Science as ¨magic¨.

[Midnight_Carnival]

always with the hard questions!
There have been shepherds who made themselves kings and then had themselves deified and worshipped as gods - were they "gods" back in the day? Yes. Are they regarded as such now? no.
I'm not convinced that living humans are the best judge of divinity around - we don't bow down and worship fires anymore, but plastic celebrities...

Anyway, the IQ tests. I've been studying how these work for a while, they interest me, at first I wanted to understand them so I'd be able to get an insanely high IQ, but later I wanted to understand them to see how people undesrtand 'intelligence'.
I think that it is similar to how we understand 'sanity' - it is thinking in a way which is considered useful to society. Society is an abstraction and constantly changing or being revised, therefore what is 'useful' to it is being revised as we speak.

Regarding IQ tests: Albert Einstein was regarded as 'not particularly bright' as a child, possibly even slighlty [censored]. Early IQ tests frequenlty give the result that everyone these days is stupid, however we are able to deal with problems and levels of abstraction which people 200 years ago didn't see the point of even considering. In America, IQ tests 'proved' that Spanish speaking children were substantailly less intelligent than their English speaking counterparts - until the same tests were given to the same group in Spanish, whereupon the English speaking American kids appeared to be vegetables.
Autistic or down syndrom kids frequently have way above average abilities in certain fields (ie mathematics, music, spacial relations, who knows what else) but they need constant supervision or they'll not cope with our society and even basic survival. I took 2 different tests on the internet to tell my my IQ, one said I was in the top whatever percent, the other said I was slightly [censored]
I've known many 'dumb' people who earn more money in a week than I'll probalby earn in my lifetime and quite a few 'smart' people who are flat broke and spend their time trying (and failing) to get money out of the 'dumb' people via clever if somewhat dishonest means.

So with us unfit to determine who's a "god" or not and too dumb to say who's smart and who's dumb, my money is on something to the effect of they could be considered one IQ regardless and that brains can do more than we know if we let them (our own and those of others). If an actual god, manifestation of divinity or (much) higher being were to appear among us I doubt we'd recognise it as such, probalby try to incarcerate it, have it psychoanalysed or destroyed as soon as possible.

[Dugi]

I agree with many of your points, but you've made a few factual mistakes:

Albert Einstein was regarded as 'not particularly bright' as a child, possibly even slighlty [censored].

Bulldust. That's a popular myth, but Einstein was always a good student and excelled at maths when he was at high school. Google 'popular myths' or check out wikipedia if you don't believe me.

Autistic or down syndrom kids frequently have way above average abilities in certain fields

It's true for autistic children, but wrong for Down syndrome. Down syndrome causes besides visible things a significant decrease in intelligence. Unlike autists, they think normally, but they are simple-minded and unintelligent. But they indeed need supervision.

Some other thoughts:

There have been shepherds who made themselves kings and then had themselves deified and worshipped as gods - were they "gods" back in the day? Yes. Are they regarded as such now? no.

Any bright person could end up considered a god. That's pretty much what most atheists think about Jesus Christ. That was possible at times when mankind's knowledge was narrow and a man could know it all. But not anymore, nowadays' philosophers mostly sell burgers at McDonald's. They can't explain how stuff works. They can't tell you what happens beyond the knowable because proper science has rendered those questions useless. They won't tell us the meaning of life because because now we know that life is just a complicated physical phenomenon and asking what's the meaning of life is like asking what colour does speed have.

I've known many 'dumb' people who earn more money in a week than I'll probalby earn in my lifetime and quite a few 'smart' people who are flat broke and spend their time trying (and failing) to get money out of the 'dumb' people via clever if somewhat dishonest means.

Yeah, success is not necessarily related to intelligence. Intelligence is only one of possible advantages. You usualy need also luck and hard work.

So with us unfit to determine who's a "god" or not and too dumb to say who's smart and who's dumb, my money is on something to the effect of they could be considered one IQ regardless and that brains can do more than we know if we let them (our own and those of others).

