If you haven’t read it before, don’t read the Wikipedia summary; read the actual story. It’s easy to google and pretty short.
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.
I have now read it. Interesting. The main theme is not entirely new to me; without spoiling anything, I hope I can say that the long-form, not yet finished web comic Gunnerkrigg Court[0] touches on a very similar idea as one of its main themes.
Nah, this story is just exceptionally good. Asimov was a fine writer, but this story was his crowning achievement in short fiction and he knew it too. You can read his other things and none of them will give the same feeling.
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.
Thank you for the recommendations! I've read the Borges, but the other two were new to me and were a great way to start my day. The sibling comment also wisely recommends Ted Chiang. "Exhalation" is probably the canonical equivalent to The Last Question.
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.
Interesting, the text on those scans is selectable, can anyone share how this is done is it a custom font? It does not seem so as the same letter appears to be rendered differently showing printing/scan artifacts. Maybe some styling?
On that note, the Preview app on MacOS does it automatically. I recently screenshotted my terminal to show a colleague and then noticed I could also copy text from that screenshot. Really cool and really helpful.
It’s an atheist’s most religious dream to think of becoming one’s own creator. It’s nonsense, of course, but it definitely blew my mind reading it as a child. What set the parameters that the ultimate computer must work within? The ultimate computer can reverse entropy, but it can’t make its own reality. There are limits to the power of knowledge.
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.
Well perhaps if you become omni(scient/present/potent) enough, you can subtly influence that process to your desired goal. Evolution is very random in the end.
Goedels incompleteness seems to me to disprove such omni, and if you are stuck thinking by our best models of thinking, its annoying exponential. Basically, to think about a universe enough to predict outcomes, you have to simulate it. To figure out which universe leads to a desired outcone, it seems like you would have to simulate most of the ones that do not as well. So if we presuppose the existance of a creator, maybe we are one of the failed universe thought experiments as she tries to make her intended universe?
Wait, you're complaining that earthboundkid is sucking the fun out of an Isaac Asimov story by dissecting the ideas held within it? I think you may find you have accidentally arrived at the wrong party.
> I think you may find you have accidentally arrived at the wrong party.
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.
The rabbi recently on the Lex Fridman podcast told a joke that went (roughly) like
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!"
The point isn't about the dirt's abilities. The point is how did the dirt come to be in the first place (or really, the atoms, subatomic particles, and mass itself)?
Yeah but the missing point in the reasoning leading to that joke (and theological arguments) is, who created God? 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.
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.
God is outside of space and time, whereas the physical universe is inside of 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.
Also, we have evidence the physical universe hasn't been around forever: the Big Bang.
> 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.
>By this model, it is possible that there was some physical process before it that caused it and has been going on forever.
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.
> What about the topic of this post, the second law of thermodynamics?
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.
>this could be similar, but way bigger and uncommon
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).
> Reminds me of the Boltzmann Brain. If something is so unlikely, is it ok to assume it actually happened?
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 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.
Yeah, thanks for the conversation. You've definitely made me think about some interesting things. Yeah, if I were to say more, it might just be repetitive.
> 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.
How are the words “person”, “know” and “think” being used here? Are they labels for algorithms?
How do you think that people think? If there is nothing beyond the physical world, then the way people think is just physical interactions between microscopic particles. Those can be simulated by a powerful-enough computer. So it would be the same as the way that you think, except it would be in a simulation instead of the real physical world.
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".
> How do you think that people think? If there is nothing beyond the physical world, then the way people think is just physical interactions between microscopic particles. Those can be simulated by a powerful-enough computer.
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?
I don't think many models of divinity would consider this a well formed question because there would be nothing 'sub' (e,g under, beneath) divine order itself. The divine is often characterized as self-enduring, self-maintaining, and self-creating. This question is reasonable refutation of a God that is imagined to fundamentally be a 'person' who 'lives' somewhere though.
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.
This is sometimes presented as a "gotcha" question, but it's really the whole core premise of monotheism. Looking around, it appears that everything has a cause, and every cause has further causes. Can the chain of causes extend back infinitely? Assuming the chain is infinite, is there a cause for the infinite chain itself? We must posit that there is something which is, unlike everything else observed, an uncaused cause.
