decot@cwruecmp.UUCP (Dave Decot) (02/14/84)
The following assertions are not guaranteed to be THE TRUTH, and you will not be cast into the lake of fire for holding contrasting viewpoints. No warranty is expressed or implied. These are speculations, but they are no less to be considered than the Book of Ubizmo, which I hold in highest regard. Perhaps God has all possible "status" information, i.e. the positions and concentration of all manifestations of energy in the universe, but does NOT really "know" everything. Perhaps he has learned everything ever learned by conscious entities, but does not know much more than the total sum. Our assignment of meaning to various patters of status information is up to us to decide, and for all of us, maybe even God, to benefit by. That is, God is reductionistically omniscient, but he does not know all the possible synthetic interpretations of the inherent information the universe contains. Perhaps he wants to learn many such interpretations. Suppose also that God can alter as much or as little as he wants of the universe's "core image" with some unknown debugging tool. It is likely that such a tool would be more usable than sdb, since we are talking about God, after all. It is to his advantage to affect only small parts at a time, since it may be difficult or wasteful to reconstruct the entire universe again for each change. Removing all hunger, war, and unhappiness from the world would cause a profound reduction in the amount of "interesting" information available. There may be better ways to end these things, and God is probably waiting until he thinks of an information preserving way. Thus, the death of one thinker is a tragedy to God. Misinformation is also a tragedy, since it confuses one of the thinkers. What God wants is healthy, clear thinkers. I am not sure whether he wants to be worshipped, although this would get in the way of innovative thinking. So, we can look on our existence as an "experiment" in the mind of God, or as "fictional characters" created by him, or as data structures in an executing program. The status information of the universe is like the electrochemical state of all the neurons in a human brain. Dave Decot "Crackpots are people, too." decvax!cwruecmp!decot (Decot.Case@rand-relay)
rpw3@fortune.UUCP (02/18/84)
#R:cwruecmp:-99900:fortune:21900010:000:568
fortune!rpw3 Feb 18 00:08:00 1984
See also Frank Herbert's trilogy "Destination Void", "The Jesus Factor",
and "The Lazurus Incident" (or is it the Jesus Incident and the Lazurus
Factor?), in which we poor humans, having created the god Ship (by making
a computer become conscious), have to suffer Ship's editing and re-playing
of the Universe while we try to figure out how to WorShip Him.
Good stuff! (Especially the first one.)
Rob Warnock
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