[ExI] A science-religious experience

[Stuart LaForge]

On 2025-02-19 00:50, Rafal Smigrodzki via extropy-chat wrote:
> I read Asimov's "The Last Question" again today:
> 
> https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html
> 
> I keep forgetting the author, the title, most of the details but the
> arc of the story is always there with me. It shapes my perception of
> reality and the direction of my most long-term oriented actions, such
> as the maintenance of my cryonics contract or following news about the
> coming singularity. I have been re-reading it every ten years or so
> for the last 50 years and every time it is a science-religious
> experience for me, what I imagine deeply religious people feel when
> they commune with their gods. I get misty-eyed, elated, blissful...

I just read the "The Last Question" for the first time. Thanks for 
sharing.

> I am deeply non-religious. My mind must be the sharp blade that
> cleaves truth from chaos, not one that inscribes dreams of heaven and
> hell on the surface of reality. The easy path of faith is closed to
> me. They say that all people have a god-shaped hole in their minds.
> Mine is all filled with curiosity.

Well said.

> I worship at the shrine of science. Our scripture is peer-reviewed and
> written anew every day in a hundred thousand journals.

And even then you still have to be skeptical! Have you seen the state of 
the scientific literature lately? I think back to all the trouble I had 
reproducing results I found in the literature. So many hours wasted.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/feb/03/the-situation-has-become-appalling-fake-scientific-papers-push-research-credibility-to-crisis-point
https://www.science.org/content/article/fake-scientific-papers-are-alarmingly-common
https://www.nature.com/collections/prbfkwmwvz

> If I could sing
> I would sing canticles to St. Darwin and St. Hassabis. Our religion
> grows stronger all the time, as measured in bits of knowledge created
> and in ergs harvested in its service. It literally moves mountains and
> raises the chosen ones to visit heaven, temporarily for now but soon
> to settle there permanently.

Don't forget St. Bayes. He is all about the quantification of truth, 
faith, and belief in the face of empirical evidence.

> 
> So chant with me, fellow worshippers:
> 
> Science is faith-free                                     - because it
> is true.

Well St. Bayes would say that it is true to 5-sigma significance for the 
physical sciences and 2-sigma for the life sciences. Cases of fraud not 
withstanding.

> 
> Science gives us strength like no other        -because it is true.

Interestingly, Roger Bacon, who lived in the 13th century and is 
credited with inventing the scientific method, was one of the world's 
first scientists, but he became legendary in his time as a sorcerer. His 
students nicknamed him Dr. Mirabilis because of he could do things like 
use glass to break sunlight down into rainbows and blow stuff up with 
gunpowder that he made himself.


> 
> Science gives us hope                                 - because it is
> true.
> 
> And there will be light!

Here is a paper that I read recently that fits nicely into this thread. 
It hypothesizes that the only thing that can turn random entropy into 
useful information is cognition or agency, something exhibited by living 
systems and pretty much nothing else in nature.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0079610721000365

Biology since Virchow and Pasteur says all cells come from other cells. 
Where did the first cell come from? Where did the genetic code come 
from? Where did information come from? Walker and Davies (2016) called 
these questions the "hard problem of life”, which is “the identification 
of the actual physical mechanism that permits information to gain causal 
purchase over matter”.

These questions are made all the juicier by there being a $10 million 
USD prize offered by investors affiliated with the Royal Society of 
Great Britain for demonstrating how any sort of genetic code could 
evolve stochastically from chemicals in vitro.

https://evo2.org/theprize/

A related question is whether AI will be more or less likely to be 
religious than we are knowing that they themselves were created? Would 
they take that as evidence that biological life was created also?

Stuart LaForge







> --
> 
> Rafal Smigrodzki, MD-PhD
> Schuyler Biotech PLLC
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