10 ms·

Talking to God

156 points by artagnon 17y ago

ryanwaggoner 17y ago
Thought-provoking, and I say that as a Christian. It also reminds me of my favorite short story: http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html
- ax0n 17y ago
  Also Christian, and I found it to be a clever bit of fiction, really. Well-written, entertaining. Also, thanks for that link :)
  - mambodog 17y ago
    Funny, thats just how I feel about the old testament...
    - godDLL 17y ago
      Really? Not to offend the persuasion of any attendees (I do mean that, stop reading if your rage is easily focused), but did you try the Hebrew version? I have studied it, as part of my education, along with ancient Hebrew laws and such. The writing is unclear, terrible at times, poetic at times; the language is so simple as to appear broken. And nearly all of the story, morals, message, or poetic meaning you take away is your own,– because of how broken Biblical Hebrew is. Whatever you take away will end up being a by-product of you studying it, not a direct product. Some 10+ years since, I can still read Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic, and I'm still not sure there was any direct product in there. So much so, that I call modern spoken Hebrew which is somewhat loosely based on Biblical Hebrew, – I call it Jibberish in my own mind, with a `j'. Like the one in Jihad, or "sacred struggle"; something inspired by—but completely unrelated—to the original scripture. And the King James is even better still, having been translated to English from Greek by a German man. Particularly the Revelations is—at times—absolutely 4chan material, I find. EDIT: ^holy\ war^sacred\ struggle
      - hackoder 17y ago
        Nitpick - Jihad does not translate (in its original arabic) to "holy war". It translates to "struggle".
      - calcnerd256 17y ago
        For someone who studied Scripture in its original language, you've still managed to hit my pet peeve of pluralizing the title of the scroll of Disclosure.
        godDLL 17y ago
        That's the part that I didn't study, it's the Christian part. It has no Hebrew source/prototype; the original is in Greek (AFAIK), and not taught in the Migdal Emeq boarding school for boys (as it is a jewish school). EDIT: I read some King James for the shear lulz. And lulz to deliver it has.
      - gruseom 17y ago
        And the King James is even better still, having been translated to English from Greek by a German man What? That's not true at all. It was translated by a committee of English scholars and clergy. It is also a landmark of literature and history that contains some of the finest English ever written.
        godDLL 17y ago
        Ooh, look, I am being wrong on the Internet. I am now ashamed to have remembered this incorrectly. Thank you for pointing out my error, I'll be sure to double check things I have only passing familiarity thereof in the future. But you could have provided a link, like this one: http://www.av1611.org/kjv/kjvhist.html http://www.av1611.org/kjv/kjvhist.html EDIT: I'm not being sarcastic up there. I'm being sarcastic below here. EDIT: and the historical/literary value remark is just plain balls. "And they had hair as the hair of women, and their teeth were as the teeth of lions. And they had breastplates, as it were breastplates of iron; and the sound of their wings was as the sound of chariots of many horses running to battle. And they had tails like unto scorpions, and there were stings in their tails: and their power was to hurt men five months." If that's not balls I don't know what is.
    - ax0n 17y ago
      That's alright. All the really good shit happens in the New Testament.
  - donaq 17y ago
    Out of curiosity, what would your reaction be if you found that it wasn't fiction? Would you accept the entity the author was conversing with as God? Or would you think he was a demon? Or just an advanced godlike alien being beyond which another, more powerful entity exists in the unknowable (kinda hard, since this being created the entirety of our reality).
    - artagnon 17y ago
      > advanced godlike alien being beyond which another, more powerful entity exists It all depends on how tight one's definition of God is. If it's very rigid, anything they encounter in the real world except something that sufficiently satisfies all the attributes of a textbook-God (read: Jesus, Mohammed, Krishna) including physical appearance wouldn't qualify as God.
      - klipt 17y ago
        Muhammad never claimed to be a god, but a prophet of the Jewish and Christian god.
    - ax0n 17y ago
      If it wasn't fiction? Here's the thing: I might be open to the prospect of a humanoid 30-something white guy talking to me being an apparition of God. But I really don't get hung up or terribly passionate about things like all the laws in Leviticus, or whether certain stories are 100% literal or metaphors. Maybe I'd ask, but it wouldn't impact my faith one way or the other, really. And if it turned out that the guy who said he was God was just a telepathic, shape-shifting alien? Meh. A lying alien. Big whoop.
      - donaq 17y ago
        It's not a telepathic, shape-shifting alien, it's an omnipotent alien that created the universe and implies that there is no reality higher than this. Would that impact your faith? Assuming for the sake of argument that he's not lying, would you think that a) he's God, b) he's mistaken, there's a higher reality over which God presides or c) there is no God.
yannis 17y ago
Interesting and well written. However, being an agnostic I offer this: From A Scientific Rationale for Belief in God http://www.vexen.co.uk/religion/God_AI.html http://www.vexen.co.uk/religion/God_AI.html >I present here a concise rationale for the existence of God. The work of Ray Kurzweil and other artificial intelligence researchers is critical to my thesis. An entity (computers or humans, it not mattering which) will eventually become all-knowing. How much time passes before what is likely to be a rapid convergence to all-knowing is not important...
