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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024

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The materialist conception doesn’t even necessarily prohibit some kind of spiritual existence, a soul of some form, a God, an all-loving, all-knowing being beyond and above us (the simulation hypothesis, which would allow for such a God, can be framed in materialist terms)… It just says that if they’re real they’re going to be systems, they’re going to function in a predictable way, they’re going to be based on laws of the universe whether we understand them yet or not.

I guess it really depends on your definition of ‘material’, because the standard conceptions of these things (like the conception of God’s omnipotence and omniscience) are very much contrary to the idea of material existence in terms of things like, ‘these are actual objects composed of materially smaller parts put together in some larger material space’. If you conceptualize materialism as just, ‘this is a paradigm that says that things will function in a way predictably subject to the axioms of existence at large’ then that’s not really something rejected by even staunch anti-materialist theists, as they see the entirety of the universe (including the things in the universe that aren’t ‘physical’) as predictably and ultimately subordinate to God’s will, and if you have knowledge of God’s will through viewing God’s essence (in terms of the Beatific vision) then you also have total knowledge about the past and future as far as a human could possibly know. In fact, the idea in Catholicism that perfect knowledge of God, who is the embodiment of all possible laws of being as God is Being, in fact makes you God (as that communicates to you the divine essence).

And obviously the classical theistic idea of ‘God’ is also much different from the post-humans attempting to capture us in ancestor simulations. They’re still, to our knowledge, ‘finite’ in terms of causality, space, time, extension, dimension, etc. If not, then they wouldn’t need to ‘simulate’ us to begin with, as there would be no distinction between their knowledge in simulating us or not simulating us, or distinctions in their indexical knowledge from ‘t1 where 1 is the second before the simulation occurs’ and ‘t2 where 2 is the second when the simulation starts’. A truly all-knowing and all-powerful deity wouldn’t be limited by computation (or hypercomputation) and would be more analogous to like, a metaphysical singularity rather than anything else. This is also quite similar to the Buddhist idea of non-duality which is pretty antithetical to materialism, to the point where basic classical laws of logic like the law of excluded middle seem to break down once you try to predicate the non-existence of the ‘self’. If I am mischaracterizing your conceptualization of materialism then I’m sorry, because I’m taking this from a very rudimentary idea of materialism as effectively conceiving reality as just being totally concrete sums of things out together in causally connected ‘space’. The traditional Aristotelian ideas of angels as being just forms beyond space and time and God as being pure actuality, as well as the Dharmic ideals of the ultimate non-existence of selfhood and the univocality of nirvana and samsara. The investments of these religious ideals are much bigger than anything extensions of materialism can supply, even the ‘out-there’ materialism of transhumanists where you can just recreate everyone who ever lived in an ancestor simulation and call that ‘heaven’, even as someone like Thomas Aquinas wouldn’t consider that as the same thing as transcending material reality, causality, and spatiality at all in union with the ultimate metaphysical principle at all.