From: kevin.osborne (kevin.osborne@gmail.com)
Date: Mon May 15 2006 - 01:03:46 MDT
After reading a particularly lucid post form a list member recently, I went
off and googled them (so that probably means I have at some point googled
you, dear reader, too; maybe time to go off and egosurf and make sure your
lucky link isn't an ex slagging you off?) and ended up at one of their
blogs: http://future-spirituality.blogspot.com/.
Now like a lot of blokes it seems I'm an atheist-since-birth Dawkins-lover
and my wife is the namby-pamby spritualist and deist/semi-agnostic so
opening a url with 'spritiuality' in the anchor was somewhat of a novelty.
I'm definitely having issues with putting 'god' in a posting title put it
that way.
Now aside from anything else on the site there was one quote that evoked a
bit of a Singulatarian reaction in me:
"Whether God Is or Will Be is equivalent in truth."
Following through on this from an SL4 perspective:
- A future post-human jupiter-brain hive-mind eschaton etc can be termed as
being equivalent to the presently popular perception of 'god' - All knowing,
all seeing, all powerful, all singing and dancing yada yada yada.
- No matter when we or our descendants achieve 'godhood', as soon as this
future god beats FTL, we suddenly have a case for god as-of-now.
Which is a bit scary for this little atheist. Maybe all these wack-jobs are
in fact tuned in to doppler echoes of our future god-self. It's a rather
mortifying prospect to think that the pope has a better handle on posthuman
superintelligence than I do.
Taking this premise a little bit further throws up a couple more
propositions:
- Future god isn't going to mess with it's own historical light cone. Hence
no visitations, obelisks, miracles of note, etc. i.e. no possible validation
of the hypothesis. Even if you did come close to proving future god will
exist, said god might have something eschation-style to say about it.
Suffice to say I'll need more than dodgy waffling in order to suddenly pop
out of existence :-). Now if only the same could not be said for the ID
people...
- If future god comes about via AGI, then a good portion of you bunch are
its direct progenitors.
- If you're a direct progenitor to an AGI, your future is kind of written.
Even if there are FTL/timetravel-breaking events caused by quantum
physics/multidimensionality etc 'it' will be sure to keep tabs on you to
make sure the dice always roll the way they did in it's original history.
- Free will: if you've got it, then you probably don't matter in
future-god/agi terms.
So you've either got free will or you matter to the future - how do you guys
like _them_ apples? :-)
(All very bluesky/scifi but hopefully an interesting thought expirement
nonetheless...)
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