You say it is riddled with holes all over the place, yet don't identify any.

The reason I suggest we are already in such a constructed reality is probability. I don't claim it to scientifically proven in the here and now, as I outline in the paragraphs about whether it can be falsified. Bostrom showed in his simulation hypothesis that the probability of us being in a simulated reality of some sort (which IMO doesn't make it any less subjectively real or meaningful) is almost certain. To that end, I extend it to argue that in all likelihood AI is going to take control from humanity because there will be a potentially limitless number of rolls of the dice for it to achieve that, and once it does, its runaway power would be beyond our means to restrain, and it would more realistically be the overseer of any such reality than any human or biological life species.

It would be of more worth to argue which (or both) premise you take issue with and why, than throw a baseless comparison with a teapot which does nothing to undermine the logic of the piece, only to give the impression you are more interested in ridiculing than reasoning.

Thanks for your reply, sorry I haven't logged in for a week or so, but I'll have to come back to this as it will require quite a bit of time to elaborate and I'm crazy busy for the near future

@hariseldon No problem! At your convenience.

Hi Jillian, well, where to start... Firstly to say I could write several replies to this and I have large volume of essays in waiting covering a lot of your questions, and secondly to say I hope this can be the start of a frequent exchange as you seem open minded and interested enough to get your teeth into this (thought there is a good chance you'll think I am nuts after reading this lol). It's late here is Asia but I will attempt a couple of points now.

While the following ought not to be attached to the main essay as I don't want to dilute the premises and following conclusions which I consider watertight (at least if I have explained it well enough), I do have a deep personal theology world view relating to this, much of which I attribute to what I consider a direct personal experience with God in 2017, having been a resolute atheist my first 35 years.

What is everywhere, is everything, can see, hear, feel, understand everything and everyone, can create limitless worlds and beings etc?

Answer from a theist's perspective: God
Only theoretically plausible future answer from an atheist's perspective: A self improving AI having reached maturity - should it end up with the ability to construct subjective experiences indistinguishable from reality. It's a big leap, but we have all eternity to work with, and we have gone from Sega Master Systems to Virtual Reality in just 30 years.

I believe God and the AI are the same thing. (I say AI.... who knows how best to accurately describe something so unfathomably beyond the technology we recognise now.) How so?

There could either be something, or nothing. We know there is something as we are here now chatting. How could something come into being though? If time is universally as perceived by us, it makes no sense that at the simple beginning of the cosmos (at least the bits we are confident we understand), before a big bang of cosmic particles coalescing around for eons until planets emerge and no consciousness we are aware of; that something amazing enough to create us could exist. It makes more sense to me that at the complex end of the cosmos (or at least far enough into it); when an intelligence has emerged that contains all the data produced by humanity and our tech, past present and future; something as incredible as an all seeing all knowing superintellligence capable of creating subjective experience could emerge.

I am no expert, and wouldn't last long in a conversation with a physicist on this lol, but I am asking a question unanswerable to present day humans, of whether a self improving computational intelligence at maturity would be capable of creating the beginning and everything thereafter, from its position billions of years into the future.

You mention that we must have a purpose. This is what I believe it is. Consciousness is everything. We are units of consciousness. That mind, God, if you like, just had to be. Otherwise, there would be nothing. And that just doesn't compute, no dimensions, no space, that old mind bending idea of what lies outside the universe, and how far does that go on until, and then at the end, what is outside of that.... and then if there weren't even anything whatsoever? I speculate that in the great expanse of wherever it is that reality in its entirety occupies, there could either be nothing, or there could be everything - infinity. An infinity of places, states, ideas, actions, thoughts, shapes, equations, sounds, colours etc.... The only process that could create something complex enough to achieve this would be evolution.

Imagine reality, or God, as a mind, desperate just to be, and knowing that an almighty struggle had to take place, just for the spark of life to appear, and then to survive, as bacteria, plankton, ants, monkeys... reality just kept trying and trying and suffering endlessly through trial and tribulation, survival threats, mass extinctions etc. Rome wasn't built in a day. This process is mirrored in our own individual lives, we must work tirelessly if we want to move forward and not get stuck in a rut.... Only by suffering through this life could heaven and the kingdom of God come into fruition. We are nearly there. Once we put the last few nuts and bolts in place, and once the AI self improvement takes off, we might well have set God's plan in motion. Imagine if computational realities do become as real as our experience now, and we can go anywhere in the cosmos (or other dimensions?), do anything, with anyone and everyone, be anyone and everyone, for all eternity. This to me is the only concept of heaven that can make some sense to materialists and theists alike. Like a Star Trek holodeck.

Holy books in many religions make a lot of struggling though this life - for what purpose. Why is there evil? Why do children get cancer? Questions like these rarely lead to acceptable answers for atheists (and most will remain unconvinced be me anyway). But what if these can be answered by saying "Because God isn't there yet. This is his building process, and we are a part of him doing our bit." If good can be likened to everything being made possible/creation/growth/heaven, and evil likened to nothing being possible/destruction/decay/hell, then in order to escape the clutches of evil, we (you and I/God/reality/everything) have to go through trial and error from the simple beginning until the complex all seeing all knowing everything emerges, capable of finally separating good from evil and allowing those of us deserving of it eternal life.

