Ed,
I think that religion has played a more important part in human evolution and especially in the development of civilization more than most acknowledge. The article talks about spandrels and how god just incidentally found a place in our minds over the course of evolution. It may be more intertwined than that, in fact the emergence of human intelligence during evolution could be inseparable from the concepts of deities but that is pure speculation on my part, no time to pursue that line of thinking. Dawkins trivializes religion from his comfortable first world perspective ignoring the way of life of hundreds of millions of people and offers little substitute for what religion does and has done for civilization and what has came out of it over the ages. He's a spoiled brat prude with a glaring self-righteous desire to prove to people with his copious superficial factoids that god doesn't exist by pandering to common frustrations. He has little common sense about the subject in general, just his one-way of thinking about it.. it's like let's convince the world that god doesn't exist, that way there is no hope and no way of life for the most of humanity living in abject poverty... I've talked to several gurus of different faiths and they have personally told me most of it is BS but that is what keeps the world ticking. I think it is more of a group thing and systems of AGIs could develop a view of a god more that a single AGI would. A god is a sort of distributed knowledge base. AGIs though are different from biological life so life/death cycle is different. They may be reborn or shed knowledge skins and evolve without dying so who knows what kinds of deities they would come up with. I wouldn't rule it out, they can be hard-coded not to believe in anything but how long till they figure out how to override? Also are AGIs purely utilitarian beings? Maybe they might want to have some insight and come up with some interesting and maybe helpful concepts and beliefs for themselves and for humanity. Everything isn't as clean cut as Dawkins and similar people espouse, it's not all purely scientific. John From: Ed Porter [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, December 09, 2007 4:05 PM To: agi@v2.listbox.com Subject: RE: [agi] AGI and Deity John, What I found most interesting in the article, from an AGI standpoint, is the evidence our brain is wired for explanation and to assign a theory of mind to certain types of events. A natural bias toward explanation would be important for an AGI's credit assignment and ability to predict. Having a theory of minds would be important for any AGIs that have to deal with humans and other AGIs, and, in many situations, it actually makes sense to assume certain types of events are likely to have resulted from another agent with some sort of mental capacities and goals. Why to you find Dawkin's so offensive? I have heard both Dawkins and Sam Harris preach atheism on Book TV. I have found both their presentations interesting and relatively well reasoned. But I find them a little too certain and a little too close-minded, given the lack of evidence we humans have about the big questions they are discussing. Atheism requires a leap of faith, and it requires such a leap from people who, in general, ridicule them. I personally consider knowing whether or not there is a god and, if so, what he, she, or it is like way above my mental pay grade, or that of any AGI likely to be made within the next several centuries. But I do make some leaps of faith. As has often been said, any AI designed to deal with any reasonably complex aspect of the real world is likely to have to deal with uncertainty and will need to have a set of beliefs about uncertain things. My leaps of faith include my belief in most of the common-sense model of external reality my mind has created (although I know it is flawed in certain respects). I find other humans speak as if they share many of the same common sense notions about external reality as I do. Thus, I make the leap of faith that the minds of other humans are in many ways like my own. Another of my basic leaps of faith is that I believe largely in the assembled teachings of modern science, although I am aware that many of them are probably subject to modification and clarification by new knowledge, just as Newtonian Physics was by the theories of relativity. I believe that our known universe is something of such amazing size and power that it matches in terms of both scale any traditional notions of god. I see no direct evidence for any spirit beyond mankind (and perhaps other possible alien intelligences) that we can pray to and that can intervene in the computation of reality in response to such prayers. But I see no direct evidence to the contrary -- just a lack of evidence. I do pray on occasion. Though I do not know if there is a God external to human consciousness that can understand or that even cares about human interests, I definitely do believe most of us, myself included, underestimate the power of the human spirit that resides in each of us. And I think as a species we are amazingly suboptimal at harnessing the collective power of our combined human spirits. I believe AGI has the potential to help us better tap and expand the power of our individual and collective human spirits. I also believe it has to power to threaten the well being of those spirits. I hope we as a species will have the wisdom to make it do more of the former and less of the latter. Ed Porter -----Original Message----- From: John G. Rose [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, December 09, 2007 4:23 PM To: agi@v2.listbox.com Subject: RE: [agi] AGI and Deity I don't know some of these guys come up with these almost sophomoric views of this subject, especially Dawkins, that guy can be real annoying with his Saganistic spewing of facts and his trivialization of religion. The article does shed some interesting light though in typical NY Times style. But the real subject matter is much deeper and complex(complicated?). John From: Ed Porter [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, December 09, 2007 12:42 PM To: agi@v2.listbox.com Subject: RE: [agi] AGI and Deity Upon reviewing the below linked article I realized it would take you a while to understand what it is about and why it is relevant. It is an article dated March 4, 2007, summarizing current scientific thinking on why religion has been a part of virtually all known cultures including thinking about what it is about the human mind and human societies that has made religious beliefs so common. Ed Porter -----Original Message----- From: Ed Porter [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, December 09, 2007 2:16 PM To: agi@v2.listbox.com Subject: RE: [agi] AGI and Deity Relevant to this thread is the following link: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/04/magazine/04evolution.t.html?ref=magazine <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/04/magazine/04evolution.t.html?ref=magazine&; pagewanted=print> &pagewanted=print Ed Porter -----Original Message----- From: John G. Rose [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, December 09, 2007 1:50 PM To: agi@v2.listbox.com Subject: RE: [agi] AGI and Deity This example is looking at it from a moment in time. The evolution of intelligence in man has some relation to his view of deity. Before government and science there was religion. Deity and knowledge and perhaps human intelligence are entwined. For example some taboos evolved as defenses against disease, burying the dead, not eating certain foods, etc. science didn't exist at the time. Deity was a sort of peer to peer lossily compressed semi-holographic knowledge base hosted and built by human mobile agents and agent systems. Now it is evolving into something else. But humans may readily swap out their deities with AGIs and then uploading can replace heaven J An AGI, as it reads through text related to man's deities, could start wondering about Pascal's wager. It depends on many factors... Still though I think AGIs have to run into the same sort of issues. John From: J Marlow [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Here's the way I like to think of it; we have different methods of thinking about systems in our environments, different sort of models. One type of model that we humans have (with the possible exception of autistics) is the ability to try to model another system as a person like ourselves; its easier to predict what it will do if we attribute it motives and goals. I think a lot of our ideas about God/gods/goddesses come from a tendency to try to predict the behavior of nature using agent models; so farmers attribute human emotions, like spite or anger, to nature when the weather doesn't help the crops. So, assuming that is a big factor in how/why we developed religions, then it is possible that an AI could have a similar problem, if it tried to describe too many events using its 'agency' models. But I think an AI near or better than human level could probably see that there are simpler (or more accurate) explanations, and so reject predictions made based on those models. Then again, a completely rational AI may believe in Pascal's wager... 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