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Ripping Open the Mysteries of gods

J

Jarhyn

Wizard
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Androgyne; they/them
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Natural Philosophy, Game Theoretic Ethicist
So, because someone has otherwise expressed that it is "annoying" to them to discuss such topics in the open forum at large, I'll put it here, in this dead pit of a forum.

This thread is not to debate whether it is wise to discuss this topic. This thread is not to debate whether the kernel of the subject of this topic exists. This is thread is for exploring that which is observed.

There are a few different kinds of 'gods' that could be discussed. If someone would like to discuss them, because this is a topic which deserves clarity and precision to explore in this way.

I would like to discuss each of them in turn, but here discuss the various formats of the idea.

Categorization:

To properly discuss this topic, we should distinguish between a few ideas.

First, there is the idea of a "god", with the quotation marks appropriate, I think, at this point. This is a thing given existence as some act of social puppetry: the idea of fairies such that people hallucinate them and "the old rules" take hold as they believe a small bit of madness into existence as a reflection of a large bit of madness; or the unfortunate phenomena where greed drives people to act in service of the very idea of money and having it and having power over others through contact with it that is "mammon" as acknowledged in the bible. This would incorporate any sort of figment or make believe thing born of human or animal or other thought such as faeries, demons, devils, angels, etc.: characters invented by people and given form through our actions and emulations.

Then there are gods, always left without capitalization, said flatly even at the start of a sentence. This is, in this presentation of language, to serve as a category for something based on its position relative to some other thing, namely as physical controller(s) relative to a simulation. These are philosophically important to understanding even a tiny fraction of the subset of ideas that are "gods of this world", the next category and something I don't care to discuss.

Next, there are (not necessarily) gods of this world, said all together and with particular intent on specificity, which are not the discussion here, but specifically physical controllers assumed to exist over this world, under the assumption that our experience of existence is as an active simulation. I think the discussion of these is droll, mostly because they can neither be proven nor disproven except in particular ways not more easily explained by a "god" than through the assumption of a god of this world. I do not think thisnthread an appropriate place for assumption.

And finally there are(not ever) Gods, the sorts of internally contradictory logically impossible nonsense beings believed in by religion, impossible nonsense computers that can calculate the future rather than merely calculate continuous things through continuous phenomena, any invocation of predestination except through explicit redirection, "something I don't understand", "an excuse to find meaning and purpose in nothing rather than just doing it for myself and my society for our own sakes", or any other such thing. Gods are also not the topic here as noted by the little g in the thread title. I have distinguished these particularly separately from the thread topic.

If someone would like to offer better ways of speaking about these specifically different categories, I am all ears.

In my contributions to this thread I will be discussing gods, and the relationship between simulation and host. Many of my observations will be case study to inform on the class and understand, primarily, the things that have this relationship, and whether there are ethical obligations that arise from it.

I am a "god"/gods/gods of this world/God nerd, in addition to other things. Like a Star Wars nerd, I do not believe in the reality nor truth of my nerdy interests, except when used in applicable and appropriate ways.

The interest is not based in belief, however I think that thinking about this stuff does lead to better, or fewer, beliefs.
 
well, "simulation". A dicey topic by itself. Then defining god as you did above. Toss in ethics. Way past this simple minded internet fraud.

I always thought the truth lies between fundy think type theist and fundy think type atheist. "simulation" fits. There is something more. I confess, "simulator writer" is way past what I would state. And "ethics"? well, we all think we know what's best for everybody else to a degree. Which is crazy because I am only one that really knows.
 
Jarhyn said:
...someone has otherwise expressed that it is "annoying" to them to discuss such topics in the open forum at large...
Click to expand...

I think ppl should stay away from topics they don't want to discuss.

What's "annoying" is when someone who considers themself an open minded free thinker tries to tell other free thinkers what they should and shouldn't spend their time debating.
 
Now that gods have been ripped away from "gods", gods of this world, and Gods, the topic can be more deeply explored.

There are many ways to select a simulation, but the way we have observed is through computational systems. When a simulation is created through some manner of computational means, even if that computational means uses matter whose behavior is reflected by things that would otherwise take great amounts of binary computational time to emulate, it is the essential creation of an environment bound to some set of rules through the encoding of state on a substrate.

In a classical computers, the environment bound to rules is through the mechanical consummation of some set of rules expressed, originally, through truth tables and state diagrams used to design the construction of physical switch graphs.

There are likely continuous and general ways to use such systems to create arbitrary rules, but those rules are fundamentally bound to the "truth" of the system, which form the foundation for the most basic form of physics that represents all interactions within the system.

