The Second Apocalypse
Miscellaneous Chatter => Philosophy & Science => Topic started by: Francis Buck on June 28, 2014, 07:45:40 pm
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Five minutes from now, you officially become God of the entire universe, anything and everything, all that exists and ever will exist and ever has existed. You have supreme power, and access to supreme knowledge -- but you're still you, at least at first. You don't instantly become omniscient -- you have to consciously access that knowledge. Same for any other power.
Upon becoming God, you also have the ability to instantly relinquish your Godhood permanently, returning to your normal state, the world continuing on precisely as it did before you became God. But once you give up the power, it's gone forever. In addition, if you do take this path, you cannot ever forget that you were God. You will always know that you had the opportunity.
As God, you will now be able to know the truth of reality -- all of reality, whatever it is. If you choose to do so, you can access any information you want. If it so happens that one particular religion ended up being true (it doesn't matter what religion or philosophy), you automatically supersede whatever deity or deities that religion describes, thus enabling you to alter or erase the current structure entirely, or maybe choose to make a different established religion the "correct one". Of course, you can also fashion a new existential regime all of your own. It's all up to you. You are God, after all.
So, do you immediately free yourself of this greatest of burdens and go back to normal life, even with the knowledge that you could have changed something? Would you just change a few things, make your life better in some way, or the lives of friends and loved ones? What about all of other people suffering on the world? If you choose to access all the information in the universe, could you ever "go back" to your old self? Would the monumental knowledge change you too much? What are the ethical ramifications of having the ability to bring peace to the world, to all of existence, but choosing not to do so and instead rejecting your new power? What would true peace even be like? Do you think you can even answer this question honestly? It may be easy to say that you'd reject such a gargantuan responsibility now, but would you really do that if you had the power? Could you resist even tweaking just a few things you don't like?
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The obvious answer: give Bakker a timeless writing room so he can publish all he wants without fans waiting.
Also I push the 'prevent genocide' button.
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I am not sure the world would appreciate me becoming good ... i think i would change many things...and depending on which side of the fence you sit, this will not go down well for you :P
But i guess that is true for everytime one person gets the power to play god (or be god). So yeah... ;D
I think the notion that even one person would reject "becoming god" is laughable. Everyone has powerfantasies...everyone!
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Limited interaction might be my approach, well after initially fixing things as I see fit... Can't say I've thought about it too much though.
It seems that it would take a mighty hand to "fix" the world as it exists today.
Maybe I'd revamp all the worlds religions and make everyone one big happy family. Seems like a lot of suffering occurs on the back of religion pursuits.
But, then again, I have little faith in humanity. If some point of conflict was removed, it would be replaced by either something new or something that already existed...
I guess the one advantage of being The God is that if people disagree with your methods/plan/vision, they are objectively wrong if you have designed reality as such :P
This question gives me the creeps.
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I'd make every remotely sentient creature in the universe immortal and invincible and reconfigure their minds to experience nothing but bliss. Then I'd do the same to myself and retire to my new heaven.
Done.
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I might be in line with Sharmat but I think FB's problem is linguistic first and foremost.
I would choose to:
Upon becoming God, you also have the ability to instantly relinquish your Godhood permanently, returning to your normal state, the world continuing on precisely as it did before you became God. But once you give up the power, it's gone forever. In addition, if you do take this path, you cannot ever forget that you were God. You will always know that you had the opportunity.
And then as per:
As God, you will now be able to know the truth of reality -- all of reality, whatever it is. If you choose to do so, you can access any information you want. If it so happens that one particular religion ended up being true (it doesn't matter what religion or philosophy), you automatically supersede whatever deity or deities that religion describes, thus enabling you to alter or erase the current structure entirely, or maybe choose to make a different established religion the "correct one". Of course, you can also fashion a new existential regime all of your own. It's all up to you. You are God, after all.
I would be utilitarian in the utmost objective sense you've described and make it so the (multi)universe happens in exactly the same way it always has, except that it unfolds in the statistical-fashion of "as many of the ever possible beings are as 'happy/satisfied' as they could ever going to be."
Then revert. To my old perspective.
Also, I think this question is inherently flawed because we can't possibly imagine (much better than FB has) the "aware" state of such Godhood ;).