- donaq 17y ago
  I stopped reading when the author made a leap in logic from superhuman intelligence to omniscience, and then from omniscience to time travel just within the abstract. This was obviously not a well thought out piece.
  - eagleal 17y ago
    I didn't read it just because he says that Kurzweil is critical to his thesis.
Herring 17y ago
tldr: fiction. I closed the tab when he started talking about dinosaurs not having respect for other life.
- tybris 17y ago
  > tldr: fiction The title says "Talking to god". You didn't seriously expect...?
  - gjm11 17y ago
    Perhaps he expected a scientific study of what happens in people's brains when they think they are talking to God, or some statistics relating the things people think God has told them with their own prior beliefs, or something of the kind. Perhaps he expected an account of how someone met with someone else they admired/feared so much that it was like talking to God.
    - Groxx 17y ago
      Perhaps he skimmed the title too quickly, and thought it said "Talking to Dog". Around the dino part, he realized that the dog shouldn't be talking, and rejected the article.
  - Herring 17y ago
    Tell that to the billions of religious people. I don't even know what I expected. Maybe something real, seeing as it was so high on HN.
- petercooper 17y ago
  Just flag it, I did. That's what flagging's there for.
ThomPete 17y ago
I am still waiting for someone to tell me how they know the difference between what they call god and an advanced alien race tricking them into believing in them. How would you know?
- jurjenh 17y ago
  I would guess that falls into the same category as Artur C Clarke's Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic The point is essentially moot - what can you / are you going to do about it?
  - ThomPete 17y ago
    Stop believing in things that could might as well be an advanced alien race.
    - DeusExMachina 17y ago
      Or just use the "sherlock holmes" approach he mentions in the piece.
- billswift 17y ago
  Why would you care? Either they are interesting or not and helpful or not. If neither, ignore them.
- lucifer 17y ago
  That's the eternal question. According to the western religions, an entity (a certain Satan that should not be confused with yours truly :) rebelled against God precisely because he did not believe in the whole story and sought the "throne". "And remember when Abraham said, `My Lord, show me how You gives life to the dead.' God said, `Do you not believe ?' Abraham said, `Yes, but I ask this that my heart may be at ease.' God answered, `Take four birds and make them attached to thee. Then put each of them on a hill; then call them; they will come to thee in haste.' And know that Allah Is Mighty and Wise." - 2:262 - I think the interesting twist in the meme that OP is seeding is to consider whether fairly advanced species send agents to emerging species to mind fuck them into oblivion. According to OP's vision, it is not merely possible, but absolutely necessary, for us to pursue destructive technology to the point that the fate of the species can be decided by any single individual in the collective.
melito 17y ago
Smiled through the whole read. Only thing that needs to be revised is 'genetic warfare'. That is definitely not a future problem. It's a very very old one. Also, while I think "prescience" would most certainly be in god's vocabulary, I think he'd be 'ultra fashionable' and think of it's use in casual conversation as being passe. Kinda Spoiler The end reminded me of "What does Marsellus Wallace look like?"
- sliverstorm 17y ago
  This is all out of the recollection of the author in the story; if the author is the type of person to use "prescience", he could easily have injected the word in his narrative. On the other hand, if this god is what he claims to be, I imagine he'd use whatever words best conveyed his point- if he was trying to make one- and who are we to say "prescience" was not the perfect word when speaking to our narrator?
- lukifer 17y ago
  Arguably, all violence is a sort of genetic warfare. But we've yet to encounter the problem of engineered-from-scratch superviruses.
  - melito 17y ago
    I was thinking more along the lines of 'eugenics'
greenlblue 17y ago
Hilarious ending. I wonder how it would sound if a woman had the same conversation?
sliverstorm 17y ago
‘so what, exactly, makes you god?’ ‘I did’ ‘Why?’ ‘Seemed like a good idea at the time’ ^ When I read this I looked around for Douglas Adams. Rest his soul.
tpyo 17y ago
"Pat Robertson would wet himself if he actually understood who he was talking to." :D
pella 17y ago
Forum "Conversation with God" http://www.fullmoon.nu/rtpforum/phpBB2/viewforum.php?f=4 http://www.fullmoon.nu/rtpforum/phpBB2/viewforum.php?f=4 other discussions : http://www.fullmoon.nu/rtpforum/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=10 http://www.fullmoon.nu/rtpforum/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=10
euroclydon 17y ago
What is a "password association?"
- DeusExMachina 17y ago
  I think it is just the way he remembers/has selected that particular password.
- philh 17y ago
  I think it's why he chose that particular password. So if my password was lucy, the association would probably be a girl I was attracted to at the time I chose it.
- Jach 17y ago
  Fun way to generate a reasonably complex password: pick six+ words out of a favorite song, take the first letter of each word, turn to CaMeLcAsE, pick a letter or two and replace with an ascii equivalent (e.g. s becomes 5, a becomes @, etc.), and wrap it with $'s or ^'s or one of those top-row characters. $JuNa5t5$ ==> Join us now and share the software
  - ekiru 17y ago
    Wouldn't using the six word phrase most likely be a much more secure password than condensing it to a mere 8 characters?
    - Jach 17y ago
      The method's for a password, not passphrase. If more places allowed passphrases, then yeah, of course I'd go for that.
zacharypinter 17y ago
