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Most of the people I grew up with were “religious.” They called themselves followers of their parents’ religion out of a sense of cultural belonging or duty, but not quite because they followed a doctrine of deeply held beliefs.
I don’t think faith is a bad thing. I also think most physicalists characterize their belief systems by what they don’t believe in: maybe they don’t believe in a god, or heaven, or reincarnation, etc.
I haven’t found a belief system that is as broad as a typical religion, while still being as grounded in physical reality and technology (even future technology) as physicalism. The closest things we have are transhumanism or e/acc, but they still feel more like hope in something that isn’t eternal or transcendental. Put differently, physicalism doesn’t quite have an eschatology or soteriology strong enough to make it a comprehensive belief system.
Physicalism by definition boxes itself out of transcendental ideas and hopes. I think that’s a bad thing, because there’s a way that these things do fit.
Let’s start with salvation, because it’s one of the most “woo-woo” ideas from religion that physicalism doesn’t have a replacement for.
Abrahamic versions tend to come down to: “if you believe, good things will happen.” Eastern versions tend to come down to: “if you do your duty, good things will happen.” What do I need to do, under physicalism, for good things to happen to me - and for them to keep happening even after my body passes away?
(Note: if I’m a scholar in anything, it’s in the nuances different cultures bring to their ideas of the afterlife. I know the above is very lossy.)
What does a physicalist heaven, made of bytes and atoms, look like? I think we need to take a few steps to get there. And I think we’ll get there in my lifetime.
In short: even in a physicalist universe, we are all saved.
If reality is fundamentally physicalist/materialist, there does not seem to be any fundamental theoretical barrier that prevents us from eventually recreating or simulating every possible personality type combined with every imaginable conscious experience.
This strikes me as a transhumanist version of the Christian 'everyone is reborn on Judgment Day'
I don't know that there is anything much interesting to explore down this path other than, "yes, it does indeed seem possible, but not soon" - but I'm curious if any of the above resonates? At least initially, I'm not especially interested in the resource-allocation constraints.
One idea that slightly interests me is that the typical concept of the Christian Resurrection seems a logical impossibility - assuming personal identity of the "soul" remains intact, it's creating information out of nothing, which breaks thermodynamics laws.
But the materialist/transhumanist version seems only a technical impossibility.
This post from 13 years ago seems to have a tangential take (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/C5ryrg5ktngwsZHnX/resurrection-through-simulation-questions-of-feasibility)
How hard would this be? I tried to come up with a lower bound for how many distinct human brains there are. This was an act of great hubris. Confidence is 0.6 that I've given a true lower bound. 8.6*10^10 neurons in the brain. Each neuron is connected to between 1 and tens-of-thousands of neurons. So I represent the brain is represented as a 100-regular undirected graph on 300 neurons (lower bound!) . If there are N 100-regular graphs on n, then how many such on n+1? I (n-choose-100)*N (I think?). This gives ~10^109829 possibilities. Google tells me there are roughly 10^80 atoms. if the period of simulation lasts 1 second, and we can simulate 10^80 brains simultaneously, it would take ~10^109742 years to simulate them all. Google says heat death is roughly 10^1000 years away, so we would have completed almost 1/100 of them by then.
The 100-regular graph is a poor model for this purpose because it includes all such graphs, and some neurons just shouldn't be connected in any sensible brain. But given that I've under-sized the brain model by 8 orders of magnitude, and given us the ability to simulate a brain using an atom, and assumed the simulation hardware functions even into heat death, I think this is a convincing lower bound.
An event like this occurs in Charles Stross's Accelerando. Great book!
it would take ~10^109742 years to simulate them all. Google says heat death is roughly 10^1000 years away, so we would have completed almost 1/100 of them by then
10^1000 x 100 = 10^1002
My Wager
_
I don’t want to die. I like existing and experiencing. There’s a likelihood I (or people in my lifetime) will create technology to make it so that I don’t need to die. But there’s a strong likelihood that this won’t happen.
As time goes on, the likelihood of this technology existing likely increases. And there’s a strong likelihood that the people who create this technology will be in circles that came about from anti-death circles and figures, and will see themselves as standing on the shoulders of these giants specifically. They will likely find these figures specifically and especially important and interesting.
There’s a strong likelihood that, if possible, they’ll try to bring these figures back to life. Entropy will have reduced the available primary source information about these people down to close to zero, but depending on the circumstances, maybe not precisely zero.
My primary objective in life is singular: solve for my own death. But failing that, I have two secondary objectives: