Questions for God?
I recently was delighted to reconnect with one of my favorite high school teachers, Wesley Walker, over 45 years since graduating from high school in the D.C. area. He was my English teacher, but he was much more. He was a gifted musician and a great philosophical thinker. He and I would have heated arguments in class that would cause my fellow students to tell me to stop arguing with
the teacher.
Mr. Walker would turn to them and say that Robert was the only one in the class who understood the whole point of being there! One of those arguments was about what is now called, “The Hard Problem of Consciousness,” which I have written about. I was pleased that we both were still thinking about it and each of us had come to value what the other had been saying decades ago.
One of Mr. Walker’s class exercises was to have us write a question for God. He and I are both Jewish atheists, so it was an amusing exercise that I immediately grasped: Suppose you had the chance to ask an all-knowing source of information one question. What would it be?
Mine: “What is space?” Today I might phrase it as “What is the nature of reality?” and/or “What is the nature of consciousness?” But I felt that if I had an answer about what is space, that would get to the root of what is the nature of reality.
We then swapped our questions with our fellow classmates, and we were supposed to answer as if we were God. One of my friends got my question and he made a valiant effort to answer in broad terms of space being what holds everything in the universe.
We then read some of the questions and answers out loud. I was disappointed to hear most of the questions. They took the form of personal questions: Who will I marry? What job should I take?
What would your question be? We are talking about a question to the Creator of the EFU (the Entire Universe).
A fellow grad student here at UCSB offered something similar. He imagined showing up at the gates of heaven when he died and meeting St. Peter. He was about to be sent to eternal bliss or to eternal hellfire. He said to St. Peter: If God gets to make such a powerful judgment about me, can I ask one question of Him? St. Peter agrees that is a fair request and asks for his question. His question? “How did you let the Holocaust happen?”
St. Peter goes off to ask God and says he will be back in a bit. My friend said he cannot imagine that any answer that St. Peter brings back will satisfy him.
These days we have a power that may come close: Artificial Intelligence. UCSB Professor Stephen Wilson recently gave a talk for the Science and Engineering Council on current research in superconducting materials. I asked if anyone had asked the current AIs for advice. He said they had!
A direct question of what material would be a room temperature semiconductor gave no useful information. But they were able to give an AI some helpful data and it did generate leads for new materials to try. No miracles, but some new research paths.
Quantum Computing is still in its infancy and faces many challenges to develop further. But that has not stopped a new breed of software engineer from writing programs for hypothetical future quantum computers.
While I might prioritize truly cosmic questions about reality and consciousness for a god-like intelligence, I would also have very practical questions. Such as: How can we achieve world peace and justice? How can we solve the Climate Crisis from a technical and a human social engineering standpoint? How can we enjoy the benefits of god-like artificial intelligence without endangering the future of humanity?
The latter seems paradoxically self-referential. But we use machines that are physically stronger than we are without fear they will try to destroy us. And the smartest people in a tech company are often the engineers and they rarely try to overthrow the management. I welcome a greater intelligence than my own limited intelligence!