Thanks for posting this! I read it a while back and lost the link. The part that's stayed with me the most about this story is the following: "...imagine discovering a secret thought or program, accessible to any intelligent individual, which, if abused, will eliminate your species instantly." "Each and every individual in such a species must eventually become capable of destroying their entire species at any time. Yet they must learn to control themselves to the degree that they can survive even such deadly insight." What a great thought. How would our species survive if any one of us had the ability to destroy all of us. I think of this in the context of the internet. I'm strongly of the opinion that the internet should not be censored or restricted in any way. However, what if there was a way to make the equivalent of a Nuclear Bomb with low-cost, easily available materials? How would the internet handle that knowledge? What would it do to society?
- callahad 17y ago
  The simplest way would be to relinquish free will.
- ntoshev 17y ago
  Evolution halts at the point where a single individual dooms the entire population. It cannot work with a step fitness function, with no margin for error. And by evolution I mean the abstract understanding for evolution that we have, which is the core of the genetic algorithms (not just biological evolution, nor some abstract "a population getting better in something"). I think we are encountering the problem at different scale at first: some countries can destroy the entire species, then more and more countries do, then it would become possible for some large or committed enough organizations. We are learning to cope along the way, and the approach so far is to keep knowledge under covers, and not to give such powers lightly.
tom_ilsinszki 17y ago
If you start a computer program, that runs evolutionary algorithms, you become their god, and you will be omnipotent (to them, at least). It's easy to write the story off as fiction, but in fact, it would explain a lot, I think.
- GrandMasterBirt 17y ago
  to any program you write you are god. You are expecting the result of that program to behave in a specific way, the program never ran but at any point of the program you can predict what will happen to the logic of the program. But to the program you are an omnipotent god, yet in reality you may have made some mistakes, gota kill and restart see if it works better after a bug fix. The only question is: to the program, does it matter that you are god? Does it make any bit of a difference if it believes in you or not? Will the outcome change depending on that fact? Do you care if the program worships you? (unless you wrote a program to worship you)
  - tom_ilsinszki 17y ago
    That's exactly my point. I will never understand God's plans (because there is no feedback from him, or I can't sense them), so I should be focusing on the problems that face me everyday. Thus, I don't think God (if he exists) wants us to believe in him. (The same way, I don't care if a program or and ant worships or believes in me).
  - richardw 17y ago
    "The only question is: to the program, does it matter that you are god?" Well, if you program it to worry about that stuff then yes. If you don't, then no. My current program couldn't care less about me. I'm okay with that.
- sovande 17y ago
  Nick Bostrom has written a paper about just that, arguing that we may be living inside a computer simulation. It's an interesting read. See http://www.simulation-argument.com/ http://www.simulation-argument.com/
- 17y ago
olalonde 17y ago
As an atheist, I find this essay truly inspiring and would say most (if not all) predictions make lots of sense. That being said, I'm afraid that the spiritual tone employed by the author might distortion the message he really wanted to pass.
jimbokun 17y ago
"Coming to terms with the realisation that you have created your successor, not just in the sense of mother and child, but in the collective sense of the species recognising it has become redundant, this paradigm shift is, for many species, a shift too far. They baulk at the challenge and run from this new knowledge. They fail and become extinct. Yet there is nothing fundamentally wrong with them - it is a failure of the imagination." "I hope that if I can get across the concept that I am a product of just such evolution, it may give them the confidence to try." I vote for staying human, and not obsoleting ourselves. The idea of becoming like the god of this story reinforces this conviction. He reminds me of Q from Star Trek, toying with species for his own amusement, having some arbitrary conception of what makes a species worthwhile, mainly revolving around that species ability to shape the material universe around them. To me, what this story demonstrates is that Atheists are not actually opposed to God like beings. But they are scandalized by a God who does not regard technological advancement as the highest calling. They cannot possibly take a God like Jesus seriously, for example, because he was not at all concerned about correcting the scientific misunderstandings of human beings. He only cared about how people treated each other, human relationships, attitudes of the human heart, and love. For me, the verse that demonstrates Jesus nature is also the shortest in the Bible: "Jesus wept." True, he did not (and does not) always intervene to eliminate suffering and tragedy, like the being in Talking to God. But he does empathize with us, to the point he was willing to literally share in our suffering alongside us.
- GrandMasterBirt 17y ago