An important fact is that humans don't have much more intelligence than the more intelligent of animals. Humans are intelligent, but the thing that separates humans from animals is something different. Our level of AI technology shows that learning, memory and other things we usually associate with intelligence has way from being human. I believe that one day humans will find a tool to increase IQ and will all have IQ like 250 or more, but that won't make us ascend to some new level. If there is something whose mind is above human minds, it is almost certainly something we cannot imagine.

If an actual god, manifestation of divinity or (much) higher being were to appear among us I doubt we'd recognise it as such, probalby try to incarcerate it, have it psychoanalysed or destroyed as soon as possible.

If something was a god, I imagine it as something with supernatural abilities. And we can notice supernatural things happening (but the definition of the word supernatural itself requires us to have never observed it).
If it was something with mental levels beyond our understanding, I guess that it would be able to emulate our way of thinking and survive in our society (humans can live in animal society if we ignore the problem that we are bodies are adopted to something else).

[johndh]

How do you define a god? What criteria would have to be fulfilled?

Some common traits I can think of from divine figures in various mythologies:

• immortality or infinite longevity
• supernatural powers or control over some aspect of nature
• responsibility for natural processes (e.g. making the sun rise)
• clairvoyance or omniscience
• power over an otherworldly domain (Heaven, Olympus)

... but these are by no means required by any one religion to consider something a god. The gods of ancient Greek, Egyptian, and Norse religions had many human flaws and limitations, sometimes being tricked or bested by mortals in some cases, or even being killed.

[Midnight_Carnival]

Dugi:
you started disagreeing with me and ended up agreeing with me?
I'll concede that I didn't know what I was talking about with albert, he had silly hair anyway, but I'm really not that sure of the down's syndrome kids. I've known some with creative abilities which far surpass my own - one played the piano like it was nobody's business, maybe I'm just dumb.

As to gods: I can't agree too much with johndh's criteria for godhood - I've never actually been asked to define a god, so I don't know how well I'll manage, maybe we should ask some down's syndrome kid?
Actually I'd trust his answer more than my own, they have this 'emperor's new clothes' style of giving really simple yet very insightful answers at times.

Let us look at the criteria which imediately disqualify you as a god:

I propose that anyone who's ever gotten into an online testosterone pissing contest where some philosophical subject is debated for the sole purpose of bored people showing that they are more clever than other bored people, is definately not a god and will never become known as one

Other than that, I think that neither down's syndrome, nor autism disqualify you from being a god, but having a stutter does - I mean imagine it...

On a more serious note, how would you distinguish between 'a miracle' and 'magic'? could "gods" be very technologically advanced beings?

[iceiceice]

What about the part where, IQ tests are widely criticized by experts for being racially biased (among their other flaws)?

(Now entering the "Fox News: No Spin Zone..." )
The facts:

• High IQ = Correlated with God
• High IQ = Correlated with white
• Ergo, Jesus was probably white.

QED.

[Midnight_Carnival]

Bear with me here, I mean no disrespect for any religions.

Why would God need a high IQ?
I mean the IQ is man's way of measuring intelligence in human terms.
Human intelligence can make amazing things, it can even put us on mars, but it sure as hell can't make mars (well not right now anyway).
Who's to say that if you put an IQ test in front of God and he answered it our evaluation of his answers wouldn't say that he was a drooling idiot?
Firstly, we don't know 'the truth', only "what has so far not been disproved" and secondly, why would he bother to take it seriously?
What the hell as a high IQ go to do with God, when did being smarter make you more holy? Will your brains get you into heaven?

Again, a problem with translation, Jesus did not speak Greek, he spoke a semitic language which was transcribed into aramaic - when Jesus said "spirit" he most likely used the Hebrew word Nefesh (or a similar word from the region such as Nebbesh, etc) which translates as "spirit" but it also tranlates as "breath", life force, might and will power. When his deciples translated what he said into Greek (the "global language" of the day) they used the closest term, Psyche, which translates as "spirit", but it also translates as mind, especially the conscious rational mind due to infulence from Greek Idealist philosophers. The Nefesh (force, will) can be assocaited with unconcious and bodily matters while in Greek idealist thinking these are viewed as 'weak' and leading people away from reason.

