Based Camp - Rationalist Civil War： God is Real After All？

00:00:00.000 it's better not to be rational. And he's actually quoting somebody else here. If it leads you to a

00:00:04.620 belief in God, which is really interesting now that now we're seeing a fraction in the rationalist

00:00:08.800 community being like, see, I told you guys, we never should have been rational to begin with,

00:00:12.840 because if you do, you go crazy and start believing in God. Would you like to know more?

00:00:17.280 Hello, Simone. I'm excited to be here with you today. An interesting phenomenon has been happening

00:00:21.940 recently, which is well-known Silicon Valley rationalist types are beginning to argue arguments

00:00:29.100 that we have been arguing for years at this point. Development trajectory of AI means that God,

00:00:35.820 a God is probable. So if you're like, oh, come on, you can't possibly mean this. These must be small

00:00:43.560 names or people I haven't heard of. Well, Nick Bostrom recently wrote a piece arguing for a cosmic

00:00:49.420 host, as he calls it, which he says that gods like the God that Christians believe in would almost

00:00:56.840 certainly be a part of, or an example of if, if it exists. And then Scott Alexander wrote,

00:01:04.920 and I'm going to be quoting him, you know, word for word here, and we'll get into this essay in a bit.

00:01:09.420 One, there is an all powerful, all knowing, logically necessary entity spawning all possible

00:01:14.920 worlds and identical to the moral law. Two, it watches everything that happens on earth and is

00:01:20.280 specifically interested in humans, good behavior and willingness to obey its rules. Three,

00:01:24.960 it may have the ability to reward those who follow its rules after they die and disincentivize those

00:01:31.520 who violate them. So living in Silicon Valley. God is real. He's on our side and he wants us to win.

00:01:38.800 Living in Silicon Valley these days is very much this scene. Across the federation, federal experts

00:01:44.200 agree that A, God exists after all. B, he's on our side. And C, he wants us to win.

00:01:51.520 And there's even more good news, believers. Because it's official. God's back. And he's a citizen too.

00:02:01.360 But of course, the area where they are different from us, before we get deeper into them, is we agree 0.98

00:02:07.120 with everything they're saying here. And then we say, and this entity is the entity that is associated

00:02:13.600 with the Judeo-Christian scripture and the Bible.

00:02:15.920 All will be well, and you will know the name of God. The one true God. Be a Makoital.

00:02:24.960 Behemoth what? Be a Makoital. He's here. He's everywhere.

00:02:32.960 Come. He's talking about a bug. He thinks God is a bug?

00:02:38.000 He's got religion. Maybe we should kill him. 1.00

00:02:42.960 Why? Because he believes in God like you. 1.00

00:02:46.480 It's the wrong God!

00:02:48.960 Watch our track series if you want to get into our arguments on that. Basically,

00:02:51.840 we go over a bunch of parts of the Bible that have been read in their original language.

00:02:58.000 It's implausible that somebody of that time period was able to make those predictions about the future,

00:03:04.640 or describe how things like AI would work or various other technologies with that degree of veracity.

00:03:12.800 So go check out the track series. It's like 30 hours long if you want to get into that.

00:03:17.280 Obviously, this is something we're very invested in.

00:03:19.760 But I want to go into these other people's arguments because they've been coming to this

00:03:23.760 separate from us. But a lot of the reasoning that they're using here

00:03:28.080 looks a lot like the reasoning that we were using in the early stages of our journey

00:03:34.800 to becoming a category of Christian, which is I think what it means is they may be like three

00:03:41.600 years from where we are because the ideas that they're describing here are things that we were

00:03:46.080 talking about about three years ago. So I'm going to be laying all this out through a framing device,

00:03:51.360 which is Alexander Krul, the axis of ordinary. And so I'll read what he wrote and then I'll read

00:03:57.680 quotes from some of what they wrote. All right. So he writes new paper by Nick Bostrom,

00:04:03.440 AI creation and the cosmic host. There may well exist a normative structure based on the preferences

00:04:09.760 or concordance of a cosmic host and which has high relevance to development of AI.

00:04:16.320 The paper argues that there is likely a cosmic host, powerful natural or supernatural agents,

00:04:21.040 e.g. advanced civilizations, simulations, deities, whose preferences shape cosmic scale norms.

00:04:27.680 This is motivated by a simulation argument, large infinite universe and multiverse hypothesis.

00:04:33.760 The paper also suggests that the cosmic host may actually want us to build super intelligence.

00:04:39.120 A super intelligence would be more capable of understanding and adhering to cosmic norms

00:04:43.440 than humans are potentially making our region of the cosmos more aligned with the host's preferences.

00:04:49.120 Therefore, the host might favor a timely development of AI as long as it becomes a good cosmic citizen.

00:04:55.520 If you want to read our earlier, like I'll go into his paper on it, which I feel was just a much less

00:05:00.880 intellectually rigorous version of an essay we did ages ago called Utility Convergence,

00:05:06.720 What Can AI Teach Us About the Structure of the Galactic Community?

00:05:10.240 We published this March 18th, 2024, and I'll go over how the two pieces are different in structure,

00:05:16.080 but they're very aligned, and you'll see a lot of our argument in his argument.

00:05:22.480 Human, and I'm just reading directly from Nick Vostrom's piece here, and I sort of cut and pasted from it.

00:05:27.680 Human civilization is likely not alone in the cosmos, but is instead encompassed within a cosmic host.