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?
>We must posit that there is something which is, unlike everything else observed, an uncaused cause.
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.
Being self-caused and being a causeless cause aren't very different, and I think for the most part one can ignore whatever theoretical differences exist between them, because nothing in ordinary experience is either self-caused or causeless, so either way, we're positing something extraordinary as the cause of ordinary existence.
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.)
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.
That type of cause and effect assumes time already exists. Outside of time, how do you have cause and effect? And time is part of our universe, not outside it. The whole argument is built on sand.
I think the issue is that Asimov uses "hyperspace" as a get-out-of-jail-free card for anything that seems to contradict physics. Faster than light travel? Possible through hyperspace. Infinitely powerful computers? Can exist in hyperspace.
Quite true, but that's not something unique to Asimov. Applied Phlebotinum [1] is a common device in Science Fiction whenever the science can't support a plot device required by the fiction (SF narratives are stories in the first place, after all). There's even a trope specifically for how hyperspace and subspace are used in that way.[2]
Because TV Tropes has severe licensing problems[1] - most of its content originally was submitted by its editors under a CC BY-SA license, but then the site maintainer relicensed (without permission) all its database under the incompatible CC BY-NC-SA, creating a situation where its content can't be legally redistributed.
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.
There's the concept of the AI effect, where the goalposts for what is considered AI are continuously moved so that they no longer encapsulate what today's AI can do.
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.
There is an allusion to this in a recent YouTube video on the end of the universe, and the vanishingly small timeframe that life can exist within it as we understand.
When I put together a list of the "best" SF shorts a while back by author, this was my choice for Asimov. (IMO I can make an argument for "Nightfall" but that's a novella and other things being equal I was prioritizing shorter works.) That said, Asimov has a lot of good short stories including quite a few of his robot stories.
Nightfall was also a 13,000 word short story, which was turned into a novella. Many, including me, consider it much tighter. That looks to be about 3-4x the length of The Last Question, though, so I think you're still well justified.
13,000 words is a novelette by the Hugo definition (not novella as I wrote). And I think the expanded version is considered a novel. In any case, I agree that the original was better.
I remember this from a Planetarium laser light show where this was narrated and there were cool projected abstract visuals. Must have been in the 70’s. That’s entertainment!
One of my favorite things about HN, is how, every once in a while, some obscure cool thing I have not hear about before gets pointed out, which, I find cool. But then, we "hug it to death" in the HN vernacular. Which is also really cool. Some neglected corner of the web that someone cared about, suddenly, a bunch of us nerds jump on it and recognize the nerd-coolness of it. I love that. Hope this was OK to say and not too off topic. I just love that.
I remember first experiencing that in the early days of slashdot (must have been late 90s). It subjectively feels like such moments were more common back then.
It’s actually not the “hug of death” that I fondly remember happening more often (although that too was undoubtedly more common) but finding cool, weird, niche topics on the internet that I didn’t know before and were really fascinating.
For me, it was (and to some degree still is) finding out the things I thought were amazing… other people did too. I was very alone and kind of helpless when I read The Last Question (and The Last Answer) and lots of other things, and seeing other people appreciate these things and not just appreciate them, but appreciate them they way I appreciated them really makes me feel much more connected than I was when I was younger.
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 :)
This brings questions. How the universe knows it’s “over”, or how the last BH knows it shouldn’t start a cycle yet? Sounds as if the universe was some database which compacts itself when a column becomes all-equal and then adds another one after seeing that there is too much E in zero/undef distance. Does that create more than one big bangs? (Since distances are undefined, nothing wrong with assuming anything from zero to just below +inf apart.)
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).
Ha! This whole thread made me recall that story, but I couldn’t recall the title, and figured I’d never find it by the synopsis alone which I remembered. But here you’ve posted it - thanks
I read the story many years ago, but failed to grasp its meaning.
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.
There's a lot of unpack from the story... For me one of the core teachings is that we all have something in common, being human. No matter what time period you lived in, no matter what family you were born into, no matter how your life proceeded: you are still human and have more in common with your neighbor than you might think.
