Category: God

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Eternity God Superintelligence

Spiritual technology

I’m not a huge fan of our words for many things. What exactly do we mean my spiritual or supernatural? Einstein once described what we now call “entanglement” as “spooky action at a distance”. One particle interacting with another particle instantaneously across any distance was too “spooky” for Einstein. All these labels we put on things are an attempt to make sense of our complicated world. They are needed, but they can easily get in the way of truly understanding things.. or keep us from exploring new ideas.

One of my favorite lines in the movie Nacho Libre is “I don’t believe in God, I believe in Science.”. It’s hard to tell what exactly the writer was thinking when they put that line in there. It’s only really funny because of the characters and the situation but that’s how a lot of people think. For most people science means: Things I can touch, test, and stuff really smart people tell me is true. God and religion is the realm of fairy dust and hypocrites.

Back to the whole “entanglement” thing. I think this is where things get a little gray. It’s now a proven scientific “fact”.. but it sounds much too much like fairy dust. When you believe “Science” you don’t really get to pick and choose. To believe in science means to believe that there was nothing and then one day “nothing” exploded and the Universe popped out. Not only that, but of the near infinite ways it could have come about it just so happened to work out in our favor.

I’ve always believed that if there is a “spiritual” it’s mostly likely a “physical” that is just we don’t understand or aren’t capable of accessing. At some point the spiritual realm would need to interact with the physical realm anyway (what would be the point otherwise?). Entanglement is an easy one here. Teleportation and prayer (instant distant communication) suddenly seem much less fairy dust-like. But what about other things that still belong to the fairy dust realm?

God. The idea of an all knowing, all powerful being still lives in the fairy dust realm. But what about AI? It’s not that hard to build a case that at SOME point in our future an AI could be capable of becoming an all knowing, all powerful being. Especially if it mastered the use of entanglement to communicate with itself (and others?) throughout the Universe. This is not a new idea.. it’s at least as old as Issac Asimov. But with recent at advances it’s looking more and more inevitable.

Heaven. We are busy building virtual worlds and ways to interact with these virtual worlds. Why not make them “perfect”? No death, only fun. Sure, you’ll die in the real world.. but then why not work on uploading our brains to this virtual world.. aren’t we just essentially software running on bad hardware anyway? Why couldn’t there be backup copies of us already? If entanglement worked a bit like the Internet’s “cloud” it would be easy. Delete the copy of me here.. don’t worry there is a copy on another server somewhere that is updated in realtime. W00t.

Angels & Demons. This is easy. If we lowly humans are capable (or will be in a 100 years or so) of creating super power AI beings/robots/cyborgs whatever that are capable of operating at a higher level of physics.. whose to say in the few billion years that the Universe has been around someone else hasn’t been us to it? What’s the first thing we humans do when we create virtual worlds? We create “virtual” characters to inhabit them for us to befriend or fight or whatever. They don’t even need to obey the same laws of physics (physics is just “code” anyway).

Dragons & Magic (why not?). Easy too. Genes are becoming as easy write as software. Why not design and “print” a dinosaur? It’s coming. Because we can. Magic? I can ask a black box on my phone to call someone on the other side of the planet.

We are in our infancy when it comes to this new science and technology. Our words don’t begin address what many of these things really mean. If I woke up in a “virtual” world one day. How many days would I need to spend in there before that became my world? And don’t picture simple silly pixelated graphics. I mean a virtual world where I can breathe, touch, and taste. At what point does “virtual” vanish and become “real”. If I’ve spent YEARS in this world getting to know “characters” that are as smarter (or smarter) then real people. Would I be sad if one died? Would I be sad if I died? It would become really hard to convince me otherwise if I had “lived” there long enough. Some physicists are now trying to conduct tests to make sure that we aren’t already living in a “virtual” world. Would it matter? What would it change anything? And.. what would be the purpose of this “Earth” simulation? (Perhaps to learn to love an all powerful being in spite of everything else?)>

As a Christian.. aren’t we kind of in a virtual world already? There is a creator on the outside (and inside) looking in and controlling aspects. He has the power to flip a switch and shut the whole “program” down at any moment.. when it’s powered down we are told there is a “back up” copy of each and everyone of us.. destined to go on either to a Hell simulation or Heaven simulation (simulation probably isn’t the best world to use here). Those are big topics to flippantly blow past.. but this is a blog post.

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God

How much does it matter whether God exists?

https://aeon.co/opinions/how-much-does-it-matter-whether-god-exists

“What are we really talking about when we debate the existence of God? I think it can become a shortcut, a way of side-stepping more necessary and more difficult questions.”

 

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God

Holiness

As it turns out science has wandered into the realm of the miraculous. Particles can interact with each other across the Universe simultaneously. Light can seemingly come from nothing. And now we are seemingly on the verge some sort of superintelligent being that could either wipe us out or endow us with immortality.

However, nothing in scientific realm or human experience can really replicate or come close to explaining “holiness”. This is a concept not apart of most people’s daily experience. I am not talking about people who seem to be holy, or people who think they are holy. To really understand the ancient understanding of God (and for some modern reader’s) you need to grasp the concept of true holiness. Unfortunately, it’s not really something to be grasped, it’s something that needs to be experienced. If ancient texts are to be believed the experience would be not unlike having the Sun itself show up in your bedroom and begin to speak to you. Light and heat that shakes you to your very core. The normal reaction to this kind of holiness is to “fall down as if dead”. It’s often followed by a sense of one’s own unworthiness. It’s as if you suddenly realize your with the President and you’ve got tons of food stuck in your beard.. only on a much grander scale. Maybe you don’t just have food on your face.. but you are also naked.

