Recursive Evolution: God, the initial programmer, and Humans, the subsequent developers

I was at church last Sunday and had a couple thoughts during the sermon. For the purpose of this blog, I will come clear and say that I am a man of Christian faith and values. Crossing opinionated thoughts with religion can become quite tricky, so I will say that for the most part this blog will try its best to separate my emotions from thoughts at first. I want to stay as logical and objectively as possible when observing life. That being said, I will consider every opinion of a topic, instead of automatically/immediately down voting it like some people of extreme religious beliefs do today. After examining and being open to various cards at play, I am free to mix emotions and conclude at the most logical and emotional belief/stance.

This post detailed here today will most likely begin a new series of future updated posts.

A Small Logic Error with Christianity

I will introduce this idea noting that Christianity is, perhaps, one of more free and lesser demanding religions. God created everything there is, and his only Son died on the Cross for human sins. One must accept this fact and believe that one is saved because of Jesus, the Son. There are numerous rules and guidelines to being a Christian, but the most fundamental one is that one will go to Heaven if that person accepts the belief that one was saved by Jesus. In addition, one must continuously repent for the sins committed in life.

The small logic error within the religion is that there are no major updates within the religion itself. Obviously, the fundamentals values deeply rooted within Christianity cannot be radically changed, but there are some error messages that display within the religion that occur with the advancement in social thought and technological advancement. There are some issues that have arisen within our society today that are not accounted for verbatim within the Bible. Issues such as same sex marriage has been a widely debated within contemporary society. The problem, however, is that before the rise of capitalism, there was no real distinction or even the term for homosexual behavior (very interesting paper that discusses this:

D’Emilio, J. “Capitalism and Gay Identity.” in K. Hansen and A. Garey (eds.) Families in the US: Kinship and Domestic Politics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Pp 131–141).

Another small error is that it does not account for the present technological innovations and new found research. Let us put Christianity aside for a quick second and review the religion that is Science. The very nature of science allows it to be considered another kind of religion. This calls for another post, but at the very least, one can agree that science shares the same behavior of beliefs as other noted religions (for example, we believe that gravity is a real and present force and it has a speed of ~9.8 m/s². We accept this theory because of the work of notable scientists and experiments). However, we know that all science is founded upon theories which can be recalled and revisited in interpretation as soon as there is enough research and experimentation, ultimately evidence.

The beauty within Science and sometimes seen as the advantage of it is that Science has the capability to change and evolve with our time of existence. A religion such as Christianity does not have as much room for change. There are revisions such as the Vatican for Catholicism. For the most part, Christianity becomes sort of locked within the times of the beginnings of our human species.

What allows Science to be continuously researched and updated while Christianity does not account for many social problems that arise from the usage of technological advancements?

The Possibility of Technological Simulation and Artificial Intelligence

(a view following alongside the Simulation Theory; short summary from VOX)

The basis behind Simulation Theory from Elon Musk is that we have video games today that have exponentially advanced since the early 21st century and will continue to advance until we cannot see a discrepancy between real life and the video game world. So Mr. Musk continues and says, why could this have not already happened with us?

Think about the fact that we can create virtual worlds within our video games that have virtual architecture, players, NPCs (non-playable character), physics, and rules. Video games only seem fake because we stare into a computer screen to view the world. A person who was born into a video game would see life as how the video game simulation and conclude the video game to be the real world. There would be different set of rules this person would live with and have his/her own God(s).

Knowing that thought now, let us step back and look at it from the Programmer/Coder’s perspective. We can create these vast simulations with an image from our mind of what we want the world to look like and live like. Take a completed virtual world that a human can code and add in the potential of what Artificial Intelligence can become like. Do not get me wrong; there is a good deal of unrealistic portrayals of AI. However, I believe that AI has the potential of becoming a fully capable sentient being(s) (now this will only occur if there are people who choose to allocate time developing AI towards this direction). Now add this batch of AI DNA and genes within the virtual world and create a population of AI sentient beings that has no knowledge of us, the creators.

The Recursive Nature of Simulations

The Coders, then, decided to recreate the events of the Bible within the early stages of this new AI population that has no information about our world (aka this population is born with a blank state that is expected to develop empirically throughout each generation). The events of Jesus dying within the simulation now have convinced the AI population of Christianity. Now this AI population has no real knowledge of us (in this scenario we are “playing God”). They do, however, believe in Christianity. Time goes on within this simulated world and the AI develop the technology and thoughts like us. The simulation experiences anomalies, genetic mutations, implementation of “randomness,” and at some point, the AI population will have scientific curiosities of how they got here, why they are alive, what is their purpose, etc.

/*A quick recession here. This assumes the fact that simulated AI sentients have parameters of being human like, and as a result, they will follow a similar evolution path in thought that Homo Sapiens have experienced. */

This curiosity of philosophy, religion, purpose, etc. compels the AI simulation to create technology that is capable of, well one can guess only guess, creating an AI simulation to explore their origins and maybe their own version of “Simulation Theory.” Our AI population that we, the coders, created is now creating their very own AI simulated world. As you can see, the evolution of humans (or sentients for a matter of fact) becomes recursive, constantly repeating.

If this becomes a true matter of fact, we can then cut off our simulation world and cut the subsequent chains of AI species and worlds. This would make us the most powerful/crucial developer and God, the ultimate engineer. Unless we discover ways to allow things such as the internet, consciousness, virtual reality to be independent of major physical hardware (interesting topic I will most likely post separately), we would be solely responsible for creating the endless amount of cycles of different sentient simulated worlds. An immediate visual I can come up with is if virtual worlds were “seeds” from Sword Art Online

“I think, therefore I am” -René Descartes

The creation of a technique similar to this could allow the existence of many if not infinite realities, worlds, and existences that we, ourselves, can be apart of. As a human being within my own “reality,” I must take on the fundamental responsibility to believe the notion of “I think, therefore I am” said by René Descartes. Tying this into my own religion of Christianity, I must also therefore believe that the human race is the first sentient created “AI simulation,” which was made by the initial & ultimate programmer: God.

God == Engineer; Humans == Developer;

This gets tricky here and certainly difficult, but it boils down to: God in our reality is truly the ultimate and all creating entity. The one that started the recursive loop. The one that basically created the script and ran it. Human beings are the first iteration index[1] (God being [0]). Our purpose is to ultimately be the first developers of the most phenomenal piece of software ever created.

System.out.println(“LILITH VI ORBIS”);

P.S. There are obviously infinite ways one can interpret these different perspectives; here is just one that I was tinkering with.

P.S.S. I am not too sure if I accept this theory myself, but it is definitely worth considering.