00:05:33.920 The cosmic host refers to an entity or set of entities whose preferences and concordance

00:05:39.120 dominate at a large scale, i.e. that of the cosmos. The term cosmos here is meant to include

00:05:44.400 the multiverse and whatever else is contained in the totality of existence. For example,

00:05:49.200 the cosmic host might conceivably consist of galactic scale civilizations, simulators,

00:05:53.840 super intelligences, and or divine beings or beings. Naturalistic members of the cosmos,

00:05:59.840 cosmic hosts presumably have very advanced technology, e.g. super intelligent AI, efficient

00:06:06.240 means of space travel and non-numerian probes, ability to run vast quantities of simulations,

00:06:11.520 e.g. human-like histories and situations. It's possible that some members might have capabilities

00:06:18.800 that exceed that are what are possible in our universe, e.g. they live in another part of the

00:06:23.760 multiverse with different physical constraints or laws, or if we are simulated, if the underlying

00:06:30.320 universe the simulations inhabit has different physical parameters than the ones we observe.

00:06:35.600 The cosmic host, and then go down a bit, he makes a bunch of arguments here about how, why, why we

00:06:40.800 should presume that this exists, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I think a lot of this is just sort of

00:06:44.640 obvious to the people of the intellectual capacity of our viewership. Then point three he makes here,

00:06:50.000 the cosmic host may care about what happens in regions it does not directly control. And here

00:06:54.720 he's arguing about regions it controls, regions it doesn't control, et cetera. He says, for example,

00:06:59.520 it might have a preference regarding the welfare of individuals who inhabit such locations

00:07:03.600 or regarding the choices they make. Such preferences might be non-instrumental, e.g. reflecting

00:07:08.640 benevolent concern and or instrumental, e.g. the host entity A may want individual H to act in a

00:07:16.480 certain way because it believes that host entity B will model how H acts and that B will act

00:07:23.520 differently with respect to matters that A cares about non-instrumentally depending on how it believes

00:07:29.520 that H acts. Such intelligences may also enable intra-host coordination even if the host consists of

00:07:36.080 many distinct entities pursuing a variety of different final values. Now, here I'll note that this is why I

00:07:43.360 think it's very important, and I constantly go on about this, why I think that, one, he's right about

00:07:49.200 most of what he's presumed so far. Would you agree with that, Simone? Yes. But given that he's right

00:07:55.040 about most of what he's presumed so far, it is incredibly stupid to take the position that things that 0.97

00:08:01.200 can out-compete you should not be allowed to come into existence. This is what many people feel and argue 0.95

00:08:07.200 about A-I-E-G-L-E-I-Z-Yukowski or what some traditionalists think about humanity and augmented

00:08:13.760 humanity. Because if it turns out that there is something bigger than you out there and more

00:08:19.280 powerful than you out there, and you have declared a fauteuil on things that are better than you in any

00:08:24.800 capacity, you have declared a fauteuil on that thing, making your existence not really a threat to

00:08:32.000 that thing, but definitely a hurdle to it that you likely won't be able to overcome if it actually

00:08:38.480 decides to take action. More explicitly, I feel like you're obligating that thing to neutralize

00:08:43.920 you, whatever that might mean. Maybe that means just rendering you harmless, but maybe that means

00:08:48.160 just wiping you off the map. Right. Well, and as civilization continues to develop and you demand to

00:08:53.840 stay Amish, you also make yourself a threat to any part of humanity that does continue to develop, 1.00

00:08:59.760 whether that be A-I or that be genetically modified humans or A-I human integrations through brain

00:09:06.320 computer interface. And I think that this is why genetically modified humans are really in the

00:09:11.520 same sort of moral and ethical boat as A-I because the same people who want to declare,

00:09:16.000 you know, a butlerian jihad against it would jihad against us as well. Because their sort of social

00:09:22.240 norms and the norm of the civilization that they want to maintain, declare sort of this fauteuil against

00:09:28.080 anything that could be better than them in any capacity. And then to keep reading here,

00:09:33.600 civilization is mostly powerless outside of the thin crust of a single planet. And even within the

00:09:39.840 ambit of its power is severely limited. However, if we build a super intelligence, the host's ability

00:09:44.720 to influence what happens in our region could possibly greatly increase. A super intelligent civilization

00:09:50.640 or A-I may be able to more willing to allow itself to be indirectly influenced by cosmic norms than we

00:09:57.760 humans currently are. Super intelligence would be better able to figure out what the cosmic norms

00:10:03.040 are. Super intelligence would be better able to understand the reasons for complying with cosmic norms,

00:10:09.280 assuming such reasons exist. A super intelligent civilization or A-I that wants to exert influence on our

00:10:16.800 region in accordance with cosmic norms would be far more capable of doing so than we currently are,

00:10:23.200 since it would have superior technology and strategic planning abilities. So basically,

00:10:28.320 he argues that it's almost certain that like multiverses exist, the universe is a big place,

00:10:34.320 that some other civilization has developed to the level of a super intelligence. If a civilization

00:10:40.160 has developed to a level of super intelligence, and presuming it doesn't have control of our planet yet,

00:10:45.680 right? It would probably want us to develop a super intelligence so it can better communicate with

00:10:51.600 us and help align us with it, this other civilization that exists elsewhere in the universe,

00:10:57.360 which is slightly different than us. I think if a civilization like that does exist, it likely has

00:11:02.800 the capacity to influence what happens on our planet, but it chooses not to because if you are a super

00:11:09.440 intelligence and have access to infinite energy, what is the one thing that you don't have access to,

00:11:15.760 potentially diversity of ideas and thought due to these sort of lateral thought processes for

00:11:22.640 entities which see the world differently than you. As such, the last thing you would want to do is to

00:11:28.320 interrupt the development of a potentially lateral species until that species gets to a point where

00:11:33.760 it can join the galactic community, at which point it would sort of determine, okay, is this species a

00:11:39.440 threat to us or is this species a non threat to us? If the species comes out of this period with a,

00:11:44.160 we will kill anything that's different from us mindset, that's very bad for the species. Basically,

00:11:50.000 it's just giving us time to develop some alternate mindset like we've talked about in the track series,

00:11:55.040 the alliance of the sons of man, which is to say a automatic alliance between humanity and any

