pan6467

Not sure where to place this. I guess Philosophy soooo....

Ok, I'm sure with all these computer geeks throughout the world someone else has though about this. If not I am a sheer GOD and GENIUS and all shall bow down to me.... (slight humor there, hope you understand.)

So I'm thinking what if..... a person or group of people can program a computer with all known natural, weather and man made history and program it in a totally unbiased manner. (Such as Hitler and Naziism existed, this is what happened.... just facts, no opinion about how evil it was.) You program all philosophies and religions equally, not programming in one as right and the others wrong.

Then you ran the program to predict the future of man and the Earth using it's database to form what will happen from what has happened.

My question is 3 fold:

Is it truly possible to do, or by man's nature would we bias the experiment and therefore render it useless?

How accurate do you think it would be in terms of nature and society?

And if made public and the accuracy for the first year is amazingly high, based on man's free will would it be possible for man to change the outcome?

And if you say that outcome could be changed because of man's free will and you are religious, then is it not possible to change the Bible's ending (Revelations)?

Or can the future not be changed because mass hysteria would make it a self fulfilling prophecy?

Just curious, have been thinking about trying to find a computer programmer that would want to try this with me. But I also realize the time required would take forever to program.

__________________
I just love people who use the excuse "I use/do this because I LOVE the feeling/joy/happiness it brings me" and expect you to be ok with that as you watch them destroy their life blindly following. My response is, "I like to put forks in an eletrical socket, just LOVE that feeling, can't ever get enough of it, so will you let me put this copper fork in that electric socket?"

Unright

This seems a tad ridiculous.

First of all good luck finding a programmer even willing to consider doing this. How can you program a philosophy? Religion? Artificial Intelligence is leagues behind what you are expecting. Hell, very few people even have a complete understanding of one religion or philosophy and even they are questionable.

If you want to ask whether or not free will exists, just asks. No need to involve the impracticle or the impossible.

MSD

All known history is not all history. Even after completing this impossible task, you will suffer from the round-off of variables and from uncertainty of what happened. Best-case scenario, you'll suffer from the same round off error that led to the revelation of the butterfly effect that inspired the chaos theory.

If you were able to take into account every single event that has gone into the creation of today's world, and predict the outcome with absolute certainty, you will have created God. I think it's fairly accurate to say that doing so is impossible.

CoachAlan

Your premise is the premise of one of my favorite series of books. The Foundation Series, by Isaac Asimov. In it, there exists a branch of psychology called "Psychohistory," whose goal it is to predict the future of civilization on a galactic scale. As individuals, humans are wildly unpredictable, but in large enough numbers, certain patterns emerge and predictability becomes more possible.

The books are fantastic, and I highly recommend you read them if the subject interests you. Also, if you have read any other Asimov, the final book in the Foundation series ties all his works together. It's called Foundation and Earth, and unfortunately it's out of print. How whack is that!? The one book that ties all hos works together and it's out of print!

Anyway, nobody will be bowing down before you any time soon (at least, not for this reason). It's a nice thought, and it fits well with a discussion I'm having in another post about free will.

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"If I cannot smoke cigars in heaven, I shall not go!"
- Mark Twain

kinsaj

I was thinking along similar lines for the world's environment... for weather predictions. I figured that measurement of wind, temperature, pressure, and such could be measure everywhere and used to predict the future weather on a global level.
Once one considers this, one must also take into consideration of the sheer amount of information needed to do such a program, weather or future. The amount of computations to do such a task would be nearly infinite if not infinite. While I feel that a reasonable accurate, but not perfect weather program could be made with limited measurements and by simply keeping it to date with other changes, one predicting the future seems totally impossible.
To make such a program, one would have to first design logic to discern individual decisions of man. This process has to be able to be done by a human, however slow it may be, before you can program to do similar. Have you a way of predicting the future of one person, if so... it could be expanded to a worldwide environment with time... but predicting any future is impossible IMO.

If the program was completed and run and correct, then it should be able to predict man's free will and their attempts to change the future too... so no.

