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I am religious and believe in free will

71 (27.6%)

I am religious and do not believe in free will

10 (3.9%)

I am not religious and believe in free will

115 (44.7%)

I am not religious and do not believe in free will

61 (23.7%)

Total Members Voted: 252

[Strongpoint]

I'm not sure if I agree with that definition, if I want to be worshiped and convince people to do so, does that make me a god? What if I have super powers? I still don't think I'm a god there, I think that'd just make me an asshole.

If you're on the usual power attributed to even e.g Greek gods... well why not? You'd be a god for all intents and purposes, if most likely a bad one.

Am I a god for a potted plant, then?

Sure, I decide its environment, its nutrition, and many other things. But there is nothing divine or supernatural in my control. Neither it is unlimited.

If the plant was sapient and you wanted to be worshiped by it, yes by my definition.

The Greeks, iirc, did not really have the same split of natural/supernatural as we do. Neither were their gods unlimited in power. And yet we call them gods.

This definition causes odd results but it's the only logical one to me honestly.

If your prerequisite of being a god is being worshipped by sapient beings, then a god that would create a universe without sapient life would be not a god at all



Also, sapience is relative. The difference between my and plant's complexity is way smaller than the difference between a hypothetical creator of the universe and me. I can't see us being sapient by the standards of such a complex entity.

This is why I found the idea of personal relations with THE GOD completely ridiculous even when I was a theist. Try having personal relations with a procaryote.

[MaxTheFox]

1. That is a corner case, an universe where only one sapient being exists is pretty moot. It's not one where we live in anyways, theism or not, so I don't concern myself with just it.
2. Well I think sapience is binary and universal. Either you have it or you don't. A plant and a bacterium are both completely non-sapient even if one is several orders of magnitude more complex so why not this? The alternative leads to more absurdities.

[Strongpoint]

Well I think sapience is binary and universal. Either you have it or you don't. A plant and a bacterium are both completely non-sapient even if one is several orders of magnitude more complex so why not this? The alternative leads to more absurdities.

I want your definition of sapience then. Binary things are usually easy to define, right?

Can you point me to the moment when humans become sapient? We all start as a single cell which is not much different from a bacterium

[Frumple]

You do have an indifferent god though. A benevolent parent doesn’t let their children suffer when it’s clear they’re incapable of looking after themselves, or indeed learning to do so.

Edit: If you take the current state of the world as an example of benevolence, I would very much never want to see what indifference would be like, wowzers.

Heh, it's basically a theology 101 example of religious language, where words like benevolence mean absolutely nothing like the general usage of the term.

There's been a fair amount of pretty interesting discussion on the subject over the years, as well as in regards to how intentional it is. Most of the major religions have gotten a lot of mileage out of the linguistic bait and switch involved, and iirc there's indication at least some of that was deliberate. Few things are better for a priest than a good god with no guarantees or actual limitations in behavior, ha.

[TD1]

Parts of the Bible read like God should be accused of war crimes.

Sending the angel of death against Egyptian children, for instance.

[MaxTheFox]

Well I think sapience is binary and universal. Either you have it or you don't. A plant and a bacterium are both completely non-sapient even if one is several orders of magnitude more complex so why not this? The alternative leads to more absurdities.

I want your definition of sapience then. Binary things are usually easy to define, right?

Can you point me to the moment when humans become sapient? We all start as a single cell which is not much different from a bacterium

The best way I can define it is, "being of a species that can learn arbitrary tasks". For AI a "species" would be a particular model. Crows, cetaceans, and great apes are arguably sapient (it's easier to disprove sapience than to prove it!) by that definition but that's within tolerances. But e.g a dog, or a snail, or a plant, or a microbe can't learn arbitrary tasks, so they're not sapient. Neither is ChatGPT-- it can't learn without spending lots of resources on retraining, first off, and second it can only generate text, not e.g drive or generate images. And it applies per species of course. I'd consider a newborn baby sapient-- and I'd consider a heavily developmentally stunted person sapient. But a pre-viability embryo is not a "being" as it cannot survive outside the mother's body so I cannot consider it anything more than a bundle of cells like a kidney.

I guess, to answer your question directly, "third trimester".

Of course there are probably some exceptions but this covers most cases. I fall back to common sense too.

[Strongpoint]

Are you sure that we, humans, can learn any arbitrary task given by an alien or divine intelligence? If yes, why?

[MaxTheFox]

Are you sure that we, humans, can learn any arbitrary task given by an alien or divine intelligence? If yes, why?

If given the necessary tools, yes. Just like a crow can learn how to crack nuts with a hammer (in fact they do it with rocks in nature, or drop them under moving cars in cities).

As for why, well the alternative would require some kind of other dimensions we can't access, or similar. But those are not proven to exist and as we understand it quantum physics does not allow for more than 3 spatial dimensions and still work the same.

I don't see any reason not to believe my assumption of "there are no physical tasks we can't do with appropriate tools", if we ever encounter some kind of superintelligent aliens I may change my opinion but for now I don't see a reason to. Occam's Razor and all.

[Strongpoint]

Are you sure that we, humans, can learn any arbitrary task given by an alien or divine intelligence? If yes, why?