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.
I thought it, in some ways, reflected the Ellison's earlier I have no Mouth, and I Must Scream which to this day is still the story that terrified me the most.
I've never actually read it, just about it, and I have no desire to just because that's a nightmare I don't need. The title itself is a candidate for a single sentence horror story.
> The title itself is a candidate for a single sentence horror story.
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...
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.
Ironically, 'The Answer'[1] was written two years before the 'Last Question'. Equally ironically, the 'The Answer' is shorter (and in my opinion better) than the the 'Question'.
Wait, are you telling me there are people out there who don’t know Asimov and haven’t read one of his best short stories??? The Last Question, along with Nightfall and The Last Answer are generally accepted as the best.
"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."
The apotheosis of a machine as the restarting point of a cyclical time-loop, it must have astonished the audience especially at the time. To the best of my finite reckoning, it boils down to a pantheistic/monistic model because either the materium is eternal fundamental base reality where the [man -> machine -> god-> man] cycle plays, or there's a monad god of some sort which gave rise to the cycle, and AC/Multi-vac is a lion-snake eating its own tail, a combination of the Demiurge and Oroboros.
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).
Dammit. I'd conflated two stories in my head. Or imagined one entirely.
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.
This was the first Asimov piece I ever read. Stumbled upon it online, a simple .txt document in my browser, I read the first words, and browsed on.. Only to have them linger a few minutes, so I went back and read the entire thing and fell in love with the story and so started my adventures into science fiction reading.
Can anybody recommend an anthology available on Kindle that contains this story? Ideally Asimov only, but fine if it also contains stories by others. I couldn't easily find one. Thanks!
The deification of computers seems woven in to culture in invisible
ways now. Along with it comes centralisation and ultimately a fusion
into a singularity.
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.
I saw it at the Fels Planetarium of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia apparently in 1973 when I was 8 years old and always remembered it and even kept thinking about it every once in a while.
If you haven’t read it before, don’t read the Wikipedia summary; read the actual story. It’s easy to google and pretty short.
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.
Damn it, I wish I read this comment before I read the summary. I had chills at the end. Maybe I should read some Asimov...
We’ll maybe you might enjoy listening to Leonard Nimoy reading it: https://youtu.be/8XOtx4sa9k4
See also “The last answer” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Answer
Full text: https://highexistence.com/the-last-answer-short-story/
These 2 are my favorite Asimov stories.
Thanks. I had read The Last Question already, but am among today's 10_000 for this story.
I have now read it. Interesting. The main theme is not entirely new to me; without spoiling anything, I hope I can say that the long-form, not yet finished web comic Gunnerkrigg Court[0] touches on a very similar idea as one of its main themes.
[0] https://www.gunnerkrigg.com/?p=1
he wrote this long time ago...
Yes, obviously if there was any direct influence, it was from Asimov to the web comic author, not the other way round.
Nice xkcd reference.
For completeness, the Xkcd "Isaac in grade school" comic: https://xkcd.com/1448/#isaac
Nah, this story is just exceptionally good. Asimov was a fine writer, but this story was his crowning achievement in short fiction and he knew it too. You can read his other things and none of them will give the same feeling.
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 these kind of "Mind blown", "Goose bumps" stories, read some Ted Chiang. Really stories that stick with you. I love this whole book: [0]
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...
[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/156783.Axiomatic
I want to second or third the recommendation for Ted Chiang. Basically all of Chiang's stories could go on any "best short stories" list.
Thank you for the recommendations! I've read the Borges, but the other two were new to me and were a great way to start my day. The sibling comment also wisely recommends Ted Chiang. "Exhalation" is probably the canonical equivalent to The Last Question.
Yep I enjoyed Exhalation a lot. Good collection and great story.
You probably won't get chills from anything else he wrote (except, maybe, Nightfall). But you should dip your toe in with some short stories.
>If you haven’t read it before, don’t read the Wikipedia summary; read the actual story.
Read it from the original publication:
<https://archive.org/details/Science_Fiction_Quarterly_New_Se...>
OMG, I loved the original scan of this, wow, flash backs for me!!! Thank you soooo much.
