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From: decot@cwruecmp.UUCP (Dave Decot)
Newsgroups: net.religion
Subject: What does God know, want?
Message-ID: <999@cwruecmp.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 13-Feb-84 23:48:24 EST
Article-I.D.: cwruecmp.999
Posted: Mon Feb 13 23:48:24 1984
Date-Received: Wed, 15-Feb-84 06:28:51 EST
Organization: CWRU Computer Engr. Cleveland, Ohio
Lines: 41

The following assertions are not guaranteed to be THE TRUTH, and you will
not be cast into the lake of fire for holding contrasting viewpoints.
No warranty is expressed or implied.  These are speculations, but they
are no less to be considered than the Book of Ubizmo, which I hold in
highest regard.

Perhaps God has all possible "status" information, i.e. the positions and
concentration of all manifestations of energy in the universe, but does
NOT really "know" everything.  Perhaps he has learned everything ever
learned by conscious entities, but does not know much more than the
total sum.  Our assignment of meaning to various patters of status information
is up to us to decide, and for all of us, maybe even God, to benefit by.  

That is, God is reductionistically omniscient, but he does not know all the
possible synthetic interpretations of the inherent information the universe
contains.  Perhaps he wants to learn many such interpretations.

Suppose also that God can alter as much or as little as he wants of the
universe's "core image" with some unknown debugging tool.  It is likely that
such a tool would be more usable than sdb, since we are talking about God,
after all.  It is to his advantage to affect only small parts at a time,
since it may be difficult or wasteful to reconstruct the entire universe again
for each change.

Removing all hunger, war, and unhappiness from the world would cause a profound
reduction in the amount of "interesting" information available.  There may
be better ways to end these things, and God is probably waiting until he
thinks of an information preserving way.

Thus, the death of one thinker is a tragedy to God.  Misinformation is also
a tragedy, since it confuses one of the thinkers.  What God wants is
healthy, clear thinkers.  I am not sure whether he wants to be worshipped,
although this would get in the way of innovative thinking.

So, we can look on our existence as an "experiment" in the mind of God,
or as "fictional characters" created by him, or as data structures in an
executing program.  The status information of the universe is like the
electrochemical state of all the neurons in a human brain.

Dave Decot		 "Crackpots are people, too."
decvax!cwruecmp!decot    (Decot.Case@rand-relay)