The Last Question
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Isaac Asimov said it was his favorite story he’d written. He imagines the entire history of the future of humanity, to the end of time, in a few pages. Really a marvelous story.
Full text: https://highexistence.com/the-last-answer-short-story/
These 2 are my favorite Asimov stories.
Nightfall is a decent story though. But yeah, The Last Question is in a league of its own. It's one of my favorite short stories ever along with The Library of Babel by Borges, The Great Automatic Grammatizator by Roald Dahl, and "Repent, Harlequin!" said the Tick-Tock Man by Harlan Ellison.
If you like a bit longer stories, try some Greg Egan. Or, his book with short stories is also really nice: [1]
[0]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/223380.Stories_of_Your_L...
Read it from the original publication:
<https://archive.org/details/Science_Fiction_Quarterly_New_Se...>
BTW, anyone just cruising by this post, it might be just me, but the advertisements at the very end of it are so dear. Just take a peek, so funny!
Use YOUR AMAZING physic (soul)
powers NOW!! Why “Develop” for
years??? MONEY? HEALTH? LOVE?
NOTHING IS HOPELESS. Remarkable
NEW APPROACH (demonstrated by
Jesus) now verified by modern science.
https://support.apple.com/guide/safari/interact-with-text-in...
Evolution is slow enough that there was never one point at which we suddenly came into being. First we were energy, then we were energy forming into chemicals, then we were chemicals forming into chemicals with rigid structures, then we were chemicals with rigid structures forming more complex structures, etc, until we got to here. Each iteration creates the next iteration, constantly, always. We are always giving birth to ourselves with a teeny tiny change. There is no distinction between a human being and a gas cloud except a couple billion years of iteration.
Since we are always creating ourselves, and whatever created the universe also created us, then we probably created the universe, and are the universe, and are creating it still. We are the creator and the created. It's mobius bagels all the way down.
Now that's a fun phrase!
Definitely - I thought I was at the SF party, not the Skeptics party.
I mean, of course the story defies physics. As do over 90% of Asimov's stories. As do most SF stories. Talking about these things is like going to a party to watch the soccer World Cup final and pontificating over how much better soccer would be if you could use your hands to hold the ball and run.
Lol. Asimov was a founding member of CSICOP, the organization that literally started the modern Skeptical movement.
Scientists come to God and say "OK God, we've had a lot of progress lately in synthetic biology, genetics, engineering, etc. and we're pretty sure we know how you did it."
God says "Oh really?". "Yes. We'll create living creatures out of dirt to show that we can do just as you did with Adam."
God says "Wow, fantastic!" So the scientists go outside with a shovel to collect some dirt. And as they're about to dig their spades in, God says "No no no, get your own dirt!"
Related: the idea of the Big Bang was first thought of by the Catholic priest Monsignor Georges Lemaître. Many scientists at the time dismissed the Big Bang, saying it was an attempt to bring religious concepts into physics. Another tangent: Msgr. Lemaître was quite interested in computer programming, as computers started to be invented toward the end of his life.
> If you make the argument that a deity is its own creator and cause, that idea could be applied to the existing physical universe directly.
The big bang could be seen as the physical universe creating itself.
Of course you could also see it as created by God (I certainly do), but these two are pretty much your only options, and I don't think one of them is more or less valid than the other. And with God not being subject to the physical universe or its laws, from scientific viewpoint, it's irrelevant. It might as well be the universe creating itself. The difference exists only outside the reach of science.
Also, we have evidence the physical universe hasn't been around forever: the Big Bang.
That's not exact. The Big Bang model brings us really close to the start of the known universe, but it doesn't describe what happened before that - nor dictates that it was really the beginning; the mathematics collapse into a non-descriptive degenerate singularity that doesn't need to match reality anymore. By this model, it is possible that there was some physical process before it that caused it and has been going on forever.
Also, the Big Bang model doesn't preclude the existence of other universes far away that were created by the same process, that we simply can't reach because they're out of our scope of causality.