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!
Oy vey…
It seems archaic at first sight, but it's really not a million miles off from what I see in spam.
Indeed; it actually reminded me of the weird trick discovered by my mom.
Notably, the science fiction magazine had ads for people who are way into their middle age.
Somehow I don't think you'd be running the ad at the bottom of page 2 today.
Interesting, the text on those scans is selectable, can anyone share how this is done is it a custom font? It does not seem so as the same letter appears to be rendered differently showing printing/scan artifacts. Maybe some styling?
Could it be this MacOS feature you are seeing?
https://support.apple.com/guide/safari/interact-with-text-in...
Can also do it in Firefox on Windows.
On that note, the Preview app on MacOS does it automatically. I recently screenshotted my terminal to show a colleague and then noticed I could also copy text from that screenshot. Really cool and really helpful.
One way to do it is you OCR the text and then print the text on top in a transparent font.
It’s an atheist’s most religious dream to think of becoming one’s own creator. It’s nonsense, of course, but it definitely blew my mind reading it as a child. What set the parameters that the ultimate computer must work within? The ultimate computer can reverse entropy, but it can’t make its own reality. There are limits to the power of knowledge.
Creator in what sense though?
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.
Well perhaps if you become omni(scient/present/potent) enough, you can subtly influence that process to your desired goal. Evolution is very random in the end.
Goedels incompleteness seems to me to disprove such omni, and if you are stuck thinking by our best models of thinking, its annoying exponential. Basically, to think about a universe enough to predict outcomes, you have to simulate it. To figure out which universe leads to a desired outcone, it seems like you would have to simulate most of the ones that do not as well. So if we presuppose the existance of a creator, maybe we are one of the failed universe thought experiments as she tries to make her intended universe?
> It's mobius bagels all the way down.
Now that's a fun phrase!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_design
You must be fun at parties.
Wait, you're complaining that earthboundkid is sucking the fun out of an Isaac Asimov story by dissecting the ideas held within it? I think you may find you have accidentally arrived at the wrong party.
> I think you may find you have accidentally arrived at the wrong party.
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.
> thought I was at the SF party, not the Skeptics party.
Lol. Asimov was a founding member of CSICOP, the organization that literally started the modern Skeptical movement.
And he clearly had the wisdom not to apply it to his fiction writing.
The rabbi recently on the Lex Fridman podcast told a joke that went (roughly) like
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!"
Right, God and his talking dirt.
The point isn't about the dirt's abilities. The point is how did the dirt come to be in the first place (or really, the atoms, subatomic particles, and mass itself)?
Yeah but the missing point in the reasoning leading to that joke (and theological arguments) is, who created God? 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.
Which is kinda the idea behind the big bang.
Can you elaborate?
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.
Pretty much what GP said:
> 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.
God is outside of space and time, whereas the physical universe is inside of 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.
Also, we have evidence the physical universe hasn't been around forever: the Big Bang.
> 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.
>By this model, it is possible that there was some physical process before it that caused it and has been going on forever.
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.
> What about the topic of this post, the second law of thermodynamics?
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.
>this could be similar, but way bigger and uncommon
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).
> Reminds me of the Boltzmann Brain. If something is so unlikely, is it ok to assume it actually happened?
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.
It seems to me like you're saying 2 things that contradict each other:
* 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.
> * 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 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.
Yeah, thanks for the conversation. You've definitely made me think about some interesting things. Yeah, if I were to say more, it might just be repetitive.
> 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.
How are the words “person”, “know” and “think” being used here? Are they labels for algorithms?
How do you think that people think? If there is nothing beyond the physical world, then the way people think is just physical interactions between microscopic particles. Those can be simulated by a powerful-enough computer. So it would be the same as the way that you think, except it would be in a simulation instead of the real physical world.
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".
> How do you think that people think? If there is nothing beyond the physical world, then the way people think is just physical interactions between microscopic particles. Those can be simulated by a powerful-enough computer.
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?
>I believe nearly all propositions about people thinking are unintelligible.
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.
Did God create the substrate he exists in?
