“Accepting the idea that we are not only the gods of the machine, but also the machines of God, gives us the wherewithal to face the prospect of death with enthusiastic anticipation instead of courage, resignation, or even terror.”
Apparently he never shuts off his computer. Or deletes programs. Or has a hard drive die. Or loses power before saving. Or…

Chayanov “PS: Somebody should tell Vox that neither The Matrix nor The Sims are documentaries.”
It’s potentially worse than that, since the video game implies that we’re sub-programs running in an application. Welcome to the [simulation of the] desert of the real program, algorithm.

http://www.xkcd.com/505/

Beautiful post and wonderful dissection as usual, Deacon.

Everyone does.(hint: you are what you eat!)

If ol’ Voxbaby can pull ‘reasons-for-God’ right out of his ass like this, doesn’t he think it’s possible that those ‘funny-old-folk’ who lived in those ‘funny-old-times’ could do the same thing?

He’s not doing ‘the case for God’ any favors at all!

I LIKE that in a guy!

http://voxday.blogspot.com/2008/06/fun-with-memes.html

”

Rich 6/29/08 7:45 PM
VD: 06.28.08 – 03:11 PM

Rich clearly doesn’t know that Big Chilly and I were using genetic algorithms to develop better artificial intelligences more than a decade ago. He babbles about science having “predictive and descriptive ability” while defending evolution, a non-scientific model which has virtually no predictive ability. He also fails to note the significance of the adjective or understand the irony of his description when expressing his opinion about the limits of AI.

Throughout, he demonstrates his inability to function within the parameters of the social niceties. Thus, we conclude that he is likely an atheist.

Oh please, let me cry, Bullshìt!

You’ve peaked my interest, Vox. What search space where you trying to traverse? What was the objective function of your optimization? What did you encode genomically, what were your sources of variation and what were your selection criteria? Why didn’t you use A*, GBF, Iterative Deeping, simulated annealing, etc?

And as for “inability to function within the parameters of the social niceties.”, one of us writes for an online tinfoiled-hatted fundy mag, has a pretentious internet name and grew a Mohawk to hide his receding hairline. Clue: it’s not me.

PS: did you use GAs in this, Vox?:

http://www.somethingawful.com/d/game-reviews/war-heaven.php

“

That’s my fault: Vox cited Bostrom’s paper in TIA; I trimmed my post more than I should have and omitted the reference. Mea culpa.

Great question! The answer of course, is we don’t. And what if the Simulator is not Vox’s idea of god, but just a higher life-form no different than us except that the Simulator has been evolving (simulating) a few billion years longer than us. Does that change anything in Vox’s mind?

ZING!

I’ve got nothing really to add here, other than to commend you on this little gem. I’ve been really enjoying your TIA takedown thus far. Keep up the good work!

Now would be a good time to revisit his rebuttal of Dawkins Ultimate 747 in light of the above revelations about his theology.

And yet it’s the theists who complain that atheism is dehumanizing.

PS: Somebody should tell Vox that neither The Matrix nor The Sims are documentaries.

http://www.antievolution.org/cgi-bin/ikonboard/ikonboard.cgi?act=ST;f=14;t=5752;st=30#entry120496

Clearly they’re not the AI gurus they claim. And they didn’t use GAs, that much is clear – I called him on it on his blog.

So really, Vox needed neither a PS2 nor drugs to come up with this; he only needed to do a bit of reading. He also doesn’t seem to explain why, exactly, God is a more likely simulation runner than anyone else – I bet Loki was a good hacker.

Does anyone really want to worship Vox Day’s buddy? Well, in this theory Pascal’s Wager might actually pay off. As Dorothy might say, ‘We’re not in Christianity any more’.

even if the game programmer created AIs that are intelligent and compassionate in the human sense, maybe by running the Evoution algorithm some billiards of years, then would it be Good to intervene? Since evolution requires randomness the programmer is not omniscient anymore, he just nows the rule set that started everything. Now assume that the programmer is moral just and sees that he has created a (evolving) reality with compassionate intelligence in it. He knows that he already lost track of the state of its program, he can’t know the state since it is created from a source of true randomness so he can not interrupt the Program without taking the great risk to crash it, and therefore annilate all life in it. And thus, since the programmer is moral just, he will just ensure that the machine running his program does not crash. But he is no longer capable to interfere with the reality he started, he can’t raise the dead, forgive sin or create miracles. For the Intelligence Live Forms in this reality this means they are alone with their problems an their struggles.
So God as a programmer is not a bad picture but renders any historic Religion and their hopes for salvation to be foolish.

best regards,
Eike