> God is outside of space and time, whereas the physical universe is inside of space and time
That's a cop-out. What does it mean to "exist" if it isn't related to space and time?
> The physical universe obeys the laws of physics and God doesn't. So just because God can do something doesn't mean the physical universe can.
What if the physical universe dictates the laws of physics? Then you don't need God as an entity to explain existence. Unless you want to call the physical universe "god", which is on itself a valid deistic proposition.
What about the topic of this post, the second law of thermodynamics?
>That's a cop-out.
In a way. It's a hypothetical answer to the question. But it also doesn't offer any proof or a way to test if it's true or not.
>What does it mean to "exist" if it isn't related to space and time?
I think to some degree it's a mystery. One analogy that can partially get there, is consider if we built a really powerful computer and simulated an AI person and world inside (assuming there's no soul, this seems plausibly possible). That person would just know the simulated space and time, and would think nothing else exists, but yet we exist. This isn't a full explanation because it would have the turtles all the way down problem, but I think it helps to conceptualize the idea of something outside of our space and time.
>What if the physical universe dictates the laws of physics?
Scientific progress seems to me to be finding more and more foundational phenomenon that are causing higher-level phenomenon. It seems strange that at some point things stop being caused and instead cause themselves, don't follow laws but instead create laws out of nothing. It just seems different to me than what we've observed so far.
>Unless you want to call the physical universe "god", which is on itself a valid deistic proposition.
I guess that sort of makes sense. But I think it makes more sense to divide it into the foundation cause, and everything that rippled out from that.
It might be a side-effect, an emergent property of a decaying universe initiated by the Big Bang. The process that generated the Bang may be unaffected by it, or it may be compensated by a stronger physical effect creating a big concentration of energy. (We know from Stephen Hawking that particles and anti-particles are created "ex nihilo" in the vacuum; this could be similar, but way bigger and uncommon).
> turtles all the way down problem
Why should that be a problem? Or, in any case, more of a problem that an entity without a cause of its own?
In any case, if we're going for 'there are things beyond our reach we'll never know about', I prefer to think that they work the same as the things we know about, e.g. my example of other universes created by the same process as ours. This follows the principle of relativity ("there are no privileged places in the universe"); and the alternative you suggest leads to imagining absolutely everything as possible, since there is and never will be a way to know it, so it's no better than fantasy.
> It seems strange that at some point things stop being caused and instead cause themselves, don't follow laws but instead create laws out of nothing
That's a common misconception. The universe never "follows" laws, not in the sense that we understand mathematical models (nor human laws, for that matter); it's the other way around. It exists in a certain way, and we "create" laws to describe patterns in what we observe. There is no guarantee that the universe is fully behaving in the way the law describes; the model can always have missing parts.
If the universe is its own cause, there would be no separation between 'creating' behaviour and 'following' behaviour. Those are just labels we assign to understand what we perceive as causality (a.k.a. predictable effects).
> guess that sort of makes sense. But I think it makes more sense to divide it into the foundation cause, and everything that rippled out from that.
Yeah, I agree it can make sense - from a linguistic analysis POV, just like the 'cause' and 'effect' I mentioned above.
The big problem with that approach is that we humans have a tendency to anthropomorphize phenomena, and we come from a culture with an imposing tradition of imbuing that 'ultimate cause' idea with the attributes of an old, wise, powerful mentor in the manner of the Elder guides of the tribe. Which is absolutely unjustified from a logical point, and only serves to muddle the dialog with people who can't avoid using those attributes. So, in terms of ontology and teleology, I find it better to conceive the universe as its own cause, in order to completely avoid that categorical error.
Reminds me of the Boltzmann Brain. If something is so unlikely, is it ok to assume it actually happened?
>Why should that be a problem? Or, in any case, more of a problem that an entity without a cause of its own?
If we say the current world is just a simulation in a different world, we haven't solved anything. We're back where we started: how did that world begin. There's been no change in the situation.
If we say the current world was created by an eternal being with no cause, then we're not back where we started.