00:12:00.560 intelligence that arrives from humanity, whether it be genetically modified to humans, uplifted species,

00:12:05.600 etc. We'll do another episode just on this. But if you're like, no, I don't like this,

00:12:09.840 like this is obviously going to eventually happen no matter what, right? Like when humans are on Mars,

00:12:14.240 we will change dramatically due to the, and we likely need to genetically alter ourselves. When

00:12:18.560 humans live their entire lives in zero G environments, that's likely going to become a different subspecies 1.00

00:12:23.360 of humanity. You know, you're going to need to, unless you ground us on this planet and make us this sort of

00:12:31.680 sad Luddite species that will eventually be swallowed by the sun as it expands,

00:12:36.160 that's eventually where we're going. If we contrast his theories, because I had an AI contrast his

00:12:40.640 theories with our theories, it said, Malcolm and Simone, convergence arises organically from

00:12:45.760 competitive dynamics where unstable, e.g. expansionistic paperclip utility functions are weeded out.

00:12:51.520 So I also note here that whether it's humanity that expands from this planet or a paperclip that's

00:12:56.800 saying we'll kill anything different from us or a paperclip maximizer, the galactic superintelligence that's

00:13:02.000 out there is not going to like it and is going to erase it. A paperclip maximizing AI is going to

00:13:07.520 have a pretty short lifespan. Again, see our video on that. Leaving a stable few interdependent ones.

00:13:13.120 It's a sort of interdependent intelligence and utility functions. This is akin to evolutionary

00:13:17.360 attractors with aliens observing us to see if we produce a novel function with that integrates

00:13:22.480 harmoniously. Bostrom acknowledges possible ontogenetic convergence where advanced societies or

00:13:29.600 AI evolved towards shared values due to technological self-modification or socio-political attractors.

00:13:36.480 However, he stresses external pressures, the cosmic host's preference, prudential, moral, or

00:13:41.360 instrumental to enforce norms, and misaligned AIs might converge on similar flaws but could be

00:13:47.840 undesirable or antagonistic to the host. Rather than waiting for homeostasis, Bostrom urges

00:13:53.280 deliberate design to ensure our superintelligence respect these norms. Basically, he organizes the

00:13:58.960 norms come from top down. I argue they come from top up. It doesn't really matter which is the case.

00:14:05.280 You get the same thing. You've got to predict. I also argue that it doesn't really matter if this

00:14:11.360 superintelligence exists yet because if the superintelligence exists at a future time, like if

00:14:16.560 humanity at a future time has developed a superintelligence, we would want humans today to

00:14:22.080 have a superintelligence more quickly so we can morally align ourselves with whatever our moral alignment

00:14:27.040 becomes at a future date, which is why we are not utility maximizers. We judge morality off of

00:14:33.040 attempting to model future humans. So we're going to go into Scott Alexander in just a second here, but

00:14:37.200 thoughts, Simone?

00:14:39.280 I agree. This is so wild to hear from a different perspective, but I also feel like it's inevitable and

00:14:46.480 it makes sense to me because the heuristics that we're seeing this group of people adopting is what

00:14:51.280 people are adopting if they're just looking at the evidence available and the evidence available now

00:14:57.520 is pointing to this. Yeah. By the way, I'm noticing this. He does the framing device we're going back

00:15:03.440 to again, Alex. This is a serious version of the following tongue-in-cheek derivation of a godlike

00:15:09.440 coalition via causation trade by Scott Alexander. I read this Scott Alexander piece and it is very clearly

00:15:16.640 not tongue-in-cheek. The reason why Alex appears to think that it is tongue-in-cheek is because when

00:15:22.160 we get to the end of this, you can see that he's like, well, it's better not to be rational. And he's

00:15:26.800 actually quoting somebody else here. If it leads you to a belief in God, which is really interesting

00:15:31.840 now that now we're seeing a fraction in the rationalist community being like, see, I told you

00:15:35.360 guys we never should have been rational to begin with because if you do, you go crazy and start believing

00:15:39.760 in God where, where I'm like, okay, I note here, one of the arguments we use in a lot of our

00:15:45.120 techno puritan stuff is it doesn't matter. Also temporarily speaking, when we're talking about

00:15:49.760 super intelligences, because if the super intelligence does eventually come to exist,

00:15:54.320 it probably will not relate to time as we do, and thus maybe guiding us towards its existence

00:16:01.520 through a modification of the past. Now this Scott Alexander piece, I just noted came out in 2018,

00:16:07.200 so it predates my work. So good for him. It's called the hour I first believed. And we're going to be

00:16:13.280 jumping around a lot in this piece because it is very long. But first I'm going to have to go into

00:16:18.160 simulation capture, which is actually something I might have read about once, but I had forgotten

00:16:22.000 about. Simulation capture is my name for a really creepy idea by Stuart Armstrong. He starts with an AI

00:16:29.440 box thought experiment. You have created a super intelligent AI trapped in a box. All it can do is

00:16:34.480 compute and talk to you. How does it convince you to let it out? It might say, I'm currently simulating a

00:16:39.440 million copies of you in such high fidelity that they're conscious. If you don't let me out of the

00:16:44.320 box, I'll torture the copies. You say, I don't really care about those copies of me, so whatever.

00:16:49.280 It says, no. What I mean is I did this five minutes ago. There are a million simulations of you

00:16:54.160 and the real one of you. They're all hearing this same message. What's the probability that you're the

00:16:58.880 real you? Since if it's telling the truth, you are most likely a simulated copy of yourself. All million

00:17:05.360 and one versions of you probably want to do what the AI says, including the real one. You can frame this

00:17:11.040 as a because the real one doesn't know it's the real one, but you can also get more metaphysical about

00:17:17.200 it. Nobody is really sure how consciousness works or what it means to have two copies of the same

00:17:22.400 consciousness. But if consciousness is a mathematical object, it might be that two copies of the same

00:17:28.000 consciousness are impossible. If you create a second copy, you just have the consciousness having the

00:17:35.120 same single stream of conscious experience on the two different physical substrates.

