A couple short stories on the matter:
Is there a god? (Less than a page, but says it all)
Dwan Ev ceremoniously soldered the final connection with gold. The eyes of a dozen television cameras watched him and the subether bore throughout the universe a dozen pictures of what he was doing. He straightened and nodded to Dwar Reyn, then moved to a position beside the switch that would complete the contact when he threw it. The switch that would connect, all at once, all of the monster computing machines of all the populated planets in the universe – ninety-six billion planets – into the supercircuit that would connect them all into one supercalculator, one cybernetics machine that would combine all the knowledge of all the galaxies. Dwar Reyn spoke briefly to the watching and listening trillions. Then after a moment’s silence he said, “Now, Dwar Ev.” Dwar Ev threw the switch. There was a mighty hum, the surge of power from ninety-six billion planets. Lights flashed and quieted along the miles-long panel. Dwar Ev stepped back and drew a deep breath. “The honor of asking the first question is yours, Dwar Reyn.” “Thank you,” said Dwar Reyn. “It shall be a question which no single cybernetics machine has been able to answer.” He turned to face the machine. “Is there a God?” The mighty voice answered without hesitation, without the clicking of a single relay. “Yes, now there is a God.” Sudden fear flashed on the face of Dwar Ev. He leaped to grab the switch. A bolt of lightning from the cloudless sky struck him down and fused the switch shut. (Fredric Brown, “Answer”) www.roma1.infn.it/~anzel/answer.html
Or
The Last Question - Isaac Asimov
Earthman_Jim@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
yeah wtf… a sentient sun? First of all, how do we know the sun isn’t sentient? And if it was/is why assume it would give a shit about humanity?
But also wtf… Like, he’s trying to merge the sun with AI? Am I taking it too literally? He’s trying to create god? So he can ask for forgiveness for being a pedo pos?
zalgotext@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
It’s a bunch of technobabble loosely related to his harebrained scheme to launch a fuckload of solar powered AI servers into LEO.
Earthman_Jim@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
Okay, so I am taking it too literally because he’s not even trying to be accurate with the description. What a weirdo.
partofthevoice@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
“Sentience” is like this hand-waving magic word. Defined typically as the ability to experience sensations and feelings, it’s very anthropic and egocentric.
We know that life evolved on Earth, to include our own species. We know that much life on Earth has an internal sense for pain and pleasure, as well as many instinctual drives like self-preservation. We know that our species knows things, and we know that other species don’t have the same depth in their capacity to know things. We’ve demonstrated that other species don’t seem to understand the world in the same way as us humans. Yet, we’ve never quite figured out what any other species knows. We’ve never modeled their form of sentience, let alone our own. We only really know about sentience intuitively, via our own experience. We judge everything’s capacity as though it’s either less than, equal to, or greater than our own — without consideration for how something might just be different. Not higher or lower, but parallel in a way.
I don’t know what sun sentience would be like, not any more than I already know why any sentience is like, but I can say one thing for sure. Our own sentience is heavily influenced by bias: social, political, legal, economical, financial, emotional, religious, moral, and scientific bias. Peel back those layers of bias, what’s left? Sun sentience might be something like that, like a blank slate that just exists.
PointyFluff@lemmy.ml 3 days ago
The sun is not only sentient, but sapient and aware of it’s eternal damnation; be thankful you can’t hear it screaming.
partofthevoice@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
if there was a infinite line, like so:
<——sentient——sapient——>… where it marks each stage of “awareness,” where would you personally think humans go on that line?
If you think it belongs over the “sapient” point, I’d think that’s very interesting. Isn’t it also interesting that we bond most well with animals that exhibit human-like social behavior?
Earthman_Jim@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
Big tangent, but I just want to say I love this reply, and it’s a great example of what reddit has lost and lemmy has preserved.
Speaking of other species and knowledge, whale songs IMO are something like the dialup sound we used to hear when our internet went over the land line. Apparently they can hear each other from an ocean away as well. Whales may have entire religions for all we know. It’s fascinating to think about, and they’re right here on this planet with us; the Sun only knows what else is out there.
eronth@lemmy.world 3 days ago
He probably used AI to generate a mission statement for the merged company.
hector@lemmy.today 3 days ago
Any sort of universal god would not care about the daily life of bacteria on a piece of dust in an unimaginably larger system.
Earthman_Jim@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
exactly
hector@lemmy.today 3 days ago
Yeah it’s a coin toss whether they would want to check us out further, or use the galactic form of chlorine on the area.
But odds are they would neither specifically know nor care. In likelihood I imagine there is other life, and not all based on carbon and water. There could be life on gas giants, even on suns, based on completely different chemical interactions.
partofthevoice@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
I disagree completely, and I am not a believer in any god. You care about things as a human, but (should a god exist) don’t you think it a step too far to assume a gods experience would be anything at all like our own? Whether it cares or doesn’t may be the wrong question entirely — too anthropic of a question. Even if it did have the human sense of care in its faculty of psychology, something that entirely be a social construct, then wouldn’t it equally so be arrogant to assume what a creator does/not care about? A creator might care a lot about you, and sees suffering as some kind of tough love… who the hell can say? The universe could be infinite, and that could simply be a preference in design. Who the hell can say?
God isn’t our enemy, whether or not it exists. Our enemy is the people who claim to speak for god.
hector@lemmy.today 3 days ago
What I’m trying to say is I believe in the utterly indifferent god. It likely neither knows nor cares about us. We would go to church about it, but what’s the point?
We do not have all the answers, and we should accept that, from our position on this speck of dust in the unimaginably larger system we live amongst, we should just embrace that we don’t know everything, despite the experts telling us affirmatively the age and size of the universe as if they could know, or the religious leaders espousing ideas the age of reason has proven to be wrong.
Part of wisdom is accepting what you don’t, and what you can’t know.
I don’t really disagree with much of what your responded with however. Creator is a nebulous term. Creating biological machines that evolve to meet their conditions become rather removed from those creators if separated by unimaginable large distances between solar systems. There is no way any being seeding life would survive to watching it evolve over billions of years, even if some form of transport could break the speed of light, which I believe to be impossible.