> I prefer to think that they work the same as the things we know about
If we don't know what caused the big bang, then I don't think we can say how similarly or differently other things will happen.
>If the universe is its own cause, there would be no separation between 'creating' behaviour and 'following' behaviour. Those are just labels we assign to understand what we perceive as causality (a.k.a. predictable effects).
But when we look at the universe, it looks like there is following behavior. A tree's shape is caused by DNA and how the cells behave, and that's caused by proteins, caused by molecules, caused by chemical reactions, caused by the electron structure, caused by subatomic particles.
When I look at this, and with your idea that we should interpret things to behave similar to what we know, it seems to me that since these elements of the universe have a cause, every element of the universe has a cause.
>we humans have a tendency to anthropomorphize phenomena
Yeah, I agree we shouldn't assume God is like us. It's not possible for God to be an old guy sitting on a cloud if a cloud is something in the created universe and sitting is an action requiring time and space, and God is outside time and space.
On the other hand, isn't it possible that God created the universe so that it would end up being like this, with humans the way we are? And God might have wanted us to be like him in some ways (free will, the capacity to love).
To begin with, we have the (weak) anthropic principle saying that no matter how improbable the event is, the fact that we are here and can observe it is proof that it has happened. We may doubt how to explain it, but we cannot deny that it exists just because it seems improbable.
Furthermore, we know that brains are a result of evolutionary refinement through thousands million years of entities competing with each other for survival to replicate their specific form among uncountable variations. We also know that the Big Bang was a extremely homogeneous concentration of immense energy at a single point. Allowing that we are comparing between infinitesimal probabilities, which one sounds like having less complexity and thus being more likely to be created by a single effect?
> If we say the current world was created by an eternal being with no cause, then we're not back where we started.
A flawless argument. But this argument cannot differentiate whether this "eternal being without a cause" is the universe itself or something external to the universe; it applies equally to both posibilites.
> If we don't know what caused the big bang, then I don't think we can say how similarly or differently other things will happen.
Right, that's a fair point of view. But my main point was that if we don't know the cause of a phenomenon and have no way to figure it out, any hypothesis about it is indistinguishable from fantasy. The principle of relativity is a heuristic to avoid fantasizing, and at the same time avoids the mistake of reasoning from the hubris of thinking that we are somewhat special among all the things in the known universe. Although there is no rational way to confirm this heuristic, the fact that it is simpler and requires less assumptions makes it preferable for me.
> When I look at this, and with your idea that we should interpret things to behave similar to what we know, it seems to me that since these elements of the universe have a cause, every element of the universe has a cause.
Yes, but that is a property of your observations about the events that take place within your reach, not an inherent property of the universe itself. Differentiating causes and effects are concepts that you choose to separate for the benefit of your understanding. It does not imply anything about how the physical world behaves. And it doesn't rule out the alternative of seeing the tree shape, DNA, proteins, molecules, particles and quantum waveforms as ways to look from different angles at the same ongoing process ("existence") which is the cause of itself, and that is exactly how I see it.
> On the other hand, isn't it possible that God created the universe so that it would end up being like this, with humans the way we are? And God might have wanted us to be like him in some ways (free will, the capacity to love).
See what I said above about fantasies impossible to confirm or reject, and about the arrogance of reasoning from the axiom that we are special. I see no difference between affirming that we are made in God's likeness and affirming that we have created God in our image; the net effect is the same, as we cannot ultimately disprove either of the two positions.
I believe Michael Ende expressed it in the best possible way: when humans enter the realm of fantasy and nurture it to create imaginary realms, we can have the best experiences possible for humanity; but when we try to bring those fantasies into our world and pass them off as realities, they become lies, which start the process of destroying both our world and the world of fiction.
I understand very well that the intimate belief in the existence of a being superior to us, who cares for us and is able to explain away all the doubts that may arise, has no rational basis and is therefore impossible to reject by reasoning, just as the belief that such a being does not exist has exactly the same lack of a rational basis; but at least our thinking can act to recognise this irresoluble problem as a child of thought, without any basis in any observation we can potentially make.