What I'm getting at:
Spirit is not mind, spirit force is not mind force.
Taking a monotheistic religion I'm familiar with (again, no disrespect intended) Christianity, God could have done all he did (prior to Jesus, etc) in his sleep and not a word of the bible need be altered.
There is a distinctive difference between humans and Divinities.
We have a divine aspect to our natures and manifest divinity in the world, but we are not Gods, the standards we use to measure ourselves, to compare and boast to friends, to determine who gets a better job, a prettier wife (actually, sorry guys, the dumb jocks have you there) and who listens to you are not suitilbe standards by which to measure Divine beings.
Anyway, humans never listen to their gods, it's something almost all relgions agree on, if we measured the IQ of a God and it came to 2500000, do you think people would start listening then?

[Naron]

But I was not referring to God, only to a "god". But I agree that I should define what a god is. For me, a god is a superior entity to a man, in all respects.
That does not mean that a god is a supernatural entity. Just far superior compared to a man. Among other things, such an entity may operate at a cosmic level and is immortal.
About high intelligence, I believe that a god should really possess an intelligence far beyond human intelligence, because it is necessary for advanced understanding of the functioning of the Universe.
This could imply that if we evolve long enough (and we avoid self-destruction), we could become gods ourselves. Of course, this is just a personal speculation.
Because we speak of fantasy (i.e magic) and magic can make you a god, the question is: can science make you a "god"?

[Dugi]

Science alone will not. You may know the greatest secrets of nature and it will not give you far superior to other men. But this knowledge can be applied through technology. So I suppose you meant technology, not science.

Currently, nothing that can improve humans was found. You can improve one thing at the cost of significantly gimping another. Rapamycin is known to extend life by about 20% and significantly reduce the risk of cancer, but it makes you vulnerable to infection (it works by blocking an immunity-empowering pathway mammals have evolved, faster aging and some cancer are side-effects of the pathway that overall increased survivability). There is a mutation (called Laron syndrome) that makes people immune to diabetes, resistant to cancer and live for very long, but it makes you physically weak (due to constantly low levels of blood sugar) and prevents growth. If people had their genomes altered (a technology for this is being developed, they can make a modified virus that replaces parts of DNA by other parts of DNA, but it does not work quite well yet) to block that immunity pathway and have Laron syndrome after growing up (when they're immunised to most illnesses and don't need to grow anymore), they might live significantly longer, have a far lower chance to have cancer and be immune to diabetes. But this is rather forced adaptation to nowadays' conditions, not overall improvement.

Still, the fact that humans' technology have not beaten evolution does not mean that we never will. I can't predict the future, most people who tried to predict future failed, but I shall make a few guesses. Very unreliable.

The technology that is developing incredibly nowadays is nanotechnology. It consists of constructing materials from molecules with microscopic structures that can't be obtained by conventional means. Example materials:
- aerocarbon - solid matter lighter than air
- frozen smoke - glass-like material that would allow you build houses that weigh only a few kilograms
- electrospun fibres - fibres made of threads only a few nanometres thin, soft and bulletproof, potential as skin transplant
- aggregated diamond nanorod - more than twice as hard as diamond
- nanorobots - relying on external energy source and impulse, these can be driven into a tumour to cut its cells to shreds or to carry medicine right into the target organ (to avoid its side effect in other organs)
- nanotube capacitor - capacity like a normal battery, but can be charged or discharged in a fraction of a second, never loses capacity
- single atomic layer chips - CPU that is faster, far smaller, producing far less heat and consuming far less energy
- bioelectronics (not to be confused with all kinds of false medicine) - electronics that can be directly connected with living cells, for example to draw energy from photosynthesis or to connect to nerve cells
- glucose fuel cell - a battery that can harvest energy from blood in living bodies, allowing implantation of devices into humans that don't need constant batter recharging
They're all too expensive to make currently, though.

