I’m mostly half-serious.

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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • There would be no religious wars, honor killings, more freedom, no religious leaders abusing their powers, no waste of labor and money on religious things, etc. It may seem that we would be more educated and have better understanding.

    Removing the word religion from this excerpt wouldn’t remove any of these problems. We would still squabble over territory, resources, and ideological differences. To give a non-religious analogy: if a time traveler went back and killed Hitler, Germany would still retain all the problems from WW1 and the Weimar Republic that were ripe for a dictatorship.




  • balderdash@lemmy.ziptoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlDo you believe in Aliens?
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    5 months ago

    Well I suppose it depends on your views of consciousness. Some would argue that our consciousness is nothing more than an emergent phenomenon grounded on the electrical impulses of our neurons. Personally, I’m convinced that the phenomenon need not be physical. It should be possible, with enough computing power, to model the same interactions. But I admit that if you reject this possibility, then the simulation hypothesis loses credence.



  • balderdash@lemmy.ziptoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlDo you believe in Aliens?
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    5 months ago

    Sorry, I suppose people haven’t heard of the “Simulation hypothesis” in philosophy.

    Nick Bostrom argued that, statistically, it is more likely that we live in a simulation than not. Assume that an advanced civilization could build a machine with enormous computing power, sufficient to simulate a human mind and a universe “around” it. It follows that the number of such simulated minds/universes could be near infinite. So the probability of our actually being in a simulated universe dwarfs the probability that our reality is not a simulation.


  • balderdash@lemmy.ziptoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlDo you believe in Aliens?
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    5 months ago

    I’m agnostic. If you find the statistical probability argument for the existence of aliens salient, then by the same token you should believe that our reality is a simulation. In which case, the existence of aliens once again becomes questionable; the statistical probabilities of an infinite simulated universe are outside the realm of our current knowledge.

    edit: See comment below on Nick Bostrom’s Simulation Hypothesis.