Posted on 06/08/2016 7:14:12 AM PDT by Heartlander
Elon Musk, the billionaire inventor and entrepreneur, the twenty-first century’s answer to Howard Hughes, believes we are living in a computer simulation. The chances that we exist in ‘base reality’ are billions to one, he says.
Last week he told an audience of Silicon Valley tech evangelists:
‘Forty years ago we had Pong. Like, two rectangles and a dot. That was what games were.’
‘Now, 40 years later, we have photorealistic, 3D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously, and it’s getting better every year. Soon we’ll have virtual reality, augmented reality.’
‘If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality, even if that rate of advancement drops by a thousand from what it is now. Then you just say, okay, let’s imagine it’s 10,000 years in the future, which is nothing on the evolutionary scale.’
His argument – that, given the increasing pace of progress in computer technology, we will eventually be able to synthesise reality and consciousness – is an abbreviated version of a 2003 paper by Nick Bostrom, a philosophy Professor at Oxford.
The paper suggests that if we aren’t living in a simulation, civilisation will end before we are able to reach the ‘posthuman’ age. The detail and the terminology isn’t important; the idea is bunkum, the sort of thing that’s fun to think about on psilocybin, but not much use otherwise.
What’s interesting is the way in which atheists are embracing the idea – or at least the possibility – of creationism. If we are living in a simulation, someone or something had to create it. True believers regard Bostrom’s trilemma with the same reverence thirteenth-century seminarians treated Thomas Aquinas’s Five Proofs.
Seven hundred years later, the Summa Theologica is no longer considered proof of anything. Perhaps one day progress in computing will reach a barrier that is currently impossible to foresee, and the idea that we are living in a simulation will seem as ill-informed.
It is a tired argument, but Atheists are increasingly behaving like members of a religious sect. There is factionalism and infighting amongst them. They have icons; Spinoza, Darwin, Dawkins (and something close to a martyr in Christopher Hitchens). And now they can choose to believe in a creator.
A prominent academic who had a public debate with one of the Four Horsemen tells me that enthusiastic supporters were bussed in to the event. They were told when to applaud and what questions to ask. This sort of monastic discipline is rarely seen outside the context of organised religion.
Atheists don’t believe in a God, but they believe we are gods, or have the potential to be. In Homo Deus, Yuval Harari’s sequel to 2014’s international bestseller Sapiens, he argues that humans of the future will overcome death. Or, as the cover strapline puts it: ‘What made us sapiens will make us gods’.
If atheists are embracing Gods and creationism, the transformation from movement to religion is complete. But since the word atheism literally means ‘without God’, a neologism is required. Agnostic doesn’t quite fit. Neither does Unitarian. Toby Young suggests ‘Creathiest’. If you can do better, leave a comment.
Idiots.
Sometimes very intelligent people can be huge idiots.
Probably often more than sometimes.
I always thought “The Matrix” (at least the original movie) had Christian undertones.
The story is that the reality we live in is not the ultimate reality. That there is a reality beyond this life we are experiencing, and that other reality is what is important.
Isn’t that exactly what the Bible teaches? There is more than just this physical world. That we are living in a reality that is part of a larger reality.
OK. Many elements of this thought process fit well within the schematics of Mormonism. So it's not as new as they might suppose.
Revelation is about the march to a one world new agey religion, with a splash of transhumanism and human hybrids thrown in. The modern church has scrubbed some of the implications of Genesis 6, but the world marches onward toward it nonetheless.
That's going to be enormously disappointing to the Transhumanist/Postgenderist miscreants who are busily abominating nature into their self-worshiping image.
Maybe Musk and Co. should lighten up on their Substance D consumption.
Sez who? The cosmological proof of God, which is just a refined version of Aquinas' and Aristotle's "first mover" proof, is still as strong as ever. That's why the atheists invented the silly concept of multiverses; to get around the cosmological argument.
Romans 1:22
22 Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools
Same Ol' Ba'al manure, different municipal toilet.
2 Corinthians 4:18New International Version (NIV)
18 So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.
Thanks for the link.
You mean like Steven Hawkings' assertion in his last book that "anything as elegant as gravity would have had to have been able to create itself." LOL. He's so obsessed with eliminating God in favor of "reason" that he's willing to jettison the fundamental logical foundations of the scientific method itself.
There are also many liberal secularists and atheists who have resurrected the idea of god in a new form - the Singularity.
There is no all knowing, all seeing, omniscient power - but they want to invent it via advanced artificial intelligence.
There is no heaven, but they want to invent mind-uploaded technology to give themselves digital immortality.
There is no hell, but if you don’t invent the super-AI to solve all our problems, the world will roast, all life will die, throw in apocalyptic prediction here.
Self-invention requires divine intervention or a sci-fi time travel paradox plus intelligence.
Yet in neither of those instances do you really have self creation. Self creation is a logical absurdity.
Hilarious! They are willing to believe we live in a simulation but unwilling to believe “In the beginning God created...”. So funny!
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