Topic: Metaphysics
I am a committed Atheist. No doubt about it. I don't believe in a God or Gods or an theistic notions. With that said, I now must tell you that some recent ideas about the subject intrigue me.
Lets assume I'm right and there is no God. Question then becomes...well can there come to be a God? Furthermore, if there can be an actualization of a God, can we create this God?
This is what some physicists have proposed. Frank Tipler being one of the most prominent. He argues that computer technology can eventually bring about a self-aware, all-powerful, all-knowing-everywhere-at-once being in the far future. And WE would facilitate it, by what we're doing now. Namely, advancing the age of computer technology, like the one I'm using now to writing this blog. We in effect become the phenotype that gives rise the genotype that is God. What? Wait a minute? right? It reminds of the verse from Simon and Garfunkel: And the people bowed and prayed to the neon God they'd made. Its not a new idea in form. It is new in content. See what they are proposing is not that we, like mad scientist, make a God, but by our actions, deterministically a Supreme Intelligence will emerge.
What Tipler, Wheeler and other physicists like them propose is actually anti-entropic. It implies as storage space on virtual machines and their ability to be in computational states (computer power) grows, that something like intelligence will emerge. But statistical mechanics teaches us in any closed system that has constituent parts, increases its entropy over time. Example: if you have a frozen block of ice in a chamber and heat it, the water will melt and the application of heat will release them from the molecular bonds and they will become a gaseous mixture, randomly colliding atoms that are in a statistical state that is much less organized than they were in the state of being frozen. Their entropy will have increased. It will have increased due to the application of heat. We could reverse this process by an expenditure of energy to freeze them again. But, the 3rd law of thermodynamics expounds that in any closed system (like our universe), as time flows, entropy (disorganization) increases.
Now, with that said, what these guys are saying is anti-entropic, and I like it!
We can create a state of matter, whereby knowledge increases. We can make an artificial realm in which there is processing power and storage space that increases to near infinity and thus make a being that is what we might call a God. We would have to use energy to do this no doubt. We would have to constrain the closed system from the effects Thermo-3 for sure. But, if we could create an intelligence that is what I call OOO (Omnipotent, Omnipresent, Omniscient) would be possible. And we would be its progenitors. What better place to do this than in a computer.
If this is possible we really make our own God. Beautiful right? Uh, beautiful maybe no?
I mean if we make this God, then it would be like the one in religious myth too right? It would know we made it, right? It might become an evil God and want to punish us with fire or a flood or just wipe us out and start again and all that shit..... Ahh man...
Wait! Lets bring a little Hindu philosophy in. In Hinduism, Brahman is the univeral life spirit that is distributed amongst all existence. Lets say our new super-intelligence is not an OOO that we made and must be, by logic subjugated to, but we are all a part of it!!!! Yes, we are all a part of the OOO. We would lose our individual states of being and hook-up with so speak, with the infinite intelligent being. And moreso, the infinite would be just as much in need of our existence as we are of it? It would not be a logical contradiction either, since remember we brought it about. The OOO would only be such if it comprised its constituencies in its manifestation.
Of course, there would some jerk saying: well if you pay $19.95 now you can have all the pleasure of OOO...don't wait! Act now!!!!