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Platonism can be a bit of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it can make certain concepts a bit easier to visualize, like imagining that probabilities are over a space of "possible worlds" — you certainly don't want to develop your understanding of probability in those terms, but once you know what probabilities are about, that can still be a helpful way to visualize Bayes's theorem and related operations. On the other hand, this seems to be one of the easiest ways to get caught in the mind projection fallacy and some of the standard non-reductionist confusions.
Generally, I allow myself to use Platonist and otherwise imaginary visualizations, as long as I can keep the imaginariness in mind. This has worked well enough so far, particularly because I'm rather confused about what "existence" means, and am wary of letting it make me think I understand strange concepts like "numbers", "universes", etc. better than I really do. Though sometimes I do wonder if any of my visualizations are leading me astray. My visualization of timeless physics, for instance; I'm a bit suspicious of it since I don't really know how to do the math involved, and so I try not to take the visualization too seriously in case I'm imagining the wrong sort of structure altogether.
It took me forever to figure out that these strange thingies were physical systems in the computers themselves, and a bit longer to realize that they didn't look anything like what I thought they did. (I still haven't bothered to look it up, despite having a non-negligible desire to know.)
Look what up, exactly?
...and (it seemed to me) all computations were embodiments of some platonic ideal, souls must exist. Which could have been semi-okay, if I had realized that calling it a "soul" shouldn't allow you to assume it has properties that you ascribe to "souls" but not to "platonic ideals of computation".
Well said.
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The word "but" in the last sentence is a non-sequitur if there ever were one. Tegmark cosmology is not theism. Theism means Jehovah (etc). Yes, there are people who deny this, but those people are just trying to spread confusion in the hope of preventing unpleasant social conflicts. There is no legitimate sense in which Bostromian simulation arguments or Tegmarkian cosmological speculations could be said to be even vaguely memetically related to Jehovah-worship.
The plausibility of simulations or multiverses might be an open question, but the existence of Jehovah isn't. There's a big, giant, huge difference. If we think Tegmark may be correct, then we can just say "I think Tegmark may be correct". There is no need to pay any lip-service to ancient mistakes whose superficial resemblance to Tegmark (etc) is so slight that you would never notice it unless you were motivated to do so, or heard it from someone who was.
The way I read it, it seems like Will_Newsome is not using the word in this way. It may be a case of two concepts being mistakenly filed into the same basket -- certainly some people might, when they hear "Theism-in-general is a mistaken and sometimes harmful way of thinking about the world", understand "theism-in-general" to mean "any mode of thought that acknowledges the possibility of some intelligent mind that is outside and in control of our universe". Under this interpretation, the assertion is quite obviously false (or at least, not obviously true).
I wonder if there is still a disagreement if we Taboo "theism"? (Though your point in the last paragraph is a good one, I think.)