The whole concept is interesting, but impossible. There is no way of predicting the future by simple observations and such. Not to any level or detail or to a distant future. Economists may be able to predict the near future of a country as a whole, but distant, precise future... a whole different story.

Sorry if I sounded a bit repetitive, but I wanted to make my statement clear.

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boom

MageB420666

you wouldn't want that program anyways, then there would be no point to this forum. Plus it would take a lot of spice out of life, it's a good thing it's practically impossible.

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Apathy: The best outlook this side of I don't give a damn.

xepherys

Well, technically, that's what forecast modelling is. They use it for weather all the time. A forecast is, after all, a prediction, NOT a certainty.


So then, God is only God so much as God is omniscient? A computer that is omniscient is not omnipresent. Is not a quality of any good god omnipresence?

BTW, I started typing your name MSD and recapitalized it as MrsElfDestruct... sorry, I was amused.



It amuses me the cavalier fashion that people use the word impossible, even in this day and age. Frankly, humanity and science prevent just about anything from being "impossible". Think back 1000, 100 or even 10 years ago to what people thought were "impossible" that we do today. Flight? Computers? Robots? Space travel? Microwave ovens? The radio? Television? Satellites? Cell phones? Pacemakers? DNA? Genetic manipulation and the genome project? Gene therapy? Pure water? Seriously folks, some of our more mundane "inventions" by todays standards were the impossibilities of a millenia ago.

CSflim

So basically what you plan to do is insert into a program the position and state of every atom in the universe? I hope you have a lot of ram!

Well the problem with large scale predictions is understood through non-linear dynamics (chaos theory). Quite simple in order to get accurate predictions over any reasonable length of time you need your initial conditions to be 100% accurate.
Naieve intuition might suggest that if you have initial conditions 99.99% accurate then your predictions would come out very accurate (say 95% accurate). This simply isn't the case. What acutally happens is the prediction and the actual diverge after quite a short period of time.
Two very interesting and totally accessible popularizataions are Chaos by James Glieck and Does God Play Dice by Ian Stewart.
And getting 100% accurate initial conditions is not just unimaginable infeasable, but it is actually impossible, even in principle, as the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle forbids it.

Another problem is that physics is not deterministic (or at least not at the level to which we have access). So there is unpredictable randomness which makes the outlook even bleaker.

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xepherys

CSflim-

While noting Heisenberg and variants on the Chaos theory are quite relevant, I'd have to posit that many principles and theories have been proven and unproven throughout our history, making, once again, nothing truly impossible.

Look at it from the open universe aspect, where there is an infinite universe with infinite matter, which would therefore create infinite anti-matter, energy, and just about everything else. If, indeed, there is no limit, than anything is possible given ample time to develop. If the closed universe model is more your suit, then assume that outside of the universe, there is something else, or nothing at all, either way humans are incapable of understanding it (currently). This means that more than likely we are increasingly fallible, and things that we find to be impossible are truly not that at all.

CSflim

However, taking the question as purely a thought experiment (and only a thought experiment, the idea of actually doing it is simply ludicrous), we can do some pretty interesting things with it from the point of view of Free Will.

First of all, as it is a thought experiment, we can build a computer that is unbelievably fast; let's say almost instantaneous (we have perhaps harnessed quantum computation). We will also ignore quantum indeterminacy and the other factors I mentioned in the above post. And also, let us assume somehow we have managed to make a record of the position and momentum of every particle in the universe, and entered it into our computer.

Now since this machine knows the laws of physics, and everything in the universe, including us (we will assume Cartesian Dualism is false) follows the laws of physics, it seems to follow that we can see into the future, including what our actions will be. Further more it seems that having seen this future, we would be unable to act in any way other that what was predicted: how could we? We must follow the laws of physics. But this doesn't seem to make any sense! How can we not be able to make a choice about how to act? We seem to have arrived at a contradiction.

