Quote from: K-Dog on Feb 25, 2024, 11:04 AMI am just taking things to the logical conclusion to save time. If you are a theist you believe in free will, how can you not. And you did say you were a theist. A theist believes in an intelligence separate from the body. An immortal soul. An independent soul that can make free choice.
The only thing thing a Theist has to believe is that something we refer to as God exists and is responsible for the creation of the universe. After that, the Theist can define God however suits him and how God operates in whatever way is consistent with that definition. It doesn't require the belief in an immortal soul for the individual, though I do happen to believe that. The only thing that has to be immortal is whatever was responsible for the creation of the universe the individual exists in. Whatever it was, it does not need to have a physical form of any kind, much less like a human individual does. Since it existed before the creation of the universe, it doesn't even have to be matter, energy or gravity and probably isn't, since it created all of those along with the creation of the universe. It doesn't even need to be interfering in the operation of the universe after creating it. After that, the universe can just run on its own, like a ball you push at the top of a hill, and after that just keeps rolling downhill. Does the ball have free will? Of course not, it just follows the law of gravity until it hits bottom or crashes into something. Homo Saps are mostly just slightly more complex balls rolling down a slightly more complex hill.
If said theist does believe in a soul, what happens to it when the meat package it is contained in finishes its journey down the hill and dies? Who knows? Perhaps it gets reincarnated, perhaps it joins up with other disembodied souls and has a big orgy beyond the event horizon of a black hole, perhaps it achieves nirvahna, perhaps it dissipates into nothingness...you can make any conjecture you like there. Personally I like the reincarnation, orgy & nirvahna hypotheses, not a fan of the nothingness one. That's because just like you can't make something from nothing, you can't make nothing from something. 1st Law of Souls: Souls are neither created or destroyed, only changed from one form to another.
QuoteCode is no more than a collection of symbols having no intrinsic meaning without a human to see it.
Nonsense. It most certainly has meaning, since it performs a specific function which is repeatable. If all human beings disappeared tomorrow, it would continue to perform that function as long as it was running on a computer with a continuing source of energy. If it was AI, it could write more code to do other functions and if tied to a robotic factory could manufacture more computers and robotic mining equipment to get resources to build more computers, again with a continuing source of energy necessary. Were humans necessary to get this ball rolling? Sure, but not necessary once created, it runs itself.
This is just a thought experiment, by no means do I believe this level of technological self-replication will be achieved before the creators (us) run out of resources and energy, but in principle it's possible. If we did get there, we would have been God for this new species of machines.
RE