I believe in a higher power, just not as most people conceive of it.
I think God is a mad scientist, and we are his ‘experiment’ run completely amuck.
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Well, I’ll leave space for that type of god, sure, something made the Universe kick off.
Just not so much up for the old bearded chap who is obsessed with our junk and what we do with it.
Karma seems to work though, which is a bit of a fly in the ointment to my science-based outlook. 
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Tell that to anybody who has spent a lifetime studying consciousness through deep meditative practice…
And we’re never going to need more than 64K of memory in a home computer! 
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Same here; IMO, that’s just an authoritarian psychological projection of the dominant father figure many people wish that they were.
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Rather different to conventional deities and afterlives, in that we have firm scientific evidence that simulations are possible; we make them ourselves. They are more closely related to seemingly unfalsifiable scientific concepts such as quantum interpretations /multiverse, string theory etc.
Consistent ancestor simulations of the type proposed by Nick Bostrom seem impossible due to combinatorial explosion…it seems practically impossible just to retroactively ad-hoc simulate a legal game of chess, let alone a universe. On the other hand, the continued seeming incompatibility of gravity and quantum mechanics is evidence that we are in a simulation. Perhaps they are actually incompatible in that they are separate simulation models.
This thread is anthropocentric thinking at its finest. It’s like watching a really good kung fu battle.
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One where no one “wins?”
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Americanized, maybe. Just a lot of slick, flashing fists and feet, graceful dodging, and a vague aura of wisdom and woo.
Definitely nobody wins, but it’s what we do.
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It’s what some of us do, sometimes.
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An argument could be made that every human being, to some extent, at some stage of their life, grapples with an understanding of the nature of reality–in childhood at the very least, before explanations are handed down. It’s just that many find the easiest, habitual ways of thinking about the world and stick with them doggedly, without asking uncomfortable questions later on. They settle themselves on the matter and let the questions go.
I don’t believe other species on Earth ponder reality the same way as us, though. They seem (in terms of behavior) more concerned with the scope of what they can sense, and dealing with that information as all the “truth” they need. We’re the only ones who seem to drive ourselves batty with questions about what might lie beyond our sensory perceptions.
So I guess that’s what I meant by “what we do.”
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Maybe not on our own. But what if he decided to reveal himself?
That goes without saying; we think, therefore we eventually contemplate our existence at some point - ‘how do we know we’re not just parts of someone’s elaborate dream,’ ‘how do we know that our whole world isn’t contained in a marble, or on a speck of dust sitting on a clover…’
And the answer quite simply is that we don’t know, we can’t know.
We’ll probably never know, and even if if we did, it still doesn’t matter; contrived or organic, this is the existence we must traverse and live in… we have no choice in the matter, unless we choose not to live at all.
For some people, it’s fun to endlessly contemplate unanswerable esoteric questions, I guess; for me, it’s just not a good use of my idle time.
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As long as it isn’t on New Year’s, because that’s when the Dr Who special is on.
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How about seven days before that?
I’m not a big fan of Christmas, so yeah, no worries.
Long as I can watch the special.
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