After coming across this paradox, we must back-track and see what unwarranted assumptions we have made. What went wrong? We entered perfect and complete data into the computer, it knows all of the physical laws? What more is there?
The computer is part of the universe.
This is what went wrong.
We must understand how the computer stores its data: in some futuristic highly condensed ram. It takes the position and momentum of every particle and stores it somewhere in ram. But all of the atoms that make up the ram must also be stored somewhere else in memory. And the atoms that make up that piece of memory must be stored elsewhere, and so on, to an infinite regress.
So a computer cannot predict the future of a universe of which it is a part, for to do that would mean it would have to simulate itself simulating itself simulating itself simulating itself...

But what if we remove the computer from section of the universe to be predicted? We built a massive, impenetrable barrier all around the computer (again, some breakthrough in physics allows us to construct such a barrier). We then load the computer with all of the data about the world outside the barrier, and ignore everything inside the barrier. Now the computer will go on it's merry way and predict the future perfectly: Every word you say, ever war fought, every novel written. The future of humanity will be predicted in just a few seconds. It will even predict the exact moment of the future that the barrier will be breached. At this point the simulation is forced to stop.

So you will never find yourself in the situation that you will know what it is you have been predicted to do. Your illusion of free will is secure. After opening the barrier which stores the computer, you will find an accurate description of all of the events of history that have occurred since the machine was started years ago. Yet this history was created mere moments after the machine was started! You could have been standing just outside the room, knowing that your very future is inside the room waiting for you to read...but that the prediction only goes as far into the future as the moment that you will read it! (The last line reads, “and then Bob opened the door into the computer room with the intention of reading this report”).

I find that this thought experiment has some strange parallels between Godel's Theorem/Turing's Halting Problem (with the computer being asked to essentially swallow itself up) and with Quantum Mechanics (with the computer behaving differently depending on whether anyone is "observing" it or not).

Fun to think about: but completly divorced from reality I have to say.

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CSflim

Well let us assume that Hesienberg is false, after all, it is a phyical theory, and hence open to being falsified. However mathematics is not something which can be falsified, so chaos is with us to stay: for useful long term predictions we need 100% accurate measurements.

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kinsaj

It is impossible not simply because of the resources needed, but also because of the fact that you can not predict how humans will react to certain instances. Also, what is being discussed is impossible presently... not necessarily in the future.
If we are reduced to picking out specific errors in wordage, the meaning of discussions are lost.

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xepherys

I don't find the word "impossible" to be simple wordage though. If this was an issue of symantics then I would agree... but impossible is a very strong word to use for a philosophical topic. And regarding science, it is so even more.

pan6467

I don't want to know what would happen in the universe that would be foolish.

But, I truly believe that a computer programmed with all known manmade history, known (not conjectured natural history) and philosophy inputted totally as fact with no bias, could in theory predict (with great accuracy at first) from examples how man will make his future and reactions. However, once the accuracy is discovered then it becomes a question of free- will and changing the prediction or mass hysteria which makes it a self fulfilling prophecy.

There are many factors that would also render predictions tough, such as if God were to intercede because man did this, a computer powerful enough to run such a program, the speed at which the program ran, (for example if running the future it takes only seconds for 100 years to pass can you narrow that 100 years down into a yearly analysis? Or would the prediction be for that 100 years and all that happened in between to the computer would be irrelevant. If that were the case then the experiment destroyed its own genuiness and the prediction would probably be inaccurate based solely on the fact that in that 100 years, something would happen that the computer had not considered in its prediction.)

If the computer ran each day in real time there would be no prediction just more input of fact into it.

So, I believe while there is tremendous potential it would be useless to try, at present. There is a time though, I believe, when man will be able to do this and perhaps society will be based by what the computer dictates.

__________________
I just love people who use the excuse "I use/do this because I LOVE the feeling/joy/happiness it brings me" and expect you to be ok with that as you watch them destroy their life blindly following. My response is, "I like to put forks in an eletrical socket, just LOVE that feeling, can't ever get enough of it, so will you let me put this copper fork in that electric socket?"