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First guess is that my newfound access to omniscience would dictate my actions, if any. And if I was a merciful God I'd probably apologize to the human race and abdicate the celestial throne although accessing omniscience might change my mind. It seems unbelievably cruel to interfere with mankind as an omnipotent being at this point in time. Its a safe bet that omniscience would instill a deep sense of indifference to the universe, as you'd already know everything that's going to happen.
Guess I'd be pretty much like God is now, or not God at all.
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I'd make every remotely sentient creature in the universe immortal and invincible and reconfigure their minds to experience nothing but bliss. Then I'd do the same to myself and retire to my new heaven.
Done.
Everlasting heroin for everyone? Whats the point?
I'd probably choose humans I thought were interesting and then craft elaborate adventures for them. I love being the dungeon master.
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Everlasting heroin for everyone? Whats the point?
I do not think that heroin is that blissful a drug mind you. I would rather pick MDMA.
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MDMA for sure.
But, I would ensure the option of reincarnation if I had that power. With the option of a heaven or oblivion for those who chose it.
Let everyone have their own Matrix, without all of the plugged in humans "suffering" to make it possible.
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I would be like Q in Trek, fucking with all the little people. Maybe holding myself some Battle Games between real and fictional characters? Maybe fuse two hitherto unnames people into a Madshire?
Basically I think my newfound omniscient knowledge and omnipotent nature would lead to a lazy Godly apathy - generally allowing my new profound thoughts room to resonate - what is the pleasure of sentient consciousness without the pain to allow appreciation in contrast? What is the meaning of life without the inevitability of death? What is life but not the increasing complexity of energetic chemical systems? Yada yada yada
I don't think I would be a Good God, neither would I be a Bad God - more of a Well Im Infinitely Bored As I have Already Experienced The Sum Of The Infinite But Wont Go Back To Being a Puny Human - kind of God.
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I actually think I would wipe out every human being on the planet. Just to see what happens. Time is on my side right? Just wait around a couple of hundred billion years, maybe travel a bit around in my vast and forever expanding playground. Eventually I will check in on old earth again, and see how the planet is doing without its virus with shoes fucking things up. If nothing more novel than humans has arrived, I guess I will create an Adam and Eve once more, start the human experiment over again, too see if humans will do things differently this time around. I might even program them a bit differently this time, it really depends on what my goal is. If I am in a good mood, like five minutes after my orgasm the size of a supernova, spraying billions of new stars into the expanding void, I might take away the need for humans to be deluded. That would have been interesting. A delusion free human race. We cannot even imagine how that would be like, would we?
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That's my issue - we aren't likely to be more than a mote in this Omniverse?
Tending to humans is probably some gut-bacteria process within this God-creature-thing?
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One corn of sand on a beach. That is quite small. Really hard to wrap your head around such smallness. Or we could be all of it, living under the spell of separation from the whole. Really hard to wrap your head around such bigness :P
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Or we could be all of it, living under the spell of separation from the whole. Really hard to wrap your head around such bigness :P.
Every grain of sand could have a piece of the whole. However, I think both ideas simply bow to human-centrism and have always struck me (as in the ideas themselves) has being evidence of human conceit. I just don't think we can grasp enough to say one way or another. I don't think we are the final arbiters of of the Omnireality-being-thing, though?
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What will you do?
I will spend a lot of time (if that concept will remain applicable to me after my metaphysical change) to check, was I ever such god before being mortal human. All that because of an old story (http://creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/Third_Wish) (not a best retelling, though, it should be limited to 3-5 sentenses and mostly direct speech).
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Every grain of sand could have a piece of the whole. However, I think both ideas simply bow to human-centrism and have always struck me (as in the ideas themselves) has being evidence of human conceit. I just don't think we can grasp enough to say one way or another. I don't think we are the final arbiters of of the Omnireality-being-thing, though?
I agree, both sides of that coin shows you delusion. I am not even sure we are supposed to grasp it. I wonder what makes humans that convinced that we can, or should be able, to grasp these ideas? Is it a cultural/religious thing? Because to me it really seems like the more we look into it the less human it gets :P
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Everlasting heroin for everyone? Whats the point?
What's the point before I do that?
Pleasure is its own reward.
If you must feel that sense of accomplishment (which I really doubt you do. There's a reason synthetic opiates are so addictive), I can just give you that too. I'm God, after all.
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If you must feel that sense of accomplishment (which I really doubt you do. There's a reason synthetic opiates are so addictive), I can just give you that too. I'm God, after all.
