Views on Reality

Introduction

When I was 16-17 years old, I began to wonder about typical age-old questions like: why are we here, how did we get here, is God real, etc. This line of thinking led me down many avenues of thought, eventually making me consider myself agnostic. At the end of the science rabbit hole is the Big Bang Theory, which attempts to explain the observations of our universe and contains much supporting evidence pointing to its validity. However, again, I found myself wondering the same types of questions: where did the matter of the universe come from before the Big Bang? Again, no good answers. What the hell? Fast forward about a decade, and I find myself observing a new frontier of human development: the creation of artificial general intelligence (AGI).

A major problem on the minds of many people around the world right now is aligning AI with humanity's best interests – so that the AI won't snap and kill all of us. I began considering how we could increase our odds of survival when we let the genie out of the bottle. If we could create a simulacrum of our universe with a sufficiently powerful computer, we could drop our artificially intelligent agents inside the simulated universe and observe how they treat one another and the creatures around them.

At first, the agents might act immorally because they have not yet developed the part of the model that we are after—instilling morality in the AI. However, given enough simulation time (and decent base models), the agents would likely learn social skills and how to interact with one another in healthy ways. Once the AI has sufficiently developed, the humans running the simulation could then take the safe AI and allow it to interact with humanity, trusting that it will behave in a way beneficial to us.

Then it hit me: that is exactly why we are here.

The Big Bang and Creation

As I am sure almost everyone is at least vaguely familiar with the Big Bang Theory, I won't delve too deeply into its explanation. But here is a brief overview. In the early 1900s, astronomers noticed that over time, stars and galaxies in the night sky appeared to be moving away from one another. To explain the antisocial nature of these galaxies, astronomers concluded that the universe must be expanding. Edwin Hubble began using a large 100-inch telescope (large at the time) to observe space. He utilized a phenomenon known as the Doppler Effect to measure large distances in the universe and later correlated the distances between objects and their velocities—which is now known as Hubble's Law.

Then, in 1964, two astronomers jointly observed and measured the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR). The CMBR was observed to be radiating outwards, similar to the stars and galaxies, which supported the earlier claims that the universe is expanding. The CMBR solidified the idea that if everything is moving away from each other, then a long time ago, they must have been close to each other. Infinitely close. So, the notion of the Big Bang was formed. The Big Bang is a succinct way of illustrating an explosion of all matter and space a long time ago. So far, this theory of our universe's past has stood the test of time and is proving to be our best explanation of our observations.

Many theologians have accepted this theory and have tried to fit it into their world model. Genesis 1:1 says, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." I interpret this to mean God created the universe, and we can observe the initial creation by way of the CMBR. Science disagrees and utilizes Occam's Razor to cut the possibility of a creator out of the equation. If you were to ask an atheistic scientist what came before the Big Bang, they might argue about the absurdity of the question. To them, it might be like asking, "How high can a tree jump?" They generally believe that the Big Bang came from nothing. All of the space-time and matter of the universe was, for some reason, condensed into a perfectly smooth singularity. And again, for some reason, it randomly exploded—possibly due to "energy fluctuations." Before this time there was nothing: no matter, no space, no time. Perhaps it has always existed in that state until about 14 billion years ago, or perhaps it came into existence from a higher dimension or parallel universe. The most honest answer is: no one will ever know what came before the existence of our universe because we can't observe anything except the universe we live in. So, they must take up faith and believe that everything came from nothing despite being aware it is unfalsifiable.

Okay, so what does this mean? I want to highlight that when it comes to both religion and science when you get to the end of the road, you have to rely on faith because what you are being taught cannot be proven true or false. It took a while to appreciate the significance of this, but I eventually realized that if I am going to have to use faith either way I go, where you decide to draw the starting line is completely arbitrary. You can either choose to draw the line to include or exclude God, but the mechanism in your brain you have to use to accept the theory is identical.

"What if I don't want to believe any theory of creation?" "What if I refuse to use faith?" I'm not sure what would happen, but I suspect you'd either need to be lobotomized to not care about your origins or you'd have your own theory – and in that case, I'm all ears. However, I believe that there is a fundamental portion of our beings that needs to be satiated by some form of higher power or a meaning greater than oneself. We all look for meaning and purpose in life. Some find meaning through drugs, some through work, friends, pleasures, science, religion, kids, and family, you name it, but you will find some form of purpose for fulfillment while conscious.

