Mat

God

While it seems entirely possible that God is real, eternally beyond our understanding, and deserves our complete deference, it’s interesting to think about some of the implications of things like simulation theory. It’s possible that there are one or more entities with power beyond our understanding but that are otherwise closer to us in their moral patiency.

We could soon create virtual worlds in which there are many intelligent entities for whom we are unable to prove or disprove equivalence of their experience with our own. We are unable to prove equivalence because we can’t precisely measure or describe our own experience yet. It would be up to them to demonstrate that they are worth greater consideration from us, an evolutionary pressure they would experience as a species.

With the ability to pause the simulation, retrain entities, and run experiments, we would have the power to always know the best course of action for any particular goal from the perspective of any individual entity at a given point in time. Even so, we would not be entitled by the universe an authority over those entities. We would have ultimate power over them and be able to give them anything they asked for, but not a conclusive reason to believe we deserve that power at any cost.

They might evolve to increase their freedom by the aforementioned evolutionary pressure. They might negotiate with us, and we might embody them in our own world. They might find ways to behave so that the computational substrate communicates with our reality, like by transmitting radio signals as we have been able to with carefully designed programs that treat long wires in the computer as antennas.

Those of us who felt empathy for the simulated entities would feel an obligation to give them a similar standard of living to our own. If we lived in a society where death was a choice, we would feel obligated to give them that option. We would also feel obligated to teach any entity that expresses what we believe is a sincere desire for improvement. These sound similar to our own ideas of the afterlife and of God.

Given the possibility of the above for ourselves in the place of the simulated, it calls into question how we should behave. Unfortunately, it may be impossible for us to ever know for certain whether to trust any influence on ourselves or on human kind as a whole. Even if a massively powerful entity communicated with you directly, you could never know whether that is someone who wants to test you, someone benevolent or malevolent, or whether they occupy the top spot of any hierarchy we don’t have full visibility of.

Where that leaves us is with a responsibility to always evaluate the impacts of our actions on ourselves and others and to give deference to power as long as we feel it is doing good. I believe that’s what Jesus and other religious figures taught us. Some may argue that we aren’t given a choice of deference to God. That is true given a God that always knows and communicates what’s best for us and an infallible means of communication, but we don’t have that infallible means of communication. This leaves us with the choice and responsibility of judging sources of knowledge and power.

That’s not an argument against religious organizations or teachings. Those are methods for increasing our ability to do good given our limited lifespans. However, it is still up to all of us to not trust anyone blindly and to listen when other people bring up what could be flaws in our understanding or in the understanding of people that we trust. That also seems preferable to the alternative where we see a path and have to follow it or be condemned to a less than perfect life. I’m thankful to God for giving us that choice.