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 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"?

Across the multiverse, some universes support life, and some of those features civs which create lots of sims. Given that our physics seems to support enormous numbers of sim universes per basement universe, most of the copies of ourselves are probably in sims.

Realizing that, there is a general convergent strategy that we should precommit to: in the future when we have the power we should 'win the sims arms race' so to speak and create many sims of our past. In this way we ensure that our sim is benevolent.

These kinds of game-theoretic convergent conside... (read more)

6[anonymous]11y

I think a step from a lawful universe to an arbitrarily programmable universe would be fairly big. We exclude miracles in principle, for ems, miracles would be possible. If ems would agree the universe has a Programmer who is allmighty (can simulate what he wants), omniscient (can look at any part of the source code) it would be a big step. So it would be relevant to the meta step "are miracles possible?" and not to the more object level step "is this X miracle report for reals?" Also a uniform prior would be useful for the more syncretic approaches - it would not be so useful for primitive kind of religious approaches like "thing X is written in my holy book while some other holy books writes something totally different" but it would be more useful for the kind of "unified theology/philosophy" that the best minds in Islam (Avicenna) Judaism (Maimonides) Catholicism (Aquinas) were developing. My point is not the veracity of each religious claim but the veracity of living in a kind of universe where religious claims are possible, even likely that something like those happens (the Programmer plays around with stuff, tests ideas, throws a bunch of tablets on a desert tribe to experimentally test some sociology theories of ems) and then all we had to decide is which ones.

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