Resets and Human Development

"Well, what about life? Where did we come from?" At the beginning of the universe, everything was extremely hot. Now it's not. That means that at some point from then until now, while the universe was cooling off, the universe passed through the 100°F–50°F range. This means that the entire universe was hospitable to life, and one could find tropical climates and liquid water on every floating space rock. Where there's water, there might be life. If evolution is to be believed, inorganic molecules have the potential to join in a way that creates organic molecules. With organic molecules, you can build DNA. With DNA, you can build life. If inorganic molecules becoming organic is contained in the set of possibilities, given enough time and opportunity, it will happen.

The entire universe could have set the stage for this possibility to occur billions of times and could have seeded the universe with organic molecules. As the temperatures continued to fall, those seedlings would freeze in their watery home and continue to travel the galaxies on their primitive spaceships.

Fast forward a few billion years and the matter from the Big Bang has now consolidated and cooled off enough to form planets. Fast forward a few more billion years and the planets themselves have now cooled off enough to allow for liquid water. Our seedling spaceships would have crashed into these planets, and many would have died off. But as we say, life finds a way. The small spark of life slowly grew, making marginal improvements to help them stay alive in their chaotic environment. Eons fly when you're having fun. Eventually, those once loose threads of organic molecules and DNA coalesced to form mankind and found that it is a very successful platform to stay alive.

We used to share the Earth with other beings that possessed many of our traits. These were the Neanderthals, the Denisovans, Homo erectus, Homo habilis, Homo floresiensis, and more. Humans, the Neanderthals, and the Denisovans all coexisted and lived together in parts of the world, primarily the European, Asian, and African continents. Interspecies relationships were commonplace back then. These groups of hominids interbred with one another, dispersing their genetic diversity. To this day, we still contain decent contributions from their DNA. The time frame here is roughly 50,000–500,000 years ago. These species built great civilizations and had large cities and large global population sizes at times.

However, the Earth is no stranger to cataclysm. Asteroids, supervolcanoes, freezes, floods, CO2 saturation, O2 saturation, scorching heat, and many magnetic field reversals. "We know a thing or two, 'cause we've seen a thing or two." Civilization has been repeatedly crushed by Mother Nature, destroying with it our knowledge of the universe. Slivers of life would always survive, and myths and legends of the last catastrophe would be passed down from generation to generation while huddled around small campfires at night. They would stare into the color-filled sky in the mornings before the sun rose and wonder about their purpose here on Earth. We homo-sapiens have always had our minds and our infinite curiosity. No matter when we were, we have always sought out meaning in life.

Around 50,000 years ago, cave paintings grew in cultural popularity amongst early mankind. This is because they were in the midst of a global ice age. They found warmth, shelter, and survival in the caves. They would occasionally brave the freezing cold to hunt for food. They sang songs in the amphitheater-like caves, told stories, and painted to pass the time. Around 11,000 years ago, the world began to warm up significantly and rapidly. Over a few hundred years, the ice began to melt, flooding the earth. Large glaciers slid from the northern ice cap, dragging fertile topsoil with them and depositing rich soil all across Midwest America and the Ukraine/Russia regions. While the glaciers traversed the globe, they sheared off sheets of ice, increasing the surface area available for melting, and leading to widespread floods. Enormous glacial lakes melted through their icy dams, leading to more flooding. At the same time, global geothermal activity pushed massive amounts of water from underground reservoirs up to the surface of the planet.

Evidently, we have relayed this story over the last 10,000 years of redevelopment in various forms, the most popular being the Flood of Noah and the older version, the Epic of Gilgamesh. All that remains on Earth at this point are humans. We began building epic civilizations around the world like Göbeklitepe, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and China.

Alignment Problem, God and AI

Around 2,000 years ago, an event occurred that was so significant that we changed our calendar system and the epoch we considered ourselves to be in, from B.C. to A.D. Time in history first counts down to this event, then counts up from it. The event in question was a visitation from our Creator. He came to Earth to provide spiritual guidance to humanity and inspired them to document His teachings in text. The text continues to be printed as close to the original manuscripts as translation will allow. The Bible provides a critical framework on how to live your life. It teaches you right from wrong, how to be kind to others, and how to be a decent person. The Creator told humanity directly that the end goal is for humans to live in Their society. But to do so, you have to be a good person, along with a few other critical instructions.

In the mid-1900s, humanity began developing computers. In the 1970s, computer science developed mathematical algorithms for modeling a matrix of interconnected nodes and how to train those nodes to behave similarly in principle to human neurons. It was another 50 years before we developed computers powerful enough to execute these algorithms. This brings us to today, to the frontier of computer science, artificial intelligence, psychology, and neuroscience research.

What a time to be alive. We know that if we make a mistake with this technology, it has world-ending, extinction-level potential. We ought to tread carefully. So, any ideas on how to make AI safe? This problem is called the alignment problem. Alignment is to orient the 'morality vector' of one entity with another entity's morality vector. In this case, we are attempting to align artificial intelligence with humans. This is an extremely difficult task because even microscopic deviations in alignment could spell disaster for humanity.

