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To: tortoise
What this means is that intelligence itself is nothing more than a process expressable on any engine capable of computation (which is damn near every bit of matter in the universe)

What you seem to be getting close to is that intelligence is the whole PROCESS of existence. Intelligence and existence being synonymous, one can not be without the other and all the "sub-processes" of life are ultimately based upon that intelligence. Having intelligence as a synonym for God works for me and God being the Source of existence then fits in fine.

72 posted on 01/10/2002 12:39:49 PM PST by Semper
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To: Semper
What you seem to be getting close to is that intelligence is the whole PROCESS of existence. Intelligence and existence being synonymous, one can not be without the other and all the "sub-processes" of life are ultimately based upon that intelligence. Having intelligence as a synonym for God works for me and God being the Source of existence then fits in fine.

Actually, I leave things more open-ended than that. My statement is based on a couple things. First, the universe is nowhere near thermodynamic equilibrium, so arbitrary processes emerge necessarily. Second, processes that have the properties required for intelligence emerge as a miniscule fraction of all the processes that occur which is perfectly allowable statistically. What I did not state, but which follows as a perfectly valid hypothesis (and which you kind of picked up on), is that there are processes that meet the criteria of "intelligent" that may operate over the span of the entire universe. It is even possible that humans are sub-minds of a much larger intelligence, but that is less likely than us being independent of a much larger intelligence in my estimation. This plausibly allows for many things, but I don't think it can rationally be taken much farther than this with the limited information we have today.

100 posted on 01/10/2002 1:39:51 PM PST by tortoise
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