Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26006155-20190617222636/@comment-26006155-20190704143926

You seem absolutely obsessed about religion, Ambassador.

I told you I'm an Agnostic, right? I'm sure it's come up several times.

I had a Christian upbrinding. But after learning about all the horrors organized religion has overseen, ancient and modern, I'm convinced that most ORs follow their own agendas more than any divine being's.

Questioning the faith I grew up with was hard for me. But after than gear shift I'm much more willing to question things most people take for granted.

I think Monty Python made a skit about an Atheist's wife calling him out for being a Lax Atheist. That he wasn't sufficently devoted to not believing in anything.

There are many types of belief cults in this world. And only some of them come from actual religions. Blind devotion to any ideal, political stance, famous person or sports team can have negative results if taken too far.

One reason I was surprised to find you're not a fan of Albert Einstein, when you say you do everything in the name of Science.

Without imagination, without curiosity, people would simply accept what they currently knew as all there was to know, and never try to look beyond that.

Einstein's theories might be old now, and have been refined or debunked in the generations that followed him. But his success in accerating the progress of human knowledge during his lifetime is a feat few in history can rival. And his championing of Imagination, the driving force behind innovation, is as relevant today as it was then.

"Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you anywhere." "Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand." "The true sign of Intelligence is not knowledge, but imagination", etc  (Google image search "einstein imagination quote" )

Galileo chimed in with his own version: "All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them".

Do you really think the scientific world was ready to rewrite its entire concept of time, because a clerk at a Swiss patent office wrote a fancy sounding document? Hell no.

Scientists with new ideas have been facing resistance throughout history. Even about things we'd find laughable today, like the Sun being the center of the solar system. Easy to believe now, it was a wild, radical idea in its day.

What Einstein wanted to do was encourage people to be more open-minded, and use their creativity to search for unknown aspects of physics when the observations didn't match current theories. To show people that Science wasn't just about dry number crunching, but to explore the universe in search of things we don't already know.

If the evidence doesn't fit the theory, we have to use our creativity to search for what unknown factor might be out there that can explain what might be causing the difference.

This is what I did, when I spent three months trying to find a model that would explain why Phone Guy in FNAF would oversee three generations of killer robots, and not be concerned about it as head of security. And why the manner of murder at Freddy's was always being stuffed in a robot, as logically problematic as that seemed.

I tried every simple solution, and none of them worked. So I kept trying increasingly complex solutions. Until finally I tried that idea that 'A mad scientist is trying to put human souls into robots'... and suddenly the seemingly random details began to line up and make sense.

I used Imagination to search for a possible answer. Then, after finding a potential model, I went back and tested the compatibility of this model with the evidence.

And it matched closely enough that, while not perfect, it definitely felt I was heading the right direction. So I kept heading that way to learn more.

If we want answers, we have to try new ideas.

Please stop trying to dismiss Imagination as Religion, or Emotion. It's neither of these things.

Humans evolved Right Brains because the advanced pattern recognition and creativity is what allowed us to break out of the set patterns of the Animal Kingdom, and become a force capable of chosing our own destiny and transforming our world.

FNAF, Steven Universe, and Undertale all contain amazing stories forged by hightly imaginative people, who each had a vision of how the world could be different, and created works of art to try and show that vision to others in the form of a puzzle/game.

And there is no way we're ever going to make headway in discovering what those stories are, unless we employ Imagination ourselves.

FNAF might seem like a silly fantasy story about people putting their minds in robots. And on the surface it's tempting to dismiss it as such.

But what if a young, curious child with a gift for science catches the idea of Robotic Immortality from their favorite series of games, and tries to make that dream a reality?

And actually succeeds?

History is full of silly science fiction, that silly people tried to make real, that now is so commonplace that it's hard to remember just how amazing it used to be.

I have the legendary movie/game Dragon's Lair, once a stand-alone arcade cabinet, residing in a tiny corner of my smartphone's memory.

Wouldn't it be grand, if none of us had to die of old age, because an anime-loving geek somewhere decided to research robotic immortality seriously, because of their childhood obsession with FNAF?

Who in this world is qualified to judge what's impossible?

Tradition-loving skeptics have a lousy track record.