Creationism?
Wednesday, June 28th, 2006I read this article today:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_biochemistry
I found the section on "Artificial Life" interesting. It suggests a nesting relationship between the creator and the creation. Get it? It’s like <so-called>god -> man -> nanobot, which can be illustrated like this:
int main()
{
...
{
...
/* after n nesting levels */
{ /* god */
/* does something here */
{ /* man */
/* does something here */
{ /* nanobot */
/* does something here */
}
...
}
...
}
...
}
...
return 0;
}
See? It’s nested, so variables in the "man" block can’t modifythe values of variables in "god" block, but those in "god" block determines the initial values of some variables in the "man" block. Likewise, s/man/nanobot/g; s/god/man/g, and you’ll see what I mean.
So, my theory is this: This universe is created by an intelligent being, and we probably won’t ever know who or what it was. We probably would, as well. But the intelligent being might also be created by an intelligent being that is more intelligent than it is. And so on.
We might also be able to produce a self-replicating creation. But let’s not restrict ourselves to "self-replicating", because this the definition of "life" (and "creating") in different nesting levels might be different. For example, while our creator might not be able to self-replicate, we can. While we can’t travel back and forth in time, our creation might be able to do just that. If you look at the "self-replicating" theme, we can, and our creation might also be able to do the same, but our qualities are different. Likewise, we eat, sleep, talk, etc., but our creator might not be able to do the same. See the relationship? We might create a nanobot to help us deliver messages back and forth in time, because we can’t do that ourselves (and the procedure might be risky to be undertaken by humans). Our creators might have created us because it wasn’t able to do something — maybe to love, to talk, to eat, anything — that’s why it created us.
See also the movie "The Thirteenth Floor" for an example of a nested world.
This explains a lot of things:
1. Why there are different religions in the world.
Well, there is a possibility that there are multiple creators working on the same universe (like CVS or SVN). In the spirit of collaborative software development, we can see that every programmer has his own style. Indenting style, variable initialization, variable naming, function naming, etc. The most important thing is that when all the modules are put together, they interoperate through a standard API.
So, our creators do the same thing, there are multiple creators working on the same universe, each with its own style. Some like it black, some like it white; some like it yellow, some like it brown. But they all interoperate, because of a standard API. A black man can eat the same food a yellow man can, they can speak a common language if both have learnt it, they can compete in sports. A yellow woman can have sex with a white man and bear fertile children (in contrast to mating between different species of animals which don’t produce fertile offsprings, this might be because animal compatibility is not a very important issue, so the program might segfault or do something funny, resulting in an infertile offspring).
Of course, every programmer has his own ego, and he embeds comments to prove that. Our creators do too, they created religions to satisfy their own ego. Ever wondered why some religions put the creator so highly that he should be served? And some religions make its believers love the so-called god? The answer to that may be that one creator has no love, it gets no love from anyone, and it can’t love anyone, so in a desperate attempt, it needs its creation to love it. Another one may have a bossy character, so it makes its creation serve up.
Likewise, we may even create robots that cook for us, have sex with us (for men, maybe the wife is too ugly; for women, maybe the husband can’t sustain an erection), serve us (like slaves), or anything else. Nanobots can help us do things we can’t like maybe perform some difficult and dangerous scientific experiments, etc. It’s analogous to our creators.
2. Why we can’t prove whether our creators exist, or whether this universe was really created by "something intelligent".
Would you have your robot overtake you? Would you allow it to control you? Would you allow it to know that it is superior (in terms of speed, strength, intelligence, etc) to you? No.
Would you allow nanobots to leak our of their container? That might start a disaster. Would you allow them to study about you? They might stop obeying commands.
Would our creator let us know about it? We might rebel.
3. Different races of man appearing in different places on earth.
This is explained above.
4. Rewards for believing in a religion.
Some religions promise heaven for those who do good things, and hell for those who do bad things. Well, we can promise our creation some interesting rewards if they do they work as told. Heck, we’ve been doing this for ages; we promise children to give them a lollipop if they bring us that cup of coffee over here and later break the promise; we promise our employees that they will get a bonus if they exceed the quota and then give them a small bonus for that. It may or may not happen. We might put retired robots on display (heaven), we might recycle them (hell). And if we don’t keep our promise, they can’t do anything about it. So do we, when offered rewards by our creators.
The conclusion is, we don’t really know what’s going on here. This is just a theory or might even just be a hypothesis, but it seems so real. Still, according to this theory, we can’t prove it right or wrong, so there’s somewhat a paradox here.
