I am not meant for your religion

From: Tim May <tcmay.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Tue, 14 Jan 2003 20:20:06 -0800

In looking over the traffic, the archives, and the responses I have
gotten, it's clear that I mistook this list for a place where some of
the Healey/Moravec/Egan/Tegmark/etc. ideas of an ensemble view of the
universe, with "all topologies models" and "all variants of theorems"
sorts of metamathematics ideas might be discussed. I didn't expect my
own special interest, which is more along the lines of toposes,
lattices, logic, and math, would be the mainstream, of course.

But I also didn't expect to find a weird religious cult, with trappings
of quantum suicide, roulette ideas takens seriously, and acausal
notions about how one should act. Not to mention the grab-bag of weird
cosmologies with no support offered, the theories of physics with no
backing, the claims that anyone criticizing these models must be part
of the corrupt establishment, and so on.

Enough. You folks don't like my stuff and I don't like your religion
about killing yourself and others in order to "perfect" the Multiverse.
  I learned more about causal decision theory, but then learned that
it's all wrong, that one should do things which are counter to one's
own interests so as to perfect the Multiverse.

And I heard about the suicide machines, the arguments for and against
euthanasia, and the bizarre ideas about making the Multiverse more
perfect (for whom?) by taking Moravec's and Tegmark's whimsies
seriously.

I will say this, you guys will make for some great characters in some
future "Star Trek" movie, the one where a cult of Multiversians is
setting off special weapons to destroy universes which fail to be
perfect in various ways.

I'll miss some tidbits of math I discussed with some of you, but I
won't miss the rest.

Until we meet in another reality,

--Tim May
Received on Tue Jan 14 2003 - 23:23:30 PST