rationalskepticism.org

Thommo wrote:
Also, it's worth attention that the correct analogue of "astronomy" is "theology" and not gods. If you look at some element of astronomy that survived the pre-scientific to scientific transition, it's usually some observable like a star, moon or planet or some feature of the periodic behaviour of those observables.

There are no analogous features of gods, the closest we can get is conventions of things that the divine has in common, which does not in fact include the capacity for universe creation.

It thus seems likely that redefining the language of theology to describe a "cause of the universe" (if there is one) or somesuch to be a "god" is more likely to obfuscate than clarify.

Modern science, such as digital physics, etc describe a construct by which universe may emerge from computation.
Modern science, such as penrose hawking singularity theorems describe origins.

In other words, our universe may be both computable, and may have emerged.

Thommo wrote:

Those are not qualities common to gods actually. Thor didn't do either of those things, Hades didn't do those things.

This is why the document referred to the concept of creator styled gods.

The class of creator styled archaic Gods is updatable therein.

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Also, keep in mind that science has been observed to update words/concepts such as 'gravity', that had multiple meanings to various cultures.

Thommo wrote:

I don't think it does. Machine learning hasn't sprung out of neuroscience and it's far from clear that calling that "non-trivial intelligence" is accurate.

You misunderstood my prior comment.

I was referring to the instance that humans can self-engineer their brains by learning tasks, i.e. they can produce smarter instances of themselves, aka create non-trivial intelligence.

Thommo wrote:
Simulations, by definition are not universe yielding, so that seems to be an error.

Again, it might also be worth mentioning the difference in sophistication between any simulation of our cosmos and the actual cosmos. There's an enormous amount of ground covered in the equivocation over treating them both with the label of "sophisticated"

This does not change the instance that universe yielding is a human performable construct. (albeit crude universe yielding)

Remember that the redefinition aims to purge scientifically unfounded properties. Perhaps the creation of a cosmos of our detail is not possible, but we already see cognitive machines that exceed humans in cognitive tasks.

So, there is indication that whatever our universe consists of, may be sufficient to construct environments that may garner non-trivial artificial intelligence.