From: Samantha Atkins (samantha@objectent.com)
Date: Sat Sep 16 2000 - 13:51:59 MDT
Spudboy100@aol.com wrote:
>
> Not to get holy-roller on anyone here, but I agree with Samatha's conjecture
> that if there is no God, then there is certainly room for one in a Universe
> that includes suffering. What Samantha gets when she "recieves a lift" from
> reading certain religious tracts is one of the religious experiences
> described by 19th century psychologist Willam James. Having a God module is
> good if it connects one up with a sense of a better ethical system. If it
> leads only to the Inquisition torture chamber, then it's a bad bet. So I am
> talking 'outcomes' here.
>
I don't particular get a lift from religious tracts. Not most of them
anyway. There is a lot of drivel in that field and a lot of
second,third and fourth hand stuff. Only a few mystic texts, stories,
quotes hit the right buttons that connect with whatever this is and then
not always. But the buttons get pressed sometimes quite spontaneously
and out of the blue. Other times I notice that my thoughts turned along
certain lines and/or certain emotions reified along certain directions
or a semi-lucid dream invoked a pattern - then it is off to the races.
Often it will be fired by things that appear to have zero religious
content.
The first time I remember it happening was when I was 5 years old. I
was examining a common everyday clothespin, the kind with the coiled
spring and the two pieces of wood. I was fascinated by its design and
action. As I played with it my mind ran around the loops of its spring
and its levers. Suddenly I "grokked" it. That kicked a whole sheaf of
images and understandings about different pieces of physics, properties
of metals, usages of those properties and principles, possible
inventions, implications, on and on it flew while I quite lost track of
"me". Most of it was in concept/picture/feeling/intuition form I had no
words for at all at that age and barely grasped the tiniest part of as
it flew threw me. And overarching all of it was this transcendent
being-ness. I remember/falling sitting down very hard and fast as I had
been standing when this happened. When it was over I tried to invoke it
again but I could not. Very powerful and haunting.
> Ultimately, it may turn out that some advanced primate species (humans) once
> had a God module as part of their brain, and it helped them develop computers
> that colonized the cosmos, which in the end leads to an ultimate Mind (God)
> which fixed things that needed fixing (since it has ultimate computing power)
> and help resurrect people such as Samantha! This is more inspired from a
> reading of Julian Barbour (The End of Time) as well as Tipler and Barrow's
> Final Anthropic Principle. Talk amongst yourselves, i'm getting ver-klempt!
> (sob!)
I think everyone here has one thing in common with many sincerely
religious people. That is the deep burning desire to transcend human
limits. It is a core leitmotif in humanity and has come out (much more
profitably and cleanly at last) in science and technology as well as in
religions. I remember when I first heard the word "omniscient" when I
was 10 or 11. I didn't think of it as some impossible attribute of some
impossibly remote being, real or imagined. I thought of it as simply a
reasonable and exciting goal. But it was definitely another key that
drew me inexorably to computers when the opportunity came along some
years later.
Ever play with the notion that somewhere in this Universe some species
of intelligent being may well have kicked off a Singularity and created
one or more Singularity class intelligences? If they did who is to say
that such Powers may not occassionally tickle the minds and cultures of
developing species with ideas/images/memes leading to the creation of
others of their kind and/or preparing for the acknowledgement of the
existing ones? For that matter are we totally certain that our own
Singularity will never have the ability to reach backward in time and
influence the smoothness and particulars of its own becoming? What if
some of the trascendent glimmerings of what most call God or Void or
whatever are actually forebodings and/or backward or external reachings
of such? Wildly speculative I know. Probably impossible to test or
falsify. But something I can't rule out.
It might even be a key useful in understanding and even pulling into
some cooperation the world's religions.
- samantha
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