Outreach plan

[DefenderOfBasic]

Executive summary: Goal is to help the God Conjecture reach two categories of audiences (1) those who can build on it (2) laypeople for whom this would be a valuable world model update (that our choices matter, religion is a pursuit of truth, things that are bigger than ourselves exist, etc)

This paper was incubated in ORI, and it's a building block for other work in ORI, so all of ORI benefits as this work propagates. Any resistance we uncover in propagating this work is valuable information for others in ORI.

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Plan

(1) Identify important nodes who can "build on it", get their input. Show how God Conjecture helps their work

(2) Identify nodes that can write about it / make a video about it - this requires taking one or two of the big ideas in the paper and making a self contained "package" that can be read & understood, lowers the friction to consume it.

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Who is working on adjacent things?

• Kruger / Hyphaeic (https://x.com/0xKruger)
• Erik Hoel? (specific pieces of Erik's work fit inside God Conjecture? What was that paper again?)
• Matthieu Pageau?
• Kane (https://x.com/KRollo7461) had a lot to say about God Conjecture, but left the ORI discord because he felt like his model was superior. I am very interested in trying to figure out what his model has if/when he publishes it
• ???

[DefenderOfBasic]

One thing immediately on my mind is to write a series of essays that act as prereqs to the God Conjecture, that can be widely understood.

• Hell is Non-Existence - short essay to prove what hell is, in every simple language. It exists by necessity of existence
  • related: what is the tower of babel? As a functional structure that humans are capable of creating but that is "impossible" to complete for some reason?
• Religion is a pursuit of truth - we talked about this in the twitter space, this is a prereq for the paper, it's basically from the intro. But on its own it's a very big idea and worth propagating.
  • The idea is by reading this essay it should convince you that, if the bible disappeared, and humanity started over, humanity could re-deduce it, the same way we could re-deduce the laws of physics. Matthieu Pageau is a good pointer to this, he has a book on the metaphysical truth encoded in the bible
• Ismorphism in religions - this is the BIGGEST / most exciting idea from God Conjecture to me personally. It's this idea that it's a framework inside of which we can look at Islam, Judaism, and Christianity as "algorithms" that perform a search over the Ruliad. So we can actually, "logically" or precisely demonstrate that, "this branch of Islam, at this time period, is actually the same as this branch of Christianity"

[SASenchal]

I think re the essays - i think order is probably Religion is pursuit of truth first (i can draft for your comments next week or so), then Isomorphisms, though i think it might be hard to do the second part (time comparison between strains of each tradition) at this stage would be speculative and may require Sunrise / an Islamic Scholar to get this correspondence right! The Hell one is straightforward, but I think we can "What is Heaven and Hell, what do they look like after we strip the language down" (that's unwieldy but you get the drift!

[DefenderOfBasic]

@SASenchal

The Hell one is straightforward

yeah this is why I wanted to do it first - I think it might even be a prereq for "Religion is pursuit of truth". Because skeptics will read that and say "oh yeah? exactly how is religion pursuit of truth?" -> my answer to that is:

• look, "hell" is non-existence
• Ancient religion was asking the question: "how do we continue to exist? what are the properties of things that exist?"
• A correct solution to this question exists - it is proven with time. If you follow a set of rules, and your tribe continues to exist, while the other tribe doesn't. Then: you were right
• It is far more dangerous to change the rules than to add new rules, that's why religion has the shape that it does (dogma). It's perfectly rational
• So far we have not been able to use our tools of science to answer questions about theology, but we can. God Conjecture formalizes the link so that we can do this. So that we can learn more about "hell", and what leads to it ("sin"). We can argue about what is "sin" as a technical matter, not a subjective matter.

[DefenderOfBasic]

"What is Heaven and Hell, what do they look like after we strip the language down"

yeah I think that's basically it - I don't think I have enough grasp on "heaven" to explain it to others. Hell seems simpler. I feel like I have a lot of open questions about heaven, and its relationship to "earth". Like, "hell" seems like one place (non-existence, even if there are infinite routes to it, some more painful than others), whereas heaven is probably richer/more diverse/has a kind of infinite possibility space? But then what exactly defines it?

(or actually: no. "Earth" / the finite human realm is the one that has infinite possible states, "heaven" IS the "perfection". In that way heaven is frozen/eternal..?)

[SASenchal]

First two on Hell and Babel are complete and live in main as first drafts - they are ready to be embellished / adapted to local language

[DefenderOfBasic]

The hell essay (https://github.com/SASenchal/God-Conjecture/blob/main/Hell.md) is actually a lot more sophisticated than I realized. I wasn't aware this was a big open question here:

How can we formalize the distinction between temporary purification and permanent damnation?

The idea that the Observer's actions influence its post-mortem state is another "big leap" (closer to the "A ceiling" than the "B floor"). I can't put this in an outreach essay, but it is a good target to shoot for to work up to.

This feels like the easiest part to explain:

exists, but at the edge of dissolution

but I think still requires the reader to accept "post-mortem consciousness" (which many people who have read/researched near death experiences believe in, but not the typical reader)

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Formal Definition of Observer Existence

this on its own is actually a really nice and easy to explain piece that can be a mini essay / "screenshot essay" for twitter. It's a useful definition that a lot of other fields can use (like memetics, what we are calling "egregore" I think can be formalized as an Observer)

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You persist at the threshold of dissolution without actually dissolving

I think this is my biggest takeaway. I still wonder: WHY does this state exist at all, HOW can it exist. I guess it kind of necessarily exists because (1) state A is existing as an Observer (2) state B is annihilation (3) therefore, we expect that there is a process an Observer can go through from existence to non-existence, and it's possible to be stuck "not letting go" so to speak.

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I do like how it neatly ties up that hell is technically not permanent. But "practically speaking" it might as well be for the observer experiencing it.

I think there is a verse in the Quran that says something like, "all is finite except for God" (referring to both hell and heaven), which I think aligns here.

[SASenchal]

I think this is what religion implies the Observer does ie they have a permanent soul. This is framing it in the computational language of the paper