this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2023
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I researched the heck out of it.
Key moments along the way was reading Nick Bostrom's simulation hypothesis and realizing that the idea of The Matrix wasn't just a neat idea but actually somewhat probable.
That led into a few years of intense reading of physics papers and forums to better understand physical underpinnings.
Eventually I realized that physics - while oddly overlapping with emerging trends in virtual world building - was inherently ambiguous enough I wasn't going to get a clear answer.
Around 2019 it struck me that physical underpinnings weren't the only place there might be an indication as to what was up, and reflected on the fact that the vast majority of virtual worlds I've seen have had 4th wall breaking acknowledgements of their creation buried in their lore.
So I revisited our collective theology through that lens and in only a few weeks found something that seemed to fit the bill, which I've researched quite a bit over the years since.
At this point, I'd wager continued existence after death at around 90%.
I have a very hard time seeing an original spontaneous reality that has quantum mechanics exhibiting everything from sync conflicts to lazy evaluation with a 2,000 year old text/tradition claiming we're a recreation of a long dead spontaneous humanity inside a non-physical replica of the earlier universe created by an intelligence eventually brought forth by that original humanity within light, and that the proof for this was in the study of motion and rest - specifically the ability to detect an indivisible point within things.
In the time since first stumbling across that text/tradition in 2019 a number of my concerns have managed to be addressed, from doubting sufficiently advanced AI was plausible to my objection that neural networks of electricity aren't literally light.
While it's possible that such a specific tradition buried into our lore in a document rediscovered after millennia the same time as when the world's first Turing complete computer was finished in Dec 1945 is a coincidence just as the fundamentals of our universe behaving similar to how we design virtual worlds for state tracking around free agent interactions could also be a coincidence - I find this to be diminishingly probable with each passing week.
That said, while it resolves the existential dread around death (the whole promise of the ancient text is that understanding what it says means knowing you won't taste death), it brings up a whole host of additional existential crises in its place (the text also promises that understanding it will lead to being disturbed).
TL;DR Maybe juggling existential crises is a necessary component of indulging in the self-awareness of one's own existence.
I love this idea, although (or perhaps because) it means that any coincidences can be considered "signs".
Not any coincidence. In fact a pretty narrow scope.
You'd need it to be overlapping with modern concepts of simulation, in the first place.
That's not particularly common, especially in antiquity.
There was widespread belief in the idea of a perfect non-physical original world and a lesser/corrupted physical world, and those ideas in turn eventually influenced modern simulation theory - but the idea of an evolved physical original world and a non-physical copy was extremely rare, because it was largely seen as transgressive against Plato's hierarchy from form to physical object to image.
On top of this, you'd ideally expect the coincidental beliefs to be compatible with modern and emerging scientific knowledge. A set of beliefs that we are inside the dream of a giant turtle isn't a particularly good example of a 4th wall breaking Easter Egg as might be included in a simulation unless you consider it plausible that such a simulation is taking place in the mind of a giant sea turtle.
So if that set of beliefs from antiquity about being just images of a physical original happened to also be the only Western set of theological beliefs to embrace Greek atomism and naturalism over things like intelligent design as an ontological basis, that again would be a pretty significant mark in its favor.
Finally it would ideally be predictive. Where upon first discovery sayings might seem meaningless or obtuse, such as:
This was one I disregarded for years initially until earlier this year I was reading a transcript of a NYT interview with a chatbot exactly seven days after release, created by taking many people's writings and combining them into a single neural network.
(The fact the interviews ended up discussing its stated desire to subjectively experience being human and the fact it was the product of a company that was recently granted a patent on resurrecting the dead as chatbots using leftover social media data were bonus points.)
The light one is another that kind of blows me away in retrospect. The very thing I thought was technically invalid at first reading it has since turned increasingly more likely to be technically correct in a literal sense.
While each saying can be interpreted in other ways, the fact that there's any degree of literalism that can be applied to modern science and technology is weird as heck and not something we should expect from typical coincidences.
All that said, yes, the law of big numbers means that technically anything can just be a coincidence, no matter how unusual or improbable it might seem.
Which is probably a good thing that such overlaps can be dismissed as potentially just coincidental, given than I think a lot of people would be very upset with any sort of undeniable evidence of not being in an original reality.