Polymeron comments on The Neglected Virtue of Scholarship - Less Wrong

177 Post author: lukeprog 05 January 2011 07:22AM

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Comment author: Polymeron 05 January 2011 03:35:56PM 4 points [-]

Ooh, I like that one. Call it the "sweet spot" theory of intelligent design - things of high enough complexity must be designed, but only if they are under a certain complexity, at which point they must be eternal. (And apparently also personal and omnibenevolent, for some reason).

At any rate, this would all be nice and dandy were it not completely arbitrary... Though if we had an agreed upon measure for complexity and could measure enough relevant objects, we might possibly actually be able to devise a test of sorts for this.

Well, at least for the lower bound. Seeing as we can't actually show that something is eternal, the upper bound can always be pushed upwards a-la the invisible dragon's permeability to flour.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 05 January 2011 04:55:38PM 11 points [-]

(And apparently also personal and omnibenevolent, for some reason).

Well, if it's eternal and sufficiently powerful, a kind of omnibenevolence might follow, insofar as it exerts a selection pressure on the things it feels benevolent towards, which over time will cause them to predominate.

After all, even humans might (given enough time in which to act) cause our environment to be populated solely with things towards which we feel benevolent, simply by wiping out or modifying everything else.

The canonical Christian Hell might also follow from this line of reasoning as the last safe place, where all the refugees from divine selection pressure ended up.

Granted, most Christians would be horrified by this model of divine omnibenevolence; the canonical version presumes an in-principle universal benevolence, not a contingent one.