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Jan. 23rd, 2007 01:04 pmjust wanted to capture a thought that occurred to me on the dogwalk today...
computeres used to be people who performed coordinated computations by hand or with help of computational devices. this kind of computation could produce a game but the pace would be so slow that no human would want to play it. and even if we put together a large group of human computers it would be too expensive for somebody to use it for gaming. add to it communication and coordination issues.
when computers became mechanical and then electronic a new quality emerged - real-time response, which made human-computer interaction "synchronizable". thus we got games, i.e. a new quality that has nothing to do with compputation per se.
it's hard to deny that humans are capable of computing and/or communicating results. for example, when we get together in a movie theater we are programmed to produce certain emotions. or when we are exposed to a fiery political speech we often respond in unison. now, imagine somebody who is patient enough to wait for the response for a very long time, and/or for whom time moves a lot slower than for us. then, along the lines of the hitchiker's guide, we can imagine that a planetary-wide game is going on. to understand this game we need to roll the "movie" of human history back and forth, back and forth - the same way you could play-out old films that were printed on an actual "moving pictures" tape.
Is it possible to discover God this way? probably not. it would be too simple. but a new quality would possibly emerge. is it detectable somehow?
computeres used to be people who performed coordinated computations by hand or with help of computational devices. this kind of computation could produce a game but the pace would be so slow that no human would want to play it. and even if we put together a large group of human computers it would be too expensive for somebody to use it for gaming. add to it communication and coordination issues.
when computers became mechanical and then electronic a new quality emerged - real-time response, which made human-computer interaction "synchronizable". thus we got games, i.e. a new quality that has nothing to do with compputation per se.
it's hard to deny that humans are capable of computing and/or communicating results. for example, when we get together in a movie theater we are programmed to produce certain emotions. or when we are exposed to a fiery political speech we often respond in unison. now, imagine somebody who is patient enough to wait for the response for a very long time, and/or for whom time moves a lot slower than for us. then, along the lines of the hitchiker's guide, we can imagine that a planetary-wide game is going on. to understand this game we need to roll the "movie" of human history back and forth, back and forth - the same way you could play-out old films that were printed on an actual "moving pictures" tape.
Is it possible to discover God this way? probably not. it would be too simple. but a new quality would possibly emerge. is it detectable somehow?
