Do we have any evidence to suggest that he didn’t take god seriously, as an entity that figured into how he constructed reality?
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They’re incredibly addictive. I now wish I had kept some unread ones in reserve. Now I must satisfy myself with The Long Earth series 
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I know. I’m looking forward to diving into them, too.
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I don’t know about a virtualized physical reality, but we are all trapped against our will in a virtual American political reality simulator programmed and operated by the morally and spiritually deranged.
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They’re good, but the style has more Baxter than Pratchett, IMO. I like both, but Baxter just isn’t as whimsical. Well, I’ve only read the first one. The others might be different.
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Good Omens is a great collaboration between Pratchett and Gaiman, a comedic deconstruction of the apocalypse.
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Since we only have writings to go on, we probably have to take his belief in god seriously. If he glosses over it, it seems more likely that he’s taking it for granted.
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One of the better (IMO) fictional treatments of the Caverns of Socrates concept is Shadowtrap by Dennis L. McKiernan.
People have too much time on their hands. Base-reality based on what? Science fiction. that’s what.
That’s just another way of invoking a god.
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Not really personally interested in him… I’m a modernist, but I do have an interest in the notion that we can really only understand history through the documents left behind. I’m not against speculation on history, but it’s just that, speculation… speculative fiction. Otherwise, it’s just assuming what Descartes (or anyone else in the past) is saying/thinking, which is another form of, I don’t know… presentism, I guess. As a historian, I think it matters to not try and make the people of the past like us by putting words or ideas into their mouths.
That being said, there isn’t anything wrong with speculative historical fiction, but it’s just not a good way to accurately represent the past.
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While Descartes tried to make God as much an apotheosis of his views of mathematical and mechanical perfection as he could, his references to God, though not many or frequent outside the Meditations, were fairly consistently pious. He was a practicing Catholic. Although, while he was never excommunicated, his books were banned for a time at the height of the Church’s power in Europe, and critics accused him of deism. It seems unlikely that he would dissemble, given his almost worshipful devotion to mathematical truth. More just a fun theory to entertain and then dismiss.
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Ninja turtles?
From the little I’ve read of him, that seems right on. I don’t, for the most part, enlightenment thinkers thought in terms of atheism. I think a god was the assumed base reality. I think that saying there was no god would have been outside of the norm and it wasn’t just about the pressure of the state bearing on them (though I do think it’s important to note the limitations places on them by their societies).
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You’ll have to walk the Pattern in one of the first-order shadows before you will be able to get to one of the base realities.
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True. And in fairness to people like Descartes and Newton, the Copernican Revolution was just getting traction and Darwin, Hubble and Einstein were all still well in the future. Knowing what they knew then, assuming a Creator was less far-fetched and didn’t really violate Occam’s Razor based on the science of the time. Indeed, almost all pre-19th century cultures had some concept of a creator or creators to explain the natural order, because it seemed completely reasonable to them even from a scientific standpoint. Similarly, most cosmogonies were either static or cyclical. Hubble’s demolition of the steady-state universe surprised everyone, even Einstein. We take it for granted now that things evolve, but it’s not an obvious thing without powerful microscopes and telescopes.
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I’ve got a hypothesis that this is the resolution to the Fermi paradox. Not that civilizations self-destruct, but that they eventually learn to accept the futility of ever-increasing expansion and settle instead for a contented existence on their little corner of reality until the inevitable heat-death of the universe.
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It’s an interesting idea. The problem is change. Unless a civilization can find a way to stop cultural and scientific evolution, it’s only a matter of time until it produces a faction able and willing to seed the galaxy with something that alters it.
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I think where I would challenge that assumption is in the idea that it is inevitable that there would be an occurrence of a faction both willing and able. Or, at least, that it would be inevitable that such a faction would be big enough for anyone to really notice, if it did occur.
There’s a case to be made for the blue pill, after all. And if they stop making red pills at all…
Maybe, much like eyes or wings or social interaction or intelligence, being insular and small is just something that crops up in any species able to persist for long enough, and those that don’t…burn out.
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Yes! Based on what? Is there any objective evidence at all for hypothesizing that reality is a simulation, with a higher order of some sort having programmed it? If so, I haven’t heard of it. How can you prove or disprove something for which there’s no evidence? (i.e., like the god hypothesis.)
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Based on pure speculation, and a little historical context. We live in an age of computers, so myths like this tend to invoke a ‘simulation’. Other cultures in other histories came up with equally absurd ideas based on what they experienced at the time.
Pure fantasy.
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