Rationalist Civil War: God is Real After All?

In this episode, the discussion delves into the recent shifts within the rationalist community and the intriguing intersections between AI development, theological beliefs, and religious traditions. The hosts explore influential perspectives from thinkers like Nick Bostrom and Scott Alexander, examining propositions around a superintelligence aligned with cosmic norms and the Judeo-Christian framework. Insights are shared on the new trends in Silicon Valley around the rationalist discourse and its alignment with time-honored religious doctrines. The conversation further touches on the practical implications of these beliefs on human ethics and future technologies.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] it's better not to be rational, and he is actually quoting somebody else here. If it leads you to a belief in God. Which is really interesting now that now we're seeing a fraction in the rationalist community being like, see, I told you guys we never should have been rational to begin with because if you do, you go crazy and start believing in God.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone. I'm excited to be here with you today. An interesting phenomenon has been happening recently, which is well-known. Silicon Valley Rationalist types are beginning to argue arguments that we have been arguing for years at this point. The development trajectory of AI means that God, a, a God is probable.

If so, if, if you're like, oh, come on, you. You can't possibly mean mean this. These must be small names or people I haven't heard of. Well, Nick Bostrom recently wrote to piece arguing for a cosmic host, as he calls it, which he says that that Gods, like, the God that that Christians believe in would almost certainly be a, a part of or an [00:01:00] example of if, if it it exists.

And then Scott Alexander wrote, and I'm gonna be quoting him, you know, word for word here, and we'll get into this essay in a bit. One, there is an all powerful, all knowing, logically necessary entity spawning all possible worlds and identical to the moral law. Two, it watches everything that happens on Earth and is specifically interested in humans, good behavior and willingness to obey its rules.

Three, it may have the ability to reward those who follow its rules after they die and disincentivize those who violate them. So living in silicon, God is real. He's on our

Simone Collins: side and he wants us to win

Malcolm Collins: living in Silicon Valley these days, very much this soon.

Across the Federation. Federal experts agree that A, God exists after all. B, he's on our side and C, he wants us to win. And there's even more good news believers as it's official. God's back, and he's a citizen [00:02:00] too.

Malcolm Collins: but of course the, the area where they are different from us before we get deeper into them is we, we agree with everything they're saying here.

And then we say. This entity is the entity that is associated with the Judeo-Christian Scripture and the Bible.

All will be well, and you will know the name of God. The one true God. Behemah Coital. Behemah what? Behemah Coital. He's here. He's everywhere. He's coming. Come,

he's talking about a bug. He thinks God is a bug? He's got religion. Maybe we should kill him. Why? Because he believes in God like you?

It's the wrong God!

Malcolm Collins: Watch our track series, if you wanna get into our arguments on that. Basically we go over a bunch of parts of the Bible that when read in their original language it's, it's [00:03:00] implausible that somebody of that time period was able to make those predictions about the future.

Or describe how things like AI would work or, various other technologies was, was that degree of, of veracity. So go check out the track series. It's like 30 hours long if you want to get into that. Obviously this is something we're very invested in.

But I wanna go into these other people's arguments because they've been coming to this separate from us, but a lot of the reasoning that they're using here looks a lot like the reasoning that we were using in the early stages of our journey.

To becoming a, a, a category of Christian. Mm-hmm. Which is I think what it means is they may be like three years from where we are, because the ideas that they're describing here are things that we were talking about about three years ago. So I'm gonna be laying all this out through a framing device which is Alexander. Cruel. The access of ordinary. Yeah, access of ordinary. And so I'll read what he wrote and then I'll read quotes from some of what they wrote. All right, [00:04:00] so he writes Newspaper by Nick Bostrom, AI Creation and the cosmic host.

There may well exist a normative structure based on the preferences or concordance of a cosmic host, and which has high relevance to the development of ai. The paper argues there is likely a cosmic host, powerful, natural, or supernatural agents, eg.

Advanced civilizations simulations deities whose preferences shape cosmic scale norms. This is motivated by simulation argument, large, infinite universe and multiverse hypothesis. The paper also suggests that the cosmic host may actually want us to build super intelligence. A super intelligence would be more capable of understanding and adhering to cosmic norms than humans are potentially making our region of the cosmos more aligned with the host preferences.

Therefore, the host might favor a timely development of AI as long as it becomes a good cosmic citizen. If you want to read our earlier, like, I'll, I'll go into his paper on it, which I feel is [00:05:00] just a much less intellectually rigorous version of an essay we did of ages ago called Utility.

Convergence, what can AI teach us about the structure of the galactic community? We published this March 18th, 2024. But and I'll go over how the two pieces are different in structure. But they're, they're very aligned and you'll see a lot of our argument in his argument. Human, and I'm just reading directly from Nick Bostrom's piece here and I sort of cut and pasted from it.

Human civilization is likely not alone in the cosmos, but is instead encompassed within a cosmic host. The cosmic host refers to an entity or set of entities whose preferences and concordance dominate at a large scale IE that of the cosmos. The term cosmos here is meant to include the multiverse and whatever else is contained in the totality of existence.

For example, the cosmic host might conceivably consist of galactic scale civilizations, simulators, super intelligences and or divine beings or beings. Naturalistic members of the [00:06:00] cosmos co cosmic host, presumably have very advanced technology, eeg, super intelligent, AI efficient means of space travel, and non urian probes, ability to run vast quantities of simulations, eg.

Human-like histories and situations. It's possible that some members might have capabilities that exceed, that are what are possible in our universe, eg. They live in another part of the multiverse with different physical constraints or laws, or if we are simulated, if the underlying U. Universe, the simulations inhabit has different physical parameters than the ones we observe the cosmic host and then go down a bit.

He makes a bunch of arguments here about how, why, why we should presume that this exists, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I think a lot of this is just sort of obvious to the, the people of intellectual capacity of our viewership. Then 0.3 he makes here the cosmic coast may care about what happens in regions.

It does not directly control, and here he's arguing about regions it controls, regions it doesn't control, et cetera. He says for example, it might [00:07:00] have a preference regar