If given the necessary tools, yes. Just like a crow can learn how to crack nuts with a hammer (in fact they do it with rocks in nature, or drop them under moving cars in cities).

As for why, well the alternative would require some kind of other dimensions we can't access, or similar. But those are not proven to exist and as we understand it quantum physics does not allow for more than 3 spatial dimensions and still work the same.

I don't see any reason not to believe my assumption of "there are no physical tasks we can't do with appropriate tools", if we ever encounter some kind of superintelligent aliens I may change my opinion but for now I don't see a reason to. Occam's Razor and all.

We can't teach a crow how to smelt metal from ore and make a spear, which is a physical task. It lacks the capacity to understand what this physical task means and giving it our tools won't help. Even teaching generations of crows will do nothing (as long as hardware, their brain stays the same)

Isn't it logical that a being that has as sophisticated intelligence compared to ours as ours to crow's can give us tasks we can't possibly comprehend even if we physically may do them?

[Egan_BW]

If god is benevolent then it's definition of benevolence is different from ours. In which case it is not benevolent, because the definition which matters is the one which is relevant to us. The existence of a creator god has no reason to change the foundations of our morality, which is one in which god is a dickhole.
Except maybe through intimidation. But it's clearly morally superior to flip off the asshole with a gun to your head rather than try to justify why he's right.

[Egan_BW]

We can't teach a crow how to smelt metal from ore and make a spear, which is a physical task. It lacks the capacity to understand what this physical task means and giving it our tools won't help. Even teaching generations of crows will do nothing (as long as hardware, their brain stays the same)

Please perform an experiment to prove this I want to see a crow-made spear.

[dragdeler]

Give me a lever that is long enough and I will lift the world + BF Skinner teaching all sorts animals all sorts of tricks = try again                            it is just a matter of partementalising the task adequately



When it would have sufficed to think of something that is too fast to be processed or has too many parallel processes to be processed by one or multiple human(s), to throw a wrench into the hyptothetical.

[McTraveller]

We can't teach a crow how to smelt metal from ore and make a spear, which is a physical task. It lacks the capacity to understand what this physical task means and giving it our tools won't help. Even teaching generations of crows will do nothing (as long as hardware, their brain stays the same)

Isn't it logical that a being that has as sophisticated intelligence compared to ours as ours to crow's can give us tasks we can't possibly comprehend even if we physically may do them?

Maybe - the problem is you'd have to find a new mechanism of thinking that is basically outside the realm of logic.  Humans can do all the things we do because we understand predicate logic, have generational memory, and can "compute". We have tools to evaluate all ideas against these frameworks - so I think it actually is an incorrect thinking to say that "just because we are so far ahead of prokaryotes, something could be that far above us."  We basically are machines built to assign labels to things and manage the interrelationships between labels.

To get to a state where we couldn't be capable of understanding something means it's not possible to assign labels to the thing, or its a thing that will never fit a pattern. I don't even know if there's a philosophical framework that can talk about "unlabelable" phenomena, or unrepeatable phenomena.

Note this is different from being impractical to understand something - perhaps there are so many interactions or state variables or whatever that humanity couldn't quite get all the details - but we know how to try and figure it out.

That to me is the key difference - what more is there than knowing how to figure something out? That is what a crow, say, lacks: they can use tools and stuff, but they can't figure something out that they don't know.

(Incidentally, same with ChatGPT and the like - they cannot "figure anything out" they can only return a probabilistically likely answer.)

[Maximum Spin]

Maybe - the problem is you'd have to find a new mechanism of thinking that is basically outside the realm of logic.

That's entirely possible, though. Humans invented predicate logic, the Turing abstraction, etc. as a generalization of our observations of the laws of physics. It's possible that this system is only a subset of some larger system humans can't comprehend - by definition, we would not be able to tell.

[lemon10]

We can't teach a crow how to smelt metal from ore and make a spear, which is a physical task. It lacks the capacity to understand what this physical task means and giving it our tools won't help. Even teaching generations of crows will do nothing (as long as hardware, their brain stays the same)

Isn't it logical that a being that has as sophisticated intelligence compared to ours as ours to crow's can give us tasks we can't possibly comprehend even if we physically may do them?

The birds, known as New Caledonian crows, are famous for making tools, fashioning twigs into spears and hooks that they use to eat grubs. A member of the corvid family, they’re related to ravens, American crows, and magpies, and live in a group of islands east of Australia.

Checkmate aetheist, crows can actually make spears.
And if you give it the right tools of course it can make a metal spear. Said tools would be something like "press this button and the modern forge spits out a metal spear", but still. Honestly the main limit a lot of animals face is the lack of opposable thumbs.
Do you think you can make a metal spear if you were turned into a crow but maintained your same body? Of course you couldn't; crow civilization is thus limited by the body they find themselves in.
---
Probably the best example of things humans can't properly conceptualize is stuff involving extra spatial dimensions.

If you were transferred into a universe with five spatial dimensions (with a appropriate body) you would very much not be able to navigate or comprehend basically anything.
So based on that humans wouldn't be sentient either.