05 - Life in the Simulation Machine скачать в хорошем качестве

05 - Life in the Simulation Machine

At a New York literary club dinner, David Blaine unexpectedly pulled out an ice pick and made it go through his hand. Assuming it was optical illusion—magicians' typical inverse problem of engineering versus reverse-engineering—the revelation came at coat check: David was using a handkerchief to sop blood drops from his hand. The scar remained visible months later at their next handshake. He was real. He took risks. He had skin in the game. He suddenly became another person—no longer an illusionist but someone who actually bled. This illuminates the Trinity's theological complexity. Throughout Chalcedon, Nicea, and various synods of argumentative bishops, Christianity insisted on Christ's dual nature—simultaneously man and god. Theologically, it would be simpler if God were god and Jesus merely another prophet like Islam views him or Judaism views Abraham. But the duality remained central through endless refinements: whether sharing the same substance (Orthodoxy), same will (Monothelites), or same nature (Monophysites). This duality caused other monotheists to perceive polytheistic traces in Christianity, leading to beheadings of Christians captured by the Islamic State. The church founders wanted Christ to have skin in the game—to actually suffer on the cross, sacrifice himself, experience death. He was a risk taker. Crucially, he sacrificed himself for others. A god stripped of humanity cannot have skin in the game in this manner, cannot genuinely suffer. A god who didn't really suffer would be like a magician performing illusion, not someone who bled after sliding an icepick between carpal bones. The Orthodox Church goes further, making the human side flow upward. Fourth-century bishop Athanasius of Alexandria wrote: "Jesus Christ was incarnate so we could be made God." Christ's very human character allows mortals to access God, merge with him, become part of him, partake of the divine. That fusion is theosis. Christ's human nature makes the divine possible for all of us. This argument reveals Pascal's wager's theological weakness. Pascal stipulated that believing in the creator has positive payoff if he exists, no downside if he doesn't—making belief a free option. But there are no free options. Following this logic proposes religion without skin in the game, making it purely academic and sterile. What applies to Jesus applies to believers: traditionally, there's no religion without skin in the game. Philosophers miss this with their experience machine thought experiment. You sit in an apparatus, a technician plugs cables into your brain, and you undergo virtual reality "experiences" feeling exactly as if events occurred. But such experience will never equal the real—only academic philosophers who never took risks believe such nonsense. Life is sacrifice and risk taking. Anything not entailing moderate amounts of both under proper constraints isn't close to what we call life. If you don't undertake risk of real, potentially irreparable harm, it isn't adventure. Inside the machine you might believe you have skin in the game, experiencing pains as if living actual harm. But there's no risk of irreversible harm, things that linger and make time flow one direction. Dreams aren't reality because when you wake from falling from a Chinese skyscraper, life continues—there's no absorbing barrier, that irreversible state intimately connected with ergodicity. Watching television with sound off during Republican primaries, seeing Donald Trump standing beside other candidates made his victory certain regardless of what he said or did. Why? Because he was real—he had visible deficiencies. Arguments that Trump was a failed entrepreneur actually prop up this point: you'd rather have a failed real person than a successful ghost. Blemishes, scars, and character flaws increase the distance between human and ghost. The public—composed of people who usually take risks, not lifeless non-risk-taking analysts—will vote for someone who actually bled after putting an icepick in his hand. Scars signal skin in the game. People detect the difference between front- and back-office operators. Fat Tony's wisdom: always do more than you talk. Precede talk with action. Action without talk supersedes talk without action. Otherwise you resemble back-office people (support staff) acting as front-office ones (business generators)—modern times' insidious disease.