  an incorrect assessment. As an atheist I believe that the concept of god as put forth by religious is ridiculous. That is all. God is invisible to all senses, his logic completely defies our logic, knows all bug gives us free will (um a contradiction), the sun revolves around the earth (oh wait that was only discarded 30 or so years ago). The point is a religion that does not teach "treat all human beings regardless of believes or values as human beings and as your own people, try to figure out what is right and what is wrong together rather than impose values from an ancient book and it's infinite interpretations on everyone. As a human being you can make mistakes but you must take responsibiltiy for them." or something to that extent. Since I have yet to see one religion state this I cannot subscribe to any religion nor can I believe any notions of god. Remember the notion of "god" is christian/muslim/jewish. Other religions believe in many gods, or spirits, or something that is not quite what our "god" is. Who is to say that "god" is what I should believe in, vs "gods" of the hindus, etc.
joe_the_user 17y ago
Actually, if a man who came up to me and went as far towards "proving" he was God as this fellow did, I would immediately grab him by the lapels and start scream "you fucking bastard, what the hell do you think you're doing, can't you see the fucking suffering your causing..." and continue the rant for as long as he would take it... Maybe that's why "God" hasn't come to me...
- kirse 17y ago
  If you believe in free will, God couldn't be causing any of the suffering to happen. People have been given the complete choice to do whatever they please, and this world is a product of that. This world's suffering is our own. Allowing something to happen != causing Secondly, who are you, in your own infinitesimally small amount of knowledge, to question an omniscient, omnipotent being?
  - ugh 17y ago
    You do know that much of human suffering is not caused by humans? Earthquakes, viruses and all that stuff. Oh, yeah, death, too, of course. But I wouldn't be very mad at god because of that. I also wouldn't respect him very much. I'm pretty blind to the suffering of animals or sometimes even other humans (I was much more shocked when I heard about the death of my grandpa than when I heard about the earthquake in Haiti). So I can understand his perspective. But god doesn't exist anyway, so this point is pretty moot. Also: omniscient and omnipotent? Does not compute.
    - kirse 17y ago
      But god doesn't exist anyway, so this point is pretty moot. Well then, it is solved! And to think, we've been wondering all these years! I hope your open-mindedness and skepticism (forgive me if I'm wrong, but I believe science is one of the biggest champions of this quality), translates well into your other pursuits for knowledge.
      - ugh 17y ago
deleted 17y ago
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rmorrison 17y ago
Amusing read. The one thing that broke the suspension of disbelief was the Velociraptor reference, which was based off of a movie and not history (God would know the difference). http://dinosaurs.about.com/od/dinosaurbasics/a/velofacts.htm http://dinosaurs.about.com/od/dinosaurbasics/a/velofacts.htm : "There's no evidence that Velociraptor hunted in packs" and "Velociraptor wasn't the smartest dinosaur of the Cretaceous period"
- oconnore 17y ago
  "(God would know the difference)." I frequently refrain from nitpicking when dealing with children ("yes, the internet is how robots talk to each other"). It wouldn't be too much to expect an omnipotent being to do so as well.
- baddox 17y ago
  This may help restore suspension of disbelief: just because we don't have any evidence doesn't mean this "god" is wrong.
ssp 17y ago
This reminds of a "proof of God" that appeared (I think) in Seven Ages of Madness by Svend Aage Madsen: If God exists, then there must be some way to realize what the true religion is. Some hint or pointer that would make it clear, and this hint would be available to all humans. Some people would not understand it, or ignore it, but everywhere in the world, a few people would choose to follow the correct religion. There are many religions in the world, but only one is universal: non-belief. In some places they are few and far between, but everywhere you find a few people who don't believe in God. For all other religions there are places in the world where that religion is simply not present. But every place has a few people who don't believe. These people must have correctly understood God's hint. Hence, if God exists, atheism is the true religion.
raquo 17y ago
Ah. This is so much in the "I want to believe" dept. :/
olliesaunders 17y ago
Just in case people are still wondering, this is one of many articles under the heading "Fiction?" in the on site's sidebar.
- artagnon 17y ago
  Yes. I found that this one to be especially good though.
sovande 17y ago
What broke the argument and suspense for me was that there was no explanation of the Fermi paradox. With 14 million type 2 and 3 civilizations and billions on our level he need to address that paradox for the story to be interesting.
- ericwaller 17y ago
  I think it was implied that the type 2 and 3 civilizations are intentionally avoiding us.
joeycfan 17y ago
Superior. Thanks for this.
crazydiamond 17y ago
Silly of the author not to let God finish about the "thinking machine". Looks like God wanted to explain, but time ran out. Anyone have any thoughts on it.
deleted 17y ago
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jrockway 17y ago
Possibility One was that I was dreaming or hallucinating. Nobody’s figured out a test for that so, at the time I think that was my dominant feeling. Actually, there is a pretty good test for this. Look at your digital watch, look away for a bit, and look again. If the digits are different between checks, you are dreaming. I'm told that this happens with enough regularity that it's a fairly reliable universal dream-test. (There are also others; google "lucid dreaming".) The most effective test for me has been trying to jump out of my window. If it doesn't hurt (I live on the 16th floor...), then I must be dreaming. This is probably a bad strategy if you take hallucinogenic drugs, however :)
- JshWright 17y ago
  I just tried your first test... and the digits were indeed different... (the last two digits, in particular). I guess that means I'm dreaming?
  - jrockway 17y ago
    No, it just means you're a pedant.

