An old flame strengthens

Filled with regret and sorrow

The new flame weakens

A long time ago, when I was four years old, I went out to a swimming pool with a friend and his family. I was too young to know how to swim, but my friend had an older brother who loved to show off. So while I was there I decided to take the bait and try to go the deep end of the pool. I can say now that this was a bad choice. While in the deep end I allowed myself to take a chance and try to swim. The next thing I remember is being woken up by my friend’s mom, me in her lap.

The lapse of memory is what I imagine death to be like: nothing. There is nothing after life, and that should terrify you, but fear can be good. This fear of death is driving me to achieve greatness with the little time I have left until the void. Hopefully, once there, I will be able to accept the eternal embrace of finally achieving a peaceful rest.

    If there is one question that is unanswerable in modern science, it is the question of existence: why does the universe exist? Surely, any person who is educated in the ways of science shall respond with the “Big Bang”, a large explosion at that created the universe. However, modern astrophysics can only go to a few nanoseconds after the Big Bang and cannot say anything about the universe before the event. Thus, the human mind invents an entity that gives reason to the cause of the universe. A god does not have to be a god that intervenes in the everyday affairs of human life, but only that it is the creator of the universe. In this sense, then there is a god, but only if we are in a computer simulation.
    Being inside of a computer simulation literally means that we are programs being run inside of a super computer where each and every one of us has a soul.exe. As Nick Bostrom of Oxford University describes, “there are more ‘people’ living in Matrices than in ‘real worlds’. As a ‘person’ then the chances are that you are living in a Matrix rather than in a ‘real world.’” This possibility lies with two others, either humans have gone extinct before inventing Matrices and or uninterested in building Matrices. If we take the possibility that Matrices exist then we also have to agree with Bostrom that there is more chance of being in a Matrix. So there must be one or many programmers who built this universe. With the previous definition of a god as a creator then there is more probability that a god exists.
    Even as we speak now, quantum scientists are using massive supercomputers to simulate the universe at the smallest scales. Even now we can see the simulation argument beginning to emerge, for we have not destroyed ourselves and we are interested in building a Matrix.
    An interesting point to note is that we can extend our definition of a god to a more “standard” definition of omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresent. We can do this because a programmer would easily be able to create more programs that can alter the fabric of the universe, know everything that will happen in advance, and can see all the variables being run. As such, it would be more surprising to find if there was no god for a god-like programmer fits this definition so well. Hopefully, there is a god so that we may find ways of hacking the simulation to meet our own ends.