"Good and evil from the CREATOR's point of view"
Opportunity to create intelligent beings not on biological base gives a man a chance not only to live side by side with these creatures but to make new artificial worlds inhabited by them. Saying ‘artificial worlds’ I mean models of virtual world produced on computer. In the nearest future it will be possible to create a model where physical laws are defined and where position and state of every brick of the universe - elementary particle - is watched up. Having started such a model from the state when the whole matter is compressed at most you can recreate the process analogical to birth and development of the world in which we exist under the condition that apparatus part of the model allows it during acceptable period of time.
Modeling virtual world man will be out of time and casualty of the created world. During the life of one person events compared with birth and death of his own world can take place in virtual one. Opportunity to interfere in the casualty of the created virtual world gives the person power, which in real world we consider to be God's. From the position of the creatures of virtual world man is God, creator of their world.
Let's consider such question: what sort of aims we can pursue making models of virtual world inhabited by artificial intelligent beings? Here is incomplete list of these aims:
- Entertaining aspect of modeling. People watch movie with great pleasure. Here they will watch process of birth, flourishing and decay of civilizations. Those who wish can take part in the life of virtual world. Pace of time can be the same as in real world and methods of interacting with virtual world can be compared with controlling virtual plane. Man can control his virtual body the same way.
- Researching aspect of modeling: researches on the model of your own world can have different aspects - social, philosophical, linguistic, evolutional…
- Virtual world where personalities live and develop can be considered as a fish nurse-pond. We fill it with bright and genius personalities of our world.
Let's consider moral aspect of creating virtual world. I will repeat the thought I expressed on one of conferences: do we have right to create intelligent beings in virtual worlds and experiment with them? First thought - it is antihuman and must not be done. But let's imagine that mankind is created by someone and we are under experiment too. As for me, I prefer to be a part of experiment than not to be at all.
Let's take another aspect: what values we will have creating new worlds. We are not going to talk about models of virtual world as a game. Value of these models is obvious. Traveling to new countries, other worlds, exotic habits and so on- they have always attracted people. We are going to pay attention to the worlds created as an object of researches. Their value consists in that knowing and understanding of processes of virtual worlds that we get from our researches. This knowledge can give us deeper understanding of our world. We cannot experiment with some processes of our world because of long periods of time that are necessary for their developing. Time in virtual world can pass much faster than in our world. Its pace will mostly depend on the power of the computer where this model is realized.
Those models are obviously valuable for us where persons meant for our world are cultivated. Those are unordinary persons will probably give new impulses to development of our world.
So, what kind of created intelligent beings we would like to see in our world?
First, nobody objects to beings orientated on some social and industrial spheres of man's life. Does anybody objects to creatures with limited freedom of will and perception. These creatures can be called a well-known word ‘robots’.
Second, our civilization needs new ideas, moral, spiritual values, and it is indiscreet to refuse to communicate with created (by us) intelligent beings with not limited will, who are equal to us.
Let's have a look at artificial worlds from the position of the activity that we are going to realize in them. According to the aims, which were set, we can suggest a few kinds of activities. Combinations are possible.
- Non-interference (observation, researches).
- Interference into casual relations of virtual world without definite aim to turn development to this or that way.
- Interference into casualty with definite aim to turn the world to a definite way. Our reasons can be:
- eradicate evils and see what it leads to;
- get maximum conflict between good and evil in this artificial reality. There is an idea that it makes civilization develop faster and does not allow it to stagnate. The idea that there is no good without evil is obvious, comparison is always necessary. That is why devil is, probably, as necessary as angel in any world;
- affect the model of virtual world trying to reach full and consecutive development of an original evolutional line. For example, technical evolution, esthetic evolution and so on;
- ...
Development and existence of virtual worlds fully depend on our will, estimation, on what we consider to be good and evil. By means of our not casual influence on the created virtual worlds we, voluntary or not, form our own understanding of good and evil in some of them. In fact, existence of our virtual worlds is defined by the aim of creation of every definite world and by the fact how fully it answers the purpose. That's why not all the worlds we will try to put to the state that answers our idea about good and evil. Good from our point of view is not necessarily good from the point of view of other world's inhabitants. It is quite possible. Good and evil are relative. We have the same in our world: what is good for one person can be evil for another one.
Now we have a question: what kind of worlds does our own world belong to? If it was created, who did it? And what way is it influenced?
If we extrapolate possible interactions of our world with models of artificial world on our world and the world whose models we can be, we can get a chance to disappear as an ordinary event in someone's researching activity. So our existance turns to be rather ephemeral, and existance of many of us may be suddenly changed or stopped because of slightest local influence on casualty of our world and even memory about us can be wiped off. You can suggest that it depends on the results the creators of our world are expecting to reach (branch of development of events in virtual world on the tree of possible ways of development) and on their will.
We don't claim on the doubtless truth. But the idea that our world was created by someone like our virtual worlds allows to explain many miracles and phenomenon, which take place in our world. Following this idea the statement ‘God's activity is beyond our understanding’ probably doesn't correspond to the fact. Aims of our creator and our aims that we put creating virtual worlds can possibly be the same. We can analyze these aims, have observations, study our world's history and make conclusions about probable sense of our existance and predestination of our world. The most desirable for us, most comforting is the idea that our world is a nurse-pond for cultivating those personalities who will take their place in the world that created us. There is a suggestion that our world is destined to enlarge the population of our Creator's world. But we can mistaken.
K. K. Danilov
Bibliography
- Danilov K.K. "Modelling the conscious of intelligent being". Moscow. International Hermes-Academy. 1995.
- Danilov K.K. "Freedom of will and reality". Moscow. International Hermes-Academy. 1995.
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