jacob_cannell comments on Theists are wrong; is theism? - Less Wrong
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Isn't this - I'm sorry if that sounds harsh - arguing by a forceful say-so? Sure, if you constrain theism rhetorically to "Jehovah-worship", that practice doesn't sound very similar to the Bostromian arguments. But "Bostromian arguments/Tegmarkian speculations" and "the claim that a god created the universe" sound pretty much memetically related to me.
You're saying that e.g. "we are living in a simulation run by sentient beings" and "we are living in a universe created by a sentient being" are such wildly different ideas that there's only superficial resemblance between them, and even that resemblance is unlikely to be noticed by anyone just thinking about the issue, and is rather spread as a kind of a perverse meme.
Methinks thou dost protest too much.
The earliest time I can remember that anyone drew a very explicit connection between simulations and theism is in Stanislaw Lem's short story about Professor Corcoran. The book was originally published in 1971, when Bostrom was -2 years old. It's in the second volume of his Star Diaries; see "Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy: I" in this (probably pirated) scribd doc. I'd recommend it to anyone. Of course, it's very much possible that Lem wasn't the first to write up the idea.
See Religion's Claim to be Non-Disprovable for discussion of what religion is and how it arose. By "memetically related" I do not mean "memetically similar" (although I don't think there's much similarity either); I mean "related" in the sense of ancestry/inheritance. Bostrom's and Tegmark's arguments are not a branch of religion; they do not belong in that cluster.
No. The implication of the post, as I perceived it (have a look at its first paragraph) was "you guys shouldn't be so confident in your dismissal-of-religion ('atheism'); after all, you (perhaps rightly) are willing to entertain the ideas of Tegmark!"
Surely you understand what is wrong with this.
You think I don't believe what I'm writing?
The OP does not make mention of the term 'religion'. Part of the confusion seems to stem from the conflation of theism and religion.
Theism is a philosophical belief about the nature of reality. The truthfulness of this belief as a map of reality is not somehow dependent or connected in belief space to magic rituals, prayers, voodo dolls or the memes of organized religion, even if they historically co-occur.
I beg to differ. In my view, the conflation is of theism with simulationism.