I used to think of this question ever since I got to know there is such a thing called God, how must it feel like to be Him? At first, when I was just a kid, the thoughts went wild. I would do this, I would do that, I would fly, get the fastest car, beat up my bullies in the most savage way.
But when I thought about it more carefully, this time not just as pure wonder but more seriously, more from an intention of understanding my own consciousness and consciousness in a broader sense I quickly realized how hard it is for me to imagine what a god must think like. Eventually, I made peace with the fact that I will never know or can imagine how it feels to be a god.
Then I thought, screw that, what would I do, or how would it feel, to have god-like powers and still be human? Because I think if you get the god brain, it is no longer you. It is not simply a transformation of your ‘self’ it is annihilation. So the only thing that can exist is your self with godlike powers.
The first thought that came to my mind was how I would use this power to satisfy my human brain, i.e., get dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, all the happy chemicals. You can get that by having lots of sex, doing crazy adventure sports, experiencing luxury, doing human things in the end.
But then I thought, I am a god and can control every aspect of existence, including my brain. So why would I take such an inefficient route to get the same chemicals when I can just make them?
At that point, the thought cracked me. The final answer was clear: there is no point or meaning to this living. I would simply commit suicide.
This childish thought experiment made me realize that as humans, we need meaning to survive, and for that, we need resistance. Paraphrasing Nietzsche “to live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering”. When you can control exactly how happy, how sad, how excited you are, there is no fight left, no resistance. That erases all meaning from life, or a more accurate sentence would be: it erases the illusion of meaning.
The universe itself is inherently meaningless. Meaning is a very human thing, invented by humans, just an evolutionary quirk that possibly helped our ancestors survive and form civilizations. A reason to keep reproducing.
And this is the very reason I would die before uploading my mind into a simulation.