156 points by artagnon 17y ago

Thought-provoking, and I say that as a Christian. It also reminds me of my favorite short story: http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html

ax0n 17y ago
Also Christian, and I found it to be a clever bit of fiction, really. Well-written, entertaining. Also, thanks for that link :)
- mambodog 17y ago
  Funny, thats just how I feel about the old testament...
  - godDLL 17y ago
    Really? Not to offend the persuasion of any attendees (I do mean that, stop reading if your rage is easily focused), but did you try the Hebrew version? I have studied it, as part of my education, along with ancient Hebrew laws and such. The writing is unclear, terrible at times, poetic at times; the language is so simple as to appear broken. And nearly all of the story, morals, message, or poetic meaning you take away is your own,– because of how broken Biblical Hebrew is. Whatever you take away will end up being a by-product of you studying it, not a direct product. Some 10+ years since, I can still read Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic, and I'm still not sure there was any direct product in there. So much so, that I call modern spoken Hebrew which is somewhat loosely based on Biblical Hebrew, – I call it Jibberish in my own mind, with a `j'. Like the one in Jihad, or "sacred struggle"; something inspired by—but completely unrelated—to the original scripture. And the King James is even better still, having been translated to English from Greek by a German man. Particularly the Revelations is—at times—absolutely 4chan material, I find. EDIT: ^holy\ war^sacred\ struggle
    - hackoder 17y ago
      Nitpick - Jihad does not translate (in its original arabic) to "holy war". It translates to "struggle".
    - calcnerd256 17y ago
      For someone who studied Scripture in its original language, you've still managed to hit my pet peeve of pluralizing the title of the scroll of Disclosure.
      - godDLL 17y ago
        That's the part that I didn't study, it's the Christian part. It has no Hebrew source/prototype; the original is in Greek (AFAIK), and not taught in the Migdal Emeq boarding school for boys (as it is a jewish school). EDIT: I read some King James for the shear lulz. And lulz to deliver it has.
    - gruseom 17y ago
      And the King James is even better still, having been translated to English from Greek by a German man What? That's not true at all. It was translated by a committee of English scholars and clergy. It is also a landmark of literature and history that contains some of the finest English ever written.
      - godDLL 17y ago
        Ooh, look, I am being wrong on the Internet. I am now ashamed to have remembered this incorrectly. Thank you for pointing out my error, I'll be sure to double check things I have only passing familiarity thereof in the future. But you could have provided a link, like this one: http://www.av1611.org/kjv/kjvhist.html http://www.av1611.org/kjv/kjvhist.html EDIT: I'm not being sarcastic up there. I'm being sarcastic below here. EDIT: and the historical/literary value remark is just plain balls. "And they had hair as the hair of women, and their teeth were as the teeth of lions. And they had breastplates, as it were breastplates of iron; and the sound of their wings was as the sound of chariots of many horses running to battle. And they had tails like unto scorpions, and there were stings in their tails: and their power was to hurt men five months." If that's not balls I don't know what is.
  - ax0n 17y ago
    That's alright. All the really good shit happens in the New Testament.
- donaq 17y ago
  Out of curiosity, what would your reaction be if you found that it wasn't fiction? Would you accept the entity the author was conversing with as God? Or would you think he was a demon? Or just an advanced godlike alien being beyond which another, more powerful entity exists in the unknowable (kinda hard, since this being created the entirety of our reality).
  - artagnon 17y ago
    > advanced godlike alien being beyond which another, more powerful entity exists It all depends on how tight one's definition of God is. If it's very rigid, anything they encounter in the real world except something that sufficiently satisfies all the attributes of a textbook-God (read: Jesus, Mohammed, Krishna) including physical appearance wouldn't qualify as God.
    - klipt 17y ago
      Muhammad never claimed to be a god, but a prophet of the Jewish and Christian god.
  - ax0n 17y ago
    If it wasn't fiction? Here's the thing: I might be open to the prospect of a humanoid 30-something white guy talking to me being an apparition of God. But I really don't get hung up or terribly passionate about things like all the laws in Leviticus, or whether certain stories are 100% literal or metaphors. Maybe I'd ask, but it wouldn't impact my faith one way or the other, really. And if it turned out that the guy who said he was God was just a telepathic, shape-shifting alien? Meh. A lying alien. Big whoop.
    - donaq 17y ago
      It's not a telepathic, shape-shifting alien, it's an omnipotent alien that created the universe and implies that there is no reality higher than this. Would that impact your faith? Assuming for the sake of argument that he's not lying, would you think that a) he's God, b) he's mistaken, there's a higher reality over which God presides or c) there is no God.

yannis 17y ago

Interesting and well written. However, being an agnostic I offer this: From A Scientific Rationale for Belief in God http://www.vexen.co.uk/religion/God_AI.html http://www.vexen.co.uk/religion/God_AI.html >I present here a concise rationale for the existence of God. The work of Ray Kurzweil and other artificial intelligence researchers is critical to my thesis. An entity (computers or humans, it not mattering which) will eventually become all-knowing. How much time passes before what is likely to be a rapid convergence to all-knowing is not important...

donaq 17y ago
I stopped reading when the author made a leap in logic from superhuman intelligence to omniscience, and then from omniscience to time travel just within the abstract. This was obviously not a well thought out piece.
- eagleal 17y ago
  I didn't read it just because he says that Kurzweil is critical to his thesis.

