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A story by Isaac Asimov (WARNING: Depressing as hell)

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slowmutant
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21 Jan 2009, 11:10 pm

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I say, what the crap do we really know?


Indeed. :)



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21 Jan 2009, 11:15 pm

slowmutant wrote:
I liked the ending. I could kind of see it coming. I thought it was a good twist. Did you pick up on its suggestion of cyclical time? That sense of things happening that have happened before and will happen again? God is computer and computer is God. "Cosmic AC" is both creator and created.
Ageless technology enduring through the cycles of creation and destruction.

I picked up on it. I just did not think it was insightful. I don't think anybody thinks that their God is or could be a Galactic computer, too many laws about pork and clothing styles. Basically, with how it was done, it was sort of tasteless, at least if there is going to be an ascension to godhood, it needs more drama rather than just a tacky tack-on.



Awesomelyglorious
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21 Jan 2009, 11:19 pm

claire333 wrote:
I tend to find most fiction to be lame in general, so I see your point. I liked it because it is an easily interpretable picture of the author's own inner struggles.

Well, a lot is. This is easily interpretable, but it is also without much substance. I mean, it has people improving over time, and then they reach their limit and cannot stop entropy using their super-computer... until after they all take the leap to join it. That's just.... so nothing. You could say less and mean more with a speculative non-fiction piece, the medium of fiction exists somewhat to make things human, but this is just a statement of speculative facts with random bad names asking a machine a question it cannot answer.



slowmutant
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21 Jan 2009, 11:19 pm

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I am not going to get into speculative metaphysics too much, because I would find it too speculative.


:lol:



greenblue
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21 Jan 2009, 11:20 pm

Orwell wrote:
slowmutant wrote:
I've read this story, and my response was not pessimistic. If anything, it was positive. Kind of reminds me of that one particular Futurama episode. :wink:

Why did the story put you in a very pessismtic mood?

It put me in a pessimistic mood because the concept of entropy is extremely depressing, something that is difficult to come to terms with. For everything we do, all our struggles and triumphs, in the end it is moot.

well, if that's the case, in the end, maybe nihilism does make some sense, after all, as it negates the objective value of our struggles and triumphs, and those being rather subjective and human concepts, and nothing to do with the Universe itself. But as we are very far from that to happen, it's something that we can just discuss about for now, and finding that depressing or not is something that can be debated about its validity, I assume.

On the other hand, humans create or mantain Hope, monotheistic religions have faith in that hope and they won't accept an end of everything.

This is probably what Asimov was getting to? I haven't read the story, but giving that he was an atheist, he might probably wanted to go with this conflict related to entropy, in which christian doctrine doesn't accept?


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Last edited by greenblue on 21 Jan 2009, 11:40 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Awesomelyglorious
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21 Jan 2009, 11:21 pm

slowmutant wrote:
Fair enough.

Maybe the Cosmic AC should have suffered a catastrophic systems crash as the result of trying to answer a question with no possible answer. The Cosmic AC destroys itself in an attempt to create a boulder bigger than it can lift. :wink:

It would have to break rather quickly in order for that to work, I would think, as there would be no reason for the system to stop working a few billion or so years after the question is originally asked. And if no answer were possible, the computer should have been upfront about this from the start of the story.



Awesomelyglorious
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21 Jan 2009, 11:22 pm

slowmutant wrote:
Is there one? A valid one, I mean.

The question was for you, not for me. Validity is in the eyes of the one judging validity.



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21 Jan 2009, 11:35 pm

Awesomelyglorious wrote:
Interesting. In any case, it seems an odd speculation, as for there to be an infinite universe, then we would have to suppose matter that we have never had contact with and never could have contact with, which is a hard to justify assumption. Even the gravity issue leads to some problems, as let's just say that we have this situation:

A----------------------------B

Where both A and B are infinite masses. If you are a micrometer closer to A than to B, then you would be pulled towards the center of A with an infinite level of force according to classical gravitational theory. Thus... this seems problematic if we have a distribution of mass, I mean, I don't know how to model this, but it still seems problematic. I guess, I cannot think about a problem with infinite masses well enough to feel comfortable with my math, because there is an issue of not being able to even conceive of point-masses, but yeah.... I would really not trust such a notion.

well, I could say that the article that twoshots provided seems somehow poor as it doesn't provide the view in a more scholarly level, if you will, or provide a source of study or expand more the issue, to backup the assertion, however, it seems to follow some logic, the way I interpret this, if I'm not mistaken, is of the concepts of empty space vs the physical universe, in which it seems to suggest that the Universe (the content - galaxies, energy) to be finite, while mere space to be infinite. But I suppose I may be wrong.


