guess this is why people think there must be something bigger than the physical universe out there, and I think it makes sense.
    - skhunted 3y ago
      I think you miss my point. There are those that find the notion that a being can have always existed without being created as plausible but not the notion that another type of "thing" could have always existed without further elaboration on why that "thing" could not have always existed. That you have a more nuanced view on the matter just means you are not in the group of people that I'm referring to. At any rate, you believe something can exist without being created and in this we are agreement. I too believe that something can exist without being created.
      - skissane 3y ago
        > That you have a more nuanced view on the matter just means you are not in the group of people that I'm referring to. I don't think "the group of people" you are referring to actually have any significance. You are attacking a strawman version of the cosmological argument, which no philosophically sophisticated theist would defend – and if it so happens that a handful of philosophically unsophisticated theists actually believe your strawman (because they can't see the obvious holes in it), so what? There are philosophically unsophisticated atheists too, who argue for atheism on grounds that intellectually serious atheists find embarrassing. When evaluating any point of view, we ought to focus our attention on its most thoughtful defenders, not the thoughtless ones.
- tkahnoski 3y ago
  Lately I've wondered... what if this flow of time wasn't true? at least not at universe scale? Messier than just gravitational affects but actual weird topography in time? There is nothing scientific about this conjecture, simply a thought I haven't had time to fully contemplate. What if there were loops and turns such that light and energy from distant galaxies would loop back around not just in space but in time creating weird feedback loops.
  - b3lvedere 3y ago
    Isn't it sort of not true at the extreme universal levels like black holes where spacetime gets incredibly weird?
    - prettyStandard 3y ago
      All SpaceTime curves start at the Big bang, and they all end at black holes. Also time and space get flipped inside a black hole. All of your futures point further into the black hole.
  - tkahnoski 3y ago
    A few quick googles... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_timelike_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_timelike_curve as usual early thinkers on General Relativity were already going down this road.
tivert 3y ago
> I have always wondered why most religious people's counter argument of the Big Bang event usually is that one cannot create something from nothing, while most documentation about deities also do not explain where these deities suddenly came from. How common is that though? I'm think your statement doesn't generalize very well, and probably only applies to a small subset of religious people (e.g. wacky young-earth creationist flat earther types). IIRC, the Big Bang is often embraced by religious people as (more or less) proof that the universe was actually created and that something can be created from nothing (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creatio_ex_nihilo#Creatio_ex_nihilo:_the_creation_of_matter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creatio_ex_nihilo#Creatio_ex_n...).
- skhunted 3y ago
  The Big Bang Theory was the first time that there was a compelling scientific argument that the universe had a beginning and the response by some religious people was to rail against the theory on the grounds that the universe has to be 10,000 or so years old. It’s a strange response. Why they are obsessed so much with the idea that the universe is quite young is bizarre to me.
  - dcow 3y ago
    It’s not bizarre if you believe the bible is a reference manual to existence as some more literal religious types do. In that sense it’s pretty obvious why some people want the universe to be 10k years old.
    - skhunted 3y ago
      I do understand that there are those who believe in a so called literal interpretation and thus equate each day of creation in Genesis to a thousand years but I don't understand their response to the big bang theory. I would think they would proudly proclaim, "Science now agrees with what we said for thousands of years. Namely, that the universe had a beginning." Instead their response was to attack it vehemently. It's a strange response to me. I think St. Augustine's argument for why there is a God assumes that there was no beginning to the universe because he said that if the universe had a beginning then obviously there is a god. St. Augustine would have viewed the big bang theory as irrefutable proof that there is a god.
dist-epoch 3y ago
> where these deities suddenly came from There is a line of thought that the deities come from when humans "suddenly" became conscious. The creation of the world is the creation of the human mind.
m3047 3y ago
The mathematical derivative in its classic origin story comes from setting something paradoxically to zero. But it can't actually be zero, because then our math breaks: "the lingering essence of a departed quantity". The derivative is seen in the real world in things like motion. If we know something's position changes over time we can calculate its speed (over time), and acceleration (the derivative of speed over time). Motion is (kinetic) energy. Energy, manifested as motion, is transferred to an object not as force over time ('tis but a proxy) but as force over distance. This is why the continuous application of a fixed force to an object in motion transfers more energy to the object in a unit of time when the object is moving faster to begin with. (kinetic energy for an object of a certain mass is proportional to speed^2) But imagine that an object is truly "at rest". No motion. A force is applied. Why does it start moving in the first place?

ericmcer 3y ago

So after we die our “souls” are checked against some condition that we can’t comprehend and we get reincarnated based on pass/fail? Or is dying without passing on your genes the test?

alafactor 3y ago
I've always liked the idea that it's something like a state vector in a vector space with a "good" subspace and a "bad" subspace. There's a projection onto the good subspace to yield a (lower-dimensional) vector without the bad components, which is then perhaps embedded in another higher-dimensional state space associated with the afterlife. A fun toy model if nothing else. Clearly I spend too much time thinking about vector spaces.