111–120 of 169 posts
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It was a much smaller internet. Crowds and server overload were much more visible.
It’s actually not the “hug of death” that I fondly remember happening more often (although that too was undoubtedly more common) but finding cool, weird, niche topics on the internet that I didn’t know before and were really fascinating.
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Creator in what sense though? Evolution is slow enough that there was never one point at which we suddenly came into being. First we were energy, then we were energy forming into chemicals, then we were chemicals forming into chemicals with rigid structures, then we were chemicals with rigid structures forming more complex structures, etc, until we got to here. Each iteration creates the next iteration, constantly, a…
Well perhaps if you become omni(scient/present/potent) enough, you can subtly influence that process to your desired goal. Evolution is very random in the end.
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It’s an atheist’s most religious dream to think of becoming one’s own creator. It’s nonsense, of course, but it definitely blew my mind reading it as a child. What set the parameters that the ultimate computer must work within? The ultimate computer can reverse entropy, but it can’t make its own reality. There are limits to the power of knowledge.
You must be fun at parties.
If you haven’t read it before, don’t read the Wikipedia summary; read the actual story. It’s easy to google and pretty short. Isaac Asimov said it was his favorite story he’d written. He imagines the entire history of the future of humanity, to the end of time, in a few pages. Really a marvelous story.
When I put together a list of the "best" SF shorts a while back by author, this was my choice for Asimov. (IMO I can make an argument for "Nightfall" but that's a novella and other things being equal I was prioritizing shorter works.) That said, Asimov has a lot of good short stories including quite a few of his robot stories.
If you haven’t read it before, don’t read the Wikipedia summary; read the actual story. It’s easy to google and pretty short. Isaac Asimov said it was his favorite story he’d written. He imagines the entire history of the future of humanity, to the end of time, in a few pages. Really a marvelous story.
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The rabbi recently on the Lex Fridman podcast told a joke that went (roughly) like Scientists come to God and say "OK God, we've had a lot of progress lately in synthetic biology, genetics, engineering, etc. and we're pretty sure we know how you did it." God says "Oh really?". "Yes. We'll create living creatures out of dirt to show that we can do just as you did with Adam." God says "Wow, fantastic!" So the scientist…
Did God create the substrate he exists in?
Various other arguments show that there can only be one uncaused cause, and such a cause must be infinitely good, and this one uncaused infinitely good thing, we all call "God." Goodness, beauty, and being exist to some degree in everything observed, and so are "transcendent" properties. We cannot observe or distinctly conceive of something lacking at least a degree of them. The transcendent properties hint at, but do not reveal, the outlines of a transcendental being which is their source.
This was all explained by the Greeks 2,500 years ago, and it's implicit in the non-Western traditions as well. It's philosophically bulletproof, although for some reason contemporary people act like it's not, I guess because we can build iPhones now? Modern atheism is really disappointing because for the most part it doesn't really grapple with the actual hard questions. We pretend like Hawking was an atheist, when quite clear he was a Deist who thought the laws of physics were God. The only really question is the question of the Daoists: okay, God/Heaven/The Dao must be there, but why should we think it's humane? And what are we going to do if it's not?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I put together a list of the "best" SF shorts a while back by author, this was my choice for Asimov. (IMO I can make an argument for "Nightfall" but that's a novella and other things being equal I was prioritizing shorter works.) That said, Asimov has a lot of good short stories including quite a few of his robot stories.
please share your full list with us.
This list and the shorter prior one were also on HN at some point.
A manga version: http://m.fanfox.net/manga/the_last_question/c000/1.html