This was posted on catholic easter sunday on the ssc subreddit. It's a posted-on-April 1st-for-plausible-deniability siskind post from back in 2018, where he outlines a kind of argument about how an all-powerfull entity that's God in all but name (and obviously emanated from a culture discovering AGI) is actually "logically necessary".
He calls the whole thing "The Hour I First Believed". I think it's notable for being a bit of a treasure trove of rationalist weird accepted truths, such as:
- All copies of a consciousness share a self, because consciousness is like an equation, or something:
But if consciousness is a mathematical object, it might be that two copies of the same consciousness are impossible. If you create a second copy, you just have the consciousness having the same single stream of conscious experience on two different physical substrates.
Which is both the original transhumanist cope to enable so-called consciousness upload so it's not just copying a simulacrum of your personality to a computer while you continue to rot away, and also what makes the basilisk torturing you possible.
- And it's corollary, Simulation Capture:
This means that an AI can actually “capture” you, piece by piece, into its simulation. First your consciousness is just in the real world. Then your consciousness is distributed across one real-world copy and a million simulated copies. Then the AI makes the simulated copies slightly different, and 99.9999% of you is in the simulation.
which is a kind of nuts I hadn't happened upon before.
There's also a bunch of rationalist decision theory stuff which I think make obvious how they were concocted to serve this type of narrative in the first place, instead for being broadly useful, Yud posing as a decision theory trailblazer notwithstanding.
The decision theory stuff itself ought to be called out more for playing pretty fast and loose with reality to begin with. "If you have a supercomputer that perfectly simulates blah blah blah" is such a fundamentally bad premise because once you presume such a thing exists you're committing to the same basic metaphysical problems that you would if you replaced the computer with God. In particular I think it commits you to hard determinism at which point there's no sense arguing about what the right action is because the answer was set in stone not just before you entered the room but when the initial state of the universe was set up. Like, there's a version of this where the question is meaningful in which case the premise is impossible, and a version where we accept the premise as given and render the question pointless. Why are you doing decision theory in a hypothetical world where nobody really makes decisions?
Or we could acknowledge that yudkowskian decision theory is just singularity apologetics and accept the impossible elements of the premise on faith.
Luckily we should be getting trickle down free will, since all universes are (of course) able to develop technology to perfectly simulate universes of lesser complexity, which seems to imply the existence of a special universe of ultimate complexity where all others emanate from, possibly in line with ain soph or equivalent mystical concept.
I don't know how that squares with that blabbing about the tegmarkian multiverse that supposedly posits that mathematically simple universes "exist 'more'", which siskind probably just included to reinforce his consciousness as a non-physical, mathematical object premise.
On a different note, 'our god means you have no free will' is also quite opposed to what I got from Christianity.
@Soyweiser @sneerclub Are you familiar with Calvinism?
Get that heresy out of here, pope or nope!
E: to be clear, im talking here about my own personal experience growing up catholic, not talking about all the different types of christianity. Im aware of a few of them, but not as huge on the details, I know they went to different primary schools. (The joys of being Dutch, look up 'verzuiling' (pillarisation iirc). Less a thing so now I think, I oddly experienced a vestige of it re primary school).
Christianity certainly runs the gamut wrt to free will, from it being strictly necessary to explain away the problem of evil to, well, Calvinism.
I will back up soyweiser here by saying that at least in modern Christianity you run into the latter a hell of a lot less often. I don't know that most of them have done a lot of theological introspection to try and reconcile the usual contradictions you get from trying to use bronze-age source material dealing in absolutes, but when push comes to shove I think most of them lean towards believing that the choice to be a decent person is real and matters.
Yeah been a while since I was confirmed (or believed) but the free will part of that was considered important from what I remember. So not only being a decent person, but also the choice to believe in and act on the faith.
Unrelated, but it is odd how much I have been thinking back about all that the last few years, esp more so the last year. Lot of it is due to the US gov being really keep on getting excommunications back on the menu. (Note this doesn't make the church good in any way, like even if we ignore the coverup of the pedophilia, they went full anti trans recently).