God made us to do things that he could not!!!
There…now that must have got your attention. Well…what follows is a result of my discussions about god with a dear friend of ours – Jeetu. It’s more or less a theory of what could be. And what made it an interesting theory to me is the fact that, it is a somewhat radical notion that there are things that we do that god cannot. Think of it….doesn’t it turn the whole perception of god upside down. No. That’s not what we think of God as. The common perception is that God created us and so the logic follows, if he created us, he obviously can do everything that we can do and more.
Now let me talk about the thing that inspired us to come up with such a theory. Funnily enough, while not in any way surprising – it all is inspired by math. And to be more specific…by 2 numbers – even more specific – 1s and 0s. Yup. That’s it. That is what inspired us. That and a little bit of matrix, a little bit of Douglas Adams and a whole lot of boozeJ. Just kidding. Actually it was just the booze. Kidding again. Actually there is no booze involved...it just makes the writing interesting. So coming back to Douglas Adams. In his book ‘The salmon of doubt’, he talks about why there is no god and then goes on to say….why there is a god. No typo there. That is exactly what he does. Read the book if you want to understand that. But this is one of things that he states that the assumption of a creator as the reason for our existence leads us to believe that the creator is a superior being to us and unexplainable. But if you consider evolution as a basis of creation, it is much easier to explain at least our physical presence.
Evolution is nothing but the process of starting off as a single-cell organism (there is the ‘1’ again) and gradually multiplying to form a more complex organism. But evolution again is something, which the few Darwins of the world understand and so is not an easy concept to grasp. But now is the age of the ubiquitous computer. And that helps understand evolution in a way nothing has ever come close to. And it makes it available to the common man.
So how does a computer explain evolution? Forget the Internet browser…and Google. You are not going to get any answers there. Think of how the computer evolved and you will understand human evolution too. Or at least a part of it. Think of a programmer. A programmer essentially breaks down the most complex tasks to multiple (if possible repetitive) simple and basic tasks. A computer works in turn breaks it down even further into the most basic of tasks such as addition, subtraction and it does all this in the least complex language of all ‘1s and 0s’. Now…if you think of this exactly in the opposite manner t o what I described…there...you have evolution. ‘1s and 0s’ form some pattern to form a slightly more complex ‘creature’ (a byte) and then that in turns combines with more such ‘bytes’ and forms an even more complex ‘creature’ so on and so forth. And thus it evolves. And at the highest level we have supercomputers etc. That is nothing but evolution. The only difference being that, we as programmers are guiding the evolution to evolve it into something ‘useful’. And biological evolution – we would like to believe was guided by …….’God’.
Don’t worry…..I haven’t lost focus. I am still on the topic. So now, we are at that point where I was before jumping into the discussion. Now, think of the computer. What we are doing with a computer is nothing short of creating life. Of course we still have a long way to go. But it seems to more a matter of time. What do we use the computers for? Most of the things we get the computer are things that we can do…but what would otherwise take a lot more time to do. And we also use it to do things that we otherwise cannot do. Say…..talking on cell phones, moving in cars, flying to places, incredibly large computations etc. If you consider these carefully, none of these are things that humans cannot do. We can shout at the top of our voice for people at a distance to hear. We can always walk or swim to reach a particular place. We can always whip out a paper and pen to do large computations. But shouting at the top of our voice will not enable us to communicate with some one a few blocks away, forget the other coast. Our legs will give way before we reach San Francisco from New York, if we were to walk it up. Large computations…don’t even think about it. But computers can do it. Artificial intelligence is inevitable if not 100 years from now…then in 200. But it’s surely going to be there. We will have computers doing tasks that, we cannot think of right now. In short we are will into the process of creating ‘life’ which can do things, which we cannot. Aah…..do you see where this is going!!!
Continuing…..what will happen the day, we create a fully functional artificial intelligence which can do everything that we can? We would have created life!! Albeit not in our form…but in a different one, all the same. Wouldn’t that make us ‘GOD’ to the life form which we created? And now if that life form can do, not just everything we can, but a lot more ….then doesn’t that mean we have created something to do things which we otherwise cannot? And as I mentioned, to those creations, we are the equivalent of ‘GOD’. So as far as they are concerned, their ‘GOD’ created them to do things which their ‘GOD’ themselves could not!!! Therein comes the conclusion – if such a thing as explained above is plausible, then it is very much possible that in our world too, our ‘GOD’ created us to do things that he/she could not!!
