Morning Q&A with Allen Leigh, Adam Davis and Lincoln Cannon

Speaker 1

These speakers made a heroic effort to track their thoughts, complex as they are, for hoping we can follow. And I’m sure there are people here who did follow those thoughts, and perhaps they sparked questions on your behalf. So we have Allen, Lincoln, and Adam with Scott backing up here are ready to ask questions you might have. Russ?

Speaker 2

Well, I’ll ask the first one to Alan. We’re quoting the Book of Mormon scriptures about God violating laws ceasing to be God. The question is: can God really violate those laws, or can they only try but still not need to violate the law? And is it a matter of law? God crashing with an attempt to violate a law that you have to violate.

Speaker 1

You probably better come up here to be heard.

Speaker 3

We can’t really give a good answer to your question because we’re going through the scriptures and interpretation and that’s really all we have. In the matter. In the case of Alma, he was talking about salvation and the necessity that mercy, as provided by the Savior’s atonement, includes repentance. He said that if it did not include repentance, then God would fail to be God. And all I can say is that I think my own opinion is that he would not have asked that as a rhetorical question, but as an actual question, that if God tried to have a plan of mercy that did not require on our part repentance, which is the changing of our behavior, then he would cease to be God because The purpose of mercy is to bring us back to God, but we can’t come back to God if we have unclean behavior. We have to change our behavior, which is by definition repentance. So my opinion is I take the question literally that it would be possible for God to fail. Other people, I’m sure, would have different interpretations.

Speaker 3

And in the case of Lehi, talking about opposition, again, in order for us to grow and mature and to learn from mortality, we have to have opposition, as Lehi explained. And if we had a plan of life or a plan of salvation that did not include opposition, then the purpose of God would be destroyed because we really couldn’t achieve The result of becoming like God without having opposition to give us choices to make. The choices began in the Garden of Eden with the choice of the fruit. and we have choices in our lives. And without the choices being available, that we can’t really learn and grow because we we just become mere robots. So I my feeling is that I take the it literally. I’m sure other people might have a different view.

Speaker 3

Oh, that’s a good idea. Yes.

Speaker 4

Uh this this can be addressed to any of the three or all of the three. There’s a heavy reliance on natural law that informs each of the uh presentations. But that was not flushed out. Are they making a reference to natural law alla stoicism, natural law alla scholasticism, or some construct of their own. And then I have a follow-up question based upon Ellen.

Speaker 1

Who would like to try what kind of law I think they’re probably thinking of

Speaker 5

Physical law rather than briefly in regards to my presentation, I’m making no assumptions about a particular Definition of natural lie, I’m open to considering how any of those that you mentioned or others that we could talk about would fit into the paradigm. Not particular.

Speaker 1

Give a further response to that.

Speaker 4

Well, the first presenter mentioned that God follows natural laws and exalted beings must be obedient to natural law. If that’s the case, does it not be a naturalist? Does that not entail an implicit Neoplatonic ontology and all the problems that that brings with it? Sorry.

Speaker 5

I don’t think that necessarily follows unless you You believe that there is a first law. There may be an infinite regression of laws in which laws are embedded. Some people think infinite regressions aren’t rational. I disagree. Does that answer your question? Do we want to follow up on anything?

Speaker 4

If you say that God must be obedient to natural law, is that a coherence argument? Or is that a presentation where that was mentioned?

Speaker 5

What I’m doing there is I’m portraying an interpretation of stuff coming from Mormon scripture, where it talks about, as DNC 88, talks about. There’s no space in which there is no law. There’s law in all space. And it talks about, and there’s, and if you look in the paper, which will be available on the internet, there’s a whole bunch of references to script passages of scripture where it talks about God. Working according to law. So I’m making no necessary assumptions about what the authors intended by law. I’m perfectly willing to adopt all kinds of interpretations about what that law might be. Do you want to add something about that?

Speaker 6

Well, I actually thought Given’s talk yesterday addressed a lot of those ideas and that the idea Latter-day Saint concept of God is not necessarily the same as traditional Christianism, that God necessarily must Pre-exist or presuppose the universe. But that is, he is a participant and exists in it. And so, when I talk about law, I’m really talking about physics. Now I don’t presume to know everything about physics, or the presume that every anybody on earth knows everything that we know, but it’s not necessary. I mean he There has to be some governance of interaction. And if he exists in the universe just as we do, he has to be subject to those same governances of interactions. Whatever they may be.

Speaker 4

So if you assume that there is this larger substrata of interactions in this metaphysic, where does it exist? And how is it that it it controls God? And we can still say that God. Is God sort of the standard definition where He’s perfect, all-powerful, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 6

And it exists because it has always existed, and there could not be existence. I would not necessarily say that laws in a materialist sense, there is no other where. There is just the universe. And so it has to exist in the universe. I don’t speak of of law as being something that is has to have a where It just is. How does it inform physical beings? Because of it’s it it is. It it is there. And in in other words, you can’t have law or you can’t have interactions if there isn’t isn’t some way of governing those interactions. And so the contrary of your question would be How could it be otherwise?

Speaker 1

This sounds like a conversation will have to go on over lunch. Lloyd?

Speaker 7

There seems to be a bit of confusion when we talk about natural laws as governing Material or God being obedient to natural laws because natural laws, if I said, okay, I won’t go outside and violate the law of gravity, you know, we’d be kind of confusing. But what do you mean by violating the law of gravity? Trying to make your point in which he says, Well, when we talk about natural laws, we’re not saying that natural laws govern the world. Natural laws are what we use to describe the world. Exactly. And so it seems to be kind of nonsensical to talk about God violating natural laws because, I mean, what we’ What would it look like to violate natural laws? This doesn’t seem to make any sense to talk about that kind of notion.