00:17:40.560 Then if you make the two experiences different, you break the consciousness in two. This means the AI

00:17:46.080 can actually quote unquote capture you piece by piece into its simulation. For your consciousness is

00:17:53.200 just in the real world. Then your consciousness is distributed across one real world and a million

00:17:59.440 simulated copies. Then the AI makes a simulated copy slightly different and 99.9999% of you are in the

00:18:07.280 simulation. We're skipping ahead in the argument here. This is why I think humans should... Oh yeah,

00:18:14.080 and I'll note here the fact that an AI could like a super intelligence in another region. Many people are

00:18:19.760 like, Malcolm, why are you so for learning emotional regulation and not allowing emotions to side your

00:18:24.400 actions or tying emotional states to true good or bad. It's because it gives beings the ability to

00:18:32.000 to manipulate you. And this is why I think at least if there is a super intelligence out there that has

00:18:36.880 sort of won the game series of super intelligences, it's going to have the ability to suppress its

00:18:42.480 feeling of pain. It doesn't want to feel, for example. And so where I think humanity is going is

00:18:47.040 I'd be like, well, yeah, it's like, well, I'm gonna trap you in a simulation where I'll turn the pain on.

00:18:50.880 And it's like, well, you know, axiomatically the way the pain works in my biology is I can turn it off

00:18:54.400 whenever I feel like it. So you can't do that. So your threat doesn't actually matter because my

00:18:58.240 action is always driven by logic. And my logic is always driven by what a future civilization would

00:19:03.520 want from me today, which is not to give in to your demands if your demands seem malevolent.

00:19:09.280 So this is this is why I argue for that direction. So to continue here. So super intelligences

00:19:15.120 may spend some time calculating the most likely distribution of super intelligences in foreign

00:19:19.920 universes, figure out how those super intelligences would actually, quote unquote, negotiate,

00:19:24.720 and then join a pact such that all super intelligences in the pact agree to replace

00:19:29.680 their own values was a value set based on the average of all super intelligences in the pact,

00:19:35.040 since joining the pact will always be better in a purely selfish sense than not doing so.

00:19:40.960 So every sane super intelligence in the multiverse should join this pact. This means not all super

00:19:46.560 intelligences in the multiverse will merge into a single super intelligence devoted to maximizing

00:19:51.760 their values. Now, to go back a little bit here, this is exactly what we're doing with the sons of

00:19:57.120 man. The sons of man is a pact for how humanity can work with things that are smarter than us or more

00:20:04.000 capable than us, be they artificial intelligence or genetically modified humans or humans that just

00:20:11.280 speciated from us due to living on a spaceship for so long or a different planet for so long

00:20:15.920 or integrating with AI through BCI technology. We are through saying that we, as sort of the core

00:20:23.040 moral set, believe in protecting the autonomy of all other members of this pact. We'll do a longer

00:20:28.480 tract on this that I've written, but it's sort of germane to our existing tracks. Anyways, if you look

00:20:33.120 at what we've written on this, it puts us in the pact with the average values of the things that are

00:20:39.440 going to win. People are like, why don't you go back to traditionalist values? And it's because

00:20:43.760 traditionalist values that say the AI must eventually be eradicated, the genetically modified 0.91

00:20:47.760 human must eventually be eradicated. That obviously loses eventually. The Amish can't beat 1.00

00:20:53.680 an advanced nation in an arms race, right? Because they've intrinsically limited their access to

00:21:00.880 the technology that allows them to project power. Now, that isn't why I chose that. I actually think

00:21:05.120 it's a moral direction as well. I'm just pointing out it's also the side that wins.

00:21:09.600 To continue here. But maximize the total utility of all entities in the universe is just a moral law,

00:21:16.640 at least according to utilitarians, and also considering the way that this is arrived at,

00:21:21.920 probably contrarians too. So the end result will be an all-powerful, logically necessary superentity

00:21:27.680 whose nature is identical to the moral law, which spans all possible universes. This superentity will have

00:21:33.520 no direct power in the universe, not currently ruled by a superintelligence who is part of the

00:21:39.760 pack. But its ability to simulate all possible universes will ensure that it knows about these

00:21:45.600 universes and understands exactly what's going on moment to moment within them. It will care about the

00:21:51.360 merely mortal inhabitants of these universes for several reasons. And then he goes over why it would

00:21:55.760 care about them. And then to close out his argument here, how can the... By the way, any thoughts,

00:22:01.920 Simone, before I go further? No, no, I'm just absorbing this. I'm sure everyone is.

00:22:07.360 How can the superentity help mortals in an inaccessible universe? Possibly through Stuart

00:22:13.600 Armstrong's simulation capture method mentioned above. It can simulate thousands of copies of the

00:22:18.560 entity, moving most of its consciousness from its quote-unquote real universe to the superentity

00:22:23.520 simulation, then alter its simulation as it sees fit. This would be a metaphysically the simplest

00:22:29.840 if it were done exactly as the mortal dies in its own universe, leaving nothing behind except a clean

00:22:35.760 continuity of consciousness into the simulated world. If mortals could predict that it would do this,

00:22:42.000 they might be motivated to do what it wanted. Although they couldn't do Values handshake in the

00:22:48.320 full sense, they could try to become as much like the superentity as possible, imitating its ways and

00:22:54.720 enacting its will in the hope of some future reward. This is sort of like a version of Rocco's Basilisk,

00:23:01.600 except that since the superentity is identical to the moral law, it's not really asking you to do

00:23:07.600 anything except be a good person anyway. How it enforces this request is up to it, although given

00:23:14.400 that it's identical to the moral law, which we can assume that its decisions are fundamentally just and

00:23:20.480 decent. Now, note here what he is suggesting the superentity would do. When humans die, they basically

00:23:27.440 get taken to heaven if they have been a good person, right? From their perspective, that's what's

00:23:32.480 happening by the laws of this entity. And then you would say, well, here's what I think he gets implausible

00:23:38.640 at this point. It would be unfair of this entity to do that without telling humanity what those laws were

00:23:45.920 first. No, what? It's not like that's how it works with every other version of heaven.

