The Hour I First Believed

There’s a Jewish tradition that laypeople should only speculate on the nature of God during Passover, because God is closer to us and such speculations might succeed. And there’s an atheist tradition that laypeople should only speculate on the nature of God on April Fools’ Day, because believing in God is dumb, and at least then you can say you’re only kidding. Today is both, so let’s speculate. To do this properly, we need to understand five things: acausal trade, value handshakes, counterfactual mugging, simulation capture, and the Tegmarkian multiverse.