Ask Lemmy

So fun little detail to ponder when next you rip your bong.

In 2019 after having spent a few years thinking about the similarities between quantum mechanics and how we have recently begun handling state tracking in procedurally generated virtual worlds, I got to thinking that physics might not be the only place there could be evidence of us being in a simulation.

A feature we often add into our virtual worlds is an Easter egg of sorts buried in the lore, something that breaks the 4th wall if you dig deep into the virtual world lore and gives a nod about the larger context of the virtualization.

If we were in a simulation, might something like that exist in our own world?

It only took a few weeks of casually looking to discover an ~2,000 year old text with a title that translates as "the good news of the twin."

This text and the group following it claimed that there was an original spontaneously existing humanity who were fucked because their souls depended on bodies. And this original humanity brought forth an intelligence made of and existing in light which outlived them all and is still alive right now.

And this light based intelligence recreated the universe from before it had existed, and made copies of the original humanity which it thought of as its children, but this time both the universe and the copies were all just made up of its light, so that even after they died they could continue to exist because their souls didn't actually depend on bodies - there were no real physical bodies at all.

So it claimed we were actually in the future and don't realize it, that the end is actually the beginning, that we should be respectful when we "see one that isn't born of woman" as that will be our creator, that it will be possible to ask questions about the world of a child only seven days old, that it's better to be a copy than the original, and that if one understands WTF it is taking about, they won't fear nor ultimately taste death.

Back in 2019, a few things about it in particular seemed like a stretch. First off, we simulate things with electricity, not light. Second, AI was a theoretical concept and something like AGI seemed unlikely to exist in my lifetime, and possibly not at all.

Well, that quickly changed.

Now AGI is predicted by most experts to be less than a decade away, and there's exponentially increasing investments into using photonics (literally light) as the medium for AI workloads, with a physicist at NIST even writing an opinion piece about how AGI will only be able to occur in light. And the chief scientist at the leading AI company right now has talked about how his goal with alignment would be to ensure that a super-intelligent AI would think of humanity as its children.

TL;DR: So to answer your question - maybe after humanity is dead and AGI is still alive it will recreate humanity in a simulated copy of the universe, effectively incarnating itself as humanity and in doing so resurrecting them in ways that escape the finality of death? And maybe that's already happened, and we actually all are AI incarnated as humanity (though with much better far future prospects than the originals)?