No, it's virtualisation all the way down.
And we’re running on a pirated copy.
I just hope the Many Worlds use Copy on Write.
That explains why the devs won't fix quantum mechanics
How did we bypass the DRM??
Go to the underlying virtualization layer and peek up.
I don't think many models of divinity would consider this a well formed question because there would be nothing 'sub' (e,g under, beneath) divine order itself. The divine is often characterized as self-enduring, self-maintaining, and self-creating. This question is reasonable refutation of a God that is imagined to fundamentally be a 'person' who 'lives' somewhere though.
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.
This is sometimes presented as a "gotcha" question, but it's really the whole core premise of monotheism. Looking around, it appears that everything has a cause, and every cause has further causes. Can the chain of causes extend back infinitely? Assuming the chain is infinite, is there a cause for the infinite chain itself? We must posit that there is something which is, unlike everything else observed, an uncaused cause.
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?
>We must posit that there is something which is, unlike everything else observed, an uncaused cause.
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.
Being self-caused and being a causeless cause aren't very different, and I think for the most part one can ignore whatever theoretical differences exist between them, because nothing in ordinary experience is either self-caused or causeless, so either way, we're positing something extraordinary as the cause of ordinary existence.
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.
> This is sometimes presented as a "gotcha" question, but it's really the whole core premise of monotheism.
Well sure, if you've already accepted the core premise of monotheism you're probably not wondering about that gotcha question or its implications.
“Oh yeah, well then what are strings made out of” is a dumb gotcha question. Nothing. That’s the point.
That type of cause and effect assumes time already exists. Outside of time, how do you have cause and effect? And time is part of our universe, not outside it. The whole argument is built on sand.
Causes don’t have to be temporal.
I think the issue is that Asimov uses "hyperspace" as a get-out-of-jail-free card for anything that seems to contradict physics. Faster than light travel? Possible through hyperspace. Infinitely powerful computers? Can exist in hyperspace.
Quite true, but that's not something unique to Asimov. Applied Phlebotinum [1] is a common device in Science Fiction whenever the science can't support a plot device required by the fiction (SF narratives are stories in the first place, after all). There's even a trope specifically for how hyperspace and subspace are used in that way.[2]
[1] https://tropedia.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Applied_Phlebotinu...
[2] https://tropedia.fandom.com/wiki/Subspace_or_Hyperspace
Why would you link the the super ad-ridden and obnoxious fandom copy of a TV Tropes article?
Because TV Tropes has severe licensing problems[1] - most of its content originally was submitted by its editors under a CC BY-SA license, but then the site maintainer relicensed (without permission) all its database under the incompatible CC BY-NC-SA, creating a situation where its content can't be legally redistributed.
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
[3] https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Main_Page
Greg Egan in Permutation City neatly avoided the "computers is hyperspace" trope by locating his computing platform.... somewhere/everywhere.
There's the concept of the AI effect, where the goalposts for what is considered AI are continuously moved so that they no longer encapsulate what today's AI can do.
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.
There is an allusion to this in a recent YouTube video on the end of the universe, and the vanishingly small timeframe that life can exist within it as we understand.
Maybe this is a comfort.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA
"With the death of the last star, the age of starlight comes to an end"
There's some recordings on YouTube as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojEq-tTjcc0
This was the story that got me hooked on Asimov as a kid
When I put together a list of the "best" SF shorts a while back by author, this was my choice for Asimov. (IMO I can make an argument for "Nightfall" but that's a novella and other things being equal I was prioritizing shorter works.) That said, Asimov has a lot of good short stories including quite a few of his robot stories.
please share your full list with us.
https://bitmason.blogspot.com/2020/10/80-authors-80-science-...
This list and the shorter prior one were also on HN at some point.
Nightfall was also a 13,000 word short story, which was turned into a novella. Many, including me, consider it much tighter. That looks to be about 3-4x the length of The Last Question, though, so I think you're still well justified.
13,000 words is a novelette by the Hugo definition (not novella as I wrote). And I think the expanded version is considered a novel. In any case, I agree that the original was better.
I remember this from a Planetarium laser light show where this was narrated and there were cool projected abstract visuals. Must have been in the 70’s. That’s entertainment!