Unright

How exactly could you program philosophy without bias? Aren't all philosophies essentially biased towards themselves? Isn't having a bias a pilosophy in itself?

Go to any religious section of any bookstore or library, it's filled with books claiming to be the only book you will ever need.

Are you just trying to test the cliche that history repeats itself?

pan6467

You can program a philosophy/religion into a computer unbiased by just inputting the facts, books, whatever as they are, no commentary or abreviating or deviating from the texts. What I mean is don't program in one as better or truer than any other.

I do believe history does go in cycles, but no, this would not be a test to see if history repeats itself because it doesn't. The cycles do but each time man progresses intellectually, mechanically, societally.

No, like I said my purpose would be to see how accurate the computer would be in its predictions. I think if programmed without bias in any form just the facts, that it would be fairly accurate. Much moreso than anything else out there.

And perhaps by those predictions we could see where technology and society will be 500 years from now.

To me it is just a very interesting topic that I like to think about every now and then. I don't understand why people just can't let their minds wonder about the possibilities. Why so many have to argue and become offensive over it. Is not the whole purpose of philosophy the expansion of mind and to ask what if? That's all I am doing here.

__________________
I just love people who use the excuse "I use/do this because I LOVE the feeling/joy/happiness it brings me" and expect you to be ok with that as you watch them destroy their life blindly following. My response is, "I like to put forks in an eletrical socket, just LOVE that feeling, can't ever get enough of it, so will you let me put this copper fork in that electric socket?"

xepherys

Computers and the code they execute are, by definition, non-biased. Code is logic, executed in linear fashion. A computer does not have the ability (beyond that which we may give it) to have an opinion. If the code was faulty (had data other than facts) then it would simply be faulty and not correctly make predictions. It'd be obvious pretty quickly that it was not fed unbiased information.

Secondly, do not confuse unbiased with nihilist. A computer is, I suppose, technically nihilistic. It does not believe anything, it just does what it's told to do. If you created a nihilistic program, it would not be able to adequately recreate humanity.

xepherys

I guess to add to that bit, part of that is that simple concepts are built into humanity, like hope, desire, excitement for the unknown. Sure, not each individual has these, but the populace at it's full scale does.

Unright

Facts? There are no such things as facts when it comes to religion. All the major religions today (Christian, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism) are based on 'events' that happened thousands of years ago by people with severe bias towards what they believe is right.

The definition of religion and philosophy is also called to be under scrutiny. Is Scientology a religion/philosophy? How about Heaven's Gate? Hari Krishnas? Is there a minimum amount of worshippers required? Does it have to have a book written about it? What about religions that have no basis in fact, just faith? If Joe Smith believes the same thing as Joe Jones with one minor difference, would both be imputted?

What would be the point of taking any of this into account if people rarely follow the core beliefs of their chosen religion? Most of the major ones list murder as a no-no, but that rarely stops it from happening.

A person's religion tells you nothing about who that person is, or what they can or would do in any given situation.

You can't crunch humanity into 1s and 0s and expect to find out what day WWIII will break out. You couldn't even get vague Nostradamus-y preditions that would be even close. We're just too unpredictable. There's no pattern, rhyme or reason to the chaos of existence.

Butterflies are fluttering. All predictions are null.

rukkyg

It's already been said but because the computer is part of the universe, its actions (predicting the future) change the inputs to the program, which produces a new output which changes the input, etc.

pan6467

I've thought of that.And it could depending on how you input the data.

If you input the data as though it's predictions become fact then you run into problems.

However if you don't input the experiment running into the computer (in other words don't let the computer know it is in the equation), it won't be contaminated.

I'm just looking for an overview projection/prophecy not one that gives individual detail over every little thing that may happen. I still contend that at first it could predict society's short term future very accurately. Because I believe society, while ever moving forward technologically, follows the same patterns and trends.

It's why we see the technological and heavily industrialized countries getting older as a people, while "third world" countries stay younger. There's many reasons for this trend. The trend should conclude by the younger societies overtaking the older societies. In essence the Eastern Europe countries, Indias, Middle Eastern Countries, Central/South American countries and African countries overtaking the Western Europes, the US, Japan and so on, either militarily or at the very least economically.