Let's suppose that 30 years have passed and all the technologies that are being developed now are finished and available to everyone. All humans can have numerous electric devices implanted into their bodies, without any need to recharge batteries (because these suck inner energy, they help with obesity). These devices help diagnosing any health problems very fast and fix the issue quite fast if they can. Engineered viruses verify DNA sequences and repair any defects, curing genetic illnesses and slow down aging (they are using XNA to work, so they can't replicate in human tissue, only in special modules). Humans' brains are connected to a small computer that does all the maths they need, can remember any data they want to keep and can communicate with devices in a much more reliable way than humans. Thanks to a connection to internet, people can talk to anybody just by thinking about it. Buildings are far taller, taking less area and all that can be used for agriculture is used to grow highly advanced, genetically engineered crops.

Now, let's become a bit more speculative, assuming it's 200 years from now and that any technology we have now is greatly advanced, but still no new groundbreaking scientific discoveries are made. Humans have their minds synchronised with a group of cloud services. If they die, they just recover from their last backup in a cloned (and improved) body or inside a simulated world (there might not be enough space on earth). Those who want can share thoughts (with other people or their own duplicates) or even fusing into a single entity controlling more bodies, becoming some kind of hive mind. Earth is too small the number of humans, so they terraformed Mars, Moon and Venus and developed the quantum vacuum plasma thurster for interstellar travel and inhabitation of planets in nearby star systems, although the great distances between stars separates humans like oceans in Middle Ages.

Now, let's assume that something very bad happens and almost everything dies (huge asteroid impact, I don't think that a nuclear war would completely destroy our civilisation). Gaseous lava cremates everything on the surface and clouds of debris cover the sun for years. 99% of land species are extinct in a few minutes. Most marine species die due to lack of food. Humans that are underground or in space survive and wait there until they run out of supplies. Hungered, they return to the surface where nothing lives. Well, almost nothing, some animals survived underground too and have some tubers and earthworms to feed on down there. They eat these animals and others until the plants start growing again, from their underground roots or seeds, as ashes are good sources of inorganic material for plants. Those whose climate is too cold for plants to grow when the sun is blocked have to build greenhouses or die. Most survivors therefore die, but some individuals survive the great winter. A small community cannot mine most of the materials our society has, so any technical knowledge becomes useless and forgotten. After large extinction events, evolution kicks in and the few surviving species differentiate greatly to fill all slots in ecosystems, each adapted for each location. Humans will differentiate into many species too. And now, everything can happen.

Keep on mind that all of those are highly speculative.

[iceiceice]

Who's to say that if you put an IQ test in front of God and he answered it our evaluation of his answers wouldn't say that he was a drooling idiot?

It's true, I think God is not used to taking tests. Maybe he would find it too boring and fail for this reason.

Why would God need a high IQ?
I mean the IQ is man's way of measuring intelligence in human terms.

I think this right but also I think IQ does not even measure this...

IQ is essentially some linear regression that some psychologist applied to a large number of tests of memory, reading comprehension etc. He noticed that all these tests are correlated, and hypothesized that there is one magic latent variable that explains the correlations, which he calls g-factor, and estimates using IQ. IQ is just some standardized test based on aggregating these random tests. They won't test your "general problem solving ability". They won't test your "aptitude for learning". There's no reason to think that one single variable can explain a person's intelligence, and most people don't anymore. It's not even clear that it has to do with human intelligence as we normally conceive it in conversation.

This question "would an entity with an IQ of 80000 be a 'god'?" is like asking "would a person who grew to be 100,000 ft tall be a 'god'?" The answer is, well, first of all most IQ tests don't scale that high I would think... it's just some collection of tests, which the psychologist might pick and choose from and use statistics to estimate the IQ. For example a test might have 20 questions related to looking at a picture and trying to remember details about it, and the average person gets 10 right. If you get 20/20 the test won't say "IQ = infinity", it will just have some maximum resolution. Similarly, a person can't grow to be 100,000 ft tall because, our bodies just don't work that way, you would surely die at ~ 20 ft tall I think, and if you got to be 100 ft tall there would be like dozens of different problems that would have killed you well before that. The question rather implies that the person in question isn't really a person. Does it follow that they are a God? I don't really see that anything can be concluded, the situation seems absurd.