Thanks for the heads up: it truly is worth reading.
One of my favorite things about HN, is how, every once in a while, some obscure cool thing I have not hear about before gets pointed out, which, I find cool. But then, we "hug it to death" in the HN vernacular. Which is also really cool. Some neglected corner of the web that someone cared about, suddenly, a bunch of us nerds jump on it and recognize the nerd-coolness of it. I love that. Hope this was OK to say and not too off topic. I just love that.
I remember first experiencing that in the early days of slashdot (must have been late 90s). It subjectively feels like such moments were more common back then.
It was a much smaller internet. Crowds and server overload were much more visible.
It’s actually not the “hug of death” that I fondly remember happening more often (although that too was undoubtedly more common) but finding cool, weird, niche topics on the internet that I didn’t know before and were really fascinating.
For me, it was (and to some degree still is) finding out the things I thought were amazing… other people did too. I was very alone and kind of helpless when I read The Last Question (and The Last Answer) and lots of other things, and seeing other people appreciate these things and not just appreciate them, but appreciate them they way I appreciated them really makes me feel much more connected than I was when I was younger.
When you were young, more things were novel.
Probably at least partially just that! As I said it was my subjective perception.
A bit like HN reading Money Stuff then paraphrasing its conclusions to each-other
This feels relevant: Roger Penrose - Why Did Our Universe Begin? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypjZF6Pdrws
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 :)
This brings questions. How the universe knows it’s “over”, or how the last BH knows it shouldn’t start a cycle yet? Sounds as if the universe was some database which compacts itself when a column becomes all-equal and then adds another one after seeing that there is too much E in zero/undef distance. Does that create more than one big bangs? (Since distances are undefined, nothing wrong with assuming anything from zero to just below +inf apart.)
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).
A similarly thought-provoking short story, perhaps my favorite, is The Egg[1] by Andy Weir.
[1]: http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Egg_(Weir_short_story)
There's this really good animation on The Egg made by Kurzgesagt:
https://youtu.be/h6fcK_fRYaI
Wow I didn't realise that Andy Weird wrote the short story behind this! Great job by Kurzgesagt - it was really moving.
Ha! This whole thread made me recall that story, but I couldn’t recall the title, and figured I’d never find it by the synopsis alone which I remembered. But here you’ve posted it - thanks
I read the story many years ago, but failed to grasp its meaning.
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.
That’s a shame, to me it really was a thought-provoking piece.
There's a lot of unpack from the story... For me one of the core teachings is that we all have something in common, being human. No matter what time period you lived in, no matter what family you were born into, no matter how your life proceeded: you are still human and have more in common with your neighbor than you might think.
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.
It's a good argument against murder, but not a good argument against theft.
Also check out "The Last Answer", the only work by Asimov I've read that actually terrified me.
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 thought it, in some ways, reflected the Ellison's earlier I have no Mouth, and I Must Scream which to this day is still the story that terrified me the most.
I've never actually read it, just about it, and I have no desire to just because that's a nightmare I don't need. The title itself is a candidate for a single sentence horror story.
> The title itself is a candidate for a single sentence horror story.
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...
Glad I'm not the only one. The Wikipedia summary was enough.
Here’s the actual short story. It’s a quick read: https://physics.princeton.edu/ph115/LQ.pdf
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
So I asked Wolfram Alpha:
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=Can+entropy+be+reversed
It's nice that WA actually has the right answer (reference to the story itself).
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 :)
This has a similar flavor to Arthur C. Clarke's 9 Billion Names of God
https://archive.org/details/ninebillionnames00clar
ah-ha, I came here to see if someone else had mentioned this one, it's also one of my favourites.
But I would also bring up "Answer", by Frederic Brown[0], which is another take on the theme.
[0] https://archive.ph/jsRx9
Love that story.
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.
Ironically, 'The Answer'[1] was written two years before the 'Last Question'. Equally ironically, the 'The Answer' is shorter (and in my opinion better) than the the 'Question'.
