BitsOfMyMind

If the world really is seven thousands years old or not no one can say for sure. But then again, we might all live in a Matrix and our lives are only a massive conspiration… Conjecture aside, I found out that Evolution is in a sense compatible with Creation. Actually, not the Creation as portrayed in the Bible but nonetheless an act of creation. Anyway, the Bible is a big metaphor and thus should not be taken word for word: the world is way too complicated to have been created piece by piece. I would want my God to be a smart individual, and just like any other individual with brains, this God would have devised a technique to generate this universe without making too much of an effort.

However, there are absolutely no signs that would make Creation remotely plausible. Creation is in a sense only a philosophical possibility. Everything points towards Evolution as the key process that generated complexity. But what if God had used it to save a bit of time? As a process and most likely a mathematical one, Evolution could be an equation that feeds back on itself, be chaotic and would self-generate complexity. It also would have no end but definitely a starting point and some initial conditions. So the equation, devised by God on its free time, that made this universe possible started off at the Big Bang and had in parameters enough of an initial condition to cause the slight asymmetry during baryogenesis that made matter possible. Some years later came us, our intelligence, and a very consequential amount of evidence that lead us to theorize that it could not have happened any faster than 14 billion years.

Unless God had a computer.

God created the equation on his laptop, pressed start, paused it after 6 days (or after 14 billion – 7000 simulation years) to check on the results and realized that where all his previous attempts had generated universes full of uninteresting blobs of matters lazily interacting with one another like in a lava lamp, this one generated us. The simulation has been going on ever since because we are quite a show. God slowed it down 7000 years ago to a speed where he/she/it and his/her/its acquaintances can keep pace with our hilarious existence. Here is creation and God is a smart person: mathematics did all the work for him; creation happened when God wanted to watch.

God is just like a curious human being watching a run of the Game of life. People watching the Game of life are just like God, even if they are not suppose to, they can always interfere in order to save a block from a certain death from a collision with a Lightweight Space Ship.

Or it could very well be that the simulation is still going. Whether 14 billion years were compressed into 6 days, if its really been 14 billion years, if its been a lot more or a bit less than that in the super universe that contains us or if there is no time past our universe is of no object. We all live in the same referential and generating us really took around 14 billion of our years.

Evolution works and if it were not for its discovery, there would be an awful lot of very useful inventions that would be missing from our life today. Whether the entity too many of us refer to as the Biblical God used it or not to create us is another question, but it certainly did it in way that has enabled Evolution to follow its course even today and if was smart, it certainly used it to create everything as well.

The earlier aversion to accepting a God less than infinite in all directions is overcome in part by the recent appreciation that an evolving God is superior to a static God. You tell me, which god is greater? A God incapable of improvement, or one constantly perfecting?
Kevin Kelly

That being said, here is another reason why I do not believe in the Abrahamic God: it was obviously made up by humans. Just like I did in the previous paragraphs, you can say whathever you like and as long as it makes sense to you, it can be applied to a divinity.

In America, Most of the people are atheistic about gods like Thor, some daring individuals go one god further.
— Dawkins

The link between demographics and climate, although logically evident (more humans -> more pollution), has been spoken of very little during the whole debate until now. The new report on the state of population and climate change that has been published by the UN, while being full of euphemisms and very careful about its words, it finally challenges the taboo and sheds the light on this issue. We can attribute the difficulty of bringing this argument to the table on the bad reputation population control policies have and it’s obvious conflict with more conservative religious organization, but the time for screwing around is up. This problem, while caused entirely by our actions as a race, can have consequences that are far bigger than humanity and only science has so far been capable of solving problems of inhuman scale. Now, I can see from miles away the great organized religions coming to interfere with resolving this crisis.

Everyone with a half-decent knowledge of psychology and philosophy will know perfectly well that us humans have a natural aversion to all that is dehumanizing. Yes, I can understand why birth control and abortions are considered immoral by some, but now is not the time to bring everyone’s religious or spiritual opinion to the polemic. Every time I hear someone saying that this whole climate issue is the will of some divinity is another blow to the respect that I have for humanity and my hopes that we can fix this problem. They can think their god is to blame, but if such is their reasoning, then I would very much appreciate them not interfering with those that are actually using their brains and trying to solve this issue.

Either way, there will be birth control in the process of resolution either in the form of policies or in the form of a cataclysm, we have the choice. Nature knows no spiritualism as any divinity is the creation of the human mind, and if we fail at sorting ourselves out, it will gladly exercise its overdue right of population control, just like it has been doing for lesser beings since life first appeared in the universe and for us before we became intelligent enough to circumvent it. The Chinese policies have prevented a good 250 million humans of being born from 1979 to 2000, which translates to a obvious amount of savings in CO2 emissions. It has created a whole host of other sociological problem, but minds are much easier to change than overpopulation.

Once we are past this crisis, I hope someone will have the courage go confront the churches and tell them that they have been wrong about everything, that they have been wrong in past, that they are wrong and that they will be wrong in the future. In fact, there is no wrong nor right in what religion preaches, there are only statements devoid of any reasoned predictions and anything that comes out of organized religion should be barred from having any influence on human governance.

I stumbled upon this organization while researching the subject. I sincerely hope it an other similar initiative will get more visibility in the future.

My mind is almost set on getting rid of my Mac, there are just a few bits here and there I need to get over with. I got convinced by the viral Windows 7 campaign and will be swi… No, I will actually start using Linux as my desktop OS. It have been soliciting its services for quite a while on a bunch of servers and only now have I got to fully appreciate its power and architecture. So much that it has lately become overly tempting to make the plunge. In fact, I had been contemplating this as a necessary outcome only a few months after purchasing that 2400 CDN$ Macbook Pro and cementing my switch from Windows XP to *nix only. Yes, Mac OS X is a great OS, but I knew deep down that I would get over all its bells and whistles pretty soon; what really amazed me was its Unix core and that my next machine would not be a Mac but something with Linux on it.

Mac OS X is kind of like a pretty but stupid girlfriend. When the charm dissipates, all that is left is a hollow shell of a human. Linux, on the other hand, is quite like growing your own vegetables. You get the full satisfaction of eating the product of your work but sometimes, the whole crop gets bricked and you just cannot figure out why. As for Windows, I cannot really find a satisfying metaphor, it’s just a tool.

Mac OS X being another flavor of Unix, there is actually plenty to do on it. What is lacking are the resources: once you stumble upon a problem, you are pretty much left to figure it out for yourself or resort to the mailing lists. With Linux, the web is littered with just about any kind of information on every part of the system; if problem, then google. Not that I am part of any, but I have found the Apple community to very superficial compared to Linux. A consequential part of the discussions seem to be about Apple gossip, features, or just plain bragging about who has the most gadgets with a white apple on it. On Linux forums, the dynamic is different. Yes, there is always a fair amount of noobs (me being one) hanging around, but very often, you will encounter a bunch of geeks marveling over some very clever network trick or pure altruism in the form of someone explaining how to get this thing to work with that stuff. By the way, noobs are also very welcome and everyone over there is very happy to help someone trying to break the shackles of techno-slavery.

So my Mac is in need of a new home. There is after all nothing wrong with having a stupid girlfriend and Macs are nonetheless very impressive pieces of technology pretty much anyone will fall in love with. As for me, it appears that I have a fetish, and only the perspective of a natively recompiled kernel will give me a hard-on.