* The brain is too complex to appear all at once, it had to come about by a series of steps (evolution).
* There is no cause and effect in the universe, everything happens as part of 1 action.
I think we can only identify the brain as complex once we divide the universe into a series of steps, and see that the brain takes a lot of steps.
> * There is no cause and effect in the universe, everything happens as part of 1 action.
I don't see the contradiction, mainly because I don't support the second sentence as is. The steps that take place during evolution may happen without anyone there to observe them, so they would exist even without a complex brain to observe them. I don't see the existence of these steps as a flaw in my argument that the universe is self-generating and self-sustaining.
Also, causes and effects being two sides of the same substrate is not the same as everything being a single action; a universe that transforms itself will have states (or configurations, or patterns, if you prefer) that are a direct consequence of its previous states, without those consequences being created by something different and external to that same universe; only by its current reality and its eternal state of change.
I often find that both religious people and scientific rationalists are unable to differentiate sufficiently between the behaviour of reality and the knowledge we have of the behaviour of reality, equating them as if they were one and the same thing. For me, the concepts of "cause" and "effect" sit squarely in the "knowledge about reality" part, so none of the features we intuit about them can contradict whatever is actually happening in the observable world. My view of these two concepts is compatible with "the previous" universe being cause of "the next" universe, without the need of any external influence nor any specific "starting point".
I'm enjoying this conversation a lot, but I don't know for how long we'll be able to keep posting on this thread, and I'm not sure I have much more to say. I have not tried to convince you of my point of view, as I'm pretty sure these are not beliefs that can be swayed by rational arguments, but are based on emotions linked to learned concepts. I have merely tried to present my understanding of the cosmos in a coherent discourse that does not coincide with the classical concepts of the origins of reality, in the hope that your view of them will provide me with new angles, which it has done.
I'll be watching the thread to see if you say anything else, but for my part I don't think I have much more to contribute, just going in circles around more and more detail about the same ideas.
How are the words “person”, “know” and “think” being used here? Are they labels for algorithms?
So, no, "know" and "think" are not labels for an algorithm, but labels for things that can happen inside brains, whether the brains be physical brains or virtual brains (using virtual particles instead of real particles). "person" is also not a label for an algorithm. I was a bit imprecise in my wording. It's debatable whether the virtual person could actually be referred to as a "person".
I believe nearly all propositions about people thinking are unintelligible.
I also believe propositions about going beyond the physical world are unintelligible.
If you’re taking about parts of software, I fail to see how you are not talking about algorithms. The use of the word “simulation” seems completely irrelevant to me.
> So, no, "know" and "think" are not labels for an algorithm, but labels for things that can happen inside brains,
Or are using the word “think” to identify some phenomena I can observe with a brain and a microscope?
Is human behavior governed purely by biological processes?
>Or are using the word “think” to identify some phenomena I can observe with a brain and a microscope?
Scientists have hooked up sensors to peoples' brains and sensed certain patterns of brain waves corresponding to certain thoughts.
It's my feeling that the Hindu observation of infinite turtle dependence argues that the notion of divine dependence is ill-fated to begin with.
Various other arguments show that there can only be one uncaused cause, and such a cause must be infinitely good, and this one uncaused infinitely good thing, we all call "God." Goodness, beauty, and being exist to some degree in everything observed, and so are "transcendent" properties. We cannot observe or distinctly conceive of something lacking at least a degree of them. The transcendent properties hint at, but do not reveal, the outlines of a transcendental being which is their source.
This was all explained by the Greeks 2,500 years ago, and it's implicit in the non-Western traditions as well. It's philosophically bulletproof, although for some reason contemporary people act like it's not, I guess because we can build iPhones now? Modern atheism is really disappointing because for the most part it doesn't really grapple with the actual hard questions. We pretend like Hawking was an atheist, when quite clear he was a Deist who thought the laws of physics were God. The only really question is the question of the Daoists: okay, God/Heaven/The Dao must be there, but why should we think it's humane? And what are we going to do if it's not?
