From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Sun Sep 16 2001 - 17:18:34 MDT
"Robert J. Bradbury" wrote:
>
> There is nothing wrong with having a "religion" that is based on a system
> of beliefs that can be rationally justified or one that openly acknowledges
> its inability to be rationally justified. For example a religion of worshiping
> "God", the creator of the simulation, seems perfectly reasonable to me
> if it also acknowledges that there is no way of knowing whether or not we
> are in a simulation.
"If you build a snazzy alife sim ... you'd be a kind of bridging `first
cause', and might even have the power to intervene in their lives - even
obliterate their entire experienced cosmos - but that wouldn't make you a
god in any interesting sense. Gods are ontologically distinct from
creatures, or they're not worth the paper they're written on."
-- Damien Broderick
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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