Anything that obeys certain laws can potentially exist as a simulation, and as has been discussed many things could create simulations accidentally, under select circumstances (see also the  Boltzmann brain).

The probability distribution for this that we have observed says there are exponentially more things having formed through long and evolutionary process generating simulations, at least within systems that themselves may be simulated in some hypothetical way.

We have seen to date one planet where simulations started to happen at a fairly high probability, all things considered. These things were bad at simulating, at first, and the laws of thermodynamics and entropy dictated zero sums on reproduction, this led to competition between imperfect replicators, bob's your uncle, and now we have systems whose sole purpose is to perfectly simulate/emulate/instantiate some mathematical system over time.

We could simulate many environments where the laws of such an environment would more favor rapid discovery of simulation, and even the ability to more readily simulate our environment, given time (ironically time that we cannot instantiate the emulation of, because to simulate a place where this place would be easy to simulate is itself that.much harder).

The simulations we put the most effort into, though, are things that simulate our own environment in some way.

Whether it is a game that has been under constant development for 20+ years, or a very expensive supercomputer, we spend the most computational effort trying to represent and understand reality in some faithful way.

There are vanishingly few reasons humans spend computational effort at all, and fewer still when it is extremely expensive, and between them there are a tightly bounded set of reasons.

All of these things serve to be explored more in depth.
 
One particularly interesting aspect of this is actually dismantling the relationship of time between a simulation and a simulator.

The majority of observations are of the simple sort that you can derive from pausing, playing, saving, restarting, speeding up, slowing down, and occasionally knowing what's going to happen.

Still, thoroughly examining these and discussing them clearly is recommended.

To start with, whatever happens to me, while some simulation is paused, is perceived no differently by the system than a single clock pulse.

I can often pause whatever game and look something up if I don't understand it. Moreover, if I really want to, I have ways of just probing the values of memory, if I want. This is a general feature of most computational simulations.

This forms the fundamental leverage we can observe some simulation host having over the substrate, the switch structure that runs the simulation.

The universe, just like our own computational systems, has a fundamental speed of interaction. For computational systems, this is defined by the clock rate.

one notable fact is that we cannot, with a computational system, determine the future of what that system will compute before it is computed as an instantiation by some system. As such, we only have certain ways to observe certain numbers to some arbitrary precision. These all fundamentally say that unless the future is explicitly written out in the rules of the simulation itself, there's no other way to perfectly create any sort of predestination within the system, and then that isn't actually reading what the system "will be" but reading what the system already is.

If we actually observe our simulations, this is rarely ever the case of those we put any great effort into producing any sort of simulation for which we will know the outcome. It's quite often the point that people don't know the future even of the simulations we create.

sometimes systems can be reasonably deterministic; arguably pretty much everything we observe is at least adequately deterministic. The same inputs at the same time given along with the same seeds to the same pRNG yields the same systemic extension from a base system.

Still though, we can observe that gods do, in point of fact, generally have access to such tools.

I will call them Obniscience and Obnipotence, because they are different from classical powers generally ascribed to Gods, which aren't the discussion here. I use the Ob because it is observational; it has to be something that the entity in question can directly observe, a concrete fact of some concrete artifact.

I cannot execute these without effort. I have to type something in a terminal, or write a script to execute when I type the thing, or program some interface, or most often, wait for someone else to figure out how to change something without causing the universe to snap out of existence in cascade of hard exceptions. This effort is not directly visible to the simulation: it happens in a time frame shorter than a single clock tick, what we would consider the "planck second" of our universe.

I could name any thing, state the exact position and the sum total of incoming moment effect at the same time (though likely only in terms of a complex number), and all other sorts of such ideas.

But as mentioned, saying what the system will be is simply not possible without a direct observation.
 
Lion IRC said:
Jarhyn said:
...someone has otherwise expressed that it is "annoying" to them to discuss such topics in the open forum at large...
Click to expand...

I think ppl should stay away from topics they don't want to discuss.

What's "annoying" is when someone who considers themself an open minded free thinker tries to tell other free thinkers what they should and shouldn't spend their time debating.
Click to expand...
I think this may be a bit misleading out of context or devoid of intent. Kind of like saying "I am not going to be judgmental." or "that's brainwashing." I say "they are a good guy", that is, indeed, being judgmental or "I brainwashed my kinds to help others".

