On Fridays I write about the quirky and fun side of economics and finance and nothing is more fun than economists using their tools on problems they were not originally designed for and that these tools better not be used for in the first place.
"We are gathered today in worship, so please stand while we sing Psalm 91. We will then analyse His supply and demand curves on page 112 in the Book of Common Prayer"
This is really fun and interesting! Actually, these musings occur in other nerd circles such as the philosophy of man, or machine learning, or physics (as in multiverses).
If we suspend disbelief and our anthropomorphic tendencies for the moment, consider that our "world" is really the brain's interpretation of our senses. It is very hard for us (agents) to prove/disprove which parts of our world are not a simulation. After all, having a PINN (Physics-informed Neural Network) is now available. A very powerful computing environment can do many simulations or epochs or experimental cycles where there are just a few base rules of interaction, but intelligent agents (e.g. humans) are allowed some degree of freedom ("choice"), and the ultimate good is just an objective function (minimalization of a cost function or optimization of something). "Evil" is just an agent's foray into increased deviation from the objective. "Holiness" is an iterative learning or gradient descent of sorts as assisted by reinforced learning/experience and fine-tuning of learning coefficients.
It does not even matter if we exist in flat land or 2D (ala Plato's cave) or 3D (as we perceive this world) or any N-dimensions. It might even provide relief to those that ask questions like "why does God allow babies to suffer?" type of thing. Well, there is not much to it, but part of an experimental process. Maybe the higher-order scientist is simply searching for suitable candidates for the base model for Human 2.0 (aka resurrection or reincarnation, etc.) for the next phases of his experiments.
"We are gathered today in worship, so please stand while we sing Psalm 91. We will then analyse His supply and demand curves on page 112 in the Book of Common Prayer"
This is really fun and interesting! Actually, these musings occur in other nerd circles such as the philosophy of man, or machine learning, or physics (as in multiverses).
If we suspend disbelief and our anthropomorphic tendencies for the moment, consider that our "world" is really the brain's interpretation of our senses. It is very hard for us (agents) to prove/disprove which parts of our world are not a simulation. After all, having a PINN (Physics-informed Neural Network) is now available. A very powerful computing environment can do many simulations or epochs or experimental cycles where there are just a few base rules of interaction, but intelligent agents (e.g. humans) are allowed some degree of freedom ("choice"), and the ultimate good is just an objective function (minimalization of a cost function or optimization of something). "Evil" is just an agent's foray into increased deviation from the objective. "Holiness" is an iterative learning or gradient descent of sorts as assisted by reinforced learning/experience and fine-tuning of learning coefficients.
It does not even matter if we exist in flat land or 2D (ala Plato's cave) or 3D (as we perceive this world) or any N-dimensions. It might even provide relief to those that ask questions like "why does God allow babies to suffer?" type of thing. Well, there is not much to it, but part of an experimental process. Maybe the higher-order scientist is simply searching for suitable candidates for the base model for Human 2.0 (aka resurrection or reincarnation, etc.) for the next phases of his experiments.