As an analogy (model?) for the relationship between
God and the world the programmer/program is an
interesting one. I have thought about this as well.
There are potentially a couple issues that would need
to be ironed out.
One big one is the immanence of God (a programmer is
certainly transcendant in relation to his program).
Is a programmer immanent in his running program? It
depends how you define it, but probably not in the way
we think of God's immanence. The programmer can be
aware (assuming he has written the code thus) of every
variable in his program at every moment in time (at
least within human limitations).
I have also thought about it from the other side. Can
an AI program prove that it has a programmer? Or
would AI programs, assuming sentience which is a huge
assumption, running on the same system and able to
communicate with one another be of different opinions
within the confines of their system about the
existence of their programmer? It seems to me that
they likely would. I find this analogy helpful for
thinking about the situation in which we find
ourselves. One can imagine that arguments among AI
entities could be much the same as the arguments that
have occupied mankind certainly over the last couple
of thousand of years.
I could expound at length about the analogy, but
suffice it to say I too find it interesting.
Blake
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