It isn't about a sense of accomplishment. I agree with you, the drugs pretty much outclass any natural sensation and they're only getting better. Anyone who says that a sense of accomplishment feels better than drugs hasn't tried drugs. But sensations are not ends in and of themselves. Hedonism is a dead end.
Pleasure is its own reward.
No, it's not. Pleasure out of context is worthless. It's just a transmission of meaningless data.
Pleasure is a functional process. It has a purpose. It rewards you for doing things right and trains you to come back and do things right some more. It's part of the suite of heuristics by which we navigate the world and learn how to function.
Your emotions are there to program you. Pleasure tells you to keep doing whatever your doing. Pain tells you to never do that thing again. Ambition and greed make you climb the social hierarchy. Lust tells you to go have sex with a pretty girl.
Emotions drive us to go out and live life. They're processes in our mental code that push us around and teach us. And they're fine for that.
What would be the point of separating an emotion or a sensation from the rest of the program. It's literally like stripping a random chunk of code out of some computer program. The process is pointless on its on. It only has meaning as a functional part of the machine.
Do you really want to be a barely sentient pleasure loop? If you lived in constant ecstasy you would barely be alive. You would just be a broken robot. One circuit telling another circuit that everything is great. And that's all.
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Maybe it's just in my mind, or my paradigm, but in god-hood wouldn't I be transcendent?
It seems like in that state, why should I care about anything? I would be everything and nothing at once.
There doesn't seem to be any reason to give it up such a state, since I am all powerful, if something somehow displeased me, it would simply not be. In other words, nothing could possibly displease me.
Naturally though, I am transcendent, so pleasure wouldn't even exist, so that is a rather silly thought in retrospect.
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The fun thing about this thought experiment are all the ideals that people choose to assign a Godly entity, and thus thereby empower themselves. And vice-versa.
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I would do what I was already doing. To become God is to become the absolute reality, the absolute sum of existence and consciousness. I would then directly experience all things, which is to say, I would continue to be aware of Myself in all my forms. To continue to be myself, being aware of God, would be in fact to discontinue myself, and "myself," which never really existed, would simply be re-absorbed into other forms the same way the water in waves is re-formed into other waves (or not-waves!) of the ocean. It would be much the same as if I died. Since I'll be dying anywho, I would therefore choose to "relinquish Godhood" in the sense of simply no longer being completely conscious of already being God and only see Myself through the aperture of my own human consciousness. The memory would be useful and possibly a good icebreaker at parties.
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Difficult question to answer in all reality... With lack of frame of reference on who/what God truly is and capable of. To discuss things Godly, goodly, and theologically, one must tread very carefully. People are delicate (especially these days) and who knows who will be offended by what next.
anyways...
The only really to do would be to recreate the entire universe, which is the only thing that everyone can all agree on that God ever did. The only time that can be "verified" by any theologian, that The Lord had any influence on any or all of creation, was at what we know of as to be the beginning of time itself.
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Hmmm I don't believe any God created the Universe.
As I imagine the Universe to contain and almost endless number of sentient beings I would be rather disappointed if this was all ruled by the Judeo Christian God or any other Human imagined diety.
I am quite happy to accept that the Universe arose spontaneously out of nothing and that before the bang there were no priors. I could accept a bounce LQG solution but again that is just pushing the cause back and going "turtles all the way down". I much prefer the something from nothing solution of the two though.
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I am quite happy to accept that the Universe arose spontaneously out of nothing and that before the bang there were no priors. I could accept a bounce LQG solution but again that is just pushing the cause back and going "turtles all the way down". I much prefer the something from nothing solution of the two though.
I more or less agree, although the way my brain seems to have rationalized the issue of something from nothing is that I'm inclined not to believe the universe (in it's entirety, so multiverse or omniverse or whatever it may be) is not a thing that is "changing", and the appearance of it having come for nowhere is a result of our misconception of time. This falls in line with block-universe ideas, I suppose. To put it another way, the universe didn't ever start, nor does it end. It's one complete thing that always has been, always will be, etc. What we perceive as the "beginning" (whether that's the big bang or something else) is just a particular part of that larger whole. So, it would be erroneous to think of the big bang as a beginning in the same sense that it's erroneous to think of one corner of a cube being the beginning of that cube.
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Kill myself.
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Kill myself.
For entertainment, or what?
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Go to give that shit back ASAP, can't be trusted with that sort of power i'm way too stupid and petty.