From: telocity (mentat@telocity.com)
Date: Thu Mar 22 2001 - 16:04:02 MST
----- Original Message -----
From: James Higgins
To: sl4@sysopmind.com
Sent: Tuesday, March 20, 2001 6:51 PM
Subject: Re: How To Live In A Simulation
Actually, I must admit I have been curious about this myself. I, too, am an atheist as so I'm not terribly familiar with revelations. But a friend of mine mentioned that this sounded similar when I was discussing it with him. So I had planned to peruse revelations sometime in the future just to check. If the text of revelations can be applied pretty closely to the Singularity then there are 3 primary theories:
1) pure coincidence
2) As mentioned, we may actually be in a simulation. In such a case this makes perfect sense.
3) Assuming we are not the only intelligent life in the universe, there are SIs out there. Which means, given unlimited technology and life span, they have been here. So maybe they give low-tech intelligent life they find a little push in the right direction. Religion has been responsible for some horrible things (crusades, inquisition, etc) but, on the whole, it gave people something to strive for and some "nice" rules to live by.
There is a fourth possibility, although I'm not sure how seriously it should be taken. Such apocolyptic stories as The Revelation may be echoes from the future. In the book _Childhood's End_ the fact that the Overlords' appearance is famaliar, even though they had never been seen before they showed themselves, is attributed to the possibility that time is not necessarily linear and that since the Overlords were the enablers of the end of humanity, there appearance was precognized by some people and became part of prophecies of the apocolypse. So if something like this is possible, the author of The Revelation would have interpreted some kind of echo from the future - containing events for which he would have no way of possibly understanding - the best way he could using language and images he could at least try to make sense of and communicate to others.
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