[johndh]

Hurray for transhumanism! We've already drastically lengthened our average life span, though this seems to be mostly because we've beaten many causes of childhood death, rather than making old people live longer. We've invented ways for the formerly-deaf to hear, the formerly-blind to see, and amputees to function somewhat normally. Augmented reality is becoming a thing, along with quantifying every possible stat about ourselves in an effort to improve it. With drugs, eugenics, gene therapy, etc., could result in a better body that is free of diseases, more intelligent, or even biologically immortal. Mitochondria may have started out as another organism entirely until they embedded themselves in our cells, and now they are replicated along with our cells during mitosis. Perhaps we could do the same with some kind of intelligent nanobot capable of healing damaged cells. Or, we could just upload our consciousnesses and never have to worry about our fragile meat bodies again, although this isn't as disaster-proof of a solution, since a solar flare or massive EMP could wipe out all of the data infrastructure storing our minds. Alternatively, our minds could be uploaded into new bodies with nanobot-infused blood, improved muscular systems, faster reflexes, photosynthetic skin, and embedded computers in our brains, like in my favorite book ever. At that point, we would be so vastly superior to anything that could rightly be called human... but would that make us gods? According to Naron's definition, I suppose it would. Another story that involves the idea of humanity becoming god-like in a different way is The Last Question by Isaac Asimov, which you can probably read in a few minutes as it's rather short.

[Midnight_Carnival]

Naron: this will never happen for the same reason that we have difficulty discussing magic as 'supernatural' - basically, when we reach this next level or whatever, we will still be 'human' and so will not be able to see ourselves as 'superior to man'. A different strain of humanoid could arise from within the human gene-pool, perhaps the result of mutation, these could decide that they were no longer human and call themselves 'gods' - hell, I could call myself a 'god' from behind the library computer terminal which I'm using because I'm too cheap to get my own internet connection (and I live somewhere where you are very lucky if you can get internet anyway!) - don't make it so.

Dugi: Sounds like fun. Do you remember that part of One Piece where they went up to Skypea and met "God" (Enel) - there were all these people who had amazing powers, it seemed, later it turned out that they were just people using fancy 'dials' (sea shells with incredible properties)? Things you posted reminded me of this. I don't think any 'tricks' which we can do within natural laws could make us 'gods' - see how despite having all those fancy dials, the guys with little wings got their asses kicked by those with devil fruit powers.
So yes, what you're talking about sounds like heaps of fun, you give some monkeys more interesting toys and watch them play, see how clever they are when they have more than their own excrement to throw around... in the end, to me it's just monkeys playing with fancy toys. Splicing genes won't make you gods either, it'll just make for some intersting social dynamics. I'm particularly interested in how it will effect our perceptions of race and gender.

Something many of you may not have picked up - gods are not 'immortal' as pointed out, many cultures have a tradition of gods dying and going to the netherworld, some return, some don't some come and go in cycles. Gods do not escape death, it just means something different to them than it does to mortals. Gods do not nescesarily lose their influence nor their agency and capacity to effect change becasue they are in a state called 'dead'.
If you want to be like 'gods', don't seek to prolong your mortal lives, perhaps try to find a way to still have an influence over the world after you've died