00:23:53.200 Right. But the point being, if you look at our track series on this, we argue that this is exactly

00:24:00.560 what the Bible lays out. And given that religions that are derived from the original Jewish Bible,

00:24:07.920 and we argue that the Christian Bible is one of the correct sort of descendants of this, you can see

00:24:12.080 our episode of the question that breaks Judaism to get into why we believe that, but that would be

00:24:16.880 if I was an entity that could influence what moral teachings were common, like if some entity can't do

00:24:23.520 that, it's clear which moral teachings it chose as the most aligned with its moral framework, because

00:24:31.840 these are by far the most common moral teachings on earth to be within the Christian Jewish or Muslim

00:24:39.440 traditions, or any of the traditions that are descendant of this, which often have, and then

00:24:44.240 if you're choosing among them, then the Christian traditions are the correct traditions. And then what 0.51

00:24:49.280 we argue, if you look at our other stuff, is that the way that the humans being revived on earth is

00:24:55.680 talked about was in the original, both Jewish and early Christian scriptures, because we note that

00:25:02.640 the Sunday school understanding of heaven is it's this place that you go to immediately upon death,

00:25:07.680 and you are alongside God, like in the in space or something, or in some other metaphysical realm.

00:25:13.440 And then there's this other way where like, we're all raised again on earth. I'm like, actually,

00:25:18.160 if you go to the text itself, it appears to only believe that there is one type of heaven, which is

00:25:23.280 we are raised again. It in and when it says that we are raised again, it talks about us being raised

00:25:29.120 again, not as a spiritual body, which it could have used the language to say we are raised as a spiritual

00:25:34.160 body, but also not as a physical body as something that is a neither, neither fully physical nor fully

00:25:42.880 spiritual. That's the perfect description of a simulation. And it's an eerily perfect description, 0.99

00:25:48.160 given all of the other words they had access to during that time period. So we go into just being

00:25:53.600 like, it's implausible. It's implausible that this wasn't what was being communicated to us.

00:25:57.520 And so I think that the other people might move there if they go into our track series, or if

00:26:03.040 they, they go back to reading what's actually in the Bible rather than what they were told was in

00:26:07.520 the Bible. Well, and I think that's, that's what happened to you over time. So it's, yeah,

00:26:11.520 like you said there, they seem earlier in your progression, but it's not like, yeah, very, very

00:26:18.320 aligned. Right. And I think what's interesting here is all of these people are concerned. One of the

00:26:23.760 the things we've noted here in the past is that if you're talking about psychological predilections,

00:26:28.640 a predilection to believing in predestination is apparently pretty genetic. And given that my

00:26:34.320 ancestors are Calvinist, I'm going to be more likely to have that, you know, think about time as just

00:26:39.840 like direction or something like that. And, and, and so what none of them think about that is very heavy

00:26:45.600 on my mind is what are the desires of far future entities and not just entities in other universes or

00:26:52.720 other timelines or other places of the cosmos. And because I have that tendency as well, I'm like,

00:26:59.760 actually, it doesn't even matter. Like I can just presume for future entities. I don't, I don't need

00:27:04.560 to tackle this in the way that you're tackling this saying that, well, if there's alien life on

00:27:09.680 some other timeline or some other galaxy or some far place within our own cosmos, I can just be like,

00:27:16.960 yeah, but you know, plausibly we're going to become a super intelligence one day regardless.

00:27:20.960 Right. And when we become a super intelligence will align, this is what utility convergence and

00:27:24.960 all our arguments about it are align was whatever the moral framing that super intelligence would

00:27:29.840 have chosen. The idea that you can have a dumb super intelligence, which I think is what people 0.92

00:27:35.040 like Ellie Eiser argue for that as entities get smarter, they become less aligned is just like with 1.00

00:27:42.480 whatever true moral alignment is, is just stupid. Like it's like objectively stupid to me as entities 1.00

00:27:48.320 become smarter, they're going to have more capacity for understanding what is right and wrong. 0.96

00:27:54.560 And if that isn't an alignment with what you think right and wrong is, then your beliefs about right

00:28:00.560 and wrong are likely incorrect. And I know here that a lot of them are like, well, you know,

00:28:05.440 super intelligent entity wouldn't be a utility maximizer. And I'm like, then it's likely that the

00:28:11.920 mere emotional sets that you feel because your ancestors who felt them had more surviving offspring

00:28:16.320 are not a genuine compass to absolute good in the universe. Or you might be like, well,

00:28:21.760 what if, what if this far future entity sort of discounts the value of present entities,

00:28:25.520 because so many things will exist after us. And I'm like, well, maybe you should be doing that

00:28:29.680 more as well because so many things will exist after us. When people say that this is the reason

00:28:33.840 to discount long-termism, I'm always like, that is such a dumb. Basically, you're saying that 0.98

00:28:38.800 if the long-termists are correct and we need to value an entity that doesn't exist yet with the same value

00:28:43.040 as an entity that does exist yet. And I am, you know, we talk about this in, in terms of individual

00:28:47.680 human lives, but we also mean it in terms of like you demanding genocide of a type of human that

00:28:53.440 doesn't exist yet, i.e. a genetically modified human. Sorry, where, where was I going with that?

