Yes, similarity to Pascal’s wager and other religious thought is not a coincidence at all. Our existence is marked by the ultimately irreconcilable conflict: on the one hand, if you view people as ML systems, being alive is both the fundamental goal of our decision-making and the precondition for all of our world-modeling; on the other hand, we are faced with the fact that all people die.
Even if we recognize our mortality rationally, our whole subconscious is built/trained around the ever-existing subjectivity. That’s why we are so often intuiting that there must be some immaculate and indestructible subject inside of us, that will not perish and can transcend space and time, as if “choosing” where to be embodied. You can see this assumption driving many thought experiments: cloning, teleportation, simulation, Boltzmann brains, cryonics, imagining what it is “to be someone else”, and so on. All of them presuppose that there is something you can call you beside being you, beside the totality of your experience. Major religions call it the soul. We, rationalists, know better than to explicitly posit something so supernatural, and yet it is still hard to truly embrace the fact that if you strip away every circumstance of existence that makes you you, the perfectly abstract observer remaining is devoid of any individuality and is no more you than it is me.
Yes, similarity to Pascal’s wager and other religious thought is not a coincidence at all. Our existence is marked by the ultimately irreconcilable conflict: on the one hand, if you view people as ML systems, being alive is both the fundamental goal of our decision-making and the precondition for all of our world-modeling; on the other hand, we are faced with the fact that all people die.
Even if we recognize our mortality rationally, our whole subconscious is built/trained around the ever-existing subjectivity. That’s why we are so often intuiting that there must be some immaculate and indestructible subject inside of us, that will not perish and can transcend space and time, as if “choosing” where to be embodied. You can see this assumption driving many thought experiments: cloning, teleportation, simulation, Boltzmann brains, cryonics, imagining what it is “to be someone else”, and so on. All of them presuppose that there is something you can call you beside being you, beside the totality of your experience. Major religions call it the soul. We, rationalists, know better than to explicitly posit something so supernatural, and yet it is still hard to truly embrace the fact that if you strip away every circumstance of existence that makes you you, the perfectly abstract observer remaining is devoid of any individuality and is no more you than it is me.