And if we as a species all have fancy toys, how does owning one make you remarkable?
If we can all fiddle our own DNA and grow fins or wings or live for longer and not get cancer (even if we stay under 4ft tall as a result), what does it matter if all of us can?
If you want to have an influence after you're dead, you have to be exceptional. Whatever clever things we come up with, however much we change ourselves, we will still be limited by our perception of 'normal' - ten thousand years ago imagine how magical a computer would have been - now it's convenient and sometimes a source of irritation. Owning a computer in 1000 BC might have qualified you as a 'god' provided you had a way of powering it and only had games that you didn't need bloody Steam to play... now owning a computer is regarded almost as a basic human right by some, same with flying, same with curing diseases once considered terminal before medicine caught up with them.
If you want to distinguish yourself I advise you not to go with clever toys, someone smarter with better technology will come along and make something better in a few years. I advise you to distinguish yourself by living your life in such a way that it serves as an example to others, that your story is something which can not be repeated easilly, even with fancy technology.
-that's just my opinion, I haven't declared myself 'god' from behind my library computer terminal

[Dugi]

A different strain of humanoid could arise from within the human gene-pool, perhaps the result of mutation, these could decide that they were no longer human and call themselves 'gods'

An interesting fact is that humans have a single, very small, non protein-coding gene that gives a huge boost in intelligence, self-awareness and many other mental capacities that are considered unique to humans. It significantly modifies the shape of brain, if most people looked at a brain formed without this gene, they would not be realise that it's a brain. This gene was experimentally inserted into mice and the modified mice were far more clever and their brains had folds like only human brains have and were significantly larger in size. This gene was created by a random mutation from a piece of junk DNA. Pretty much this brain became this brain thanks to that one gene. So, your idea is not far fetched at all - humans made a huge leap in their evolution thanks to a random mutation.

Do you remember that part of One Piece where they went up to Skypea and met "God" (Enel) - there were all these people who had amazing powers, it seemed, later it turned out that they were just people using fancy 'dials' (sea shells with incredible properties)?

Sorry, I don't know One Piece and I could not figure out about which part of my reply you wrote about.

[Yomar]

This gene was experimentally inserted into mice and the modified mice were far more clever and their brains had folds like only human brains have and were significantly larger in size.

Woha, so if they insert that gene in a Chimpanzee for example , maybe our future could become a bit like the one that we saw in the "Planet Of Apes".

[Dugi]

Chimpanzees can't speak (they have a few simple words they can pronounce, but attempts to teach them human language led to poor results). Their fingers are stronger than human fingers, but far less precise. Their shoulders are stronger, but their movement is quite limited (unarmed chimpanzee will overpower an unarmed human, armed human will overpower an armed chimpanzee even if that chimpanzee was trained to use that weapon despite his superior strength). They are not adapted to make full use of that gene.

But still, I think that it would be a huge step towards sapient apes. Communication is possible without speaking, clumsy hands are not so bad, lower intelligence can be mitigated by practice. I doubt these would replace people, but should be able to live with humans as a person, not as a pet.

The answer is out there, the experiment on mice was done quite recently, I wonder what are they experimenting with now. Maybe dogs could be a good try before apes, dogs grow up in a year, chimpanzees need a decade.

[Yomar]

I know Dugi, I was just joking a bit and in fact I was exaggerating on purpose, I find the movie cool, but I always found improbable or irrealistic the fact that a bunch of apes could like conquer the world and subdue humanity, we have trained armies, tanks, fighters etc., but its a movie after all.

As for magic, well you guys said most of the things already, humans call magic things that they cannot understand or explain with the knowledge that he possesses, in fact there ppl that still nowadays believe in magic, but in places where progress is more limited, like in tribes (but modern countries are not exempted), persons tend to believe more in supernatural and many times are more religious in less advanced countries.

But its kinda in human nature, now that we are technologically more advances and science pervaded more our culture this thing is still present in us, it just changed, for example when ppl see something unexplainable at the moment in the sky many may say that they saw an U.F.O., many times that would be even correct, if they intend with UFO Unidentified Flying Object, but nowadays most intend with UFO a sort of starship involving aliens, but most of the time those sightings had a logical explanation, but ppl tend to say "I never saw something like that so its an UFO or something extraterrestrial" and with extraterrestial rarely they mean things like an asteroid or a comet, because if you say extraterrestrial to someone they may think immediately "Oh yes, Aliens from an another planet". or "Spaceships coming from other worlds"