There’s a lot of very bizarre death-related stuff some people here take seriously: future simulations of you recreated from historical data, “quantum immortality”, big universe with copies of you existing very far away, us living in a simulation, and so on and so forth. It’s just that the atheists who believe in such can’t call that “afterlife” otherwise they wouldn’t be atheists.
edit: I think there’s also a very serious case of inconsistency. If you ask someone about “afterlife”, they’re pretty sure there’s no afterlife, but if you come up with an elaborate narrative, for example one where the future AI uses all the digital data and backtracks a simulation of the world to recreate you, so when you die you just wake up in that AI’s simulation—they’re no longer nearly as sure.
There’s no inconsistency, because we take the word ‘afterlife’ to mean what 99% of humanity means by it, which isn’t, y’know, really compatible with the pattern theory of identity.
“Afterlife” encompasses a very wide variety of beliefs, especially if you are speaking of 99% of humanity. That’s sort of like saying “trees” is incompatible with “pines”.
No, it’s like not using the word ‘God’ to describe a super-intelligent AI. The two concepts have some things in common, but a physical, man-made computer program just isn’t what people mean when they say “God”. Likewise, their brain getting reconstructed some decades after their death isn’t what people mean when they say “afterlife”.
When people say “afterlife”, what they mean is living after they die. It’s words with fairly general meaning. (By the way, inability to generalize or use general concepts is a big autism stereotype)
There’s a lot of very bizarre death-related stuff some people here take seriously: future simulations of you recreated from historical data, “quantum immortality”, big universe with copies of you existing very far away, us living in a simulation, and so on and so forth. It’s just that the atheists who believe in such can’t call that “afterlife” otherwise they wouldn’t be atheists.
edit: I think there’s also a very serious case of inconsistency. If you ask someone about “afterlife”, they’re pretty sure there’s no afterlife, but if you come up with an elaborate narrative, for example one where the future AI uses all the digital data and backtracks a simulation of the world to recreate you, so when you die you just wake up in that AI’s simulation—they’re no longer nearly as sure.
There’s no inconsistency, because we take the word ‘afterlife’ to mean what 99% of humanity means by it, which isn’t, y’know, really compatible with the pattern theory of identity.
“Afterlife” encompasses a very wide variety of beliefs, especially if you are speaking of 99% of humanity. That’s sort of like saying “trees” is incompatible with “pines”.
No, it’s like not using the word ‘God’ to describe a super-intelligent AI. The two concepts have some things in common, but a physical, man-made computer program just isn’t what people mean when they say “God”. Likewise, their brain getting reconstructed some decades after their death isn’t what people mean when they say “afterlife”.
Yet.
X-D
I think God would fit in many places where people on LW say Omega.
When people say “afterlife”, what they mean is living after they die. It’s words with fairly general meaning. (By the way, inability to generalize or use general concepts is a big autism stereotype)
more like saying search trees are the same thing as pine trees