From: Brett Paatsch (bpaatsch@bigpond.net.au)
Date: Fri Aug 29 2003 - 00:35:50 MDT
Caution: My following comments are not intended
seriously. Playfully only.
Robert J. Bradbury <bradbury@aeiveos.com> writes
To: <extropians@extropy.org>
Sent: Friday, August 29, 2003 9:33 AM
Subject: Re: g**gle is also a calculator
>
> On Thu, 28 Aug 2003, Damien Sullivan wrote:
>
> > If google can be broken, google is not god.
This reminds me of a question posed by maternal grandfather
(not for the first time I'm sure) and despite being a theist so far
as I could tell.
If God can do anything can God make a rock so heavy he
cannot lift it.
A bit glib in a way but it gets at the essential contingent nature
of the world as we experience it. What is light without dark.
Pleasure without pain. Victory without struggle. Heroism and
nobility without the freedom to fall short of such.
One could refrase as Damien S does, that indeed if google can
be broken, google is (by most notions) not god.
>
> Aha, so google is a Meta-God. Given how "broken"
> the current reality is (people starving, global warming,
> oil spills, yada, yada, yada) clearly it is not perfect.
Not so Robert. Not if we are to engage sportfully in the the weaving
of economical plausible myth, a passtime that I'd hold has been
a rationalising function since time immemorium.
The theist does not need to posit many worlds merely two. On in
which all that appears nasty and petty in this one (merely half of the
whole) stands as a challenge to heroism and nobility of character
in its participants. It is not, so far as can see that suffering and
hardship cannot be part of a best of all possible world it is only that
these things cannot be mitigated. Simply posit as some religions do
that there is an acounting at the end of ones life and that justistice is
metered out before one is usured into the alternate half of the universe
with appropriate karmic adjustments for good and bad performance
and you have a system (it seems to me) where all suffering and struggle
can be a means of elevating and promoting that which is good and
noble within us. This world alone cannot be the best of all possible
worlds, but this world plus just one other, not multiple others would
seem to permit a situatiuon where karma can carry across the two
worlds and real heroism and nobility can exist perhaps precisely
because we cannot know that justice is done in the one necessary
other world. Yet justice *could* be done in that one other world.
Just a simple playful musing, from an amateur mixer and melder of
myths. But one in which all things including evil things in part of a
world could be seen as good to god if they stimulated complexity and
if all pain is mitigated in this world is mitigated or justified in that
other
world and is part of the necessary challenges of this one.
> And all that stuff about the apple and falling from grace
> -- that is just a rationalization from when we were
> completely clueless as to what might really be going on.
> So clearly its an experiment to discover the one perfect
> future (just like Trance says in Andromeda).
>
> So, GOOGLE, is not a god -- *YET*. But anyone who
> knows the contents of 3,307,998,701 web pages is pretty
> darn close in my book.
Ah Robert, I think, you give too much credit too easily :-).
>
> I wonder if the tipping point is when Google becomes
> more perfect than reality?
Now theres some terms "perfect" and "reality" begging some
definintion :-)
>
> And if anyone saw the Tonight show rerun last night with
> Jay Leno interviewing two young people regarding some
> reasonably common facts (that they were clueless about)
> the tipping point is far far closer than most people on the
> list would suspect.
>
> Forrest didn't have it quite right. Instead of "Stupid is as
> stupid does", it should instead be "Stupid is as stupid is".
Didn't see the show so ya lost me in the last bit about the
"tipping point".
"Stupid is as stupid is" *is* pretty hard to argue with ;-)
Regards,
Brett
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