Lincoln_Cannon comments on Beyond the Reach of God - Less Wrong

66 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 04 October 2008 03:42PM

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Comment author: Lincoln_Cannon 04 October 2008 08:47:45PM 2 points [-]

"What can a twelfth-century peasant do to save themselves from annihilation? Nothing."

She did something. She passed on a religious meme whose descendents have inspired me, in turn, to pass on the idea that we should engineer a world that can somehow reach backward to save her from annihilation. That may not prove possible, but some possibilities depend on us for their realization.

A Jewish prophet once wrote something like this: "Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord: And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse." The Elijah meme has often turned my heart toward my ancestors, and I wonder whether we can eventually do something for them.

Unless we are already an improbable civilization, our probable future will be the civilization we would like to become only to the extent that such civilizations are already probable. The problem of evil is for the absolutely omnipotent God -- not for the progressing God.