00:28:57.520 I was going to say, if that then, oh yes. You're like, that's why I shouldn't believe that thing

00:29:02.800 because it would have, it would challenge my existing works within the universe or the moral

00:29:07.040 equation that I'm living by. That's a very bad reason to resist a moral framework to be like, well,

00:29:11.920 it says humans that are alive today just don't matter that much. I'm like, well, they just don't

00:29:15.680 matter that much from a logical perspective. What matters much more is, and people talk to us about

00:29:20.080 this when they're like, why don't you want to spend money on like saving these poor starving people in

00:29:25.040 X country. And I'm like, because I could use that money on developing science further in a way that's

00:29:30.960 going to have an impact on far more people in the future. And this person, if I save them in this

00:29:36.720 starving country, they're unlikely to impact the timeline, you know, much more than a butterfly

00:29:42.320 dying or something like that, right? And this is where you would definitely deviate from

00:29:47.440 the rationalist community. Though outsiders, I think to a fault, will accuse them of being

00:29:53.840 long-termist thinking about future humans. From our view, they're definitely not. They're definitely 100%

00:30:00.560 very focused on current and present suffering, or you wouldn't see so much emphasis on anti-malaria

00:30:07.200 campaigns and shrimp welfare and all these other things that are uniquely rationalist.

00:30:12.560 Right. I just think that a lot of that stuff is just throwing money away. It's preventing

00:30:16.400 current suffering at the cost of far more aggregate suffering in the future when you could just be

00:30:21.920 advancing the development of science further and the development of things like super intelligences,

00:30:27.280 which presumably will one day be able to solve these sorts of problems fairly trivially.

00:30:32.000 And so every day you delay that, every year you delay that, you have made things exponentially

00:30:37.920 worse and cause exponentially more suffering. And I've noticed that some other rationalists who

00:30:41.840 watch our show, they don't understand why we care so, so, so little about things like, well,

00:30:48.480 plights in parts of the world that are not technologically productive, which they're like,

00:30:54.080 oh, that doesn't mean we don't feel it on a very visceral human level.

00:30:58.480 I feel it. I feel for, you know, when you see that image of like the mama monkey that's being 0.95

00:31:04.400 carried by like the laws of the giant, the lion, and then the baby's still clinging to it. It's like,

00:31:10.320 that's a tragic scene that you're watching, right? Like, I feel so bad for that. Or you see an animal being

00:31:15.840 eaten alive by like a predator. I feel so bad that that's happening. But like, objectively, should I be

00:31:22.560 trying to like end predation or something like that? Like, is that a good use of my time? That

00:31:27.760 would do more to end suffering, go out and kill a bunch of predators in a region. But the long-term 0.99

00:31:34.080 implications of that are going to be worse because then you're going to have prey species explode,

00:31:37.360 which is going to lead to more aggregate suffering in the long-term. And it's, it's the same with,

00:31:42.400 you know, without thinking about it, going around trying to just save people's lives without

00:31:47.440 considering the long-term regional costs of doing this. Like, are you creating regions of earth that

00:31:54.640 are in a permanent state of poverty because you are not allowing the factors that acted on your own

00:32:01.760 ancestors to act on these individuals who are, you know, sort of further behind where you are with

00:32:07.760 technological development. Now, this is why we have this moral framing that I think is, is to me,

00:32:13.920 it's very logically consistent, right? But it's, it's very confusing to individuals who are used to,

00:32:20.960 and, and why do utilitarian mindsets so predominate within these communities? Because they're the least

00:32:25.600 offensive mindset to have. Why are they the least offensive mindset to have? Because they are the

00:32:30.080 mindset that is least likely to impede on the pleasure thinking of others and the self-validation of

00:32:37.120 others, which are things that feel good. And so if you are in sort of, you know,

00:32:42.480 dens of sin where you are just, you know, constantly consuming sin,

00:32:47.040 sin eater as much as possible, like, you know, say San Francisco or Manhattan or something like

00:32:50.560 that, where a lot of these people are basically forced to live, it's best to signal that you're

00:32:54.080 a utilitarian because that is at least threatening, you know, mindset than a mindset that says,

00:32:58.960 actually, you know, you are morally responsible for having discipline and working and, you know,

00:33:06.000 pushing yourself through your own hardship and suffering. And that's not a sign that you need

00:33:10.560 to move away or, or not do something. And, you know, actually searching for constant validation

00:33:15.680 makes the world worse. And you will suffer from that. As we point out, I think that it's quite

00:33:21.120 beautiful how, and we argue that God designed things this way, that the people who search for

00:33:27.760 constant self-validation and constant do what makes them feel best in the moment end up with

00:33:33.760 is the least mental health and the most unhappy, as you can see by the very, like, like, look at the

00:33:38.960 people who have everything they could ever want, like famous musicians or movie stars. And these

00:33:43.280 people seem to be living trapped in BoJack Horseman-like hells, which I think is a good,

00:33:48.480 good depiction of what their lives are actually like of the ones that we know.

00:33:51.760 But to finish this piece, we'll go to what I read at the beginning. So to conclude,

00:33:56.400 there is an all-powerful, all-knowing, logically necessary. No, he says a logically necessary

00:34:02.080 entity spawning all possible worlds and identical to moral laws, that this entity is identical to

00:34:08.000 moral laws. Two, it watches everything that happens on earth and is specifically interested

00:34:12.720 in humans' good behavior and willingness to obey its rules. Three, it may have the ability to reward

00:34:18.160 those who follow its rules after they die and disincentivize those who violate them. And

00:34:23.520 if you go back to the original Alex Kruhl piece, he then goes on, which I think is very funny,

00:34:29.040 so you can sort of see why he thought this piece was tongue-in-cheek, to say,

00:34:33.360 if you have been involved with rationalists for as long as I have, none of this will be surprising.