Herring 17y ago

tldr: fiction. I closed the tab when he started talking about dinosaurs not having respect for other life.

tybris 17y ago
> tldr: fiction The title says "Talking to god". You didn't seriously expect...?
- gjm11 17y ago
  Perhaps he expected a scientific study of what happens in people's brains when they think they are talking to God, or some statistics relating the things people think God has told them with their own prior beliefs, or something of the kind. Perhaps he expected an account of how someone met with someone else they admired/feared so much that it was like talking to God.
  - Groxx 17y ago
    Perhaps he skimmed the title too quickly, and thought it said "Talking to Dog". Around the dino part, he realized that the dog shouldn't be talking, and rejected the article.
- Herring 17y ago
  Tell that to the billions of religious people. I don't even know what I expected. Maybe something real, seeing as it was so high on HN.
petercooper 17y ago
Just flag it, I did. That's what flagging's there for.

ThomPete 17y ago

I am still waiting for someone to tell me how they know the difference between what they call god and an advanced alien race tricking them into believing in them. How would you know?

jurjenh 17y ago
I would guess that falls into the same category as Artur C Clarke's Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic The point is essentially moot - what can you / are you going to do about it?
- ThomPete 17y ago
  Stop believing in things that could might as well be an advanced alien race.
  - DeusExMachina 17y ago
    Or just use the "sherlock holmes" approach he mentions in the piece.
billswift 17y ago
Why would you care? Either they are interesting or not and helpful or not. If neither, ignore them.
lucifer 17y ago
That's the eternal question. According to the western religions, an entity (a certain Satan that should not be confused with yours truly :) rebelled against God precisely because he did not believe in the whole story and sought the "throne". "And remember when Abraham said, `My Lord, show me how You gives life to the dead.' God said, `Do you not believe ?' Abraham said, `Yes, but I ask this that my heart may be at ease.' God answered, `Take four birds and make them attached to thee. Then put each of them on a hill; then call them; they will come to thee in haste.' And know that Allah Is Mighty and Wise." - 2:262 - I think the interesting twist in the meme that OP is seeding is to consider whether fairly advanced species send agents to emerging species to mind fuck them into oblivion. According to OP's vision, it is not merely possible, but absolutely necessary, for us to pursue destructive technology to the point that the fate of the species can be decided by any single individual in the collective.

melito 17y ago

Smiled through the whole read. Only thing that needs to be revised is 'genetic warfare'. That is definitely not a future problem. It's a very very old one. Also, while I think "prescience" would most certainly be in god's vocabulary, I think he'd be 'ultra fashionable' and think of it's use in casual conversation as being passe. Kinda Spoiler The end reminded me of "What does Marsellus Wallace look like?"

sliverstorm 17y ago
This is all out of the recollection of the author in the story; if the author is the type of person to use "prescience", he could easily have injected the word in his narrative. On the other hand, if this god is what he claims to be, I imagine he'd use whatever words best conveyed his point- if he was trying to make one- and who are we to say "prescience" was not the perfect word when speaking to our narrator?
lukifer 17y ago
Arguably, all violence is a sort of genetic warfare. But we've yet to encounter the problem of engineered-from-scratch superviruses.
- melito 17y ago
  I was thinking more along the lines of 'eugenics'

greenlblue 17y ago

Hilarious ending. I wonder how it would sound if a woman had the same conversation?

sliverstorm 17y ago

‘so what, exactly, makes you god?’ ‘I did’ ‘Why?’ ‘Seemed like a good idea at the time’ ^ When I read this I looked around for Douglas Adams. Rest his soul.

tpyo 17y ago

"Pat Robertson would wet himself if he actually understood who he was talking to." :D

pella 17y ago

Forum "Conversation with God" http://www.fullmoon.nu/rtpforum/phpBB2/viewforum.php?f=4 http://www.fullmoon.nu/rtpforum/phpBB2/viewforum.php?f=4 other discussions : http://www.fullmoon.nu/rtpforum/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=10 http://www.fullmoon.nu/rtpforum/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=10

euroclydon 17y ago

What is a "password association?"