"I don't want to discuss that." and "We shouldn't tell freed thinkers what to think". Being just a run of the mill interhack myself, I often approach things from "the other side". How can the phrase "We shouldn't tell others what to think." be weaponized? When is it appropriate to tell others "We should be thinking like this". Basically, what does "negative connotations" look like when it is actually a reliable stance in a given situation.

When is "I don't want to discuss it" appropriate and reliable. When is it not. When is it offered in peace and when is it deployed as a weapon.
 
Jarhyn said:
One particularly interesting aspect of this is actually dismantling the relationship of time between a simulation and a simulator.

The majority of observations are of the simple sort that you can derive from pausing, playing, saving, restarting, speeding up, slowing down, and occasionally knowing what's going to happen.

Still, thoroughly examining these and discussing them clearly is recommended.

To start with, whatever happens to me, while some simulation is paused, is perceived no differently by the system than a single clock pulse.

I can often pause whatever game and look something up if I don't understand it. Moreover, if I really want to, I have ways of just probing the values of memory, if I want. This is a general feature of most computational simulations.

This forms the fundamental leverage we can observe some simulation host having over the substrate, the switch structure that runs the simulation.

The universe, just like our own computational systems, has a fundamental speed of interaction. For computational systems, this is defined by the clock rate.

one notable fact is that we cannot, with a computational system, determine the future of what that system will compute before it is computed as an instantiation by some system. As such, we only have certain ways to observe certain numbers to some arbitrary precision. These all fundamentally say that unless the future is explicitly written out in the rules of the simulation itself, there's no other way to perfectly create any sort of predestination within the system, and then that isn't actually reading what the system "will be" but reading what the system already is.

If we actually observe our simulations, this is rarely ever the case of those we put any great effort into producing any sort of simulation for which we will know the outcome. It's quite often the point that people don't know the future even of the simulations we create.

sometimes systems can be reasonably deterministic; arguably pretty much everything we observe is at least adequately deterministic. The same inputs at the same time given along with the same seeds to the same pRNG yields the same systemic extension from a base system.

Still though, we can observe that gods do, in point of fact, generally have access to such tools.

I will call them Obniscience and Obnipotence, because they are different from classical powers generally ascribed to Gods, which aren't the discussion here. I use the Ob because it is observational; it has to be something that the entity in question can directly observe, a concrete fact of some concrete artifact.

I cannot execute these without effort. I have to type something in a terminal, or write a script to execute when I type the thing, or program some interface, or most often, wait for someone else to figure out how to change something without causing the universe to snap out of existence in cascade of hard exceptions. This effort is not directly visible to the simulation: it happens in a time frame shorter than a single clock tick, what we would consider the "planck second" of our universe.

I could name any thing, state the exact position and the sum total of incoming moment effect at the same time (though likely only in terms of a complex number), and all other sorts of such ideas.

But as mentioned, saying what the system will be is simply not possible without a direct observation.
Click to expand...
back to my list for me

what matches observation the best ...

clearly something more is the most reliable for belief in a belief forum. Make up whatever we want in a political forum seems to the norm ( I suggest that is more of a planned strike than truly seeking answers more often than not tho)

the list of something more

more complex than humans inanimate object
alive
alive and knowing we are here (again sliding scale here. Is it like I know I have skin cells that die and flake off?)
simulation (I think this is a belief in "created us like we created cars" but I am open to changing its location)
deity (as in the big religion's)
add any others

rank them in order of reliability. I mean in terms of how the universe works not how I want society to work.
 
SIB said:
Lion IRC said:
Jarhyn said:
...someone has otherwise expressed that it is "annoying" to them to discuss such topics in the open forum at large...
Click to expand...

I think ppl should stay away from topics they don't want to discuss.

What's "annoying" is when someone who considers themself an open minded free thinker tries to tell other free thinkers what they should and shouldn't spend their time debating.
Click to expand...
I think this may be a bit misleading out of context or devoid of intent. Kind of like saying "I am not going to be judgmental." or "that's brainwashing." I say "they are a good guy", that is, indeed, being judgmental or "I brainwashed my kinds to help others".

"I don't want to discuss that." and "We shouldn't tell freed thinkers what to think". Being just a run of the mill interhack myself, I often approach things from "the other side". How can the phrase "We shouldn't tell others what to think." be weaponized? When is it appropriate to tell others "We should be thinking like this". Basically, what does "negative connotations" look like when it is actually a reliable stance in a given situation.

When is "I don't want to discuss it" appropriate and reliable. When is it not. When is it offered in peace and when is it deployed as a weapon.
Click to expand...

to be fair, I did have to be very clear here about what I wanted to discuss since a lack of clarity could easily lead to such a thread being hijacked to debate whether gods-of-this-world exist.

