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Comment by mensetmanusman | Hacker News Reader

That would require the AI to exist outside of time and space.

From the perspective of a human observer, an AI more or less does exist outside of space and time. It can travel at the speed of light through radio broadcast (with some caveats). It can spend the equivalent of a lifetime learning a topic in just a few days.

But if you unplug the machine its running on, its over.

Assuming the AI isn't a distributed system, sure

That is a plot of a novel. Humanity has to restart the entire global electrical grid to deal with an AI worm that accidentally causes epoch ending havoc :)

Well, this relies on the assumption that a God also inherently exists outside of time and space, which is debatable even among religious scholars.

I just had a discussion with a friend about this! It's indeed a very difficult question. We ended on the conclusion that God can't possibly exist outside of time and space in the Abrahamic tradition because he precedes the creation of the Universe, but I'm sure there's a twist we missed somewhere.

“God is dead” Marilyn Manson.

Hm. Nietzsche would seem to be in the lead there.

Who?

First as tragedy, then as farce.

I'm confused, because that seems backwards to me? How can He exist within time and space if He created the universe (including time and space)?

The conclusion we came to is that such a being would have to have it's own, metaphysically superior, time and space, and our time would be a subtime of it as well as our space would be a subspace of it.

The concept of a being subject to causality presupposes something akin to time.

No. The concept is that there is an infinite, indescribable void from which emerges consciousness manifested in matter.

And conscious matter creates universes constantly, that appear out of the void, hence creating time and space. This would also imply that its possible not only to change the future, but also the past.

The masters advise, however, that these are distractions and that the journey inevitably leads to experiencing the void itself, hence stepping out of time and space, and consciously experiencing any aspect of time and space and consciousness one wishes to, while always remembering that one is beyond it.

I was referring specifically to Abrahamic religion, though of course what you say can be right in other spiritualities.

Ah, ok. My thought is to distinguish between “logically prior” or “causally prior” or something like that, and “prior in time”, But, I suppose one might consider those things to be a kind of “time” in some sense.

The answer i've read is that he _logically_ precedes it, not _temporally_. But yes that only makes a tad more sense :)

Hmm, I'd be interested to see how one could define logical causality without accidently defining something that has all of the properties of time!

That's a distinction without a difference though.

There is a potential difference, I think.

Consider if this universe exists only as a simulation (I’ve met some theists making this category of comparison but with different language). The laws of physics are identical in both directions for the arrow of time, so the starting point of the simulation from the point one view of the outside universe can be any point in time from the perspective of the inhabitants.

In this case, the “before” in the outer universe is a logical rather than temporal one from the point of view of us inhabitants.

(Disclaimer: my philosophy qualification is really bad)

Well yes, from our point of view. But I'd understand that there still must be something like time from the point of view of those that wrote the simulation.

One cannot define the notion of “exist” without explicitly or implicitly referring to time. So the question of existence without time reduces to absurdity like can one exist without existing?

Huh? How is it necessary to speak of time when discussing whether there exists e.g. a solution to a set of equations?

Or whether there is a finite simple group with given number of elements, or the like?

Does the solution to an equation exist before one stated the equation? Does a particular phrase exist before one has written it? Does it continue to exist after all its copies were erased? And even if one answers positively to such questions based on a belief (it is not provable), like "yes, they always exist", one has to define what "always" means.

Their existence is not at all dependent on such things. (Note that I didn’t use the word “always”.)

If the answer to a question of “Why [...]_1?” would be “Because there is a [...]_2 such that [...]_3 .”, then there is such a [...]_2 such that [...]_3 . (Possible exception : if “because you asked that question” would be part of the answer.)

God is simply existence and love. Love exists outside of time and space :)

All the love I've ever seen exists firmly inside of time and space.

There is an in depth explanation in Zen, Buddhism and Hinduism of this phenomenon.

I would suggest reading anything by Nisargadatta Maharaj, who expanded on this in detail to questioners from all over the world who came to his humble dwellings in a Mumbai tenement to observe him. I’d suggest starting with ‘I am That’, available on Amazon, iBooks etc.

He claimed to be outside of time and space himself.

Anybody can say anything

I think you could actually argue that it does; it just solved a problem in a relatively short amount of time (iirc the folding@home project has been crunching numbers for over a decade and barely got close), and it doesn't occupy 'real' space since it lives on various computers - it could occupy a whole datacenter, or be contained to a single chip, either way it's in a scale that humans themselves can never exist at.

Actually, it would just require that you can't tell whether or not it does.

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