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Philosophy

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  • If anything, this would be a very good evidence in favour of the simulation hypothesis. Canonical reading: a short sci-fi story by Eliezer Yudkowsky, That Alien Message: lesswrong.com/posts/5wMcKNAwB6X4mp9og/that-alien-message Commented Feb 2, 2024 at 14:16
  • Yeah... short "star sentences" are Trickster God; Jesus appearing American Physical Society’s (APS) March Meeting and letting Lawrence Krause and everyone else poke through his piercings, and see the crown of thorns embedded in his skull while he speaks, would be a pretty impressive public miracle. Commented Feb 2, 2024 at 16:18
  • I mean, obviously. To be clear, as far as we know, this has never happened and probably never will happen. But when faced with something that would challenge our existing models of reality as much as that hypothetical situation, people find aliens with the ability, time and inclination to move stars and hold them in a gravitationally unstable inclination—who indeed, as far as we understand physics, might well have needed to start before English as a language existed—to spell out a message about divine existence to be possible, and a divinity to be impossible. Commented Feb 3, 2024 at 4:02
  • Why? Well, clearly not because we view either of these situations to be at all likely, and certainly not because one is physically possible and the other is not—the alien hypothesis can pose incompatibilities with physics, particularly superluminal propagation (in fact, the question more or less implies that the scenario should be set up in such a way as to generate these problems) whereas there are ways to conceive of a deity that would be perfectly compatible with physics while still retaining very good practical approximations of omniscience, omnipotence, creation and so forth. Commented Feb 3, 2024 at 4:07
  • It seems clear that it is simply because "aliens" are socially coded as rational, but "gods" are not. Commented Feb 3, 2024 at 4:08