"A call to arms"

[Guest MarKo.mk]

If we're capable, as complex as it may be, it is possible. So you're telling me its impossible that in the last 5 billion odd years of this universe's existence, a sentient being that far exceeds our currently basic human comprehension has evolved or intelligently designed itself (thats what we're going to do with ourselves with stemcells, isn't it?) to become over thousands of years "super-intelligent" and may only be hindered by the speed of light? (in which case it will only take a couple of million years to saturate the universe anyway).

I'm not watching Sci-Fi, I'm reading science every day on SciAm, New Scientist, and PhysOrg.

We're building quantum/photonic and biological computers. We're modifying DNA real-time with viruses. We're building self-replicating nano-structures. We're close (50-100 years) to replicating sentience with AI and technology. We're about to scan the genome of the entire world.

If it took us 25,000 years to go from building fires to intelligently designing our genome, why can't it happen in every galaxy in the universe? Why can't this happen? Why isn't it possible for it to already have happened?

Why can't I call a supremely intelligent being GOD???

[Mudder]

Are you into Scientology?

[Guest emp_newb]

omfg. Lock this please god. I got bothered over arguing. If this goes to Scientology I swear I will burn down a pet store.

[Twinblades713]

If this goes to Scientology I swear I will burn down a pet store.

I wouldn't mind. What have pets ever done for me?

[Mudder]

Why does Scientology offend you?

[Guest MarKo.mk]

Hahaha.

No dude. I'm not a ****ing scientologist. I'm not making this **** up.

These are the views of preeminent technologists and scholars around the globe from Carnagie Mellon (Kurzweil, Moravec) to Cambridge (Aubrey de Grey) .

Nanotechnology, genetics and artificial intelligence will incomprehensibly change our world.

[Pali]

Yes, it is possible (at least, by our understanding... it is also possible that it is impossible, and our models just don't reflect that reality).

Gods are also possible (again, by our understanding).

That something is possible does not give it credence. Until there is evidence, there should not be acceptance.

[Guest MarKo.mk]

We know too little to discount it. Humanity is in it's infancy.

Madly shouting God doesn't exist is no less insane than shouting God MUST exist.

[Guest emp_newb]

Bye Thread

Love always,

Emp_Newb

[Guest MarKo.mk]

I like your quote Pali, by the way.

It reminds of something the physicist Freeman Dyson said in an interview concerning global warming. He's convinced we're completely overreacting. Also brings to mind very many quotes by Sir Arthur Clarke.

[Mudder]

Gods are also possible (again' date=' by our understanding).[/quote']

What understanding are you talking about? Nothing, period, points to any possibility of any sort of God existing.

[Pali]

What understanding are you talking about? Nothing' date=' period, points to any possibility of any sort of God existing.[/quote']

By our understanding, the possibility exists that our understanding is wrong. Therefore, under that possibility, the possibility that gods exist lies.

[Pali]

We know too little to discount it. Humanity is in it's infancy.

Madly shouting God doesn't exist is no less insane than shouting God MUST exist.

Which is why I do no such thing. I don't define a god and then say he doesn't exist. I let other people define the gods they believe in and then I tell them why I don't think they are justified in that belief.

[Guest MarKo.mk]

That's perfectly reasonable.

I think we're in total agreement, we just vary on the amount of mental exertion we're willing to use in the argument for the existence of [a] supreme being(s) (not bound by preconceived religious notions).

There's more important things to worry about, like not destroying ourselves with thermo-nuclear war, replicating nano-machines, engineered super-viruses, etc. etc.

[Pali]

I see no reason to argue FOR them... that is why I argue against the notion as being rational. I call people on positions that I think are irrational and based on insufficient evidence. Giving them a chance to argue their case is the only way I can tell if I should accept it or not.

[Guest MarKo.mk]

Oh yeah, and killing terrorists wherever they may lie.

Pew pew!!

[Mali]

From Nabakov's Pale Fire:

KINBOTE: Yet disobeying the Divine Will is a fundamental definition of Sin.

SHADE: I cannot disobey something which I do not know and the reality of which I have the right to deny.

KINBOTE: Tut-tut. Do you also deny that there are sins?

SHADE: I can name only two: murder, and the deliberate infliction of pain.

KINBOTE: Then a man spending his life in absolute solitude could not be a sinner?

SHADE: He could torture animals. He could poison the springs on his island. He

could denounce an innocent man in a posthumous manifesto.

KINBOTE: And so the password is -?

SHADE: Pity.

KINBOTE: But who instilled it in us, John? Who is the Judge of life, and the Designer of death?

SHADE: Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.

KINBOTE: Now I have caught you, John: once we deny a Higher Intelligence that plans and administrates our individual hereafters we are bound to accept the unspeakably dreadful notion of Chance reaching into eternity. Consider the situation, Throughout eternity our poor ghosts are exposed to nameless vicissitudes. There is no appeal, no advice, no support, no protection, nothing. Poor Kinbote's ghost, poor Shade's shade, may have blundered, may have taken the wrong turn somewhere - oh, from sheer absent-mindedness, or simply though ignorance of a trivial rule in the preposterous game of nature - if there be any rules.