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Last edited by greenblue on 21 Jan 2009, 11:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.

twoshots
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21 Jan 2009, 11:45 pm

Well, it's not a scholarly article, sure, there isn't much to say about the idea. But the point mass model does not serve as a valid reductio. My brain's winding down so I don't feel comfortable with three dimensions, but let's just posit a 1 dimensional world where there is an average mass density of 1 kilo per meter everwhere such that |x|>1 and let's place a 1 kilo point mass at the origin. Clearly, this universe has infinite mass. The force exerted on the origin is proportional to -dm/x^2 when x<-1 and dm/x^2 when x>1. So we can express the net force as
-∫dm/x^2 + ∫dm/x^2 ranging over the appropriate regions. Since dm = dx in this case, this just becomes
-∫dx/x^2+∫dx/x^2 = 1/x|(-oo, -1) -1/x|(1,oo) = -1+1=0, not surprisingly.

We might similarly expect that in such a universe the forces would cancel out in higher dimensions, and since a homogeneous universe might be a plausible limit of an infinite universe, then this seems to say there are no obvious absurdities of that sort.


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22 Jan 2009, 12:29 am

Let's relate this more explicitly to the problem AG posited, by showing that we can place our point-mass someplace with a net force which is still finite. Suppose instead that we shift the origin over so that now the point mass is 1.5 meters from the left infinite mass region and .5 meters from the right. Then our integral is
-∫dx/x^2+∫dx/x^2 = 1/x|(-oo, -1.5) -1/x|(.5,oo) = -1/1.5 +1/.5 = 1/2


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ike
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22 Jan 2009, 12:33 am

Orwell wrote:
ike wrote:
I thought you were going to post the short where it ends by saying that the series of robots was discontinued "not because robots aren't capable of falling in love, but because women are". I saw the topic of the thread and had a sudden flashback and it seemed suddenly like a very autistic sort of thing. :)

Interesting. Do you happen to remember what story that is? I'd like to read it.


I found it in a book of collected shorts that I picked up at a thrift store many years ago ... in my early teens if I remember correctly... The book was titled "8 stories from the Rest of the Robots". It seems to have been reprinted with a slightly modified title... Though the number of stories is different too, so I'm not sure if it's my memory that's gone off or if they dropped a few from the book.

Here's the book on Amazon

http://www.amazon.com/Rest-Robots-Isaac ... 981&sr=8-1

I was going to say that I couldn't remember the title of the story until I found the book on Amazon... It's the first one in the description:

Quote:
ROBOT TONY is the first robot designed to perform domestic duties by the U S Robots and Mechanical Men Corporation. Is it Tony's fault that the lady of the house where he's field-tested falls in love with him?


I don't remember it having that title though... I remember it having a title that had something to do with love or romance.


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ike
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22 Jan 2009, 12:35 am

Here's the ISBN from the copy I had with the original title back in the 80's.

http://www.amazon.com/Rest-Robots-Eight ... 469&sr=8-4


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Sand
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22 Jan 2009, 12:38 am

I find it amusing that so many people are pissed off that God could be a computer. That was Asimov's joke too and it is funny. All these guys here who think they can out think a computer that knows far more than mankind will know for millions of years is also quite amusing.



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22 Jan 2009, 12:52 am

Awesomelyglorious wrote:
slowmutant wrote:
Fair enough.

Maybe the Cosmic AC should have suffered a catastrophic systems crash as the result of trying to answer a question with no possible answer. The Cosmic AC destroys itself in an attempt to create a boulder bigger than it can lift. :wink:

It would have to break rather quickly in order for that to work, I would think, as there would be no reason for the system to stop working a few billion or so years after the question is originally asked. And if no answer were possible, the computer should have been upfront about this from the start of the story.


Maybe the computer thought it could when in the end it couldn't. Maybe the computer couldn't accept defeat.



Awesomelyglorious
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22 Jan 2009, 1:47 am

slowmutant wrote:
Maybe the computer thought it could when in the end it couldn't. Maybe the computer couldn't accept defeat.

Computers wouldn't be built with that kind of self-awareness of personality, at least there is no evidence that the computer Asimov indicated had these features throughout this period of time. In any case, a system crash would not be a matter of defeat, it would be a matter of contradiction or overload, contradictions and overloads do not take this long to deal with, and if one were likely then it would have likely happened with the first such computer, not the last one.



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22 Jan 2009, 2:47 am

To speculate on the nature of computers millions of years in the future is in the level of Neanderthals debating the efficacy of tailfins on Cadillacs. It is extremely unlikely that humanity as we know it, considering the rapid progress of genetic understanding and the profound stupidity humanity is demonstrating in its control of the environment, will continue to exist for the next few centuries, much less the end of the universe.