Death is not bad, it’s neutral. What would be bad is either someone dying that has a bad effect on the living, or the way the dead person having experienced some other thing along with dying (pain, regret etc.)

Personally I think atheism is logical but practicing atheism isn’t. Not because it offers the benefits of having believed in a particular religion if they end up being right but because so much of religion is based off of personal experience, so it’s good to try some out just in case you end up converted. (As long as you keep a skeptical but fair view, you shouldn’t need to worry about being tricked.)

As for the argument that it’s just a waste of time because there are so many religions and you will likely never find the right one, you can group them. If there really is a God, probably a lot of different religions would be based (unknowingly) oh the same entity. And if so many religions have truth, does it really matter that much which one you believe in as long as you get the basics right?

Specific religions are only necessary (in my opinion) if you are seeking out truth, but if you just want to be “saved”, categories should do just fine.

Yeah, mostly. There is other stuff in the post, but credence is accurate. Not like the view of one particular unknown probability but how you consider occurrences (where you know the chance) when there are multiple times they could occur or multiple things that could happen.

The idea of connections making up everything (like some sort of code that determines what particles are where) is attractive to me because every particle with mass must be made up of others unless mass is a trait like location and could be coded for by these connections. Otherwise you just infinitely divide particles. It’s not a flawless idea, but seems close to the truth to me.

I do believe in a God, but your point doesn’t hold so much weight because OF COURSE It doesn’t have solar system is unusual. Otherwise, we couldn’t have ended up here. Every solar system that has intelligent life has to be unusual, so what makes ours special?

Maybe it is special, but without these qualities it isn’t, so the same argument could be made of any solar system containing intelligent life.
It’s possible I explained this poorly, so this might be a bit confusing.

Pretty close on what I was trying to say. Think of this as more of an add-on, not a correction. It's better to have individual and perfect knowledge of all the probabilities, but since we often can't (or are too lazy to) we could (and do) group them into categories, based on the result of the occurrence actually happening, and we can also not consider rare things that happen that aren't significant as not truly rare based on the assumption that many other rare things that would have had the same effect could have happened but didn't. This obviously doesn't work for all situations, though.

Sounds familiar, but no. Probably knew at some point. Is Bayesian Probability where you estimate the probability of a hypothesis being true, or am I just mixing things up?

But then again, if higher education were such a fantastic starting point, then why do so many of its graduates end up slinging coffee at Starbucks? The proof is always in the pudding, isn't it? — Tarskian

Maybe true, but it could also be that most people aren’t interested in the jobs that education helps with attaining, and so for the majority it is not that helpful. What would you propose?

There simply is no job where you have to manually compute math results. These students do not learn how to build such software. They also do not learn how to use such software. Instead, they learn how to fail at being themselves the software. — Tarskian

The students aren’t learning how to do math themselves, but how math works. (Which you need to know to know how you increasingly complex science and math work.) While you may need to know how to make software to make a software that does math, you also need to know how to do math, and knowing how to do math is more helpful towards making a software than the other way around.

There are also ways people can learn to make software within public education programs too, they just aren’t ass common (by all means, we should have more though).

That's just another scam. The government spends money on "scientific research". Next, when there is scientific progress somewhere, the government is quick to claim credit for it, and then wants some more money for "scientific research". — Tarskian

There’s scams everywhere. Just because the government wastes money on this doesn’t mean we don’t need scientists to actually make progress.

You cannot make progress inside the system, because that will almost always be shut down. Every innovation is in one way or another a threat to existing interests. That is why all progress is made outside the system — Tarskian

Just because making progress in the system is hard doesn’t mean it doesn’t give students opportunities. I wasn’t talking at all about innovation in the part you responded to.

totally agree
I made the points in the post because I was mostly referring to times when there are an innumerable (not too big, it would just take a lot of effort) amount of occurrences that could lead to the same result. These ideas are meant to cope with that.

No, it doesn't. For example, if you want to figure out how to write a mobile app, no school will ever help you. — Tarskian

I said it was an attempt, not that it was completely successful. Also, teaching someone how to make an app wouldn’t be the same as teaching them how apps work. I wasn’t saying that it teaches general information about everything, that’s obviously not true, but instead that it teaches a set of basics that people think are necessary.

I would say that the only way to get people started in their career is a specialized path for every student. It is possible and it is being done already. — Tarskian

I’m not talking about programs that teach more specialized subjects, but instead specialized paths built into public education systems. Totally agree with this though, just not that some organization could create separate paths for every student in a largeish country.

Not having any starting point at all, is not the solution either. — Tarskian

True. I was mainly talking about public education systems, and how they usually don’t have that many options to fully commit to a certain path because younger students aren’t trusted to make good decisions for themselves. The “starting point” would be higher education.

Baseline generalities do not prepare for anything at all. We already know that. That is why youth unemployment is a reality nowadays. — Tarskian

Maybe. I was mainly saying the baseline education
was necessary for students who wish to go into jobs that have to do with them. Kind of like a way of introducing a lot of jobs that need to be done, but otherwise might not. (Like math related ones.)
Are you saying we need to shift the baseline to something more applicable for the majority of students’ likely future careers, or just get rid of baseline education altogether?

