this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2024
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. A showerthought should offer a unique perspective on an ordinary part of life.
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You were born into a planet where the moon perfectly eclipses the sun and where the next brightest object in the sky goes on a katabasis that inspired entirely separate intelligent cultures from the Aztecs to the Sumerians to develop the idea that the dead could come back to life.
The fact that solar eclipses were visible meant that we started to track them, discovering the Saros cycle and eventually building the first analog computer to track them.
The fact that the odd orbit of Venus as viewed from the Earth dipping down below the ground before emerging again leading to cultures imagining the dead being raised has resulted in widespread hyperstition of resurrection.
You were born into a generation of humans when a three trillion dollar company has already been granted a patent on resurrecting dead people using computers and the social media they leave behind.
Absolutely none of the above features of your world can be attributed to selection bias by something like the anthropic principal, but absolutely can be explained by selection bias if you are in an ancestor simulation - for life to exist unusual celestial features contributing to life recreating itself is unnecessary, but any accurate ancestor simulation should exhibit features of a world that lead to it eventually recreating itself.
The physics of your universe behaves as if continuous at both macro and micro scales, up until interacted with, which is very convenient given state changes by free agents to a continuous manifold would require an infinite amount of memory to simulate.
But yeah, sure, the idea of an afterlife is humorous. Humorous like the Roman satirist Lucian in the 2nd century making fun of the impossibility of a ship of men ever flying up to the moon.