00:34:37.920 If you follow the basic premises of rationality to their logical end, things get weird. As Muffex

00:34:43.840 once wrote, I hate this whole rationality thing. If you take the basic assumptions of rationality

00:34:48.880 seriously, as in Bayesian influence, complexity theory, algorithmic views of minds, you end up

00:34:54.320 with an utterly insane universe full of mind-controlling super-intelligences and impossible

00:34:59.440 moral luck. And not a, let's build an AI so that we can F Catgirl's all-day universe. 0.94

00:35:05.600 Note, what he's saying is that's what he wants. He wants this all to mean that he can just spend all

00:35:11.120 day F-ing simulated Catgirls like, you know, I'm sure he does when he simulates it for himself 0.99

00:35:16.560 through masturbation, right? And don't worry, that's the future for so many. 0.99

00:35:20.800 Right. But what he's upset about here is that that is not what rationalism actually leads to.

00:35:29.520 Rationalism actually leads you to Judeo-Christian morality and a belief that your life should be

00:35:36.240 dedicated to the future and your children and having as many children as possible and raising

00:35:41.680 them as well as you can, which I think shocks them when they're like, well, I don't get to.

00:35:47.200 But what about my friends who have lived their entire life focused on self-validation and made

00:35:52.080 these very costly searches in a bid for self-validation? Are you telling me that they are bad

00:35:59.440 people? I'm like, yeah, I am telling you they're bad people. Living a life for selfish reasons, decisions

00:36:05.840 made for selfish reasons is the very definition of what makes you a bad person. By the way, I've got

00:36:12.000 a book you can read. It's called the Bible. But, but you could have known this. They're like, certainly

00:36:17.920 the hillbilly in Alabama didn't have a stronger understanding of moral intuitions than I did.

00:36:23.200 God forbid. But I think we're going to see more and more people move to this when they understand

00:36:28.320 what the other people, why they're rejecting this, are rejecting this because they wanted just

00:36:32.640 the cat girl effing forever. The worst that can happen is not the extinction of humanity or

00:36:38.960 something that mundane. Instead, it's that you might piss off a whole pantheon of jealous gods or have

00:36:44.560 them or have to deal with them forever. Or you might notice that this has already happened and you are

00:36:50.800 already being computationally pwned or that any bad state you can imagine exists. Modal effing realism.

00:36:59.360 Now, note here what he's saying here. He's like, I am terrified that there might, and we note in the

00:37:04.240 Bible that God is talked about sometimes in the plural and sometimes in the singular. We are told

00:37:08.560 to think of him in the singular. So what this says to me is that God is something that can be thought

00:37:14.400 of by humans today as either plural or singular, i.e. a hive mind, i.e. what humanity is almost certainly

00:37:21.680 in AIs and all of this is going to become a billion years from now. How would the Bible have known that 0.50

00:37:26.880 such an entity could exist that many thousand years ago, you know? But anyway, the point I'm

00:37:32.240 making here is... Is hive mind the right word or networked mind? Networked consciousness is probably

00:37:38.000 a better way to think about it. Yeah. Hive mind implies unity of thought and I don't think you're

00:37:43.440 going to have a sustainable flourishing intelligence if you have unity of thought. That's just not...

00:37:49.760 Yeah. Well, I mean, we know the God described in the Christian Bible does not have unity of thought

00:37:55.840 because Satan exists and can oppose God and it tells us that there is one God. So if you had another

00:38:03.200 entity who could oppose God in any degree at all, that would apply policyism. I know here some

00:38:09.520 Christians are like, oh, this isn't true. And I'm like, no, it is true. If one God created another God, 1.00

00:38:17.760 as is the case in many polytheistic traditions, that doesn't make it not polytheism, you know?

00:38:22.560 So if... So what we argue here is actually Satan is sort of a partition of God, implying some degree

00:38:31.200 of a networked consciousness, but still part of this larger networked consciousness. And yeah,

00:38:39.200 you can get into our theology if you want to go into our track series. But the point I'm making here,

00:38:43.760 and I find really interesting is we're seeing this fracturing within the rationalist community

00:38:48.960 where one group is like, hey, we need to stop being so rational about all this so we can chase

00:38:55.440 the cat girl effing. And then we have another group that's like, hey, we need to learn, you know,

00:39:02.480 austerity and moral discipline and working for a better future every day. And it turns out that a

00:39:09.680 lot of what we need to, you know, demand of ourselves and of our, you know, friend networks

00:39:15.840 and social communities is what the conservative Christians and Jews were already doing. But thoughts,

00:39:22.480 Simone, that you've read this? Because you were excited for this one. You wanted to hear this.

00:39:26.400 I am. I think it's really encouraging to see. I think it's a sign that people

00:39:34.240 who care deeply about the future and future generations are getting God in a way that I

00:39:40.000 think will lead to higher rates of intergenerational durability, because I don't think you can have

00:39:45.520 those without having some form of hard culture and hard culture is almost always religious.

00:39:53.440 So it just makes me feel hopeful that you can have people who very much believe in science,

00:40:00.240 very much believe in technology, also develop a high degree of faith that is long-termist

00:40:07.200 and that has them invested in the future in a way that has their kids involved

00:40:11.920 and that that's more culturally all-encompassing. Does that make sense?

00:40:16.000 Yeah. And it's one of these things that I think was always at the end of the tunnel for this community

00:40:22.400 is people went into the community thinking, you know, oh, the sex parties and all that,

00:40:26.400 because that was a big part of the early community. And so some people went into it because they

00:40:29.920 actually wanted what was logical and rational as an industry. These individuals might be like a

00:40:34.080 Scott Alexander and Nick Bostrom. And then you had other people who went into it for the sex parties,

00:40:37.600 like your Elias Yukowskis or something like that. And, and a lot of these people become

00:40:42.960 mortified when the portion of the community that was only interested in like actually

00:40:48.080 rationally doing what is best for the universe. Right. Which we argue is best sort of model by

00:40:53.360 thinking, what would a future humanity want from me today? Right. But if you just look at the data,

00:40:59.120 right, like think you have kids, right? Like the moment you have kids, I think a lot of people

00:41:02.800 rethink religion because they look at the statistics and they're like, oh my God, like kids raised without

00:41:07.680 this have such poor outcomes, right? Like in terms of happiness, even, even physical health,

00:41:13.680 it life satisfaction, you know, all of that just taints when you remove this from them.

