“There is no afterlife and there are no supernatural miracles” is true, important, and not believed by most humans. The people who post here, though, have a greater proportion of people who believe this than the world population does.
How do we know there is no afterlife? I think there’s a chance there is.
Some examples of situations in which there is an afterlife:
We live in a simulation and whatever is running the simulation decided to set up an afterlife of some kind. Could be a collection of its favourite agents, or a reward for its best behaved ones, or etc.
We do not live in a simulation, but after the technological singularity an AI is able to reconstruct humans and decides to place them in a simulated world or to re-embody them
Various possibilities far beyond our current understanding of the world
But I don’t know what your reasoning is—maybe you have ruled out these and the various other possibilities.
Let me amend my statement: the afterlives as described by the world’s major religions almost certainly do not exist, and it is foolish to act as though they do.
As for other possibilities, I can address them with the “which God” objection to Pascal’s Wager; I have no evidence about how or if my actions while alive affect whatever supernatural afterlife I may or may not experience after death, so I shouldn’t base my actions today on the possibility.
There is no reason to live in fear of the Christian God or any other traditional gods. However, there is perhaps a reason to live in fear of some identical things:
We live in a simulation run by a Christian, Muslim, Jew, etc., and he has decided to make his religion true in his simulation. There are a lot of religious people—if people or organisations gain the ability to run such simulations, there’s a good chance that many of these organisations will be religious, and their simulations influenced by this fact.
And the following situation seems more likely and has a somewhat similar result:
We develop some kind of aligned AI. This AI decides that humans should be rewarded according to how they conducted themselves in their lives.
If you want to be pedantic about it, chaos is not necessarily the opposite of order. The act of relying requires pattern matching and recognition, thus deducing a form of order. There is nothing to rely on when it’s just chaos. Noise vs a sin wave. The opposite of a sin wave is its inversion which cancels things out. A sin wave cannot exist within a noise because all the data points are replaced by additional random data.
It’s entirely possible to take the Fourier transform of noise and see what sine waves you’d have to add together to reproduce the random data. So it’s not true that noise doesn’t contain sine waves; ideal “white noise” in particular contains every possible frequency at an equal volume.
You are right. We are interested in extracting a single sin wave superimposed over a noise. Fourier transform will get you a series for constructing any type of signal. I don’t think it can find that sin wave inside the noise. If you are given a noise with the sin wave and the same one without the sin wave, then I think you can find it. If you don’t have anything else to compare to, I don’t think there is any way to extract that information.
If you have a signal that repeats over and over again, you actually can eventually recover it through noise. I don’t know the exact math, but basically the noise will “average out” to nothing, while the signal will get stronger and stronger the more times it repeats.
“There is no afterlife and there are no supernatural miracles” is true, important, and not believed by most humans. The people who post here, though, have a greater proportion of people who believe this than the world population does.
How do we know there is no afterlife? I think there’s a chance there is.
Some examples of situations in which there is an afterlife:
We live in a simulation and whatever is running the simulation decided to set up an afterlife of some kind. Could be a collection of its favourite agents, or a reward for its best behaved ones, or etc.
We do not live in a simulation, but after the technological singularity an AI is able to reconstruct humans and decides to place them in a simulated world or to re-embody them
Various possibilities far beyond our current understanding of the world
But I don’t know what your reasoning is—maybe you have ruled out these and the various other possibilities.
Let me amend my statement: the afterlives as described by the world’s major religions almost certainly do not exist, and it is foolish to act as though they do.
As for other possibilities, I can address them with the “which God” objection to Pascal’s Wager; I have no evidence about how or if my actions while alive affect whatever supernatural afterlife I may or may not experience after death, so I shouldn’t base my actions today on the possibility.
My thoughts:
There is no reason to live in fear of the Christian God or any other traditional gods. However, there is perhaps a reason to live in fear of some identical things:
We live in a simulation run by a Christian, Muslim, Jew, etc., and he has decided to make his religion true in his simulation. There are a lot of religious people—if people or organisations gain the ability to run such simulations, there’s a good chance that many of these organisations will be religious, and their simulations influenced by this fact.
And the following situation seems more likely and has a somewhat similar result:
We develop some kind of aligned AI. This AI decides that humans should be rewarded according to how they conducted themselves in their lives.
Most rational for sure. Irrationality is chaos. Can we rely on chaos?
We can probably rely on chaos to be chaotic.
If you want to be pedantic about it, chaos is not necessarily the opposite of order. The act of relying requires pattern matching and recognition, thus deducing a form of order. There is nothing to rely on when it’s just chaos. Noise vs a sin wave. The opposite of a sin wave is its inversion which cancels things out. A sin wave cannot exist within a noise because all the data points are replaced by additional random data.
It’s entirely possible to take the Fourier transform of noise and see what sine waves you’d have to add together to reproduce the random data. So it’s not true that noise doesn’t contain sine waves; ideal “white noise” in particular contains every possible frequency at an equal volume.
You are right. We are interested in extracting a single sin wave superimposed over a noise. Fourier transform will get you a series for constructing any type of signal. I don’t think it can find that sin wave inside the noise. If you are given a noise with the sin wave and the same one without the sin wave, then I think you can find it. If you don’t have anything else to compare to, I don’t think there is any way to extract that information.
If you have a signal that repeats over and over again, you actually can eventually recover it through noise. I don’t know the exact math, but basically the noise will “average out” to nothing, while the signal will get stronger and stronger the more times it repeats.