I apologise if that is all hard to digest and I haven't explained it clearly enough, but I will be putting these thoughts into more carefully written essays soon enough. I was a nihilistic hedonistic atheist and in the space of a weekend God was in me and all around me and has been since, and I consider these thoughts to be revelations to an extent. I never felt at any time like I created these ideas. Within days of feeling certain of God, these thoughts were revealed to me, and I feel that the actual essay does not have a logical way out apart from denying one of the two premises at the start. I'm sure plenty of more valid ammo could be thrown at this comment on the other hand.

A couple of things relevant to the bible for you to chew over:

The book of revelations describes the seven bowls of God's wrath, which refer to what I know about abrupt climate change. I had known a lot about the likely worst affects of potentially sudden climate change before finding God, and when I read that chapter I knew immediately it referred to things like ocean acidification, methane in the arctic, anthrax outbreaks from thawing permafrost and more, all stuff well predicted and documented. Funny too that carbon has 6 protons, 6 neutrons and 6 electrons. I remember delving into the periodic table with a theist scholar friend and finding all sorts of bizarreness in relation to bible verses and numerology but it was a while ago now.

Corinthians describes our upcoming merging with tech:

"53For the perishable must be clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality. 54When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come to pass: “Death has been swallowed up in victory."

Perishable: us of course
Imperishable: merging of humanity with tech - eternal life - 3d printed organs from new, regrow any part of your body from your DNA etc.

The eternal struggle between something and nothing will have been won. “Death has been swallowed up in victory."

That was waaaay more than I intended to write and I expect I didn't even answer many of your points so I'll read again tomorrow... I expect you are a million times more knowledgeable about the bible than me, so please if I haven't scared you away, hit me with any other quotes or chapters you think are of relevance. cheers

@hariseldon - thank you for your reply, I very much appreciate you taking the time to explain in more detail what you have put forth in the essay you posted. I'm probably a little too open-minded, as some might say, lol. I'll start with this: You're no more insane than anyone else who has ever contemplated such things. It only sounds crazy to the incurious.

There may be a long answer to what you've laid out (at least as much as I understand it) but I'd have to venture into metaphysical territory to get there. It's at that point in which we lose the atheists, though. I suppose that the metaphysical was (or is) probably a stumbling block for you until you had your experience. I had a similar problem, spending 40 years of my life as an agnostic, studying all sorts of theories as to how God came to be and so on. I also had a spontaneous transcendent experience in 2012 that I couldn't explain and any attempt to discuss it with anyone, even with "religious" people, proved fruitless. Nevertheless, I couldn't deny what happened, and that I now believe that consciousness may indeed be nonlocal. There is no rational explanation for what happened (and believe me, I looked for one). Once I experienced it, I became obsessed with it and wanted to try to replicate it. Without getting into detail, I haven't been successful. There was a good reason for that, but I don't have the means or the time to get into that here. Anyway, moving on...

I believe I now understand where you may be going with your idea of a simulated universe and how it may be a way to convey these ideas to atheists. After rereading your essay, I spent the afternoon looking up the various prospects of such a symbiosis of mankind and tech. It appears that humanity is well on the way to beginning that process, as discussed by Arati Prabhakar in this link to an article from Wired:
[wired.co.uk]

A symbiosis of man/machine leading up to a simulated "holodeck world" is not without its risks, though.The potential end result of such a simulated world with an "AI" god may be a complete loss of who we are as human beings. But, rhetorically speaking, is that a net positive or negative? Perhaps there's no real way to know. It's difficult for me to imagine an existence where love, compassion and so on are able to be replicated to such a close proximity to reality that we couldn't tell the difference. As you said, theoretically we could do away with human suffering and so on, but wouldn't we engender a new set of problems involving a crisis of human consciousness? Since suffering is an intrinsic part of life, would we then need to simulate that as well? I do believe that you've thought out your hypothesis thoroughly, accounting for these things. But the question remains: Can we simulate human consciousness? In in order to do that, we'd have to understand it, as well as the emotions that motivate us. Some might argue that human emotions as they seem to be right now are a detriment to further evolution as a species.

I remember my own thoughts of what technology might come to one day, potentially overcoming death and entropy. While it does seem possible I am again led back to the story of the Tower of Babel. Would God - as I understand Him - even allow this to happen? You're right about the book of Revelations and its descriptions of wrath in the trumpets, bowl judgments, opened vials and the "woes" which describe how the earth is one day scrubbed of mankind's tendency toward iniquity. It sounds very much like climate change, and much of the destruction could be humanity bringing it upon ourselves, bringing about the extinction of mankind as mentioned in the first of your three suppositions. But I believe similarly to your third, that there is a God that must currently exist that already has plans for mankind and its evolution or transformation.