Why so ? there is another alternative: that a cause is its own cause. This is like in some programming languages where everything is an object, classes are just objects whose classes are metaclasses, and those metaclasses are just objects whose classes are... themselves. So God might be created, its creator is just (possibly another version of) itself.
It's at this point that you realize that our human logics and brains, developed in a universe where (apparently, who knows how the sub-quantum things work) every cause is caused, is entirely inadequate to speculate about the origins of such a universe. If the universe is oftentimes weird, much much weirder than you can possibly imagine, even after you adjust for its weirdness a thousand times over, if its phenomena and patterns often defy our brains and make us invent a myriad myth and superstition to account for them, what can possibly compel you to believe that that which is beyond the universe is even comprehensible, even in principle ? that it can be even hypothesized about and queried by our language ?
>Various other arguments show that there can only be one uncaused cause
I'm not aware of convincing arguments for the necessary oneness of a hypothesized supreme being. The one often employed by the followers of the religion I was born into is an appeal to the "Conflict-Free Universe": Assume there are multiple equally-powerful supreme beings of independent wills, then they will necessarily clash, and that will manifest as conflict and corruption in our universe, which is obviously ordered and free of all conflict and corruptions, and so it must really be the case that there is but a single will behind this universe.
There are several glaring holes with this kind of reasoning
- It assumes we can recgonize a clash of gods when we see it. Do ants or bacteria recognize when humans have wars or conflicts ? I don't think so. To borrow some religous people own favorite phrase, "Absence of Evidence is not Evidence of Absence". If gods (or supreme causes, or whatever you call it) are invisible, then so are their potential conflicts.
- It imagines gods as humans, or at least animals. Why would several independent wills necessarily leads to infighting ? Mathematicians, for example, do not often fight about the truth of proved theorems, although each one of them is an indepedent will. If the whole of existence (of which our universe is just a small part) is like mathematics, or chess, and all gods have perfect minds capable of grasping it in its entirety, then there will be no conflict, truth will compel all independent wills to agree simply by being so blindingly obvious. If creating humans is the single best possible thing to do, then all gods will agree to creating humans, and furthermore they will even agree about which of them should create them, and what tools or materials they\it should use while doing so. In a game of perfect information whose players are infinitely-powerful computers, there is no need for cooperation, communication or coercion in order to agree on the best strategy, all players will simply compute the same answer independently (while taking each other into account). The above argument implies there is some random or unjustified choice that god is/was making, and thus several gods will necessarily clash with each other.
>such a cause must be infinitely good
I find this a bizarre leap of faith. Why ? why should your idiosyncratic morality, which was probably abhorred and decried as false by generations past, and will be abhorred and decried as false by generations to come, be the mark of an eternal and immutable god? you can no more know the morality of a hypothesized god than you can know the number of arms and legs he has, or whether he is even a he. Indeed, the Problem of Evil presents a very compelling evidence that God's morality, if there is any, can never be grasped or understood as anything but a random entropy source by humans.
>It's philosophically bulletproof
Nothing in philosophy is bulletproof, however convincing it may seem (to you). This is a field where people routinely doubt their own existence before breakfast.
>although for some reason contemporary people act like it's not, I guess because we can build iPhones now
Atheism is older than religion.
>Modern atheism is really disappointing because for the most part it doesn't really grapple with the actual hard questions.
It's kind of a mixed bag really. Evolution, for instance, gives a completely new and horrifying spin on the Problem of Evil, which I believe to be the single most devstating blow against any ideology that believes in an inherent good in the universe, and is the cause of me abandoning my religion. On the other hands, new atheism often focus on annoying and besides-the-point things, like God's views on homosexuality or irrelevant scientific errors in holy books. This is useful to show how similar are the holy books to the views of the time they were written in (which, in turn, makes one suspicious as to how an eternal and transcendent god can be affected by the vulgarities of the time), but leaves multiple escape hatches and holes for the opposite side to squirm through. Ultimately, the failing of central atheism is not something it believes, but something that all modern popular ideologies struggle with: the rage-inducing and shallowfication effects of modern media.
