From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Thu Apr 23 1998 - 04:45:12 MDT
"neosapient@geocities.com" <neosapient@geocities.com> writes:
> if god existed he would _not_ be "nice", just look at this deathist
> planet and universe. Being omnipotent = being responsible for all that
> happens.
Actually, this might not be clear. The ethics of creation is tricky.
If I start a huge game of life simulation, I cannot predict exactly
what will happen and while I am omnipotent from the perspective of the
simulation (I can change any state at any point in the run) I would
have a hard time determining the eventual outcome unless it was very
simple and obvious. I expect the same for other creators (be they
omnipotent entities, posthumans playing with planet-sized cellular
automata machines or myself at my workstation); they cannot be held
responsible for the individual events in their creations, although
they are responsible for the creation as a whole. It might be
impossible to prevent nasty (from the perspective of inhabitants)
events without constantly intervening and wrecking the autonomy
of the created world.
Isn't it fun that we are soon going to face theodicy problems
ourselves? :-)
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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