Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion Not-Quite-Science Forum Must a God be available to us?

I'm glad you are enjoying it. I find it entertaining myself at times. Also exasperating on occasion but never dull.

I think if the AI is aware, we had better hope it is benevolent. Maybe it can save us from ourselves. Would a computer ruled world be better or worse than today's world? Maybe one day we will find out. What rule by a rational being, based on logic and reason, be any better than what we have today? And once that computer is aware, who is to say it will remain rational, logical and reasonable? We like to think we know what a computer would do but I don't think we're prepared for the results.

AI, eventually, will be used to develop AI. And it will likely do precisely the same thing as fire. Good if it warms your house and cooks your food. Bad if it burns your house to the ground: Expect both outcomes.

But who will leave earth, as the result of human evolution and explore the universe? It will be them ... not us. And it won't matter.

da for once i agree with you.

as for #5, there is a quote ever since the king james version was created, dealing with witches. after a early version was discovered they find there was a slight problem with that quote. namely that to get the word witches out of the earlier verson, you had to mispell the word. left in the early version it discussed "mind poisoner" which is beleive to mean ppl that preached hate. considering that during that time frame church officals were dealing with trying to deal with ppl who would go to other religons if they were told they could no longer talk to the christian god (excommunication) i beleive the reason for the "mistranslation" is easy to figure out.

in other words you not only have to figure out which verion, who wrote it, but also who copied and translated it.

i have trouble with a god that says that you should question everythings (he must have created science) except what the preacher tells you.

in my religion, everyone has a different path they must follow, to find the truths that you are ready to find.

heres a thought for today:

how do you know that you are not a computer ai program. think about it.

if you were, your preception of your body would be a creation of that program. your preception of the matter of the world would be created by the program. only your thoughts would be real and those would be part of the ai program. how would you know that you were not actually in a real world. your awareness of everything is dependant on your senses, which if you are part of a program, would be artifically created. taste would be artifically created. sight, sound, nothing more than electical signals anyway. feel, smell, just computer data.

how you would you know.

faith?

dehammer wrote:
"How do you know that you are not a computer ai program. think about it."

How do you know you are not an invisible purple rhinoceros?

Think about it!

If the answer is just a matter of faith ... there is no more reason to believe one answer than the other.

as far as the faith things goes, your right

hmmm, an invisible purple rhinoceros, hmmm.

well ppl react to me so i know they can see me, one way or another, so if im invisible, i must have some sort of manner of making myself appear to be something other than purple.

a second point is that while i might not be the thin man, im not quite as big as a rhinoceros, so i would have to be a very small rhinoceros, who has the ability to move things much higher than itself, and which has the ability to use things that are shaped for a human. hmmm, shapeshifting? but would not that require a knowldege that you are shapeshifting?

logic would decree that if your an invisible rhinoseros, purple or otherwise, you would have some things that indicated that you were not human, which would beg the question "what am i?"


on the other hand, if all of your senses were just electrical signals being transmitted to a part of a computer, that was running a program that included the structure (proper term?) that it was a living, breathing, moving, independant lifeform with a human body, how would you know?

i dont even have a clue myself how you would know.

to go to scfi for an example (yes im sure its not real, but how do you know), in Star Trek, the next generation, Data (one of the characters, an android) accendently created an photonic lifeform that was aware of its surrounding. later, in another episode, moritari (the phontonic lifeform) show that he was still around and still aware. the solids (regular chacters had never found a way of bring the photonic in to the "solid world". in order to get back control over their ship. they devised a device that would give the photonics all the indicators that they were in solid world and allow them to explore it to their hearts content, but still it was a computer.

if you were a photonic trapped inside the computer how would you know.

dehammer wrote:
"well ppl react to me so i know they can see me, one way or another"

Actually no one sees you.
There is no one else.
There is nothing else but your mind.
You are dreaming.
This is all an illusion.

Time to wake up and take out the trash.

no thanks, im having too much fun laughing at your statements to take it out

You aren't really laughing. You are sobbing hysterically. It is just in your dream that you are laughing.

Wake up and take out the trash.

im fully awake and too busy laughing at your antics to take you out to to the curb.

Put yourself in the position of Mozes during the Exodus. The people you are leading are not listening to you and there is anarchy. You must impose law and order, the problem is that they won't accept any laws made by you. So, you pretend that the commandments were made by God. You must, of course, present it in such a way that the people will believe that. So, there must be some ''proof'' of God.

Today's leaders have led us to Iraq using ''proof'' of WMD, so not much has change since Biblical Times.

on the other hand, put yourself in the head of an alien that looked nothing like humans. its much easier to pretend to be god and get one man to take the orders to the masses with a few fireworks thrown in to back up those commands. they would have known from watching man and from watching a few of the ppl that were in the group, that if they held moses up in the mountain long enough, there would be plenty of excuse for those fireworks. once the ppl got a load of those fireworks, getting them to follow the chosen leader would be a snap.

im not saying that the bibilical god is or was an alien, just pointing that out.

personally, i do believe that most of the "gods commands" were more something that was wanted by the person that recieved the command, to get the chruch exactly the excuse to do what the ppl running it wanted.

To paraphrase R. D.:

"I may be dreaming everything,
I can know nothing except that
I think therefore I am".

A brilliant and courageous statement,
unfortunately a complete dead end.

"I can conceive of a God so there
must be one."

A cowardly submission to the Church.
If you want a God badly enough, you can
try to invent one, but it can never be
greater than yourself. A pretty sorry
excuse for a Deity.

Pragmatist

Back to the topic:

The Count makes a point that I see as smart people convincing not so smarts to accept the ideas they offer. That is only a tiny speck of the issue. The Biblical "God" was a visible god. It led the mob by day with a cloud and it led the mob by night with a light or fire. For any person to stumble around in a wilderness for fourty years following such godly eminations is a little much.They could have circled the Earth many times.

At 3 miles an hour average for 10 hours a day we should go 30 miles. 30 miles times 365 is 10,950 miles a year times 40 years = 438,000 miles and 438,000 miles divided by Earths circmference of about 24,900 equatorial miles = about 17.6 times around the Earth. It would require one dumb mob to be led like that. Soooo no 40 years at all you might say so when to give the story meaning and when to not?
jjw

Perhaps Moses and his followers should have stopped smoking that stuff that was creating the smoke.

Must a CEO be available to US?

three words. ken lay exxon.