Crazy Ideas Thread

Gunnar_Zarncke

This thread is intended to provide a space for 'crazy' ideas. Ideas that spontaneously come to mind (and feel great), ideas you long wanted to tell but never found the place and time for and also for ideas you think should be obvious and simple - but nobody ever mentions them.

This thread itself is such an idea. Or rather the tangent of such an idea which I post below as a seed for this thread.

Rules for this thread:

Each crazy idea goes into its own top level comment and may be commented there.
Voting should be based primarily on how original the idea is.
Meta discussion of the thread should go to the top level comment intended for that purpose.

If this should become a regular thread I suggest the following :

Use "Crazy Ideas Thread" in the title.
Copy the rules.
Add the tag "crazy_idea".
Create a top-level comment saying 'Discussion of this thread goes here; all other top-level comments should be ideas or similar'
Add a second top-level comment with an initial crazy idea to start participation.

This thread itself is such an idea. Or rather the tangent of such an idea which I post below as a seed for this thread.

Rules for this thread:

Each crazy idea goes into its own top level comment and may be commented there.
Voting should be based primarily on how original the idea is.
Meta discussion of the thread should go to the top level comment intended for that purpose.

If this should become a regular thread I suggest the following :

Use "Crazy Ideas Thread" in the title.
Copy the rules.
Add the tag "crazy_idea".
Create a top-level comment saying 'Discussion of this thread goes here; all other top-level comments should be ideas or similar'
Add a second top-level comment with an initial crazy idea to start participation.

If we lived as ems in a simulated universe, literally any claim of any religion of any religion could be true. Any other claim, too.

The point is, when people seriously ponder if we lived in a simulated universe but have nothing but scorn for religions, it is not so much rational as cultural. In a sci-fi geek subculture, simulation is cool, religions not.

Culture, in this sense, means the following. If theory A and B makes the same predictions but the formulation, the wording of A seems vastly preferable than B - that is culture.

IMHO this is one of the most important kind of bias in me I need to control for. I need to ask myself "if this was reworded in a way that is culturally compatible with me, would I still reject it so strongly?" or the opposite "is it something entirely without merit, but merely worded in a way that presses my 'cool' buttons?"

Arguments for the singularity are also (weak) arguments for theism.

As I have repeatedly stated (without much response), first at the bottom of my baseline post.

0John_Maxwell11y

I hesitate to mention this, but I believe there was a period where a crankish LWer or two was advocating religious belief on simulator-god grounds. I think it had more to do with intellectual hipsterism than anything. Your culture point is also discussed in this Slate Star Codex post.

3DanArmak11y

If we live in a non-simulated universe, (almost) any claim of any religion can still be true. It's just so astronomically unlikely that we shouldn't spend any time considering it. (See: Pascal's Wager.) How are ems different? A uniform prior over all possible religions isn't useful. What evidence would they have, from the mere fact of being in a simulation, that any particular set of religious claims is likely, aside from the bare claim "there are Simulators but we don't know anything about them except that they want our universe to be simulated"?

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