No, current education is pretty much a complete failure. I am surprised that any graduate finds any job at all. — Tarskian

This is very pessimistic. As long as there are experts who were able to make progress because of their education (talking mostly about experimental fields of science here), progressing the species (or fulfilling roles like doctors) the education system has not failed completely. While it’s stir that this doesn’t happen to the majority of people, how else do you propose we teach the people who end up being the ones who play important roles in the success of humans as a species?
They may come up anyway, but this education system probably either helps them learn about such subjects or helps more students to explore possibilities that they might not have without education.

No, because Starbucks et alii do not require it. The cash till can perfectly handle all arithmetic. The cash till is a computer. — Tarskian

Not for the people using the computer, but for the people designing new, better computers, eventually making life better for the average worker by automating more things/making current systems work more efficiently.

Yeah, pretty much. The idea is that there are more unaccounted possibilities in either a category that is similarly rare, has the same effect, or cause the same reaction.

While it is true that most things that are taught to students are completely unnecessary for them to know, schools don’t always attempt to teach a student everything they will ever learn in a particular topic. Education is an attempt to teach students the basics of how things work so that the student can continue in many paths, expanding on their knowledge until they can offer new, helpful insights and be productive members of society.

While math knowledge isn’t important for people who won’t use it, and people who will use it probably still don’t need the knowledge (although it is helpful to have a baseline knowledge in case common tools fail to perform a specific task), it is really for the people making the tools. While most people will not use it, the people that will make a huge impact, and progress as a species depends of some group knowing these things.

You might ask “why teach everyone, then?” It is true that this is inefficient, and if it was feasible to offer students only the education they need, I’m sure we would.

This idea has failed because of two problems.
One: the resources required. You can’t have a specialized path for every student, so you end up grouping students in large groups based on what you think they will end up doing, which we already do, to an extent.
Two: It’s hard to know what a person will do, and you can’t have everyone decide at an early age, when education starts. Therefore, it’s necessary to teach a baseline in many topics and then later allow options for specialized learning.
Current education does this fine.
I’m sure there could be more efficient ways to do this, but there always are.

This is a side topic to the main post, so I’ll summarize the relevant point here: the knowledge of basic math must be taught to make students, to assure that the people who would make advancements in fields that require math have basic knowledge to build upon in order to eventually make contributions.

If we have an infinite amount of time ahead of us, I can assume that there is no need to worry or be scared. If we are condemned to have no power during this period, then we essentially do not exist (I will also respond to that side), and if we have any power, then we would eventually gain more and more, until we are able to do whatever we want, including a release from an infinite existence.

Speculation aside, if we have nothing after this life, it doesn’t matter anyway, and is nothing to be afraid of (since nothing can happen to something that doesn’t exist).

What we should be afraid of is the state of the world after we leave it, and the possibility that our impact is one that leads more people to lives without fulfillment, (since fulfillment in this life is the only thing that matters if there is no life after).

This existence based on the fulfillment of others is particularly altruistic and unnecessary, but it is still possible to reach self-fulfillment while increasing the contentment of others (IN their lives, it of course doesn’t matter what you think of your life after you have lived it if you don’t exist after your death).

I’ll just give my take on the OP instead of the replies because I don’t have the willpower to read them all.

Guidance through such a virtual world might be helpful, and yet there is no trace of anyone 'programming' or 'guiding' us anywhere. — jasonm

This, to me, holds little weight. Such programmers might simply want to see what the subject does without interference. The simulation might just be so good we can’t find any evidence that we are in it.

If it's just a simulation, does it matter if the laws of physics are perfectly consistent? — jasonm

It does, as inconsistencies would be evidence of the simulation that the creators might not want to have. A better question is “Why include inconsistencies?”
There also might be inconsistencies, and we are just too unobservant to realize.

Again, if you are there, leave us with some trace of your existence through 'miracles' and other types of anomalies that our world does not seem to have. — jasonm

Again, assuming the programmers want you to know they are there. That might ruin the simulation, it seems more likely to me that they would not do that.

Also, there are many who say miracles do happen anyway (my position on this not being important to the subject). It’s interesting to consider the simulation argument as an explanation for these occurrences. One might argue that these things are direct intervention by the programmers (or observers, at least), and so they don’t follow the normal rules.

Third: what type of computing power would be required to 'house' this virtual universe? — jasonm

In the real world (hypothetical) computing might work differently, so this isn’t really a main point. And even if the rules are the same (which would likely be because the programmers modeled the universe they created off of their own reality), who’s to say that the entire universe is simulated? It might be just enough to create a believable reality for the subject, which would require significantly less computing power.

Nevertheless, I think the best answer comes from Occam's Razor: "Explanations that posit fewer entities, or fewer kinds of entities, are to be preferred to explanations that posit more." — jasonm

The Occam’s Razor argument is, I think, one of the most valuable arguments relating to the simulation question. I would agree that, while possible, the probability of this being a simulation is highly unlikely.

I think it is also true that from anyone's perspective, they are at the center of any hypothetical simulation. (Unless you guys experience something very different.) Pointless to affirm this, of course.

This all begs the question: why make the person in the simulation famous? (assuming the creators have some control). I think it would probably be more useful to put the simulated mind in positions where they make important decisions, but are not necessarily famous, assuming that the creators of a hypothetical simulation want to learn something about the subject.