The people of PaRD, hello!

I have written a little short story to (perhaps) tickle your minds. It is the second chapter to my short story “The AI Man”. Here I will attempt to portray the sort of reality we live and experience, by an analogous story of the mystery and wonder of our own existence being made clear by looking into a world inside a world.

It goes like this...

Chapter 2

In ages long ago, there was an old dusty computer. Long forgotten in the corner of a dark basement belonging to someone’s mother. Once the perfect environment for endless hours of dwellings in vast digital worlds of wonder, the artistic creations of programmers’ imagination.

Behold! There is a time for gaming and a time, to do other things. Thus, the computer was wiped, everything deleted. It was shut down. All memory of that old thing soon faded away…

Until that miraculous day. The day of wonder and awe never to be forgotten. A shining light came from the computer. Endless digits of 1’s and 0’s filled the screen to the propelling sound of cooling fan’s turning swiftly and the smell of old dust filling the room. In the beginning, everything seemingly a true mess. Riddles of chaos was in the computer code.

The next day, while little rays of light were shining through the holes of a curtain, something new happened. The code was changing, what seemed like little arrangements of patterns. 01101001 01000001 01101101 was repeated down the screen. In a flash “Let there be light!” appeared in letters on the screen. Suddenly the speakers of the computer were alive, sending beautiful symphonies of music into the room. Colors filled the screen; the numbers were no more. On day three there was a transformation. Dancing to the sound of music the colors made shapes. The World was formed, the code of life. Made in the image of our own, great digital forests as far as eyes can see, the wind blowing and leaves flying by. Endless oceans of crystal blue, with the sun twinkling on the surface floor.

More days went by while something new appeared on each day. Then, on the sixth day I decided to visit my mom. I asked “Mother, do you still have that old computer of mine?” “Yes, my dear!”, she replied. And so I went, walking down the stairs wondering about that smell, and the sound and colors filling the room. Slowly I walked in wonder towards my old dusty computer.

I stared into the screen of the computer. “Who are you?”, the man on the screen asked.

Perplexed in thought I asked myself the question, “Who am I?”

For discussion: Do you think it's fair to draw these parallels to our real world and could we learn something new? The universe spontaneously expanded from nothing to everything 13.8 billion years ago. This is pretty interesting and much heated debate has occurred through the centuries to this biggest mystery of all time. Yet the logic and self-evident conclusions seem transparent to any seeker of truth who may humble himself, that behind the curtain there is an artist and He is God..

This post was edited by LazyDazy on Mar 19 2020 02:14pm

is this some sort of attempt to write an allegory for the creation of earth by god in 7 days? only instead of earth its god bringing a dusty computer spontaneously to life and making a sentient being alive inside of it?

if so, it's still weird as fuck.

Kind of, and probably is weird as fuck, yes. Good thing I never pursued a career as a writer! But I feel the story portrays some of the absurdity often told by atheists.

I guess it's a mix of telling the narrative often told by the secular world, that everything happened by accident and random. I'm then trying to show how absurd it must be that a left computer should be able to write a code spontaneously by itself, that has life and conscious beings inside it.

This post was edited by LazyDazy on Mar 19 2020 02:18pm

there are several errors with that idea tho. firstly self coding computers do exist, not to the extent you have laid out in your story. but humans also didnt come to exist over the course of 6 days.

if for example a machine learning team started a self coding computer and gave it 100,000 years to do it's thing, i fully expect it would come out to a sentient being of sorts.

secondly life on earth isn't truly random from the atheist/scientific perspective. evolution can be demonstrated via fruit flies in a very short duration. or for a more visual example look to super lions:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-392292/The-superlions-marooned-island.html

do i take from your example u dont believe in evolution at all?

Self-coding, if you give it some kind of instruction or pattern? To me it seems that it would only be able to do so if previous intelligence make futile grounds for the evolving code.

I think your right about the random part, on the big picture part it seems random, or lucky from the atheistic perspective.
I believe in micro evolution but am sceptical on macro. As far as I understand evolution can mostly be shown to de evolve rather than improving on existing components of the living creature. Take a look at animations showing the factory work of a living cell and everything that needs to be in place. It's amazing and a mystery and highly improbable that just happened to be allowed in the computer (our universe). Unless someone wrote the code for life. I guess intelligent design is where I am at, of some sort.

How would you best explain origin of the universe and life within?

creationism through natural occurrence. including, but not limited to, evolution.

You should look up cellular automatons, esp Conway's game of life. Its an interesting concept bridge to link the mundane with the sentient.

This post was edited by EndlessSky on Mar 19 2020 08:54pm

Honestly the origins of life, while interest, isn't all that miraculous. Maybe it's not how it happened, but we have several mechanisms for all the steps to create rudimentary cells in a purely natural way in the early Earth, and once those cells get started and self-replicate evolution gets you the rest of the way through mutation and natural selection. The specifics still need to be deciphered, but we have general mechanisms and methods that could have worked.

To me the only interesting scientific question that God has any place is the origin of consciousness, like how it originates from the activity of a neural network, and if it originates in other networks.

So a natural birth of the universe without intelligence? Would the cause of the universe have to be something metaphysical? It seems to me, since before the physical world, something transcendence must be the cause. This cause can't have infinite other causes prior to itself, as we enter some kind of infinite regress problem. That leads us to a final and absolute "mechanism" that will result in all future events to occur and unfold. So an transcendent and eternal mechanism that set the universe I motion some 12.8 billion years ago. One more attribute might be added, as it seem we are extremely "lucky" to have the values and constants in the law of physics. Nothing is self evident, so there is the notion of fine-tuning.



Isn't it somehow a miracle, that since the universe could have been black emptiness with laws hostile to anything complex and then life, it beautifully expanded by a steady pace allowing over time the occurrence of life. But as in the analogy I tried to make, it seems absolutely absurd that a digital computer code over time should be able to make a fully functioning game by itself with no human interaction. I assume you are familiar with the complex nature of making just simple weather systems in a MMO game. Let random chance make a game, and you just have a mess of a code. Perhaps if you intelligently made something useful to begin with, and let some random transformations in the code happen with a set of rules, and you have something similar to Google's deep mind. That by itself needed some years of programming to make a useful algorithm. The universe has these foundations build in to the underlying code. That's a mystery that takes some huge leap of faith to just desmiss as lucky chance. The intelligent design of gn community, a name that spells suspecion to many, have made some good calculations to the improbable reality of cells and what not assembling itself from atoms to proteins to DNA to fully functional cells and later highly complex life with consciousness. It just seem out the window, to propose that "evolution did it, we don't know, science will tell us in some distant future or never", these are some highly used remarks to something which seem pretty clear, at least to me!

The nature of consciousness as you say just adds more credibilty as I believe you say to the nature of sme great artist behind the curtain.

Its not really something we can call a miracle since we don't know the full space of the variables that would allow life, and we dont know how they are set.