DeusExMachina 17y ago
I think it is just the way he remembers/has selected that particular password.
philh 17y ago
I think it's why he chose that particular password. So if my password was lucy, the association would probably be a girl I was attracted to at the time I chose it.
Jach 17y ago
Fun way to generate a reasonably complex password: pick six+ words out of a favorite song, take the first letter of each word, turn to CaMeLcAsE, pick a letter or two and replace with an ascii equivalent (e.g. s becomes 5, a becomes @, etc.), and wrap it with $'s or ^'s or one of those top-row characters. $JuNa5t5$ ==> Join us now and share the software
- ekiru 17y ago
  Wouldn't using the six word phrase most likely be a much more secure password than condensing it to a mere 8 characters?
  - Jach 17y ago
    The method's for a password, not passphrase. If more places allowed passphrases, then yeah, of course I'd go for that.

zacharypinter 17y ago

Thanks for posting this! I read it a while back and lost the link. The part that's stayed with me the most about this story is the following: "...imagine discovering a secret thought or program, accessible to any intelligent individual, which, if abused, will eliminate your species instantly." "Each and every individual in such a species must eventually become capable of destroying their entire species at any time. Yet they must learn to control themselves to the degree that they can survive even such deadly insight." What a great thought. How would our species survive if any one of us had the ability to destroy all of us. I think of this in the context of the internet. I'm strongly of the opinion that the internet should not be censored or restricted in any way. However, what if there was a way to make the equivalent of a Nuclear Bomb with low-cost, easily available materials? How would the internet handle that knowledge? What would it do to society?

callahad 17y ago
The simplest way would be to relinquish free will.
ntoshev 17y ago
Evolution halts at the point where a single individual dooms the entire population. It cannot work with a step fitness function, with no margin for error. And by evolution I mean the abstract understanding for evolution that we have, which is the core of the genetic algorithms (not just biological evolution, nor some abstract "a population getting better in something"). I think we are encountering the problem at different scale at first: some countries can destroy the entire species, then more and more countries do, then it would become possible for some large or committed enough organizations. We are learning to cope along the way, and the approach so far is to keep knowledge under covers, and not to give such powers lightly.

tom_ilsinszki 17y ago

If you start a computer program, that runs evolutionary algorithms, you become their god, and you will be omnipotent (to them, at least). It's easy to write the story off as fiction, but in fact, it would explain a lot, I think.

GrandMasterBirt 17y ago
to any program you write you are god. You are expecting the result of that program to behave in a specific way, the program never ran but at any point of the program you can predict what will happen to the logic of the program. But to the program you are an omnipotent god, yet in reality you may have made some mistakes, gota kill and restart see if it works better after a bug fix. The only question is: to the program, does it matter that you are god? Does it make any bit of a difference if it believes in you or not? Will the outcome change depending on that fact? Do you care if the program worships you? (unless you wrote a program to worship you)
- tom_ilsinszki 17y ago
  That's exactly my point. I will never understand God's plans (because there is no feedback from him, or I can't sense them), so I should be focusing on the problems that face me everyday. Thus, I don't think God (if he exists) wants us to believe in him. (The same way, I don't care if a program or and ant worships or believes in me).
- richardw 17y ago
  "The only question is: to the program, does it matter that you are god?" Well, if you program it to worry about that stuff then yes. If you don't, then no. My current program couldn't care less about me. I'm okay with that.
sovande 17y ago
Nick Bostrom has written a paper about just that, arguing that we may be living inside a computer simulation. It's an interesting read. See http://www.simulation-argument.com/ http://www.simulation-argument.com/
17y ago

olalonde 17y ago

As an atheist, I find this essay truly inspiring and would say most (if not all) predictions make lots of sense. That being said, I'm afraid that the spiritual tone employed by the author might distortion the message he really wanted to pass.

jimbokun 17y ago

"Coming to terms with the realisation that you have created your successor, not just in the sense of mother and child, but in the collective sense of the species recognising it has become redundant, this paradigm shift is, for many species, a shift too far. They baulk at the challenge and run from this new knowledge. They fail and become extinct. Yet there is nothing fundamentally wrong with them - it is a failure of the imagination." "I hope that if I can get across the concept that I am a product of just such evolution, it may give them the confidence to try." I vote for staying human, and not obsoleting ourselves. The idea of becoming like the god of this story reinforces this conviction. He reminds me of Q from Star Trek, toying with species for his own amusement, having some arbitrary conception of what makes a species worthwhile, mainly revolving around that species ability to shape the material universe around them. To me, what this story demonstrates is that Atheists are not actually opposed to God like beings. But they are scandalized by a God who does not regard technological advancement as the highest calling. They cannot possibly take a God like Jesus seriously, for example, because he was not at all concerned about correcting the scientific misunderstandings of human beings. He only cared about how people treated each other, human relationships, attitudes of the human heart, and love. For me, the verse that demonstrates Jesus nature is also the shortest in the Bible: "Jesus wept." True, he did not (and does not) always intervene to eliminate suffering and tragedy, like the being in Talking to God. But he does empathize with us, to the point he was willing to literally share in our suffering alongside us.

