(September 21, 2015 at 2:33 pm)Rational AKD Wrote:(September 21, 2015 at 9:15 am)emjay Wrote: @Rational AKDhello. the argument presented isn't necessarily an argument for Christianity. really it's an argument for monistic idealism, though a separate and easy argument can show how idealism implies theism. but that's the most you can take the argument's implications. this argument didn't convince me to become a Christian. I was first a Christian, but I was a dualist. this argument convinced me to become an idealist and abandon dualism. I have separate reasons that I am a Christian, which are off the topic of discussion.
Hello. I think your theories are very interesting but how are they connected with Christianity? It's one thing to say we're all figments of God's imagination and living in a simulation, but why this God and this religion rather than any other? I guess what I'm asking is which came first in you, Christianity or this theory?
Thank you for your reply and your honesty
I found myself drawn to your theory both for its originality and because of its 'ground up' approach, which is the same sort of way I'd think about these things. I've done my own thought experiments about simulations and one came to a similar (or perhaps not?) conclusion of god as techie playing something like the Sims. It wasn't serious - I don't believe in that - but it was still food for thought, and still a possibility that would allow for an afterlife and all the omni's. So when I saw your theory, written in heavy duty logic (which is beyond me but which I trust much more than mere ideas) I was naturally curious and since you were a Christian I wanted to know if one implied the other and I would have been willing to listen if it did but I couldn't see how it could. So thank you again for that honesty. I'm not a dualist, though I suppose I do 'regress' to it sometimes without thinking. I'm interested in Neuroscience, Neural Networks, and computational theories of the mind and as it stands they give me the comfort of thinking that the mind problem is solvable and that we're on our way, but nonetheless there is that unbridged gap between the physical workings of the brain and the experience of mind. So even though the brain's neural networks make perfect sense for what we experience in consciousness, and they are directly correlated such that surgery, drugs, or stimulation will have predictable results on that experience, it still doesn't answer the question of how that experience is created from something physical like the brain. So that's why your theory, as a possible alternative to that, was interesting to me.