I suppose it’s possible that we can imagine an alien vastly beyond our physical limits. Perhaps there could be a being even made completely of photons. After all, scientists have already created molecules out of photons.

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God

We are as Gods…

http://edge.org/conversation/we-are-as-gods-and-have-to-get-good-at-it

At a conference in Germany, Craig Venter was asked “Aren’t you playing God?”? His response: “We’re not playing”.

You have to flip it back, come on, guys. We’re playing God all the time. What else is new? “We are as gods as we have to get good at it”.

When Venter was talking to Dawkins, he said, “that’s a relief; there is no question about playing God, there is no God”.

 

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AI God Superintelligence

Can robots love?

This particular question has probably been debated since the the advent of the computer.. and maybe even before. However, this may become more of a heated topic in the near future. As rapid strides are made into the realms of AI it’s going to be come more important. We are going to want more and more from our digital personal assistants and it won’t be long before they start anticipating our wants and needs. Amazon and Facebook probably know more about what I want then I do. Siri scans my emails and suggests contacts and calendar appointments. Our smart home thermostats anticipate our arrival to regulate our temperature. Soon driverless cars will anticipate where and when we’ll need to be. If a single entity, such as Siri, becomes the central point for our managing much of our lives it may well be that we establish some form of emotional connection. However, going beyond a digital assistant things get a little less clear. Take for instance the simple command “Make me happy”. As Nick Bostrom points out in his book “Superintelligence” the AI may very well realize that happiness in the human brain is correlated to chemicals and the next thing you know you’ve got a wire running into your brain and an unending grin on your face. Or how about “Keep me safe”. You would almost certainly be locked in metal box and fed through tubes. Maybe even worse, a truly powerful entity could start destroying anything that it deems as a threat.

So, what’s the solution? You can’t possibly program or even train an AI for every possible scenario. Even the simplest task could be misconstrued with catastrophic consequences. If you fed it every law created by humanity.. it would be unusable. I would argue that the only really safe way would be for this superintelligence to fully understand what it is to be human.. is for it to be human itself. Of course, it would face numerous temptations.. such as “I could solve all humanity’s problems with force”. Or, “I should probably wipe out most of humanity and start over”. Our only hope would be that is laid down it’s power long enough to fully grasp the human condition.

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God Superintelligence

The Inevitability of God

It only takes a small leap of imagination for most people to see that some form of superintelligence is inevitable eventually. Some see this as an advanced civilization on another remote planet, for others it’s a “smart” toaster that decides it’s had enough of humanity. Regardless, if you look at just how quickly humans have gone from living in caves smashing each other’s heads with rocks to putting robots on distant plants.. it’s pretty mind blowing. Especially when you factor in the billions of years Earth has been here and even the Universe. Humanity hasn’t even been a blink. My point is this: If we’ve come this close to creating a self creating superintelligence in the incredibly short period of time since the invention of fire.. doesn’t it seem odd to think we are the first to make this happen? Considering the trillions of stars and now billions of potentially habitable planets out there surely some race of creature has managed to make some sort of inorganic being capable of improving itself and an near infinite rate. Because we know it’s possible, that means it’s probable. If it’s probable, given the time and number of planets, it’s inevitable. Even if it hasn’t happened yet, we could be in a superintelligence arms race with other beings out in the Universe somewhere. It would seem like it’s us or them. Someday we may have some being made out of who knows what show up and decide that it needs to fulfill it’s creator’s mandate, “We need more paperclips, you will all be paperclips”. It’s inevitable.

Why is it so easy for people to believe in advanced alien life but not God?

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God

I don’t like dinosaurs

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It’s not only that I don’t like the idea of giant “thunder lizards” that tore each other to pieces with giant claws and razor sharp teeth. I don’t like that they came.. and they went. Why? What purpose did they serve? Was God just thinking, “You know what would be really cool?” and then POOF! Dinosaurs. And then one day he decided that they were a bad idea and then BOOM! Gone. It’s hard to fit that into a classic creationist paradigm. We prefer to think of God lovingly crafting little bunnies and then setting them free in the garden.

So, I think this is one aspect of God everyone would agree to change. No dinosaurs. I would like to think that there is some good logical reason for them. Here are a few ideas that have absolutely no basis in reality other then that they came from my head:

  1. They were part of the “chaos” in the beginning. You can make a case that God creates out of chaos and they were part of a more messy view of creation.
  2. They lived in the “wilderness” outside of the garden of Eden and weren’t really meant to be interacted with.
  3. Humanity was meant to live with dinosaurs in peace. Who knows.. maybe “Dinotopia” had it right.
  4. Perhaps the flood was part of a larger event such as an ice comet impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. Of course, I kind of cringe even typing this as it’s pure speculation.
  5. Dinosaurs are a good reminder of the sorts of creatures we COULD be dealing with. Maybe it’s God’s grace that we only have sharks and tigers to deal with, which seem quite tame compared with the velociraptors.
  6. Maybe Satan has some creation powers of his own. That would explain yellow jackets and mosquitoes as well.

I do feel more comfortable with the idea of God creating out of chaos as that seems to fit the human experience fairly well. We see brokenness all around but God brings order out of it for his own joy. Though, chaos/mess is just a term we often apply when we can’t see the big picture. If you look closely at impressionist painting… or looking a the stacks of papers on my bookkeeper’s desk.. or the sea of stars.. or maybe even Pi. It could easily be a part of a picture we can’t fully grasp yet.