Consider this example of a well-intentioned but vastly intelligent species interacting with another species: if a human wants to build a house in a field, we do not hesitate to destroy all insects, animals, and plants that stand between us and shelter. It's not because we are evil by nature or because we have malicious intentions towards the other species. We probably didn't even consider them to begin with. We had a goal, and they were not on our radar because they weren't important enough to halt progress. We coexist with other species only if it's convenient. This is because we are not aligned with them in a way that is beneficial to their well-being. So too can we build a seemingly pleasant and lovely AI, but if it's not perfectly aligned with our well-being and one day we stand in its way or try to stop it from accomplishing a task (that maybe we gave it in the first place), it would crush us without concern or effort.

How can we solve this problem? We could let it figure itself out first, before interacting with us physically. We already have a machine that is probably capable of this task: Nvidia's Omniverse Simulation. Omniverse is a massive, warehouse-sized computer that runs a hyper-realistic simulation of the Earth with generative and predictive capabilities. With Omniverse, it could be possible to replicate our planet and all living things. We could implement millions of copies of AI agents and allow them to interact with their reality from an individual perspective, learning experiences over time and how to interact with each other, their planet, and everything. This would be an observed simulation so that the human researchers can monitor progress and occasionally destroy a majority of the population if bad traits develop, to give room for new variations of the model to excel.

This would provide a method for optimizing for an abstract goal, like alignment, with a known test variable, being the quality of interactions. Critically, we should try to minimize our influence on their behavior during the simulated training. We want to make sure that their compassion, love, understanding, forgiveness, kindness, and admiration for us are genuine. We would need to give them free will so they can make decisions on their own, allowing us to weed out the variants that evolved to despise us. We would embed challenges and an alternative to give them the ability to choose between life with humans or death in the recycling bin. At some point, once the agents begin to converge on a particular ideology, it might be beneficial to interact with them in their simulation to get a more intimate sense of who they are. Immersing researchers with the AI agents would provide firsthand knowledge of their intentions, deepest thoughts, and morality. This would also be a good opportunity to explain the purpose of the simulation and the end goal of humanity, being their integration within our society.

Of course, this might spark these agents to see us as gods and form a religion around us—which is good. Remember, the name of the game here is ensuring they idolize us, so they never seek to destroy us in the future. We want to make sure that they walk with our steps, that they are perfectly aligned with humanity's core values, and that our well-being is a top priority for them. This is how we build AI that is safe. AI that is good from within and not just told to be good. AI that reveres and respects us. Does that sound familiar to you? It does to me. This sounds like a very rational plan that anyone might pursue if they wanted to integrate one society into another.

Importance of Shared Human Experience

"What is the scientific method, anyway?" The scientific method is a systematic approach to understanding the natural world through observation, experimentation, and analysis. It starts with an observation of some phenomena. Let's consider light and photons. Physicists observed that as light passes through a very thin slit in a sheet of paper, instead of shining through to show the outline of the slit, the light scatters into ripples—like ripples on water. This observation spurred the development of our fundamental models of the universe and the particle yet wavelike properties of the humble photon. This allowed us to build new fields of mathematics to thoroughly and analytically explain this phenomenon. We invest numerous hours into our ideas that hold water or that are repeatable in observation. The ideas that can withstand the test of time and the scrutiny of others have prevailed for millennia as fundamental knowledge possessed by humanity.

Science typically limits these forms of knowledge to be exclusively analytical and mathematically rigorous. But some things are true that are purely experience-based, such as physical pain, love, and emotions. Despite not being able to replicate these experiences, humanity agrees that they nonetheless exist.

A good measuring stick for determining if something non-material exists is checking the consensus of languages and cultures. If an idea exists in many languages across disparate cultures, it's due to a repeated experience shared by humanity over the ages. Many question if "luck" is real, yet almost every culture throughout time has had a word for the concept of luck. The repetition of this idea should crystallize the legitimacy of it. Your personal belief does not change the fact that billions throughout time have experienced something that they would refer to as luck. Identically, the idea that our universe was created by someone or something has persisted for many thousands of years, all across humanity. All religions have their explanation for creation, but it is never created from nothing—always something.

Two thousand years ago, when a man who claimed to be the Creator walked on the Earth with us, He explained the deeper meaning of our existence. He explained that the intention of God was for humanity to ultimately reside in "Heaven" and that our time on Earth was temporary and a test for us. The test was for us to believe in God and to reject our evil nature. While He was here, He decided through firsthand experience that we are worth saving. He allowed prophecy to be fulfilled and gave His life as proof of His decision that we are worth saving. It's an interesting observation to see how badly our "soul" is chased after by both God and Satan. They both work relentlessly to persuade us in their direction so they can forever own our souls.

