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"A sufficiently advanced Artificial Intelligence would be indistinguishable from God." (Way Of The Future - AI Church)
by rsiqueira 6y ago
"A sufficiently advanced Artificial Intelligence would be indistinguishable from God." (Way Of The Future - AI Church)
- mensetmanusman 6y agoThat would require the AI to exist outside of time and space.
- drusepth 6y agoWell, this relies on the assumption that a God also inherently exists outside of time and space, which is debatable even among religious scholars.
- sudosysgen 6y agoI just had a discussion with a friend about this! It's indeed a very difficult question. We ended on the conclusion that God can't possibly exist outside of time and space in the Abrahamic tradition because he precedes the creation of the Universe, but I'm sure there's a twist we missed somewhere.
- lolive 6y ago“God is dead” Marilyn Manson.
- da39a3ee 6y agoHm. Nietzsche would seem to be in the lead there.
- lolive 6y agoWho?
- 015UUZn8aEvW 6y agoFirst as tragedy, then as farce.
- drdeca 6y agoI'm confused, because that seems backwards to me? How can He exist within time and space if He created the universe (including time and space)?
- sudosysgen 6y agoThe conclusion we came to is that such a being would have to have it's own, metaphysically superior, time and space, and our time would be a subtime of it as well as our space would be a subspace of it. The concept of a being subject to causality presupposes something akin to time.
- complexmango 6y agoNo. The concept is that there is an infinite, indescribable void from which emerges consciousness manifested in matter. And conscious matter creates universes constantly, that appear out of the void, hence creating time and space. This would also imply that its possible not only to change the future, but also the past. The masters advise, however, that these are distractions and that the journey inevitably leads to experiencing the void itself, hence stepping out of time and space, and consciously experiencing any aspect of time and space and consciousness one wishes to, while always remembering that one is beyond it.
- sudosysgen 6y agoI was referring specifically to Abrahamic religion, though of course what you say can be right in other spiritualities.
- drdeca 6y agoAh, ok. My thought is to distinguish between “logically prior” or “causally prior” or something like that, and “prior in time”, But, I suppose one might consider those things to be a kind of “time” in some sense.
- chubs 6y agoThe answer i've read is that he _logically_ precedes it, not _temporally_. But yes that only makes a tad more sense :)
- sudosysgen 6y agoHmm, I'd be interested to see how one could define logical causality without accidently defining something that has all of the properties of time!
- FeepingCreature 6y agoThat's a distinction without a difference though.
- ben_w 6y agoThere is a potential difference, I think. Consider if this universe exists only as a simulation (I’ve met some theists making this category of comparison but with different language). The laws of physics are identical in both directions for the arrow of time, so the starting point of the simulation from the point one view of the outside universe can be any point in time from the perspective of the inhabitants. In this case, the “before” in the outer universe is a logical rather than temporal one from the point of view of us inhabitants. (Disclaimer: my philosophy qualification is really bad)
- sudosysgen 6y agoWell yes, from our point of view. But I'd understand that there still must be something like time from the point of view of those that wrote the simulation.
- fpoling 6y agoOne cannot define the notion of “exist” without explicitly or implicitly referring to time. So the question of existence without time reduces to absurdity like can one exist without existing?
- drdeca 6y agoHuh? How is it necessary to speak of time when discussing whether there exists e.g. a solution to a set of equations? Or whether there is a finite simple group with given number of elements, or the like?
- fpoling 6y agoDoes the solution to an equation exist before one stated the equation? Does a particular phrase exist before one has written it? Does it continue to exist after all its copies were erased? And even if one answers positively to such questions based on a belief (it is not provable), like "yes, they always exist", one has to define what "always" means.
- drdeca 6y agoTheir existence is not at all dependent on such things. (Note that I didn’t use the word “always”.) If the answer to a question of “Why [...]_1?” would be “Because there is a [...]_2 such that [...]_3 .”, then there is such a [...]_2 such that [...]_3 . (Possible exception : if “because you asked that question” would be part of the answer.)
- mensetmanusman 6y agoGod is simply existence and love. Love exists outside of time and space :)
- FeepingCreature 6y agoAll the love I've ever seen exists firmly inside of time and space.
- complexmango 6y agoThere is an in depth explanation in Zen, Buddhism and Hinduism of this phenomenon. I would suggest reading anything by Nisargadatta Maharaj, who expanded on this in detail to questioners from all over the world who came to his humble dwellings in a Mumbai tenement to observe him. I’d suggest starting with ‘I am That’, available on Amazon, iBooks etc. He claimed to be outside of time and space himself.
- dqpb 6y agoAnybody can say anything
- endtime 6y agoActually, it would just require that you can't tell whether or not it does.
- scoopertrooper 6y agoFrom the perspective of a human observer, an AI more or less does exist outside of space and time. It can travel at the speed of light through radio broadcast (with some caveats). It can spend the equivalent of a lifetime learning a topic in just a few days.
- sockpuppet_12 6y agoBut if you unplug the machine its running on, its over.
- pyhtel 6y agoAssuming the AI isn't a distributed system, sure
- mensetmanusman 6y agoThat is a plot of a novel. Humanity has to restart the entire global electrical grid to deal with an AI worm that accidentally causes epoch ending havoc :)
- Octopodes 6y agoWhich novel?
- Cthulhu_ 6y agoI think you could actually argue that it does; it just solved a problem in a relatively short amount of time (iirc the folding@home project has been crunching numbers for over a decade and barely got close), and it doesn't occupy 'real' space since it lives on various computers - it could occupy a whole datacenter, or be contained to a single chip, either way it's in a scale that humans themselves can never exist at.