However I suspect self-causation is the wrong way to look at it. In the case of Python metaclasses and such, the self-referentiality is created by a pointer. The metaclass doesn't actually contain itself; it contains a pointer to itself (Python makes this a little obscure, but all objects in Python are really pointers to C structs). To be self-causing though isn't like following a pointer. The relevant operation is not following the reference back to the cause, the relevant operation is _causing_. You can sort of get around it with time travel, but then the thing isn't causing itself, strictly. Rather thing from T2 is causing thing at T1.
(In fact, Buddhist analysis of causation is very good on just this point: when we really look closely at causation, we find that all causing must be self-discharging and immediate, which means all things are empty of inherent existence. You can get back to monotheism, as some flavors of Buddhism do, by positing this ground of causation as Buddha Nature.)
>such a cause must be infinitely good
This is a mathematically proven fact, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel%27s_ontological_proof
In general, I recommend Boethius's Consolations of Philosophy as a good primer on Neoplatonism and why the One and the Good must be identical.
>Atheism is older than religion.
No, not believing in specific gods is older than religion. Atheism is a specific doctrine that originates in the eighteenth century as part of a garbled transmission of Confucianism to the West and newfound scientific interest in materialism. To be an atheist isn't to say Zeus or Odin or Yahweh don't exist. You can be extremely religious and deny the existence of any named god! Indeed, that is the height of piety, to humbly submit that you don't and can't know God's name. To be an atheist is to say that the Good as such doesn't exist and the world is fundamentally physical. (However, there's no good definition of physicalism that doesn't lapse into circularity or absurdities…) There are very few true atheists. To really be an atheist, to use Lacanian terminology, is to not believe in any Big Other, but doing that requires an unusual degree of vigilance. Everyone is always letting in some Big Other, but saying that their Big Other isn't like the other Big Others.
The problem of evil is just that problem that whatever good it is that God is interested in and whatever good it is that we are interested in must be different goods. But of course this is so. Why wouldn't it be? The question (again, getting back to Daoism) is whether our good is subsumable under God's good, or whether to exist as ourselves we must tragically oppose whatever it is that God's goodness is and so ultimately perish.
Well sure, if you've already accepted the core premise of monotheism you're probably not wondering about that gotcha question or its implications.
[1] https://tropedia.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Applied_Phlebotinu...
I use adblocking so I didn't notice the ads; if you prefer, you may check it[1] at AllTheTropes,[2] the initial fork that kept the content under its original legal license. Though as far as I understand it, that project migrated to Tropedia and it is no longer maintained, which is why I linked there instead.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_Tropes#Licensing_and_conten...
[2] https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Category:Applied_Phlebotinum
I wonder if the same thing applies to godhood. For thousands of years, humans have shifted the evolutionary path of other species. We create humans outside of the human body every day. We manipulate fundamental forces and create particles. For fun, we interact with virtual worlds full of creatures we made. We've even put life on other worlds.
Maybe our universe is just some greaterverse being's homework.
Maybe this is a comfort.
This list and the shorter prior one were also on HN at some point.
tl;dw: It is well known that the universe expands, tracing this back in time leads to the singularity called the Big Bang. But is it possible to ask for a "before" the beginning of time? What is time? Time is what we measure with clocks. What are clocks? Something that returns to the same state (say, a pendulum, or the earth orbiting around the sun - a "year"). To be able to build a clock you need mass. Only objects with mass, moving below the speed of light, experience time. In the very far future, after all stars have burned out, the only objects remaining will be black holes. Eventually, even they will decay due to Hawking radiation. So in the end, there will be only expanding space, and radiation that "travels to infinity". Photons themselves do not experience time as they move with the speed of light. Without mass, without anything that has a notion of time, the concept of distance becomes meaningless. The universe will become spacelike. Without distances, the universe may as well be a singular point. Like the Big Bang :)
Edit: I think we should see time only as a parameter and find out how any calculation could work without it. That would relax the past tense (what “was” before time) into something manageable (no linguistic analogy yet).
