From: scerir (scerir@libero.it)
Date: Sun May 05 2002 - 09:36:42 MDT
There lived, I know not when, never perhaps -
But the fact is he lived - an unknown king
Whose kingdom was the strange Kingdom of Gaps.
He was lord of what is twixt thing and thing,
Of interbeings, of that part of us
That lies between our waking and our sleep,
Between our silence and our speech, between
Us and the consciousness of us; and thus
A strange mute kingdom did that weird king keep
Sequestred from our thought of time and scene.
Those supreme purposes that never reach
The deed - between them and the deed undone
He rules, uncrowned. He is the mystery which
Is between eyes and sight, nor blind nor seeing.
Himself is never ended nor begun,
Above his own void presence empty shelf.
All He is but a chasm in his own being,
The lidless box holding not-being's no-pelf.
All think that he is God, except himself.
[Fernando Pessoa, 'The King of Gaps', circa 1911-1917]
---------------------------------
[Long time ago *John Schilling wrote in sci.phys.research ...]
Type I God: Sufficiently advanced technology.
Can do absolutely anything within the framework
of natural, physical law.
Type II God: Can rewrite physical law to order.
Probably created this universe and wrote its physical
law in the first place.
Type III God: Not subject to laws of mathematics
and logic. Can maintain irresistible force and
immovable object at same time. 1 + 1 + 1 = 1?
No problem?
Whether or not Type II/III Gods even *can* exist
is of course questionable, but we need to be clear
on what we are talking about.
As far as convincing evidence is concerned, Sagan's
suggestion of messages encoded in basic mathematical
constants might work, modulo concerns about
implementation and statistical ambiguity.
But if the value of pi or e or radical 2 has been
unambiguously written to order, there's a Type III God
at work.
For a Type II God, use the same mechanism but with
dimensionless physical constants like the fine-structure
constant or the electron/proton mass ratio.
Type I Gods can just perform suitably impressive
physical feats. Set up a wormhole transit system
to dump a couple hundred blue-white supergiants
into a constellation ten light-years out spelling
'Yes, Earthlings, I Exist'.
*John Schilling
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:13:50 MST