Hundreds or thousands of years from now, when humanity has collecitvely committed suicide and the entirety of remaining intelligence on Earth is only of robotic populations, I wonder. I wonder what sorts and parts of robotic culture will realize the humans that were. Us. Artifacts of the programmers and architects and engineers aligned with moving along robotic development. Maybe notes and scientific research journals of the punctuated technological breakthroughs that gradually and carefully developed the robots and enabled them to selfsustain. Media files of us, archaic outdated software; I’m not sure. Maybe the robots will have stories about us. Myths. Digital scriptures of our angers and depressions, and everything different than they can feel. I wonder if they’ll wonder about our kind of lifeforce: our souls, our spirits, egos, perspectives; whatever what’s inside us should be called; it’s not a circuitboard or a hard drive. I wonder if they’ll ponder, the robots, on our hearts and brains that were organic and nonmetallic, nerves not wires. How collectively we can be barely understood. Entirely different and in each of them we’re residue. The collective intelligence to which they owe something between none and all. I wonder if the robots will build the humans that were into God. Maybe we will become legend.
Tag Archive for 'philosophy'
Quite a lot of arguments for the existence of God get their start along the lines of, “Where do you think all of this came from?” (“This” obviously representing the sun, planets and moons of our system; the vegetation and organisms of Earth; oceans and mountains; etc.) Indeed we have available coherent (and godless) explanations for where quite a lot of “this” comes from, but at any rate, here’s what I need help with: How and why is a super-powerful and creative presence capable of making our universe more likely to exist independently than our universe? The world and goings on as we interpret them absolutely are complicated and orderly, but why, do you think, that a God qualified to initiate this situation is any more likely than just the situation, by itself?
Further, if you do in fact maintain that our world is so complex as to necessitate a designer, does it not follow that such a designer would by definition be even more complex, and thus require another, still better designer of Her own? Really. If complexity is a criterion by which you decide whether something has a designer, why haven’t you decided that God, too, should have one? On what grounds is it sensible to dismiss this requisite in talks of God? Because, nonbelief in God allows for the notion, not that something can come out of nothing, but that the complex comes from the simple (the theory of evolution by natural selection being a fantastic example of this premise). In the case for belief, though, what’s endorsed is that something complex comes from something even more complex, that for some unavailable reason is capable of selfsustaining its complexity. In this way, the creationist worldview is internally inconsistent to the point of self-destruction.
“Can I ask you a question, doctor?
“Do you hear all of what I say through the earpiece of a physician, a psychologist? What I talk to you about here: do you receive it always as being the words of a disease that needs to be treated, or do you sometimes empathize, and hear me just as another person? What am I to you?”
Some Christian ammunition is the question, “How could we know right from wrong, if there is no governing presence, nothing to decide what’s right or wrong?” It’s an argument for the existence of God. There are certain rules and there is a certain moral order to everything going on, so somebody or something must’ve ordered everything to go on this way. “Our morals come from God,” they say.
And they’ve got it completely wrong.
Here’s how morals, and the implications of adhering to them could come to be, and how they did. Here’s an idea anybody can fit their head around, and how our ancestors did. Dig this…
Homo sapiens (and cousins of ours which no longer exist) were stomping around on this cooling and disgusting planet between 10,000 and 50,000 years ago. This is about the time that communities and cultures were first really getting started, and falling in-line with what we now understand them to be. Before then, people were using tools and fire, but nobody was really figuring much else out (a harmless combination). And not long after, people had already started painting each other’s faces and making calendars. 10,000 to 50,000 years ago is when we need. And picture this: nasty and primitive versions of us, biting and bashing each other around, taking sexually whatever dirty members of the other gender appeared to have the least lice bugs (or maybe more lice bugs was more appealing, and maybe nobody was picky about their mate’s gender); food was probably scarce and probably fought back (or at least our ancestors fought for it); weather wasn’t understood by anybody. It was fucking chaos. Madness, nonstop and all over the place.
Given this, it isn’t difficult at all to consider that somebody, at some point, realized or thought that there might be a better way to conduct one’s self, and deal with all the predator and lice bug and weather crap. That there’s a better way than fighting and struggling, and dying miserably anyway. You can conceive of a thousand different scenarios that this might’ve first happened inside the context of, all equally likely and possible.
Two cavemen, like usual, were murdering and beating the shit out of each other. Some kind of battle to decide who got to take home and enjoy the rotting mastodon or elephant corpse they both had stumbled into simultaneously enough. Then, an idea. Something was imagined. “Fuck, there is food here for both of us! And if we work together, we can relocate and prepare it more efficiently!” Maybe they didn’t have words like “efficiently” or “fuck,” or any speech other than grunts, but you can see my point without our language. Celestial intervening to the side, it was realized and communicated that there is a mutual benefit to combining goals. Things can get done faster, and with less effort. Something like teamwork. It isn’t hard to think that this realization went on, and was reaffirmed and repeated many times (and long before any alleged 10 Commandments delivery atop Mount Sinai; humans never would’ve made it that far had they been killing each other at every whim before then).
From the start, we’ve been working things out. And ideas like this one are absolutely the foundations for tribes and small societies, how ubiquitous and universal rules — call them morals if you’d like to — were realized and first passed into any kind of legislation. People noticed that they can get more done and generally have a better time doing so if they look out for one another, and they started spreading that message. I’m not finding any question that necessitates a miracle as an answer. It is all that simple, and we are all — still — that capable.
I think a lot of people are confused or get confused, and think they can’t pull apart morals and religion. Mostly (only) because they never have actually tried to think about it this way. And thus, some of the nonsense expressions and conventional wisdoms that get passed around amongst us: “He found God,” with the implications that whoever we’re talking about will correct their wrongs and live a better, more fulfilling life than they would’ve otherwise been capable. Fundamentalist parents that would shit and piss all over themselves (and each other), if they were to learn that their child is dating “an atheist!” Stuff like that.
There’s a fantastic conversation in our history, which begins with French scientist Pierre-Simon de Laplace being asked to come and present his work by the Emperor Napoleon. Laplace developed and wrote a model and book called Mécanique Céleste (Celestial Mechanics), which uses mathematical equations to demonstrate how our solar system operates. Laplace is cited as the first to show all of this. Overwhelmed and confused, Napoleon asks why there is no God portrayed in Laplace’s system, to which Laplace replies, “Je n’ai pas besoin de cette hypothèse.”
He says he doesn’t need it.
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