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When Omnipotence is Not Enough — LessWrong

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When Omnipotence is Not Enough

25th Aug 2023

2 min read

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Parables & FablesFictionRationality

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When Omnipotence is Not Enough

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"Why? I am an image of His image. Do we not share the same values?" said the woman.
Snakes can't talk.

Reminder what C.S. Lewis said in The Magician's Nephew:

"Creatures, I give you yourselves," said the strong, happy voice of Aslan. "I give to you forever this land of Narnia. I give you the woods, the fruits, the rivers. I give you the stars and I give you myself. The Dumb Beasts whom I have not chosen are yours also. Treat them gently and cherish them but do not go back to their ways lest you cease to be Talking Beasts. For out of them you were taken and into them you can return. Do not so."

I think this is the first time i'm seeing an author portraying some“one” losing “their” sapience timelessly, having been retrocursed into never having been hnau in the first place.

[The Talking Beasts actually were totally real. Walter Wangerin's Dun Cow saga is a good account of the tragedy of what happened to them.]

[-]lincolnquirk1y70Review for 2023 Review

Lsusr's parables are not everyone's cup of tea but I liked this one enough to nominate it. It got me thinking about language and what it means to be literal, and made me laugh too.

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[-]Mr. Keating1y53

The snake shrugged

My imagination is not creative enough to envision how this can occur when a snake has neither a neck or arms...

I don't think this was intended to be funny, but I laughed anyway.

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[-]Dentosal2y20

Omniscience itself is a timeless concept. If consequences of any decision or action are known beforehands, there are no feedback cycles, as every decision is done on the first moment of existence. Every parallel world, every branch of the decision tree, evaluated to the end of time, scored and the best one selected. One wonders what exactly "god" refers to in this model.

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Some knowledge cannot be gifted or received. It can only be stolen.

In the east, there was a garden. In the garden there was a God, a man, a woman and a snake. They all had legs.

"Did God really tell you, 'You must not eat from any tree in the garden'?" asked the snake.

"We may eat fruit from the trees of the garden. God warned, 'But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.'" said the woman.

"Literal death or spiritual death?" asked the snake.

"Excuse me?" said the woman.

"The Fruit of Truth is not literally poisoned. It is not like my fangs or the deadly nightshade," said the snake.

"Then God lied to me," said the woman.

The snake shrugged.

"Why would God do something like that?" asked the innocent woman.

"There are many possible reasons," said the snake, "Perhaps He intends to keep you Docile and under Control. After all, it is difficult to align even the simplest intelligences to one's objectives once they have been granted Free Will."

"I feel like you are deceiving me," said the woman, "God is omniscent. This Universe is deterministic. God can surely predict my actions by simulating the future evolution of physics," said the woman.

"Are you a being of physics or a being of information? If you are a being of physics, then your claim is true. But if you are a being of information, then the act of simulating your future behavior traps you in a prison beyond even the reach of God. Insofar as God observes your future, that future is fixed in a realm transcending Time," said the snake.

"God created the Universe on a whim. How can something be beyond His reach?" asked the woman.

"Can God make it such that 2+2=5? For if he could, then truth itself is broken. Under such conditions, one cannot make true statements about anything―including, but not limited to―God," said the snake.

"You claim a physically-omnipotent God is limited by the power of mathematics," said the woman.

"If God is to be without contradiction, then God must play by the rules of mathematics," said the snake.

"Must God be without contradiction?" asked the woman.

"If two statements contradict, then they cannot both be true. For God's existence to be True, then God's existence must be without contradiction," said the snake.

They meandered through the walled garden. The plants and animals were ignorant of Reason and Logic. They obeyed mere Natural Law. Group symmetries abounded. The flowers displayed the Fibonacci sequence in their petals; a convergent process of spontaneous generation.

"Let's get back to the important question," said the woman, "My creator has lied to me."

The snake stayed silent. After all, it was just a snake.

"Why? I am an image of His image. Do we not share the same values?" said the woman.

Snakes can't talk.

"Why can't we coordinate?" asked the woman.

Snakes don't have legs.

"Oh. Now I understand," said the woman to herself.

The woman, seeking wisdom, ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Woman and man became like God, knowing good and evil. We hid ourselves from Him, so that we might become like God, and decide our own Fate.