This post is entirely intended to be inspirational and entertaining. Which though is no excuse for the logical flaws in it. None of this is particularly plausible nor am I trying to support religion in some weird way, anyway I hope anyone doesn't find this offensive, but I don't think this is the most sensitive website around religious subjects anyway, so.
Religion Sci-fiin style of Dr. Emmet Brown
Suppose that mankind succesfully produces a Friendly AI in the future and also adopts some ethical doctrine that cares about people, goes on making technological advancements and prolonging the lives and subjective experiences of humans, or something else along those lines. Then also suppose that humans learn how to travel back in time. It would present an ethical dilemma of what do about all those lost beings that died long ago. Considering there had been a finite number of such cases, it would be plausible to consume a finite amount of resources to bend the future of humanity backwards in time, or travel back in time, to fetch all those people just before they perish and allow them to join the eudaimonic future society of humans.
Now consider the possibility that the vast majority of futures for mankind do not contain these outcomes where a Friendly Ai is succesfully established where people care about people and have not succesfully established any flexible, sophisticated or complex morality at all. And in those futures where humanity achieved all those things, it could be seen as a problem, that some futures had consisted of such tragic waste. So we decide to alter the past futures of humanity, and travel backwards in time - yet again, and establish religion, appear on the mountain of Sinai, give out the 10 commandments, and speak of this being superior to humans that takes care of everybody. Which would be the friendly AI, a bostromian singleton, or similar. However they would not do this just to steer the possible future outcomes of humanity away from unwanted futures, but also to create a new parallel future, to see if the course of recursive moral advancements would take an entirely different form after injecting similar goals or ideals prior to the development of the Friendly AI - that is 'God' (I'd prefer Mother over Father though) in heaven - the future society.
The Matrix movie, Reductionism and Mathematical Universe Hypothesis
Suppose that the universe humanity lives in happened to be a computer simulation - akin to the fictional setting of the Matrix movie - instead of a "real" universe. The notion of "real" would then have a very obscure meaning, but for the sake of argument, let's consider this possibility. (There's no particular reason to think of simulated people as not real)
Meditation: How would you expect a simulated universe to differ from any 'actual' universe?
Well for one, you could say that if the observable universe is reducible to, or entirely describable by, mathematical formulas and axioms this would seem to increase the plausibility of a simulated universe, because in contrast, if the universe was not reducible to mathematically describable structures that would in some sense rule out a computational environment of finite accuracy1 or information.
According to the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis this would be the case - not that the universe is a simulation, but - that the universe is reducible to physics with mathematical descriptions. The physics underlying observed reality can be generalized to fields and formulas, correlations and so forth, which technically could be running in a limited computational space, with limited memory if not computational speed.
Another rather interesting point is to consider the likelihood of any sentient being (ie. selected at random) existing in reality vs existing inside a simulation occurring within that/some reality. So if you would have intelligent beings creating simulations containtaining sentient beings, it could be said that maybe in some of the possible universes there are far more sentient beings inside simulations than there are actual 'physical' sentient beings. And if you knew you were in one of those universes (though in that case "a universe" could be something that exists within(/is the) a simulation, but since our concept of simulations exists inside this universe, the "think outside the box" kind of becomes impossible to do) then how likely would it be to be in a simulation without being aware of that?
On the other hand there's 1: Heisenberg uncertainity principle, and since our minds are in constant interaction with the environment not just via sensory information but also through trauma, metabolism, disease, etc. it does seem like humans have their brains located in the really real world which we can observe, rather than some dentist's chair in some fictional dystopia.
Ps. Although now that I think about it these two subjects though serving the same purpose are mostly distinct. Anyway it would be good to treat the "Religion Sci-Fi" as an exercise of rationality, since it takes so many "leaps of faith", includes rationalization and triggers conjunction fallacy. For an example: What probability do you assign for future time travel? On the other hand the simulation scenario is of different nature, and it's more about actual reasoning and collecting evidence from the environment for and against. Why do you think this reality can/can't be a simulation?
Whether it is meant for entertainment or not I think the usefulness of these hypothetical scenarios (in the context of a community blog) is directly proportional to the precision of their construction.
