Any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God

Scientific American ^ | 1/7/02 | Michael Shermer

[Aurelius]

"Religions sincerely devoted to God will be strengthened by science, never weakened."

Religeon and science are distinct ways of looking at the world. They have nothing to do with one another. One confusion results from what I believe is an erroneous view that science can tell us something about the ultimate nature of reality. That scientific theories tell us what some aspect of the world is like "in reality", while in fact, they only provide an imperfect and incomplete model of that aspect of the world.

[TigersEye]

Just as we have no need of mathematics to add one and one, as we can directly visualize the answer.

True. But,...
The difference between God and created beings is, to God 1+1=1.

[jejones]

A brief online search turned up no death date for Clarke, and I've seen nothing about your other claims; could you cite a source?

[Joe Slobonavich]

I had logic in college. I drove my logic teacher a little of the deep end.

I can imagine, since you seem to have failed to grasp the logic that proves that the statement "Any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God" cannot be false.

If you were to present an ETI that CAN be distinguished from God, the author can dissmiss it, because your ETI is clearly not "sufficiently advanced," so his original assertion does (and must) remain true.

[onedoug]

#117: Though it took Bertrand Russell, in his Principia, some 400 pages to rigorously prove that 1+1=2.

[Aurelius]

"...to God 1+1=1."

I'm afraid I don't follow.

[js1138]

That scientific theories tell us what some aspect of the world is like "in reality", while in fact, they only provide an imperfect and incomplete model of that aspect of the world.

Whereas religion gives us a perfect and complete view of the world???

Which is why, perhaps, that members of various competing religions have been killing each other throught history???

[mindprism.com]

Creation is the process God works through to maintain perfection.

Chickens are how eggs make other eggs.

God is the egg and reality is the chicken, this is a bit better than the smoke ring analogy, but what I'm implying with both is that God is 'inside out' right now, IN or UNDER reality not OUTSIDE it.

Its like when your genes build your body and brain, they get all the benefits of evolution to tell them HOW to build it, but once it is ALIVE and LIVING and CONCIOUS its basically hands off from the genetic level, like a programmer is hands off with his chess program once it is running.

So reality is God either cloning or transmuting Himself.

[Aurelius]

My comments were with regard to science, I made no comparison to religion.

[jejones]

Ah...I may have found one of your sources for the allegation of pedophilia: a British tabloid, the Sunday Mirror. Looking at the Sunday Mirror web site tends to make me think it has all the reliability of US tabloids.

Also, I see a Reuters article quoted on USENET dated January 5, 2002, saying that Clarke has just turned 84, which would seem to imply that he's alive. It's certainly possible he's died in the past two days, but I'd think there'd be some word of it on the net.

[JimVT]

I commend to everyone's attention (without saying I buy every bit of it) the statements of Seth, an "energy essence personality" who offered what I consider to be some really common-sense ideas about who we are, our "souls", our "eternal validity" and a lot of other stuff in about 10 books delivered by Seth through Jane Roberts (now deceased)

I'm sure this statement will stimulate that usual anti-God crap but check it out at Seth

[Aurelius]

"Though it took Bertrand Russell, in his Principia, some 400 pages to rigorously prove that 1+1=2."

I may be wrong, but I would doubt that "1 + 1 = 2" is a proposition in Principia Mathematica.

[onedoug]

I thought it was, in Russell's.

I also thought to goof on Fermat's "Last" Theorem, but can't manage the HTML. Oh, well....

[jejones]

Trust me, it is; the proposition and its proof are in Volume 2. (The "400 pages" is all the preceding material, not just the proof of 1 + 1 = 2.) I don't have a copy of all of PM (I wish I did, but it's $800 or so!), but I do have the paperback with the first 56 chapters, and near the end is a proposition, "if a and b are elements of 1 and disjoint, then a union b is an element of 2" (remember, R&W use the Frege definition of the cardinal numbers, in which n is the set of all sets with n elements, though of course the definition is framed to avoid circularity!). R&W comment that this proposition will be used later to prove that 1 + 1 = 2.

[KayEyeDoubleDee]

So how come we first "invent" an area of mathematics and only subsequently "discover" that it describers Nature

I would argue that historically this is not the order of these two events. It is only recently that a few obscure areas of mathematics have been shown to have physical "manifestations". For instance, I read recently about an example involving the Banach-Tarski paradox.

[backup]

Imagine what Charles Babbage would think of my abilty to look at a colored piece of glass and utilize the computational resouces of the internet - he might consider it omniscient

Actually, I don't think he would.

He'd recognize it as a very impressive machine. But certainly not 'magic'.

Indeed, I have always disagreed with Arthur C. Clarke's "second law". The only people who mistake a phenomona for 'magic' are those who believe in magic. The others will always look for an explanation and try to figure out how it works.

[jejones]

That scientific theories tell us what some aspect of the world is like "in reality", while in fact, they only provide an imperfect and incomplete model of that aspect of the world.

You left out the part about the models being replaced with better ones as time goes on. This is a major advantage of science over religion.

[Aurelius]

I'm no expert on the Principia, never cracked it for that matter, except maybe to see what I looked like. But it's hard for me to see how they could have defined 2, except essentially as 1 + 1.

As for Fermat's last theorem, God, of course, could have checked that out case by case. You don't have to check it for all powers, only for 4 and the primes.