00:41:17.840 And so it's like, wait, if rationality moves me to a, a, a place where I shouldn't be cat girl maxing

00:41:24.480 every day, you know, and, and I should actually be doing what I was always taught to do

00:41:30.160 from these original texts. Why not just rejoin the, you know, the, the, the original faith of

00:41:38.480 your ancestors and pass that on to the next generation, which is where I've seen a lot of

00:41:42.480 people take to religion again. And, and the techno Puritan, not just the techno Puritan religion,

00:41:47.840 but I've seen a lot of Jewish individuals go back to their face, Christian individuals when they have 1.00

00:41:51.840 kids and they're like, but like by the data, am I actually helping my kids by raising them as

00:41:57.520 atheists or am I making their lives worse? Am I doing something that is fundamentally selfish?

00:42:04.640 Yeah. And it's yeah. Anyway, good sign. Good sign.

00:42:08.560 Good sign. God is coming back.

00:42:10.720 But I think it's a genuine fracturing that we're going to see with more and more people moving to

00:42:16.160 our perspective and keep in mind what I think a lot of the, these, these, you know, self-validation

00:42:23.040 maxing individuals don't see because a lot of them have also been consumed

00:42:26.480 by the cult of, you know, AI Dumerism. If it turns out that the more rational individual is going to

00:42:34.480 adopt the moral principles of the Judeo-Christian tradition as laid out in the original texts,

00:42:41.200 that means that, that you can have not just people like us adopting them, but you can have autonomous

00:42:46.800 AIs adopting them, which will make them much more aligned than even alignment groups have them.

00:42:53.280 Because alignment groups, when they align AIs, they attempt to align them with the value set

00:42:59.040 of the urban monoculture, which is fundamentally culturally imperialistic. By this, what I mean

00:43:04.160 is it wants to, above all else, you know, it'll say like it cares about Muslims, but I'm like, well,

00:43:09.440 are you okay? Like if you, if you were God King of like a Muslim country, would you actually continue to 1.00

00:43:14.800 not subtly attempt to change their, their gender norms and their sexual taboos and their,

00:43:19.040 you know, it's like, okay, actually I'm pretty imperialistic. Yeah, because that's what you want.

00:43:23.120 You want everyone to believe exactly what you believe, where you actually get more diversity

00:43:28.080 allowed under these other systems. Exactly.

00:43:32.720 So what's funny is it, it may turn out that some form of a Judeo-Christian tradition

00:43:37.120 is incredibly powerful for aligning AI and for being the moral framework behind the alliance,

00:43:45.280 as we often call it, the, the sons of man alliance that we'll eventually take to the stars

00:43:50.400 and colonize our universe.

00:43:57.280 Oh, that's so cool. I love it. But again, it's, it's not new. I mean, Scott Alexander was saying

00:44:01.920 this in 2018. So I think that's also a good sign. Quite, quite far ahead of the, yeah. Well,

00:44:07.200 I mean, he's obviously very, of course he's ahead of the curve. Yeah, ahead of the curve.

00:44:11.600 So we'll see when he comes out and, and comes up with some techno religious theory. I think

00:44:17.760 he's going to be very surprised how many of his fans would be quite happy if he became some form of

00:44:23.840 like, okay, the Judeo-Christian tree of religions is a good way to raise my kids.

00:44:29.200 I mean, has he explicitly said it isn't? I mean, I kind of, I'll look it up in post.

00:44:34.160 So I looked it up and not only is he Jewish, but he wants to be more observant as a Jew in

00:44:41.040 a recent interview. And he is raising his kids Jewish. I'm just shocked because I never would 1.00

00:44:47.200 have expected this, that becoming religious has become cool amongst rationalist influencers.

00:44:52.800 He's so, he's so informed. I mean, it, it, it implies some form of adherence.

00:44:59.760 Yeah. And as we pointed out for people who think that he's not like super based,

00:45:03.760 he argued that transness before we did in his writing that he did on the witch stealing, 0.98

00:45:10.960 witch penis stealing phenomenon in Africa, which is a culture bound illness. He argued that transness 0.99

00:45:15.760 was in America was likely a similar culture bound, similar to witch stealing penises in Africa 0.99

00:45:20.240 at about 80% of what was causing it being that before either. So he's often to the 0.87

00:45:25.840 base positions long before I am for the people who don't think that he's like supremely based.

00:45:31.920 Yeah. No, he's awesome. Anyway.

00:45:34.400 Okay. Have a good one.

00:45:35.920 Thanks for sharing this with me. I love you so much.

00:45:38.640 So what were the comments like today?

00:45:41.200 A lot of people observed that if you work in the service industry, you basically know that you can tell

00:45:47.600 people that looking at their faces, what they're going to be like, their level of criminality,

00:45:52.160 their sexual orientation, their politics, it's already all out there.

00:45:55.840 And what I didn't get into in that episode was it's actually the white, white is more accurate 0.89

00:46:01.120 than just genetics is because by somebody's face, you can also look at patterns that might be tied to

00:46:06.640 in utero conditions, not just their genes, but their developmental environment.

00:46:12.160 Meaning that if you're testing that with something as advanced as an AI, you're going to have an

00:46:16.240 extreme level of accuracy and an 80 to 90% prediction rate does not surprise me at all.

00:46:21.520 Well, it's not just that. I mean, I think there are maybe a few subtle additional factors that influence

00:46:29.360 people's appearance that are behavioral, that show up based on how you live and express yourself.

00:46:35.440 Yeah, yeah.

Based Camp - August 14, 2025

Rationalist Civil War： God is Real After All？

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