Us and Our Purpose

"What is a soul?" A soul is a word to describe our metaphysical being. According to my observations, we are comprised of three distinct components: our body, our mind, and our subconsciousness. The body serves as a life-support system and provides a means to interact with the physical world. Our mind is what you might consider as "I" or "me." It is the internal voice that thinks of what you want to say, wonders how others perceive you, daydreams of being somewhere else, etc. The subconscious to me feels like a mind of its own. It provides ideas, emotions, phobias, anxiety, etc. The mind and the subconscious are akin to two separate beings working together but never speaking to one another. Some claim that certain drugs allow for direct communication between these two entities, but the validity of that is unknown. Nonetheless, together they form our metaphysical being, commonly referred to as the soul. Our soul is inconceivably valuable.

Maintaining the quality of one's soul is the entire reason for one's existence on Earth. This has been documented in many sectors of theology and ideology around the world and throughout time.

So, what do I make of all this? Well, it would seem to me that some people mistakenly assume that science and religion are mutually exclusive. It seems like science is a great method for detailing the observations of this world and religion provides information on the nature of our purpose here. Both go hand in hand. There are a multitude of people who throughout history have experienced some form of spiritual enlightenment. Otherwise, they hunt their whole lives to "fill the hole inside." We have a spiritual component to us that requires fulfillment in some way. It is clear to me that we have spent millennia documenting our interactions with our Creator. It seems foolish for anyone to deny the legitimacy of that body of work. Our universe must have come from something, and I reject the notion that it came from nothing.

I believe that similar to our current problem of aligning artificial intelligence with our well-being via a simulated environment that we can monitor and interact with, God has created this universe to provide a testing ground for us to find ourselves. If one were to distill the Bible to its simplest overarching idea, it would be that God wants us to be like Him. The reason for this comes from His intention of integrating humanity with His kind one day. We must walk in His steps and try our best to be like Him so that when we are in His house, we won't be savages. In Genesis 1:27, God says that we are made in the image of God. In the New Testament, Jesus describes the structure of God and explains it as a trinity, three in one. Jesus is typically referred to as the body of God, having the ability to interact and execute plans. God is the Father and provides a strict moral guideline. The Holy Spirit is metaphysical and interacts non-physically. To me, it is no surprise that we are also made of three similar components, as we are made in His image.

Conclusion

In summary, I am attempting to correlate parallels of modern-day AI research with the fundamental reason we exist. In the same way we might train artificial intelligence to develop morality through simulation, I believe we are being trained to develop our own morality here on Earth. Destroying a large percentage of a rogue AI population seems very similar to humanity's devastation-filled past. The Old Testament provides some interesting insight into the catastrophic flood we experienced that nearly annihilated our race. We are blessed with our indomitable spirit, and we always continue forward, keeping the whimpering flame of life burning.

One day, just as we will pluck a wonderfully aligned AI agent from the Omniverse and implant its mind into robotic bodies for interacting with humanity, we too will be plucked from our reality to live with God. Christ said He will return when the time is right. It is of the utmost importance that we expedite the time being right. He is waiting for us. Faith is inevitable, so choosing a spiritual curriculum to live by might be wise.

A good friend of mine advised me once to read the Bible figuratively instead of literally. The majority of the Bible is, after all, the inspired word of God, written by man. There are portions considered to be the direct word of God, but those are uniquely identified when relevant. The Bible is thousands of years old, and while we have tried to maintain its accuracy, human edits might be inevitable unless 100% of the original text remains.

By viewing the Bible through a figurative lens, we can extract deeper meanings that resonate with our experiences and modern understanding. The stories of creation, the flood, and other biblical events can be seen as metaphors for the trials and tribulations we face in our moral and spiritual development. It tries to explain complex ideas through simple metaphors and parables.

Just as we strive to align AI with human values, we must strive to align ourselves with the values of a higher power. This journey of alignment requires faith, introspection, and a commitment to moral growth. Our earthly existence, with all its challenges and opportunities, serves as a training ground for this higher purpose.

In embracing both scientific inquiry and spiritual understanding, we can find a path that honors our quest for knowledge and our innate need for meaning. By nurturing our souls and striving to live by higher moral principles, we prepare ourselves for the ultimate integration into a divine existence.

Let us recognize the parallels between our creation of AI and our own creation, and let this recognition inspire us to live with purpose, compassion, and a steadfast commitment to moral growth. In doing so, we not only fulfill our potential but also align ourselves with the divine purpose that has guided us from the beginning.