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“My race needs no special defense for the past history of them and this country. All they need is an equal chance in the battle of life.”
— Robert Smalls
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I AM that which is present.
I am not an object IN the present.
All objects in the present come and go.
They have momentary, apparent existence when in the present.
But absolutely extinct when they leave the present.
The present is always here, yet it is not a thing.
It is my presence; my light; my beingness!
It cannot be located anywhere in space, yet anywhere you point in space, it is there.
It cannot be found anywhere in time, it is ever-present!
I am not a person becoming aware of the present.
I AM the presence in which the whole body-mind-world experience is appearing.
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This is the primary paradigm shift in Self inquiry.
The way to it is not through words.
Words only talk about it and motivate us to look in the right direction.
The way to it is through silence.
Why? Because I AM silently present!
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Plato’s student, Aristotle, held that humans are special due to our ability to think. Our rationality is what separated us from the rest of the world...and then we created artificial intelligence.
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Among the philosophers who have tried to prove the existence of God, there are two broad categories of proof. One seeks to establish the necessary existence of a perfect being, while the other tries to show that there either has to be or is most likely to be a first cause or an intelligent designer that is the Creator. The name most associated with the first approach is Anselm, the 12th-century theologian.
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Let’s re-envision Anselm’s conclusion through the lens of 19th-century philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach who argued that if birds have a god, it would have wings. In other words, God is the perfection of the believer. Hence, the human god would be the perfect human.
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Since humans define ourselves by our rationality, the perfect rational being would be our god. When we take the machine learning and number crunching ability we have now and combine it with big data—the vast banks of information able to be harvested online—the result is that the computer can know when we are pregnant, when we just bought a house, or when are about to have an affair. AI is capable of knowing things about us we haven’t told anyone, indeed some things we may not even know about ourselves yet.
We think we have free will, that we decide what we are going to do and when we are going to do it. But as we see, big data and artificial intelligence can combine to know what we will do and when we will do it. Does this make it omniscient in the way we think God would be? Even according to our standard, pre-digital understanding, it seems that the AI we may someday construct would be god-like.
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AQUINAS X PRIME PROGRAMMER
The other approach to proving the existence of God is to demonstrate that there must be a first cause, what Aristotle called “the Prime Mover,” the origin and source of the universe as we see it. The thinker most connected with this approach, what we now call the Cosmological Truth for the existence of God, is Thomas Aquinas, who argued that while every effect has a cause and we can construct a chain going backward in time, that chain cannot be infinite. It must have a first link, a first cause.
There is no problem in thinking that the chain can go infinitely far into the future—for each link in the chain of cause and effect, just add another link to the end. But, he contended, the chain cannot go infinitely far into the past. If it were true, then the amount of time between our current link and one that is infinitely far in the past would be infinite. If you started at the link infinitely far back, how long would it take before now? An infinite amount of time. But if something is an infinite amount of time away, then it would never happen. But now is occurring...now. So, the chain cannot go back infinitely far, or now would never happen. So, there must be a beginning, some initial cause that launched all future effects, a Prime Mover, or God the Creator.
While both Anselm and Aquinas try to prove the existence of God, notice that they are proving different things. Anselm argues for the necessary existence of a perfect entity, while Aquinas argues that there is a Creator. Genesis 1:27 tells us that the Creator created humans in his own image. So, the god that Aquinas is proving the existence of will have an image like ours.
If we manage to create strong AI, a machine we programmed that becomes intelligent and has beliefs, we will have created it in our image. In this way, we would be its god. We are the source of the virtual world. We are the ones who brought it into being and gave it an internal life. Our material world is the Mount Olympus of digital being. We would be the gods of the artificially intelligent.
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| Excellence is to do a common thing in an uncommon way." |
| BOOKER T. WASHINGTON A |
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