I think a computer programmed to just follow the trends in societies would show this theory. However, you could not program this theory into the computer. You could just program the historical trends and let the computer come up with its own conclusion.

The only difference in this trend is the fact that the industrial countries are so far advanced, however I think that the gulf of differences could be the weak link that allows the poorer countries to eventual takeover.

__________________
I just love people who use the excuse "I use/do this because I LOVE the feeling/joy/happiness it brings me" and expect you to be ok with that as you watch them destroy their life blindly following. My response is, "I like to put forks in an eletrical socket, just LOVE that feeling, can't ever get enough of it, so will you let me put this copper fork in that electric socket?"

Zdragva

lmao. im sure its been said already but HOW? u would have to take into account everything :P i mean technically you would need to turn the universe into a computer in order to carry out all the calculations as at all points in the history of the universe the universe has been present, and as i say you would need to take into account every possibility. writing this has reminded me of something i read once tho. if the universe doesnt die in a big crunch but continues expanding forever and mankind can somehow survive, iv read a book where by mankind survives by creating a computer that uses the universe as, well as a computer, after a certain period of time due to the fact the universe is not infinate in size/ there isnt an infinate amount of arrangements for finite things, we would live the SAMe lives over and over, we would think the EXACT SAME thoughts over and over again after enough time... weird huh. even if we manage to escape death we're doomed to a horrific future at best :P

pan6467

Is that not possibly what we are doing now? Living the same life over and over again, hence deja vu, the feeling you've been through an event before?

__________________
I just love people who use the excuse "I use/do this because I LOVE the feeling/joy/happiness it brings me" and expect you to be ok with that as you watch them destroy their life blindly following. My response is, "I like to put forks in an eletrical socket, just LOVE that feeling, can't ever get enough of it, so will you let me put this copper fork in that electric socket?"

CSflim

Well I presume that you didn't have Deja Vu the first time you lived your life. Hence if you are having Deja Vu now, then you are not re-living the same] life are you?

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xepherys

Wow, that's deep...

pan6467

I believe we do relive the same life over and over. But reliving and doing exactly the same things are 2 totally different ideas and aspects.

I believe every choice you make sends you down a different pathway. These pathways intersect and mingle at different points in one's life. There are infinite choices in one's lifetime to choose from and even the slightest choice makes a huge difference.

You run 5 minutes late because you chose to take a longer shower. Because you did you missed being in a severe car accident that killed 3 people. In a previous life you had chosen not to take that long of a shower and had left on time. In that previous life you died in the accident.

Thus the choices eventually lead to a longer life because you learned previously what had happened before. Now, we do this infinitely until all choices are played out.

The world still reacts the same. The events are the same, the leaders are the same because noone else's choices affect your life. Your life choices are the only things that affect only your existence. The same people enter your life maybe in different ways but the friends and family you have and the enemies you make are the same every life.

So if there's a nuclear war in your lifetime it happens the same day the same time, no matter what your choices are.

Your future lives are based on the first life you led. Your choices affect your life to some degree and can have you living longer but overall the life is the same.

It is a great theory, is it possible? Yes, why not?

Every men has his own philosophy and theory of what life is. Noone has yet been proven right nor has anyone been proven wrong, and I don't think anyone will ever be.

By the way Deja Vu, doesn't mean you are changing your life, simply means you've been there before, so yes, you can live the exact same life over and over and have Deja Vu. Why the rolling eyes, I don't understand as again noone truly knows any answers and noone is right or wrong because there is no proof what the meaning and what life truly is.

__________________
I just love people who use the excuse "I use/do this because I LOVE the feeling/joy/happiness it brings me" and expect you to be ok with that as you watch them destroy their life blindly following. My response is, "I like to put forks in an eletrical socket, just LOVE that feeling, can't ever get enough of it, so will you let me put this copper fork in that electric socket?"