Hacker News Reader

Comment by julianpye | Hacker News Reader

Regarding AI and God and religion - here is a blog post that I wrote that suggests that being in a simulation actually increases our chances for a religious afterlife.

https://medium.com/@photodiary/implementing-religion-in-ai-l...

View on HN

This runs into the question of whether you're a single person.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQHBAdShgYI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjfaoe847qQ

If you transplant half your brain into another body, and both of you wake up, which one is you? If you start swapping your atoms one by one with someone else, and neither of you die, at what point do you become the other person?

Unfortunately questions like that are necessary in order to address the idea of a simulation afterlife. If our bodies are literally who we are, and our bodies disperse, it may not make sense to say that we can still be simulated after our bodies disappear.

That's a non-sequitur you have there, because you do not even attempt to explain why there should be a case distinction. To be fair, even Nick Bostrom's original simulation argument is also based on several fairly unfounded and not very plausible assumptions (e.g. what extremely advanced societies would do). Much of the debate seems to be based on speculation.

Well, my blog-post is half-serious. The bigger question from it would be why the hell the Universe would be implemented in Java :)

Honestly, we hacked most of it together with perl. https://www.xkcd.com/224/

Well if you do it in Basic a pony takes 4 million lines.

> To be fair, even Nick Bostrom's original simulation argument is also based on several fairly unfounded and not very plausible assumptions (e.g. what extremely advanced societies would do).

Bostrom doesn't assume that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com