SHADE: There are rules in chess problems: interdiction of dual solutions, for instance.

KINBOTE: I had in mind diabolical rules likely to be broken by the other party as soon as we come to understand them. That is why goetic magic does not always work. The demons in their prismatic malice betray the agreement between us and them, and we are again in the chaos of chance. Even if we temper Chance with Necessity and allow godless determinism, the mechanism of cause and effect, to provide our souls after death with the dubious solace of metastatistics, we still have to reckon with the individual mishap, the thousand and second highway accident of those scheduled for independence Day in Hades. No-no, if we want to be serious about the hereafter let us not begin by degrading it to the level of a science-fiction yarn or a spiritualistic case history. The idea of one's soul plunging into limitless and chaotic afterlife with no Providence to direct her -

SHADE: There is always a psychopompos around the corner, isn't there?

KINBOTE: Not around that corner, John. With no Providence the soul must rely on the dust of its husk, on the experience gathered in the course of corporeal confinement, and cling childishly to small-town principles, local by-laws and a personality consisting mainly of the shadows of its own prison bars. Such an idea is not to be entertained one instant by the religious mind. How much more intelligent it is - even from a proud infidel's point of view! - to accept God's Presence - a faint phosphorescence at first, a pale light in the dimness of bodily life, and a dazzling radiance after it? I too, I too, my dear John, have been assailed in my time by religious doubts. The church helped me to fight them off. It also helped me not to ask too much, not to demand too clear an image of what is unimaginable. St. Augustine said -

SHADE: Why must one always quote St. Augustine to me?

KINBOTE: As St. Augustine said "One can know what God is not; one cannot know what He is." I think I know what He is not: He is not despair, He is not terror, He is not the earth in one's rattling throat, not the black hum in one's ears fading to nothing in nothing. I know also that the world could not have occurred fortuitously and that somehow Mind is involved as a main factor in the making of the universe. In trying to find the right name for that Universal Mind, or First Cause, or the Absolute, or Nature, I submit that the Name of God has priority.

[Pali]

Kinbote's entire argument is an appeal to consequences, resting entirely on the idea that a godless universe would be undesirable therefore it cannot be the case. Logical fail.

If God is unimaginable or undefinable, believing in him means believing in nothing. To believe something exists you need to have some idea of what it is. Without definition, the word god is meaningless.

[Mali]

Precisely the words you will be uttering sheepishly when confronted with the presence of the divine, Pali!

Face it man, you are jaded. You really want something to make you believe in God. It's not far off brother. Just have a little faith.

Take it from these guys:

[Pali]

If I die tomorrow and end up before your God, I will have no qualms in asking of it why I should have believed in it when it had given me no good reason to do so. Faith is not a good reason to believe anything. It is making an answer up and believing it because you want to. Not because you have good reasons to.

P.S. That song sounds horrible acoustically. But then, I tend to hate songs that get made for a full group to be playing and then have acoustic versions come out - it wasn't designed for just guitar, don't play it that way.

[Pali]

Last post, then I must go to work... just want to expand on something I said a little, as it is important.

"If God is unimaginable or undefinable, believing in him means believing in nothing. To believe something exists you need to have some idea of what it is. Without definition, the word god is meaningless."

Words are just labels we put on ideas so that we can communicate those ideas to each other. If your definition for the word "god" is different from my definition of the word "god", then when you say god to me I am misunderstanding your intended meaning. Now, the basic definition of god I use when discussing the subject is an omnipotent, omniscient, and at least somewhat benevolent intelligence that created the universe. If god to you is anything more or less than this, then I need you to define the word god for me as you use it else it is impossible for me to ever understand what you are talking about. As of yet, you have given no definition for the word "god", so I have serious trouble even understanding what it is that you think exists... I've had hour-long discussions with people before finally realizing that they use God to mean something much more like the Force than an intelligent agency of any kind, and that wastes our time because we're arguing against different straw men.

[J.Twendrist]

Regardless of the metaphysics of it, the raw fact that billions of people believe in the God of Abraham (the God of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam) makes him exist. This is so because in the mind of each and every one of those people God is as real as oxygen. Perception produces reality, and each one of those people have a reality that includes God... and they outnumber you.

[Pali]

Back when almost everyone believed the Earth to be flat, did that make it so for them, or were they all simply WRONG?

I am of the position that an objective reality independent of human (or any other) observation exists. What we think about reality does not influence how it actually is.

[Mudder]

Well said Pali. ****, stop beating me to these replies. Let's share the role of token atheist! Sheesh.

[One Way Up]

I'm glad this post turned has turned how to be quite popular. It's pretty interesting hearing eveyone's views. Not to mention the fact that my vocabulary is being bolstered by reading some of your posts. Some of it reminds me of the Architect, from the Matrix.