I just am interested in determining at least some properties of the gods we can observe so as to understand the possible properties of gods-of-this-world that don't necessarily even exist, as well as to understand which properties ascribed to Gods are simply nonsense.

To me it's like finding some basic facts of a "Galois Group", identifying something is a "Galois Group" and coming to the conclusion that the basic facts first explored must logically apply.
 
Jarhyn said:
SIB said:
Lion IRC said:
Jarhyn said:
...someone has otherwise expressed that it is "annoying" to them to discuss such topics in the open forum at large...
Click to expand...

I think ppl should stay away from topics they don't want to discuss.

What's "annoying" is when someone who considers themself an open minded free thinker tries to tell other free thinkers what they should and shouldn't spend their time debating.
Click to expand...
I think this may be a bit misleading out of context or devoid of intent. Kind of like saying "I am not going to be judgmental." or "that's brainwashing." I say "they are a good guy", that is, indeed, being judgmental or "I brainwashed my kinds to help others".

"I don't want to discuss that." and "We shouldn't tell freed thinkers what to think". Being just a run of the mill interhack myself, I often approach things from "the other side". How can the phrase "We shouldn't tell others what to think." be weaponized? When is it appropriate to tell others "We should be thinking like this". Basically, what does "negative connotations" look like when it is actually a reliable stance in a given situation.

When is "I don't want to discuss it" appropriate and reliable. When is it not. When is it offered in peace and when is it deployed as a weapon.
Click to expand...

to be fair, I did have to be very clear here about what I wanted to discuss since a lack of clarity could easily lead to such a thread being hijacked to debate whether gods-of-this-world exist.

I just am interested in determining at least some properties of the gods we can observe so as to understand the possible properties of gods-of-this-world that don't necessarily even exist, as well as to understand which properties ascribed to Gods are simply nonsense.

To me it's like finding some basic facts of a "Galois Group", identifying something is a "Galois Group" and coming to the conclusion that the basic facts first explored must logically apply.
Click to expand...
I get that, I think. lol, one of my two brains cells anyway. Properties are the key to me also. I look at the properties and see if they match what most people see and experience. Only fundy think types do all or nothing. All evil/loving god type statements.

The simulation line of logic may be just past me. To me simulations are set up by something else. Well, brains simulate the word around for us. Errrr, yeah .... Simulation can be altered to match what we want it to match. Example: Click bait on youtube. Scientist has seen inside a black hole. To the average person, not understanding "computer sim" it can seem like a set in stone observation. Like it is real.

If we are a simulation (kind of a true statement to me) then its more reliable to say we have no idea the rules it is following. Its almost useless to apply here. We have a limited, very limited, understanding of what the sim is running. Like you pointed out, the programmer can stop it, erase certain things, or just play around around with any malase at all.

Example: A 10 year old burning down their SimCity creation. Sure, we can say very few things.
"All evil" would not be one of them.
"Not worthy of my praise", if we are in a simulation, the programmer programmed that outcome.
We are going to choose not him by design.

'going to hell if ..." well, that is a control component (limit if you will) that simulations need to have to match that which you are modeling or playing with. Ex: letting a computer generate music. Setting no limits ... well, my guess is that more noise (from our perspective) will be produced than "music". But from the simulation's perspective its all music. We have limits in our bodies. Smoother "waves", if you will, are will be "chosen", selected, whatever, more to propagate and influence the system. Don't ask my dad about that one tho.

In a simulation I set a line to produce one human that rose from the dead. Sorry about my clearly western upbringing. But out here, I match the trait in question to what most people see and experience. Nothing died and rose as some are teaching. But it is possible if "Data in our heads" defines what we are. If its a sim, it can happen. If the sim set it, such that it can't happen? well, we see "glitches" all the time. One stray cosmic ray and poof ... 2+2 = 42.

Again, maybe this is just way past me.
 
SIB said:
Simulation can be altered to match what we want it to match
Click to expand...
Simulation is one of those fields that exists at the very core of a lot of philosophical discussions, to me? It's this fundamental act of making one system that works like some other system within the possibilities of the "base system".

It seems to me to be the basic thought experiment, this consideration of the qualities of simulation, that is at the heart of all Abrahamic religion.

If you look at math to derive some useful metaphors, it's like a "Galois group". When you look at the generality of what actually forms a Galois group, you realize that just about anything can be such a thing, but such things do have identifiable properties that allow us to understand our world through provable corollary.
 
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