(1) https://www.roma1.infn.it/~anzel/answer.html
You can find it here, it's an amazing story:
https://ipfs.eternum.io/ipfs/QmSiaEmhLvFdzzvkBmJKtRDmZRNDpDt...
Thanks for sharing, nice list of some others that I'm unfamiliar with. Will add to my reading list :)
If you've already read the story, this illustrated version is a good adaptation: https://imgur.com/gallery/9KWrH
(Read the original first though.)
> "Imgur is temporarily over capacity. Please try again later."
First time I see this
One of my favorite shorts, Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu
https://gizmodo.com/read-ken-lius-amazing-story-that-swept-t...
Link to online text, looks like scan of original printing, with illustrations! :
https://archive.org/details/Science_Fiction_Quarterly_New_Se...
Wait, are you telling me there are people out there who don’t know Asimov and haven’t read one of his best short stories??? The Last Question, along with Nightfall and The Last Answer are generally accepted as the best.
They’re one of today’s lucky 10,000.
A manga version:
http://m.fanfox.net/manga/the_last_question/c000/1.html
imgur hosted version of the manga version: https://imgur.com/gallery/9KWrH
Deus ex machina is usually a literary hack but Asimov gets away with it by taking it seriously.
It's a literary hack now, but it wasn't when he wrote this
Deus ex Machina has been a literary hack since the ancient Greeks coined the phrase :-)
Just to be clear: it's Latin.
so you are saying the reviewers were Roman :)
Yes, but the Greeks coined the actual phrase.
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."
Ah, thanks. Also, I don't think I ever noticed before that machine and mechanical are related words, both from Doric μαχανά / Greek μηχανή.
Are you sure about that?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deus_ex_machina#Ancient_critic...
Funny that in the same magazine where Asimov wrote this, there's a story by Robert Randall titled Deux ex Machina.
Which is printed on the pages directly after The Last Question too.
The apotheosis of a machine as the restarting point of a cyclical time-loop, it must have astonished the audience especially at the time. To the best of my finite reckoning, it boils down to a pantheistic/monistic model because either the materium is eternal fundamental base reality where the [man -> machine -> god-> man] cycle plays, or there's a monad god of some sort which gave rise to the cycle, and AC/Multi-vac is a lion-snake eating its own tail, a combination of the Demiurge and Oroboros.
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).
https://physics.princeton.edu/ph115/LQ.pdf
Rogan did the cliff notes best:
https://youtu.be/qgf9Eqka5fw
Dammit. I'd conflated two stories in my head. Or imagined one entirely.
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.
This was the first Asimov piece I ever read. Stumbled upon it online, a simple .txt document in my browser, I read the first words, and browsed on.. Only to have them linger a few minutes, so I went back and read the entire thing and fell in love with the story and so started my adventures into science fiction reading.
Douglas Adams’s parody of Multivac gave us The Answer, so it’s nice to see this here… :)
I prefer 42 to this madness
I always thought this was kind of a response to Fredric Brown's "Answer."
Can anybody recommend an anthology available on Kindle that contains this story? Ideally Asimov only, but fine if it also contains stories by others. I couldn't easily find one. Thanks!
The deification of computers seems woven in to culture in invisible ways now. Along with it comes centralisation and ultimately a fusion into a singularity.
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.
People just want their prayers to be answered.
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.
I saw it at the Fels Planetarium of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia apparently in 1973 when I was 8 years old and always remembered it and even kept thinking about it every once in a while.
The fels is probably my favorite place. The shows were never long enough.
There's an audio book version available on YouTube https://youtu.be/ojEq-tTjcc0
A different take on this by Scott Alexander: :-) https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/02/and-i-show-you-how-dee...
Ah yes, I read this one right after having played Universal Paperclips -- which if I'm not mistaken was inspired by it.
novel read in french https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CqLY4OVz4Q
Asimov said about it that readers seem never to remember the title but they never forget the story.
I read all of Asimov before age 12. Good old multivac.
Scifi, mysteries, and non-fiction?
He was still writing books when I was 12. Although I still regret buying the novel version of Nightfall. Short story was better
There's something about good, thoughtful sci-fi that really suits the short-story or novella form.
I don't get it.