Comment on Rationality Quotes October 2013

Wed, 16 Oct 2013 13:23:12 GMT

Science of Mind hypothesizes a god with no personality. While this god goes much less far beyond the laws of physics, it goes a bit beyond them in that the hypothesis is of an infinite intelligence underlying the universe, of which human intelligences are a part or manifestation, like a drop of water in the ocean. For me, this leads me to the idea that there may be laws of consciousness that are part of the laws of physics, but which we just haven't figured out yet, just as radiation and quarks and so on were all there long before they were investigated well enough to have their laws categorized. When I attended such a "church," I referred to it as my atheist church. The pastor seemed a little uncomfortable with this, but contained himself.

The idea that personality is weaknesses and defects, I think is wrong. It seems more like a mental illness than a hypothesis to me. But there seems some useful content. Personality is part of how we manage a very finite model of a very large world. We need to do this to be effective because our minds are finite. And so Adams is right that an infinite intelligence, an intelligence whose horsepower had not run out before it comprehended the entire universe, would not need a model of the universe which was less complex than the universe itself.

WHen I attended this "church," I conceived the Universe as a gigantic intelligence, running a simulation of the universe. In fact it seems that it must be conceived this way, or rather that it can be. How does the electric field KNOW to evolve the way it does? The universe in some sense has been built to produce that result, just as we might build a specialized computer to simulate the electric field if we wanted a very fast highly detailed simulation. The universe has been built exactly as complex as it needs to be to simulate all the laws of physics, but no more complex. And all it does is simulate them. We are Hanson's ems, except it is not only our minds that are emulated, it is everything about us.

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