GrandMasterBirt 17y ago
an incorrect assessment. As an atheist I believe that the concept of god as put forth by religious is ridiculous. That is all. God is invisible to all senses, his logic completely defies our logic, knows all bug gives us free will (um a contradiction), the sun revolves around the earth (oh wait that was only discarded 30 or so years ago). The point is a religion that does not teach "treat all human beings regardless of believes or values as human beings and as your own people, try to figure out what is right and what is wrong together rather than impose values from an ancient book and it's infinite interpretations on everyone. As a human being you can make mistakes but you must take responsibiltiy for them." or something to that extent. Since I have yet to see one religion state this I cannot subscribe to any religion nor can I believe any notions of god. Remember the notion of "god" is christian/muslim/jewish. Other religions believe in many gods, or spirits, or something that is not quite what our "god" is. Who is to say that "god" is what I should believe in, vs "gods" of the hindus, etc.

joe_the_user 17y ago

Actually, if a man who came up to me and went as far towards "proving" he was God as this fellow did, I would immediately grab him by the lapels and start scream "you fucking bastard, what the hell do you think you're doing, can't you see the fucking suffering your causing..." and continue the rant for as long as he would take it... Maybe that's why "God" hasn't come to me...

kirse 17y ago
If you believe in free will, God couldn't be causing any of the suffering to happen. People have been given the complete choice to do whatever they please, and this world is a product of that. This world's suffering is our own. Allowing something to happen != causing Secondly, who are you, in your own infinitesimally small amount of knowledge, to question an omniscient, omnipotent being?
- ugh 17y ago
  You do know that much of human suffering is not caused by humans? Earthquakes, viruses and all that stuff. Oh, yeah, death, too, of course. But I wouldn't be very mad at god because of that. I also wouldn't respect him very much. I'm pretty blind to the suffering of animals or sometimes even other humans (I was much more shocked when I heard about the death of my grandpa than when I heard about the earthquake in Haiti). So I can understand his perspective. But god doesn't exist anyway, so this point is pretty moot. Also: omniscient and omnipotent? Does not compute.
  - kirse 17y ago
    But god doesn't exist anyway, so this point is pretty moot. Well then, it is solved! And to think, we've been wondering all these years! I hope your open-mindedness and skepticism (forgive me if I'm wrong, but I believe science is one of the biggest champions of this quality), translates well into your other pursuits for knowledge.
    - ugh 17y ago

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rmorrison 17y ago

Amusing read. The one thing that broke the suspension of disbelief was the Velociraptor reference, which was based off of a movie and not history (God would know the difference). http://dinosaurs.about.com/od/dinosaurbasics/a/velofacts.htm http://dinosaurs.about.com/od/dinosaurbasics/a/velofacts.htm : "There's no evidence that Velociraptor hunted in packs" and "Velociraptor wasn't the smartest dinosaur of the Cretaceous period"

oconnore 17y ago
"(God would know the difference)." I frequently refrain from nitpicking when dealing with children ("yes, the internet is how robots talk to each other"). It wouldn't be too much to expect an omnipotent being to do so as well.
baddox 17y ago
This may help restore suspension of disbelief: just because we don't have any evidence doesn't mean this "god" is wrong.

ssp 17y ago

This reminds of a "proof of God" that appeared (I think) in Seven Ages of Madness by Svend Aage Madsen: If God exists, then there must be some way to realize what the true religion is. Some hint or pointer that would make it clear, and this hint would be available to all humans. Some people would not understand it, or ignore it, but everywhere in the world, a few people would choose to follow the correct religion. There are many religions in the world, but only one is universal: non-belief. In some places they are few and far between, but everywhere you find a few people who don't believe in God. For all other religions there are places in the world where that religion is simply not present. But every place has a few people who don't believe. These people must have correctly understood God's hint. Hence, if God exists, atheism is the true religion.

raquo 17y ago

Ah. This is so much in the "I want to believe" dept. :/

olliesaunders 17y ago

Just in case people are still wondering, this is one of many articles under the heading "Fiction?" in the on site's sidebar.

artagnon 17y ago
Yes. I found that this one to be especially good though.

sovande 17y ago

What broke the argument and suspense for me was that there was no explanation of the Fermi paradox. With 14 million type 2 and 3 civilizations and billions on our level he need to address that paradox for the story to be interesting.

ericwaller 17y ago
I think it was implied that the type 2 and 3 civilizations are intentionally avoiding us.

joeycfan 17y ago

Superior. Thanks for this.

crazydiamond 17y ago

Silly of the author not to let God finish about the "thinking machine". Looks like God wanted to explain, but time ran out. Anyone have any thoughts on it.

deleted 17y ago

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jrockway 17y ago

Possibility One was that I was dreaming or hallucinating. Nobody’s figured out a test for that so, at the time I think that was my dominant feeling. Actually, there is a pretty good test for this. Look at your digital watch, look away for a bit, and look again. If the digits are different between checks, you are dreaming. I'm told that this happens with enough regularity that it's a fairly reliable universal dream-test. (There are also others; google "lucid dreaming".) The most effective test for me has been trying to jump out of my window. If it doesn't hurt (I live on the 16th floor...), then I must be dreaming. This is probably a bad strategy if you take hallucinogenic drugs, however :)

JshWright 17y ago
I just tried your first test... and the digits were indeed different... (the last two digits, in particular). I guess that means I'm dreaming?
- jrockway 17y ago
  No, it just means you're a pedant.