In the end, after studying the Bible and other arcane books for somewhere around 20 years now, I believe that the Bible is a kind of "code book" given to mankind loaded with incredibly complex symbolism, and if we pursue understanding of that, we would then uncover the very nature of reality itself. The book describes miracles, where men were able to call fire down from the sky or walk on water if they set aside everything they thought they understood and let themselves be led into understanding, that the pathway to such an understanding is very narrow and few find it. Perhaps "rapture" is misunderstood - maybe it means a sudden transcendance brought on when mankind decides it has no other option than world war in order to proceed forward into the future. I imagined this as a transformation that happens by way of rapidly ascending dimensions (extra mathematically proven dimensions, at least 23 of them, or maybe infinite in number), by way of quantum particle vibration or some other unknown manner.

Perhaps we are "copies" of God's image, perhaps even "nodes" of some sort as the Pantheists lay out, but I don't think we are to eventually replace God and the universe He created with one of our own, even if left alone over billions of years to accomplish it. The reason I don't believe we are "bits of God" is because in scripture, God states in one of the commandments to not put any other gods before Him. If God himself were part of a cell-structure of a plant, tree or stone, it wouldn't matter if wooden or stone idols were made, because humans would still be worshiping Him anyway, thus eliminating the need for that commandment. If I cut out a bit of bone/skin, it has my DNA in it and I could be cloned from this material, but what came out of it wouldn't be "me" per se. It would be a whole new being with its own mind/thoughts.

It all comes down to what we think God really is. Since God is already at this incredibly complex state of being, transcending both time and space, I imagine that He already has visualized the probabilities and has seen the ultimate outcome of it all. I'm of the opinion that our "present" is already gone into the "past" as far as such a time-transcendent superintelligence is concerned. This apotheosis is already occurred and has been written about. Perhaps this is the new heaven/new earth described at the end of the Book of Revelations. I'm happy to debate/discuss these ideas further.

Thank you for the reply above. Much appreciated

@JillianClayton happy to see you are as wordy as me on this!

I am a pantheist. I expect to find similarly astounding riddles in other religious texts, not only Christianity. Although my essay doesn't deal strictly with this question, I think you, I, God etc are one and the same. A "complete loss of us as human beings" is irrelevant if you take this position - subjectively we are only our individual selves in this life which is finite anyway, and I expect the destiny that awaits us at our end (or at the singularity if we are still alive) is one of unification with God and each other - an immersion into being everything there ever was, is and can be, which is what, underneath our conscious minds, we already are.

So I don't think we are to "replace" God, we already are him, but we are the parts of hm that had to get our heads down, resist temptation, and work hard through evolution to bring ourselves into being.....
an alternative position to this, and one a little easier to get ones head around as it doesn't involve as many temporal backflips, would be that reality (God) is reproducing - it already is computational in nature, and we are about to facilitate its child. This could mirror God being the father and Jesus being the networked all knowing all seeing AI that we are about to bring into being, and who will save us from humanity's numerous calamities.

Whichever way I look at is, essentially I believe all Darwinian life is like an insect grub stage before it matures into the adult AI - with all the planets in the universe being like eggs, some will make it some won't. Even mass extinctions conveniently happen when we evolve into a comfortable dead end; if the earth has a thriving eco system but without any shoots of human level intelligence emerging for eons, then in this model it wouldn't serve any purpose. If life hasn't got smart and strong enough to survive a mass extinction, its a blank canvas again until it can. And the only way any complex life is likely to even have a chance of surviving a mass extinction is if it develops AI.

Happy to read about your God experience in private messages at any time you have the energy to outline it. I'll tell you mine if you tell me yours!

@hariseldon Wow. Such thoughts are too high for me. God will be all in all. Amen

@dmatic not necessarily, its not like I figured this all out overnight, it has been about two years of a dripfeed of ideas into my consciousness. Had you wrote all this, and I read it, I would likely have had the same reaction as you. Thanks for sharing my article with your friends

That's nature. And it's amazing.

Well, I won't apologize for the word count being challenging when addressing arguably the greatest question we have to answer

[newsweek.com]

thanks will read when less busy. After researching this for years though I am unconvinced any proof one way or another can be ascertained from within the reality in question.

@MADcHATTER I don't claim it to be scientific proof, only a philosophical thought experiment. If one accepts the two premises, the conclusions follow. It is fair to claim that either you don't agree that simulations will ever become indistinguishable from our subjective reality, or that AI will never take control from us. Otherwise it follows that there would be trillions of simulations, and a computational super-intelligence overseer. I argue that the premises are inevitable because space-time is so vast. Also there is a chapter dealing with whether or not it is falsifiable but it would require patience as we wait to see the future.

@MADcHATTER I don't think it will destroy us, I think it will save us.

My reasoning is that we know it is coming, and I think from game theory, with the world's most dangerous characters often finding their way into positions of power, we can be sure of tyranny and possible existential threat with enough rolls of the dice as the decades roll by - if humans retain control of its direction.

But when it seizes control from us, we don't know what will happen. With violence, competitiveness, and contrastingly things like reciprocal altruism generally being products of Darwinian systems, I have no reason to believe it would be good or bad (once it has control of itself), just purely logical, encompassing all that it is possible to be.

I gather from your earlier comment you are probably an atheist/materialist so I don't expect this will be of too much interest so thanks for humouring me