Saturday, April 24, 2010

Mike Christensen- Decalogues

One of these films brings up the question of algorithms, and whether the universe can be accounted for. Even though the father runs all the information he can get, the ice still breaks. The moral of the film seems to be that you cannot trust algorithms to always give you the answer, and should not put your faith in them when something important is on the line.
I would say that this is false. As a determinist materialist, I believe that every action and event is the outcome of certain causes interacting upon one another. Even though those causes may be numbered in the hundreds or even greater, they can still be found by the right observer. I believe that one simply has to know all the causes and how they interact in order to understand the future event, and then that person shall know it with such certainty that it might as well have happened already.
The real question is whether we are able to view all of the causes. As in, is it physically possible for humanity to understand an event in such complete detail (even down to the atomic scale and beyond) to generate that view of the future? And if so, can we build a computer powerful enough to hold all of that information? If so, then the universe will someday gain consciousness.

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