Consciousness and the Social Brain

and how long could it last? You could be ageless and immune to all disease or disability. A limited lifespan could be programmed into the simulation, if necessary, to avoid hitting limits on computing resources. But theoretically one could continue indefinitely in a simulated body in a simulated world, as a conscious being experiencing a simulated life.
    I’m not quite sure if such an existence is better described as heaven or hell. It depends on the simulated world, I suppose. Either way, the technology is theoretically possible and in my view, as I noted before, inevitable. We humans are expert at inventing ways to entertain ourselves and make ourselves comfortable.
    It has been said that people invented God. People will invent the afterlife too.
    At this point in the discussion a sneaking suspicion comes to mind, described by Bostrum in 2003. 28 What if our current reality isexactly such a simulation? Maybe a complex simulated universe has already been created by computer scientists in some meta-universe that we don’t know about. When our own computer scientists create a plausible simulated reality, maybe that will be a simulation within a simulation.
    Now my head starts to hurt. I don’t
think
we live in an artificially constructed simulation. But I admit I have no basis for knowing. It is, at least, theoretically possible.
Does God Exist?

    I might as well go for the big question. The God debate between science and religion can be incendiary. I detect on both sides a tendency to start with a conclusion and then to erect the reasons. I don’t like that approach, especially on the scientific side, because it cheapens the intellectual arguments. Here I would like to avoid the trap of partisanship. My goal is narrowly defined: what does the present theory of consciousness say about the existence of deities?
    A common argument against the existence of a deity takes the following form: science has a natural explanation for thing
X
. Therefore, we do not need a supernatural explanation. Therefore, we do not need a deity. The most obvious example of this argument invokes Darwinian natural selection. We have a natural explanation for the diversity of life on Earth. Therefore, we do not need a supernatural explanation. Therefore, we do not need God. Richard Dawkins’ book,
The God Delusion
, 29 comes to mind as one of many, many examples of this type of argument.
    The origin of the universe also frequently enters the debate. If physicists have a scientific theory of the origin of the universe, then we do not need a supernatural explanation and thus do not need a deity. Stephen Hawking’s book,
The Grand Design
, 30 explores this argument. As pointed out by many scholars, physicists actually have yet to devise a workable, self-contained theory, accepted by the scientificconsensus, that explains the existence of the universe. In the minds of many people, therefore, God still has some wiggle room.
    All of the arguments noted above focus on what a deity might or might not do, what it might or might not have created in the past. These common and endless arguments, however, avoid the central issue of what a deity is supposed to
be
. What is a god made out of? Can that stuff exist? Is a god even possible?
    Across all cultures and all religions, universally, people consider God to be a conscious mind. God is aware. God consciously chooses to make things happen. In physical reality the tree fell, the storm bowled over the house, the man survived the car crash, the woman died prematurely, the earth orbits the sun, the cosmos exists. For many people these events, big and small, must have a consciousness and an intentionality behind them. God is that consciousness.
    Without consciousness, the God concept becomes meaningless. If God is a nonconscious complex process that can create patterns and direct the affairs of the universe, then God obviously and trivially exists. The physical universe itself fits that description. The critical question is whether consciousness lies behind the events of the universe. If so, then God exists. If not, then God does not exist.
    Armed with a theory of what consciousness is and how it is constructed, we can directly address the God question. Are the events in the universe associated with an awareness? If yes, then God. If no, then no God.
    According to the attention schema theory, consciousness is information. It is information of a specific type constructed in the brain. It is a quirky, weird