It seems to be piggybacking on themes of afterlife, karma, gods, and those typically are of interest to many. But, what kind of longer-lasting idea it tries to propose, that escapes me.
It's easy for us to get lost in our own heads, saying "I'd never be like that person". We see them as the other, but in fact they are not so different from ourselves. This seeing of people as "the other" is the source of much conflict in the world.
But in this story, there is no other. There's only you. As the reader, you step into the shoes of the main character and ponder how you might feel if you were presented with such news upon your death. How would you look back on all the choices you made? How would you look back on the way you treated other people, who you've now learned are in fact yourself?
How would you feel? About your life just lived? About the lives ahead? Would you find peace? Finding peace in this reality is equivalent to the acceptance of others. In pondering these questions, the separation between yourself and others begins to dissolve, offering you a glimpse into the illusory nature of the self.
Plus, we don't know what the afterlife holds, or if there is one at all. So it's an interesting thought experiment also because it is an entirely plausible reality.
That's just my 2 cents though.
If it takes place in the same universe as "The Last Question", you could argue it has a bit of a "Roko's basilisk" flavor.
I've heard that this is how the story originated; a friend of Ellison had a doll with no mouth named this and Ellison quickly thought that it would be a great title for a horror story...
This is one of the short stories that that has stuck with me for life. Highly recommend reading it.
Edit: I actually learned of the story from a HN submission years ago. It has been discussed here many times: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=the+last+question
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=Can+entropy+be+reversed
I find the related queries quite funny: "how many calories does ballroom dancing burn?"
Right after I had the answer to the entropy question that would have been my next one :)
But I would also bring up "Answer", by Frederic Brown[0], which is another take on the theme.
His short stories were fantastic, I read the complete collection again during the first lockdown (and Rendevous with Rama got me through my bout of covid). 9 Billion Names of God is great.
I found it funny how he could predict so much about the future, except for many aspects of social change. That's not unique to him, many authors have struggled with that. I loved the image of an observatory on the far side of the moon which had a typing pool full of (obviously female) secretaries, it felt simultaneously futuristric and retro.
https://ipfs.eternum.io/ipfs/QmSiaEmhLvFdzzvkBmJKtRDmZRNDpDt...
(Read the original first though.)
First time I see this
https://gizmodo.com/read-ken-lius-amazing-story-that-swept-t...
https://archive.org/details/Science_Fiction_Quarterly_New_Se...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deus_ex_machina#Origin_of_the_...
"Deus ex machina is a Latin calque from Greek ἀπὸ μηχανῆς θεός (apò mēkhanês theós) 'god from the machine'. The term was coined from the conventions of ancient Greek theater, where actors who were playing gods were brought onto stage using a machine."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deus_ex_machina#Ancient_critic...
It's potentially also Roko's Basilisk, because if the eternally looping machine knew you are aware of it, and you tried to break the time-cycle to prevent the re-creation of itself and everything (samsara?), you could end up being punished in an endless eternal while(1){existence;}. Maybe in that sense it's like the Tenma of the sixth heaven getting in the way of those seeking to break from that cycle, but I know less about this.
In spite of these links to a deeply cyclical creation, life and existence, it starts the end speaking the words of a deity usually strongly held to have a through-and-through YOLO creation (miraculous resurrections notwithstanding).
There's a similar story to the The Last Question (and it's not "The Last Answer")
In this story, the question was more "meaning of life" and the computer has the answer but those asking were incapable of understanding it. I seem to remember similar back and forth over time but that might be me getting mixed up between the two stories.
And no - I don't think it's Douglas Adams related.
There are people, who deep in their hearts don't want individual tools to expand and improve themselves, but something new to kneel down and pray to.
I place this struggle squarely on the humanist <-> anti-humanist axis.
It's not unique to the Singularity. Another common trope is, when God doesn't answer, people turn to the Devil or Cthulhu. When medicine fails to provide a miracle, they turn to magic crystals.