Hi all, It is obvious to me that the true functionality of God has gone unnoticed here. Regardless of your religion or lack thereof, we and the world in which we live are the product of, at minimum, >150 million years of evolution. Systems are more nearly perfect than most people give them credit for.
God is SO much more than just a placeholder. Where would you go to find people who fail to appreciate the intricacy of our operation? On an AGI forum of course, where they think they can spend a year or two and program up a computer that is intelligent by our very advanced standards. One of my "discoveries" in DrEliza was that it is MUCH easier to understand the cause-and-effect chains of malfunctions than it is to understand the "substrate" (us) in which those chains reside. So, when approaching a new subject, how should unknowns best be handled? As though they are being INTELLIGENTLY controlled, or at least were INTELLIGENTLY created, as the substrate of reality is SO much more complex than are its anomalies, even though it seems completely obvious to our semi-scientific minds that this is NOT the case. If you presume the correctness of "Intelligent Design", you will be MUCH closer to the reality of our world than presuming God is just a placeholder. Of course, if you drill down deeply enough in any subject you will eventually get past this to actually understanding the detailed processes that are involved, but that is an approach best left to the NEXT century as research ever so slowly fills our voids in understanding. Let's take what may be THE perfect example - our own central metabolic control systems (CMCS): The internal operation of these may well transcend the mental capacity of human minds to EVER fully understand, but it will take decades/centuries of additional research to get anywhere near even being able to address this issue. However, simply presuming them to be infinitely intelligent (though completely ignorant of modern research) has yet to fail in predicting their responses to various interventions. Really major malfunctions, like tumors, are immediately fatal. Our CMCS seems to have an understanding of process control methodologies that is at least that of a PhD control systems engineer, e.g. they keep records forever, try experiments, gradually introduce new methods, red tag malfunctioning components, etc., etc. So, where would you start in dealing with apparent malfunctions in something that seems to be infinitely intelligent? Until I came alone, all efforts were concentrated on hormone-related malfunctions, etc, with occasional rare successes. However, presuming their apparent malfunction to be the result of a reasoned decision brings up questions like "What would make an intelligent system to do THAT?" and "What sort of situation would cause such an intelligent system to rethink such a decision?" Once you start looking, the situation that precipitated the bad decisions are found, and new situations can be devised that would convince even YOU that the control methodology should be changed. In short, you have a highly intelligent opponent within you, who is doing everything it can to continue doing things badly. Who is that opponent? Satan? Where did he come from? God? Of course a competent control systems engineer would know better than ask such silly questions, but how can this be explained to someone who didn't take that year in college? Further, even a competent control systems engineer would rather dispense with trying to deal with the knowledge of HOW such an intelligent systems works, in favor or simply presuming THAT it works and proceeding to "outsmart" it via external control. So, you end up with methods that bear some resemblance to Voodoo and could easily become the basis for a religion that, akin to some other religions like Scientology that has followed a similar path, actually have significant therapeutic value to correct some illnesses. Send your donations to... Steve ====================== On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 9:48 AM, Piaget Modeler via AGI <[email protected]> wrote: > For an AGI system, would "God" be an efficient placeholder for the > "unknown cause" of an event or situation? > It seems that this is what some people do when faced with inexplicable > situations that their mental model is > not sufficient to generate an otherwise plausible hypothesis? And would > this be a slippery slope? > > On the other hand, police detectives, when investigating a murder seem to > have some model of human action > and causes of death. I don't think they put "God" as a placeholder for > the cause of a death in a particular case. > > When teaching an AGI, will the world we explain to the AGI be full of > unknowns or knowns? > > Thoughts? > > ~PM > > > > > *AGI* | Archives <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now> > <https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/10443978-6f4c28ac> | > Modify > <https://www.listbox.com/member/?&;> > Your Subscription <http://www.listbox.com> > ------------------------------------------- AGI Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/21088071-f452e424 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21088071&id_secret=21088071-58d57657 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
