Two Conflicting Narratives!!

Subhankar
5 min readMar 2, 2020
credit:2001: A Space Odyssey

Is this piece rational or slightly less rational? Well, there is more to life than forming a rational opinion. There is fun; there is love; there is beauty. There is more to life that we want from life than simply being right or wrong. Isn't it?

Do you ever have to lie to yourself to be rational or just to justify stuff? Do you ever have to believe the lies of others? The sad truth is most people before the internet has lived this way. Some people are still living this way keeping their eyes closed. How to delineate ???

Destiny ⇨Chance, Randomness, choices
Religion⇨Belief
Rupture
⇨ Singularity
Maya (illusion)⇨Simulation Theory
God⇨Artificial General Intelligence
Astrology ⇨Briggs
Prayer ⇨Meditation
Creation Myth⇨Big Bang
Predestination ⇨ Materialism
Freewill ⇨ Predeterminsm / abstract thought flow

Belief & Religion (and religious violence)—
There are hundreds of millions (if not billions )of people wake up in the morning with a religious expectation of afterlife. Their life is hardly influenced by terrestrial variables such as economics, politics, service. There are rich middle east intellectuals who would drop out of the London School of Economics and join ISIS.
What does this imply?
The toxicity of religious ideology?
Well, it is the power of belief. But any religious beliefs are not even completely toxic. That is the horrible paradox. It is the collective behaviour of a group of people who are just following a ritualized belief that explains why they are doing what they are doing. It is the doctrine that people follow. If the doctrine is abuse to the animal, people will do so in a large number and that is totally okay. It is dangerous. Right?

There are crazy people in this world who are just suffering from some thought disorder ergo their craziness is clinical. They are delusional. They kill people. But they are also mentally ill. Most mentally ill people require help almost all the time but these people just harm other people out of no reason that would explain their action. Nothing would make sense. Then there are a classically psychopathic, sadistic and evil persons who just enjoy killing other people. Then there is another type of people who cares as much well being of themselves as of others but would still go out and hunt down people and die in the process so that they would end up in paradise. Well if you observe their thought template, it would make perfect sense of killing people an that is why things are horrible about this dogmatism. The life after the death of your ego and all sorts of stuff. The consciousness services in the judo Christian and in Islam this life does not matter at all. Whereas in Hinduism you are reborn till you reach heaven or hell.

Things get really bad when this religion is used to manipulate people? There is just too many negative externalities.

But, who gets to decide by what metric rationalism gets evaluated in religion when it is repeatedly used to gain power? It matters a lot because somewhere in the world some teenage kid will be brainwashed to this belief system. It is as much a belief of you picking a healthy habit. When the faith-based beliefs are challenged, the believer gets offended and take that as an insult and resorted to violence. And when govt gets influenced by that religious fundamentalism, it imposes blasphemy laws. The person who says anything against the holy book gets jail time. That is where the conversation is broken and there is no other way but to resort to force.

How do we get to the point where we are able to let seven billion people communicate with each other ( for some reason I do believe that it is possible)so that they are productive and able to think for the cohesive instead of garnering geopolitical tension as some portion of the world is governed by seventh century theocratic barbarism — majority of the one point seven billion people forced to live under some ritual constraint, children invaded from their right to education and separated to be trained in some way, women going through maternal rape — but are you in the right position to make those judgements? Is not the same reason that is being used to exercise violence by one group over another?

Artificial General Intelligence v God: who would eventually win?—

Christianity — 2.2 billion, Muslim — 1.7 billion, Unaffiliated (Atheist/ secular/ Agnostic) — 1.1 billion, Hindu -1.1 billion, Buddhist — .4 billion

Since the advent of the internet, there has been a rapid shift of people from core believer of mono religion to science-based data-driven thinking. Do we even need religion? Are we well of without it? What about machines? How far can it go? Since the Turing test, we have come a long way. As of now, the AI models are not good enough to do a fraction of human work. Monotheistic religions claim there is some God-bestowed sacred element in us. All this talk about spirituality, 21 grams, and eternal life where our souls gather after departing the physical boundaries of our mortal body — these are all beautiful myths of religious folklore? What is consciousness then? What is this element that enabled us to become the Masters of the Planet? The question is: will AGI have consciousness? Will it live by the same principles and desires we do? Will it have to do so to be intelligent? Whatever the answers, if we ourselves can create an artificial soul in silicon matter, the concept of a divine spark in our souls will give way to evolutionary Darwinism once and for all. It will be exactly the answer to the consciousness quest that will end the centuries-old debate on the existence of God.

Destiny —
There might be no destiny as many people might believe. None of us is really destined to be anything. Imagine when you were a child and what was your dreams. Imagine the early teenage years and the person you would like to become in later years. Till the time you reach mid-twenties, you have no clue. If you really were destined to be something should not that something take charge and help you to propel in that direction. It barely happens. You have to go through a lot of junk and out of those junk, some of the core powerful memories correlated to one particular thing mostly positive and you call it destiny. But the way everything happens is not that more of a chance than destiny. It gives us strength and will power but does not this explain why most of our behaviour is irrational at normal state and we have to really think if we want to be rational. And that rational decision is not quite rational as it comes with infinite biases and most of the time those biases are not scared properly within one particular frame. such complex everything is. So if you believe you are destined for something and it works for you, go ahead as long as it gives you return but if we take every person in the planet, I am definite that it won’t be that way.

Sources — Lots of borrowed stuff from lots of places, some of my own stuff

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