So we’re talking about parallel universes? Because that would change everything. If we’re living in a multiverse, and I was informed of that before taking the pill (i.e. the blue pill will split off an entirely different reality based on my personal philosophy vs. the blue pill will fundamentally change the only reality that we have), then I’d go for blue. I mean, why not? If there’s no one true reality, you might as well live in your own private utopia.
It makes little difference; either the existing universe will be coerced to fit your view of it, or a new one will be created to the same specification; is one way particularly worse than the other? Why?
So what? certainty just means you are certain; it doesn’t mean you’re right. If you truly and absolutely believe in your religion, you’d probably argue that the outcome would be the same whichever pill you took.
Okay, just in case any of us actually has this chance, I want to remind everyone to think of happy thoughts and PLEASE do not think of the State Puff Marshmallow Man!!
Yes, that’s true. But I suppose that I’d be a lot more hesitant to change the one true reality than I would be to spin off a brand new reality. Maybe because if my new universe wound up sucking, then I would have destroyed the only one there is, rather than just have created an inviable pocket universe. I wouldn’t be condemning everyone else to live in my crappy reality.* And like I said, my answer would also depend on whether or not I’m the only one being given this choice. If the person right after me is going to take the blue pill, there’s no point in taking the red. The rules are just going to change again anyway.
I agree that there isn’t anyone who’s 100% sure about the nature of reality, which sort of changes the experiment too. Would the universe change based on my ideal version of reality, the reality that would benefit me the most, or what? Because while I do believe there are certain facets to the nature of reality, I’m more sure of some of them than others. For instance, I’m pretty damn sure that everyone else has a mind essentially like mine, that the universe is non-solipsistic. So I wouldn’t expect that to change. On the other hand, I’m a lot less sure about the existence of a higher intelligence than man. I’m fairly sure there’s something better than us, and I’d like that to be the case, but I’m not totally sure. Would my created/changed universe have an H.I.? Or wouldn’t it, since I don’t believe in this entity with my whole heart?
*The very fact that I’m asking myself this proves how much of a doubter I am, because like Czarcasm said, someone who was truly a believer in their religion (religion in this context meaning atheism as well) shouldn’t expect the universe to change at all. I think it almost certainly would.
no, you’d be condemning a brand new set of ‘everyone’ to live in your crappy reality.
Bear in mind that the reality shouldn’t really be any less crappy (from your POV at least) than it is now; the universe will be as you think it is. If this includes a God, he’s going to be as elusive and/or obtuse as you currently find him to be.
That makes the blue pill sound a bit less scary. If I have a 10% belief that there is a god, and the universe is conformed to my beliefs, then the universe will become one that has a 10% chance of having a god. So to me, and me alone, the universe has not changed at all.
Well, it’s not “my” theory by a long shot, but having read about evolutionary psychology a bit, it seems like a plausible one, using only the data we can confirm or discount with evidence. We’re all going to die, and we’re aware of it, so the fact we’re not constantly depressed or fearful about our unavoidable fate is pretty interesting, given our generally strong survival instinct. It’s true people can become acclimated to fear, and maybe it’s not so astonishing that we don’t bother to worry about something we have no control over; but death is a powerfully fearsome eventuality, so it’s hard to rationalize simply brushing it aside as a relatively trivial inevitability, like taxes.
How we will evolve is something I have no expectations about. The way modern medicine and our impact on the environment have probably altered the trajectory of human evolution so far make the “natural” part of natural selection difficult to analyze.
Also, it would be a universe where, if I believed Jerry Lewis and Jerry Lee Lewis were one and the same, there would be no need for an nlo “rage of the million suns” moment, because they would indeed be one and the same. Sounds like a good enough reason for me to get off the fence and say I will take the red pill.
God is incomprehensible. And is the incomprehensible.
I do not believe in an afterlife. (Or as Blood, Sweat and Tears put it - roughly: “I don’t believe in heaven and I pray there aint no Hell.”) I do not believe in a God who gives a shit about me or mine or any particular life. Anthropomorphic embodiment or otherwise. I do not believe in fate.
But I believe in the incomprehensible.
I believe that there is a reality out there that exists with or without our percieving it and that said reality includes some absolute Good and Evil and the unknowable. That it is beyond our understanding by orders of magnitude. The best we can do is to try to honestly understand how this universe works and begin to know God through that. Religious faith is not scientific: it cannot be proven and is not falsifiable. But science can be a means of expressing ones spiritual beliefs if one believes that by studying how the universe works you are studying God.
To the op: Faith would be nice. I think those who can really believe have an advantage there, a comfort, a confidence, a surety. Doubt is often unsettling. Especially in that metaphorical foxhole.
In all fairness though, we do have some understanding of reality, we can experience it. Whether or not it is truly and completely comprehensible doesn’t matter in this regard. The fact is, we have some experience with some facit of reality.
You can’t really say the same for God. After all, what we might think is a Godly experience could be an unexplained facit of reality.
That’s what I mean by incomprehensible. Reality may ultimately be beyond our complete comprehension, but we can definitely experience something that we call reality. Existence exists, what we know about existence is incomplete, but we know that existence exists-this can’t be said about God.
But on what basis do we have that there is a God out there? Faith?
Meatros, all we can honestly say is that we have perceptions, that we have an experience, and that it appears to us that others have similar perceptions. It is this basic conundrum that the whole “pill” reference divulges out of.*
Our experiences are not reality. In no way shape or form. There are filtered and altered by our perceptual process from word go, in ways that have been selected for adaptive advantage by millions of years of evolution. Our experience is adaptive, but it is not reality. My belief in a true reality behind the curtain of my perceptions, that exists with or without our experience of it, is ultimately a leap of faith. My ability to percieve, let alone to comprehend, is ultimately limited to those forms of perception and comprehension that evolution has selected for me. We use our tools to form models that we believe increasingly accurately reflect this assumed reality, but we can never really percieve it. Can I really visualize an 11-D object, even if I knew the math to model it well?
Of course belief in a true and independent reality is a leap that we almost all willingly take, despite the fact that it unprovable and nonfalsifiable. Questioning it is something left for philosophers and has no practical value. Most of us believe that to question such even bespeaks of human arrogance. We acccept it with little doubt because it so useful to do so, and so unhelpful to not.
Of course faith is the basis of any theism as well (faith often despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, which to the religious may be the only kind of faith worth having). Faith in the existence of God can also be adaptive. It can comfort and soothe. It can give strength and confidence. It can also be maladaptive and give surety where doubt would be a more adaptive response. It can close minds. Which (theism or atheism) is “better”, in the sense of more adaptive, really depends on which version you have and the current world/circumstance in which you find yourself. Which is “true” is ultimately unknowable.
*Along these lines I had totally mispredicted the conclusion to The Matrix series. I had thought it was going to be a box within a box, that the world that Neo was currently experiencing was as much of an illusion as the matrix was. How do they know that they are not just caught up in another level of deception? How do any of us? And why should we care?
Right, the fundamentalist branches are the ones that teach hate. It’s not the mainstream position of the church (or temple, or mosque, or whatever). Why are you having such a hard time with this?