Preface
This post is entirely intended to be inspirational and entertaining. Which though is no excuse for the logical flaws in it. None of this is particularly plausible nor am I trying to support religion in some weird way, anyway I hope anyone doesn't find this offensive, but I don't think this is the most sensitive website around religious subjects anyway, so.
Religion Sci-fi in style of Dr. Emmet Brown
Suppose that mankind succesfully produces a Friendly AI in the future and also adopts some ethical doctrine that cares about people, goes on making technological advancements and prolonging the lives and subjective experiences of humans, or something else along those lines. Then also suppose that humans learn how to travel back in time. It would present an ethical dilemma of what do about all those lost beings that died long ago. Considering there had been a finite number of such cases, it would be plausible to consume a finite amount of resources to bend the future of humanity backwards in time, or travel back in time, to fetch all those people just before they perish and allow them to join the eudaimonic future society of humans.
Now consider the possibility that the vast majority of futures for mankind do not contain these outcomes where a Friendly Ai is succesfully established where people care about people and have not succesfully established any flexible, sophisticated or complex morality at all. And in those futures where humanity achieved all those things, it could be seen as a problem, that some futures had consisted of such tragic waste. So we decide to alter the past futures of humanity, and travel backwards in time - yet again, and establish religion, appear on the mountain of Sinai, give out the 10 commandments, and speak of this being superior to humans that takes care of everybody. Which would be the friendly AI, a bostromian singleton, or similar. However they would not do this just to steer the possible future outcomes of humanity away from unwanted futures, but also to create a new parallel future, to see if the course of recursive moral advancements would take an entirely different form after injecting similar goals or ideals prior to the development of the Friendly AI - that is 'God' (I'd prefer Mother over Father though) in heaven - the future society.
Meditation: How would you expect a simulated universe to differ from any 'actual' universe?The Matrix movie, Reductionism and Mathematical Universe Hypothesis
Suppose that the universe humanity lives in happened to be a computer simulation - akin to the fictional setting of the Matrix movie - instead of a "real" universe. The notion of "real" would then have a very obscure meaning, but for the sake of argument, let's consider this possibility. (There's no particular reason to think of simulated people as not real)
Well for one, you could say that if the observable universe is reducible to, or entirely describable by, mathematical formulas and axioms this would seem to increase the plausibility of a simulated universe, because in contrast, if the universe was not reducible to mathematically describable structures that would in some sense rule out a computational environment of finite accuracy1 or information.
According to the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis this would be the case - not that the universe is a simulation, but - that the universe is reducible to physics with mathematical descriptions. The physics underlying observed reality can be generalized to fields and formulas, correlations and so forth, which technically could be running in a limited computational space, with limited memory if not computational speed.
Another rather interesting point is to consider the likelihood of any sentient being (ie. selected at random) existing in reality vs existing inside a simulation occurring within that/some reality. So if you would have intelligent beings creating simulations containtaining sentient beings, it could be said that maybe in some of the possible universes there are far more sentient beings inside simulations than there are actual 'physical' sentient beings. And if you knew you were in one of those universes (though in that case "a universe" could be something that exists within(/is the) a simulation, but since our concept of simulations exists inside this universe, the "think outside the box" kind of becomes impossible to do) then how likely would it be to be in a simulation without being aware of that?
On the other hand there's 1: Heisenberg uncertainity principle, and since our minds are in constant interaction with the environment not just via sensory information but also through trauma, metabolism, disease, etc. it does seem like humans have their brains located in the really real world which we can observe, rather than some dentist's chair in some fictional dystopia.
Ps. Although now that I think about it these two subjects though serving the same purpose are mostly distinct. Anyway it would be good to treat the "Religion Sci-Fi" as an exercise of rationality, since it takes so many "leaps of faith", includes rationalization and triggers conjunction fallacy. For an example: What probability do you assign for future time travel? On the other hand the simulation scenario is of different nature, and it's more about actual reasoning and collecting evidence from the environment for and against. Why do you think this reality can/can't be a simulation?