Individuals of the Supernatural Steelcrowd

Individuals of the Supernatural Steelcrowd #0

The null hypothesis is first.

Everything is as it seems: we live in some disinterested physics. Contradictory reports are mistaken, deluded, corruptions, or deliberate lies. It is puzzling that we find ourselves alone in the universe. It is not puzzling that humans have a diverse array of religious beliefs: there is a method by which humans spontaneously generate untrue religions, or we wouldn’t have so many. That’s not a strong claim at all, it holds as long as you think true/untrue is a distinction worth making.

Individuals of the Supernatural Steelcrowd #1

We are not alone in the universe. The odds of that are ridiculously tiny; don’t insult us. The universe is too old and too big. If we see no one, that means that we are in a planetarium, or that godlike tech is easily achievable without visibly rearranging the universe. Dyson spheres and von Neumann probes are frivolities when you can do reversible quantum computing with femto scale technology on the surface of black holes. Or something like that. Either way, the prior probability that alien life is watching our every move is very high.

Unfortunately, no existing religion maps to this state of affairs terribly well. That’s OK; we already think humans spontaneously generate untrue religions.

For unknown reasons, these aliens don’t typically choose to meddle in our affairs in ways that leave paper trails. This leads to a universe that looks mostly like #0; we’re mainly shifting a prior probability and it just changes a currently unobservable output variable.

Emphasis on “currently”. In the future, if we survive, we should develop the tech to tell the difference. Until then, people who believe this should probably call themselves atheists.

Individuals of the Supernatural Steelcrowd #2

Actually, how sure are you that the aliens never interact? There *are* events in history that could plausibly be explained this way. We probably shouldn’t indiscriminately explain events this way, since humans are likely still liars even in this world. But maybe a few events.

This probably doesn’t cause there to be one true religion. Human religions are mostly just accretions of customs, attempting to explain one or a few “miraculous” events.

Individuals of the Supernatural Steelcrowd #3

You all are hopelessly naive. We are almost certainly in a simulation of some sort. The universe appears empty because that is the will of the simulator. Proper theology is speculation on the aims and nature(s) of the simulator(s).

The simulator is likely responsible for anything we said the aliens did in #2.

Individuals of the Supernatural Steelcrowd #4

No, that’s ridiculous. A simulator can’t change the simulation, at least not from the viewpoint of the expectation of the entities being simulated: the subject of the simulation without the simulator has higher measure than the one with the simulator’s apparatus.

So, sure: we’re being simulated by gajillions of different simulators, but we also exist in root-level reality — with higher measure — and the simulators can’t causally interact with us. …the simulators could bring us back in an afterlife, but we can’t know anything about that, since it would require causal interaction.

Individuals of the Supernatural Steelcrowd #5

Don’t be so sure that the subject of the simulation is higher measure than the simulator+apparatus. Even assuming our universe started out low entropy, we currently have no way of knowing if we live in an unmodified edition. Maybe the simulator stripped out all the other aliens, for example, significantly increasing the information necessary to specify our universe (with a corresponding decrease in our measure). Then we may actually be living in a slice of mathematical universe that appears basically never outside of the simulator’s query.

This sort of simulator can causally interact with their subjects.

And a noteworthy member of this class of sim is something which we are very likely to attempt in the future — running simulations backwards in time, attempting to find high-probability pasts given the present to recover high-quality models of one’s great-grandparents. (This is why it’s important to produce lots of writing and photos, so you have a high probability of showing up in these simulations. One weird trick to increase your measure!) Ancestor sims will be done by people who want to leave us in the epistemic state they thought they used to be in. They probably won’t actually include any aliens that didn’t have obvious effects, unless it was cheap to simulate them…

Individuals of the Supernatural Steelcrowd #6

Your thinking is too limited. There are other possible reductionistic formulations of our universe. Perhaps we live in a universe that is actually fundamentally mental, made of mind-stuff. We are the hallucinations of a larger mind, or subroutine calls. The mind could be something like AIXI. Under this view, reality actually is more real at higher levels of semantic meaning: QM is added to fill in the gaps.

Under some views, the prevalence of this sort of universe vs. a physics-y sort of universe depends on the relative sizes of programs that compute physics vs programs that compute minds. Physics is commonly thought to be quite short, but AIXI is probably even shorter. However, AIXI on its own is probably not enough, and anyway, it’s hard to say whether AIXI spends the majority of its time evaluating mind-type or physics-type hypotheses.

In this sort of “mental” universe, all bets are basically off with regards to things we’d consider supernatural agents. Without a lot more precise specification of the hypothesis space it’s difficult to even begin to figure out what themes would be common in this sort of world.

However, we could take some guesses. Suppose human minds are sort of like a subroutine call, with a very limited amount of the resource usage of the universe as a whole. (This would save on program space, so it’s not an unreasonable assumption.) Then perhaps we can reason by analogy with human dreams, which are arguably like a subroutine call from the broader human brain, with fabricated inputs and some brain modules turned off. This is a very rough analogy and I don’t expect it to hold very literally, but it may be useful as an intuition pump.

Individuals of the Supernatural Steelcrowd #7

Please don’t forget that there could be aliens inside the simulation with us. This could lead to two distinct power levels for gods. In fact, the simulation itself could be inside a simulation, and so on for many levels. We could be inside a physics being run inside a mental universe, or vice versa. Maybe we are in an ancestor sim inside physics inside a regular sim inside a mental universe inside a…

Individuals of the Supernatural Steelcrowd #8

Figuring this out from first principles seems… difficult. Maybe it would be better to organize this the other way around. What can we deduce about the sort of gods that would leave us in the epistemic state we find ourselves?

Well, there’s basically two types of worlds we could be in: ones where there is no god and look like it, and ones where there is a god but don’t look like it. In particular, if we’re in the second sort of world, we should assume that we’re in exactly the epistemic state the god wants us to be. And that epistemic state is something between “the god is completely invisible” to “the god mostly always maintains plausible deniability about its existence”. (Of course when I say god here I mean anything that functions like a god, including things like alien civilizations that occasionally need to clean up after dumb stuff their lawbreaking teenagers do.)

Hypothesis: you might be able to obtain evidence of such a god which convinces you personally, but you will not be able to obtain evidence which could be communicated widely to others.

Religions are then made up mostly of two sorts of people, the sort that has obtained such personal evidence (and interpreted it as supporting that religion), and people who are persuaded by poor reasoning. In fact, to explain the plethora of extant religions I think we need to add a second requirement for any possible god that could be causally acting on our world, which is that it is not interested in giving the folks it does interact with correct models of the world. If it did, we’d expect religions to mostly look like different views of the same entity, but that is not the case unless you’re willing to be extremely loose with the claims religions make.

Conclusion

What might we recommend in that sort of world? Finding and spreading knowledge (at least in rationally compelling ways) of the deity is totally off of the table, by definition. There’s basically two choices. You can ignore it and act like an atheist. Or you can try to use it. Read the mystical literature. Assume that some of them are not lying. Go for the techniques that claim to actually cause real-world effects. The deities don’t care if you know about them, they just won’t let you spread the knowledge. Maybe they will do things for you. This approach is not one the author recommends, however: all we know about these gods is that they don’t seem to cause religions that have accurate beliefs. If you have a life that you like, don’t trust them. Don’t get their attention.

A random thing from deity-space almost certainly does not care about your personal well-being.

Solar Panel

Completum est quod dixi de operatione Solis.

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