There…now that must have got your attention. Well…what follows is a result of my discussions about god with a dear friend of ours – Jeetu. It’s more or less a theory of what could be. And what made it an interesting theory to me is the fact that, it is a somewhat radical notion that there are things that we do that god cannot. Think of it….doesn’t it turn the whole perception of god upside down. No. That’s not what we think of God as. The common perception is that God created us and so the logic follows, if he created us, he obviously can do everything that we can do and more.
Now let me talk about the thing that inspired us to come up with such a theory. Funnily enough, while not in any way surprising – it all is inspired by math. And to be more specific…by 2 numbers – even more specific – 1s and 0s. Yup. That’s it. That is what inspired us. That and a little bit of matrix, a little bit of Douglas Adams and a whole lot of boozeJ. Just kidding. Actually it was just the booze. Kidding again. Actually there is no booze involved...it just makes the writing interesting. So coming back to Douglas Adams. In his book ‘The salmon of doubt’, he talks about why there is no god and then goes on to say….why there is a god. No typo there. That is exactly what he does. Read the book if you want to understand that. But this is one of things that he states that the assumption of a creator as the reason for our existence leads us to believe that the creator is a superior being to us and unexplainable. But if you consider evolution as a basis of creation, it is much easier to explain at least our physical presence.
Evolution is nothing but the process of starting off as a single-cell organism (there is the ‘1’ again) and gradually multiplying to form a more complex organism. But evolution again is something, which the few Darwins of the world understand and so is not an easy concept to grasp. But now is the age of the ubiquitous computer. And that helps understand evolution in a way nothing has ever come close to. And it makes it available to the common man.
So how does a computer explain evolution? Forget the Internet browser…and Google. You are not going to get any answers there. Think of how the computer evolved and you will understand human evolution too. Or at least a part of it. Think of a programmer. A programmer essentially breaks down the most complex tasks to multiple (if possible repetitive) simple and basic tasks. A computer works in turn breaks it down even further into the most basic of tasks such as addition, subtraction and it does all this in the least complex language of all ‘1s and 0s’. Now…if you think of this exactly in the opposite manner t o what I described…there...you have evolution. ‘1s and 0s’ form some pattern to form a slightly more complex ‘creature’ (a byte) and then that in turns combines with more such ‘bytes’ and forms an even more complex ‘creature’ so on and so forth. And thus it evolves. And at the highest level we have supercomputers etc. That is nothing but evolution. The only difference being that, we as programmers are guiding the evolution to evolve it into something ‘useful’. And biological evolution – we would like to believe was guided by …….’God’.
Don’t worry…..I haven’t lost focus. I am still on the topic. So now, we are at that point where I was before jumping into the discussion. Now, think of the computer. What we are doing with a computer is nothing short of creating life. Of course we still have a long way to go. But it seems to more a matter of time. What do we use the computers for? Most of the things we get the computer are things that we can do…but what would otherwise take a lot more time to do. And we also use it to do things that we otherwise cannot do. Say…..talking on cell phones, moving in cars, flying to places, incredibly large computations etc. If you consider these carefully, none of these are things that humans cannot do. We can shout at the top of our voice for people at a distance to hear. We can always walk or swim to reach a particular place. We can always whip out a paper and pen to do large computations. But shouting at the top of our voice will not enable us to communicate with some one a few blocks away, forget the other coast. Our legs will give way before we reach San Francisco from New York, if we were to walk it up. Large computations…don’t even think about it. But computers can do it. Artificial intelligence is inevitable if not 100 years from now…then in 200. But it’s surely going to be there. We will have computers doing tasks that, we cannot think of right now. In short we are will into the process of creating ‘life’ which can do things, which we cannot. Aah…..do you see where this is going!!!
Continuing…..what will happen the day, we create a fully functional artificial intelligence which can do everything that we can? We would have created life!! Albeit not in our form…but in a different one, all the same. Wouldn’t that make us ‘GOD’ to the life form which we created? And now if that life form can do, not just everything we can, but a lot more ….then doesn’t that mean we have created something to do things which we otherwise cannot? And as I mentioned, to those creations, we are the equivalent of ‘GOD’. So as far as they are concerned, their ‘GOD’ created them to do things which their ‘GOD’ themselves could not!!! Therein comes the conclusion – if such a thing as explained above is plausible, then it is very much possible that in our world too, our ‘GOD’ created us to do things that he/she could not!!
Labels: Braindroppings
