What I've Been Clicking...

I agree:
Fr. Jonathan politely corrects Bill Maher and invites him to a chat (via Foxnews).
I was relieved to see just the kind of polite and reasoned retort that I had just been talking about below. Apparently Bill Maher wants to be the next Michael Moore and is making a documentary about the absurdity of faith. Fr. Jonathan rather patiently explains why just about everything Maher says about Christianity has almost nothing to do with what Christians say about themselves.

I'm ambivalent:
Catholic Bishop recommends calling God Allah to open a dialogue with Muslisms (via Drudge).
I see his point, and I understand that Allah is not an exclusively Islamic name for God. I also think it would be nice to be the better man and extend the olive branch first. The problem is that too many Muslims will see a white flag waving on the end of the olive branch, and too many Western Christians would be confused. That being said, I certainly see benefit of claiming Allah as our own in a sort of "We saw him first" kind of argument.

I disagree:
Whacky theoretician seriously proposes that there is a 20% chance we are a computer simulation (via NYTimes, via BBSpot.com)
The reporter seems to be writing the essay tongue-in-cheek, but you know there are whackjobs out there who would base a heresy on it. Do I even need to state that the obvious problem with this theory would be our own consciousness and self-awareness? The reason simulations work is because they appear to simulate behaviors to those outside the simulation. That's the illusion. The illusion wouldn't be for the bits of data inside the simulation, because they aren't really capable of perceiving anything. If the "simulated" people inside the simulation were actually perceiving something, they wouldn't be "simulated" people. They'd be real people. Creating a math equation that can predict how people would behave in a given situation, and then getting a computer to solve that equation, is far different than actually creating little bodiless people.

Comments

[Publius]

Do I even need to state that the obvious problem with this theory would be our own consciousness and self-awareness?

To a materialist, computer consciousness would probably not be any more of a problem than human consciousness.

[Publius]

The first paragraph of my comment is obviously Peter's. I should've put some sort of quotation marks or something in there. In fact, I believe I did italicize it, but this blog is set to strip out HTML tags.

[PeterTerp]

"To a materialist, computer consciousness would probably not be any more of a problem than human consciousness."

So would a materialist think that a computer simultaneously running simulations of various humans have a multiple personality disorder? Or would that just end up reflecting our own interior conflicts?

I'll grant that our brains are running "simulations" all the time. When I'm in a personal conflict, I'm imagining what would happen to two different versions of me...but it's not as if the versions of me that I imagine are somehow separate consciouses...at least, I hope they aren't. I barely have enough time for myself as it is...I'd hate to see what would happen if I had to share time with five different other me's.

[Publius]

Maybe they'd say that the software in the human brain is like DOS in which you can only run one program at a time and the software of the great supercomputer that houses us all is like Windows XP or Linux or Unix or whatever and can run a great many programs at a time.