How would a godlike being or a super advanced AI view life/the universe, the passage of time, etc?
I am not making the case for god or for some alien super advanced AI…
I am asking, in the whole universe… with all the planets, solar systems, galaxies, all the passage of time, all the (potential) life forms out there, all the suns that are 100 million times bigger than our sun, all the binary or trinary suns orbiting a black hole… all of the wonderful wonders of the universe, how would a super advanced being keep up with it all? What would designate, in it’s mind, the boring and mundane from the magnificent to the truly magnificent? How would it view the passage of time? If, there are billions of planets with life with billions and billions of species on each planet, how would this super intelligent being view each single from of life and the path that life took from beginning to end?
In other words, is there a limit to how much a super intelligent being can comprehend or would it comprehend EVERYTHING and understand it as easily as you or I do when we read something in the newspaper or hold a simple conversation?
As for ordinary sensual perceptions, probably not all that much different from how we perceive the cosmos.
Maybe more tools, like telescopes and microscopes. Those have certainly opened up our own perceptions to “godlike” dimensions. We can see from atoms to quasars. Our godlike friend can probably extrapolate upon that.
As for internal perceptions, who can know? How would you explain the richness of human emotional life to a lizard- or insect-based intelligence that lacks our joys, urges, rages, aspirations, humors, loves, and terrors? Our godlike friend may have entire suites of emotions unknown to us, in which he delights.
What calculus of “right and wrong” does he follow? Surely the maximization of expectations is an universal concept. He must have a strategy to do the “right thing” to accomplish his ultimate goals.
Is he alone, or part of a society? Is cooperation, or competition, the capital virtue?
How can this question possibly be answered? What you are effectively asking is:
“If something - which I haven’t defined, and that as far as we know can’t exist under any conditions of which we are aware - did exist, what would the nature of its existence be like?”
Even those who believe deities - in my experience - consider deities to be “supernatural” which is another way of saying not actually existing in any way of which we have any understanding. And they consider their deities to be unknowable.
They would probably view it as an interdependent system cut off from the rest of existence, assuming anything exists outside our universe. I’m guessing it would see time as an illusion and would probably be able to see the virtually infinite ways the finite matter and energy can be arranged in our adiabatic system.
Assuming that we’re speaking of a temporal being within the Universe, the answer is “neither”. It would have no limit to what it could know, but it would know almost nothing compared to how much there is to know. The more questions you answer, the more new questions you raise. And you can then answer those, but that just raises even more. The total number of unanswered questions always increases.
If it was a magical god like being there would be no problem if the physical size or location of “memory banks” but if it was an AI… how big would the physical memory bank have to be to copy/remember EVERYTHING?
And then there is still the matter of significance. How can the tragic death a planet full of beings have any impact when it has already happened billions of times? That works equally well for a godlike deity or an AI…
The problem is, unless we assume the information in the universe is somehow nowhere near optimally packed, then the absolute minimum is several times the size of the universe. Consider, even if the information of a single particle could be stored as a single bit, and it cannot, then even if we could build a memory bank such that we could put one bit of information on each particle, it would require the number of particles in the universe. But considering that there’s a whole lot more than one bit of information per particle, it’d be huge. Really, it would essentially take another universe to model and record everything in this one.
Significance, even for humans here on Earth, is all about perspective. A person is likely to mourn intensely for the death of a loved one, care somewhat about a local tragedy or death of a celebrity or a large tragedy elsewhere. At a certain point, we don’t really care. That is, it seems there’s a relationship such that how we perceive the significance of an event is proportional to both our relationship to that event (either in proximity or importance) and how impactful it was.
So even if we have a god or super advanced intelligence, I would assume it would assign significance based on similar criteria. So, running with an AI, maybe it has certain parameters that some events meet or don’t meet, like perhaps some experiment. Maybe it identifies events that are somehow statistical outliers. For instance, we assume that life is fairly common, maybe it is, and if so, maybe such an intelligence would think little of our existence. OTOH, maybe intelligent life like us is rare, perhaps even exceedingly so, and thus it would take special interest in us.
And if this god or intelligence has some ability to assert a preference, then maybe it will just assign significance to events it personally finds interesting. Just because something is common doesn’t necessarily make it uninteresting, or vice versa for uncommon events.
That is kind of what i was alluding too. If physical memory banks are needed it will be very selective as to what information it stores/keeps.
Yes, I agree with this but I wonder how the advanced intelligence affect things? Would it have more compassion because it was more advanced? Or less, because we were so far below it?
Everything? Depending on what compression algorithms, throughput rates, latency and so on, roughly the size of all the matter in the known universe I suppose. You can’t really store information about the smallest fundamental particles in any medium that takes up less space/mass than those smallest fundamental particles, can you?
well, if an AI somehow had the ability to look forward and backwards across time and the same for the physical space of the universe… it wouldn’t need to store memories, would it… that thought just occurred to me…
Perhaps. But that sort of presumes some underlying fundamental concepts about the nature of time and the universe.
Specifically, it presumes (like most/all time travel fiction), that every moment in time (or every possible variation of every moment in time) “exists” somewhere, simultaneously. Where does “last week” go that one can go there in a time machine?
According to our current understanding of physics, it wouldn’t be possible to observe the whole universe because of the light-speed limit - distant areas outside of your light cone can never be directly observed by you. Light speed delay would also limit how fast the super-intelligence could think and access stored data, even with just a jupiter-sized ‘brain’. If you’re trying to store all of the data about every subatomic particle, you end up needing more particles than you’re storing data about, and that doesn’t include anything trying to process those particles. So any kind of ‘complete understanding’ just doesn’t fit with what we know of reality.
Thank you, that was the type of detail I was interested in hearing.
But for the sake of my example, I was thinking of a scenario somewhere between hard and soft science fiction. Our entity could bend the rules of physics somewhat but not to the point of complete and total rejection of the laws of physics.
Like, for example, in Star Trek, people can talk over long distances instantaneously (forget the mechanism) but are still limited to warp 10 physically when traveling.