Speaker 5

I’m not a physicist, but I am a computer programmer. And in computer programming, you can create physics engines. like in the virtual world, Second Life. And those physics engines may allow humans to fly, which doesn’t work very well in our world. And you can have those physics engines embedded in our world where the objects behave differently. So, the physics engine in the embedded world doesn’t violate any physics laws of our world. And if you want to talk about natural laws as being the way we describe the world, then there would be natural laws that are different. In those two worlds. The denizens of a virtual world would describe their natural laws differently than we describe our natural laws. But also going back to this question here just momentarily. The God that I worship personally, I’m not going to speak for anyone else, doesn’t necessarily even know the answer to your question. And I’m okay with that. I’m okay with finite gods. Yes.

Speaker 9

This question is for Alan. And Alan, I think you said, and it kind of sort of follows up, that God has to abide by God has to abide by natural law. And that you also said that some, I think you said That somewhere someone had printed a conclusion that at the other end of the universe, the laws of physics and gravity and all that are the same as they are here. Yes, two questions. How do we know? I mean, how can you? Measure that all the rules of interaction that we have here really are the same 80 billion light years from here. And number two, I guess I, and it’s really fault, I don’t understand why we couldn’t. And if God, why God can’t create a virtual world, then why this itself is in the virtual world, and that God has set the rules just as Lincoln would set the rules when he’s setting up a virtual second life or something like that. You know why God couldn’t change the rules and create another universe to create this universe differently?

Speaker 3

The statement that I gave concerning natural laws in this world being also those in the galaxy six billion miles light years away. Was a recent development or advancement in science in which they were able to study the and I don’t know the details because I’m not an astronomer or a physicist, but they were able to study the The laws that seem to be in effect within this distant galaxy, and they were obeying the same type of physical laws that we have in this world. Joseph Smith said that truth is things as they are, things as they have been, and things as they will be. Yes, God could create a virtual world in which he could have whatever conditions he wanted, just as with second life, for example, that we can have virtual worlds that allow us to do things that are not physically possible. in this world. But virtual worlds of that type are not reality. They’re a creation of some intelligent being, but they’re not reality because reality is things as they are, things as they have been, and things as they will be. All we can do is take the scriptures that we have and again try and interpret them in terms of a consistency among the context within the different scriptures.

Speaker 9

Could you say that God did set up the laws? I mean, why why is it impossible for God to set up the laws for the universe? And and and they are the real laws that we have. Saying of creation has to fellow.

Speaker 3

I use the term law to refer to the relationships and the conditions that govern matter. Whether it’s ph uh we have we’re all aware of the physical laws that are studied by science. I have extrapolated from that into the uh supposed laws that would i uh govern material matter. Joseph Smith said that spirit is matter. So to me, reality is the existence of matter, whether physical matter or spiritual matter. And we know through science, we’re learning through science, the physical laws that control physical matter, then we extrapolate a similar or a parallel parallel situation for Spiritual laws. The scriptures don’t really say that there are spiritual laws. This is sort of an extrapolation from our world into the spirit world. So this is reality, is the existence of these Elements and the relationships between them. In Abraham, we do read that God said, Let us go down and take matter and organize our world, which indicates that the matter I can’t really say that it would be preexistent to God, but it would be at least preexistent to the creation of our world. And that the laws would be the laws that govern that matter. Whether that if God wanted to create a virtual world with different laws, he could do that. But the virtual world would not be reality in terms of actual elements that exist. It would be just a fabrication through software or whatever the media might be that would be used. But to me, reality is the existence of real elements and real laws that control the relationships between those elements. Anything else is not reality.

Speaker 10

Sure. This is for Adam about agency and the doctor and covenants. It talks about agency being a matter of accepting or rejecting light. And then coupling that with the Elias concept of the light of Christ that fills the immensity of space, I’m wondering if you could just Or if you have played around with the idea of light or light of Christ being information that’s embedded, I mean as you’re talking about quantum, you’re saying that it allows information to be imposed onto waveboards. There’s some correlated You’ve played with in that respect.

Speaker 6

I’ve read Section 93 many times and I still don’t understand everything about it. The light of Christ, in my mind, can’t be just the photons, the electromagnetic radiation that we typically associate with. And so it has to be something more, and it’s not physically tenable to be just that. And it may well be something that helps assemble the information so that we get the simultaneous interaction with the information that we need. I think that’s a really good idea. How to make it into an observable would be a real intriguing problem and question. I don’t know if that answers what you’re thinking about. But ultimately, I don’t know a whole lot about What Section 93 is talking about. Wish I did.

Speaker 11

You were talking about detecting intelligent matter and I wanted to know what you or anyone else does with the dawning realization that some huge fraction of the matter in our universe is dark or essentially opaque. To us, and that most of the real numbers we know about are uncomputable. How do you sustain sort of technological optimism in the face of the awareness of those limits? Why not? Left and right novels.

Speaker 6

So what she’s talking about is that 95% of the universe that we observe is some kind of stuff that we have no idea what it is. Some thirty percent of it is dark matter, which is a matter that we don’t know what it is. And then the other stuff is dark energy, which is we don’t even know what it isn’t. And it doesn’t behave in anything like matter that we know of. Now, I don’t know an LDS physicist who hasn’t thought, oh, maybe dark matter, spirit matter. And so that is an intriguing idea, and it has a lot of appeal. But it’s something that has to be looked at very, very carefully. For example, we don’t know if spirit matter has the possibility of interacting gravitationally, which is the defining characteristic of dark matter. So it’s an open-ended question yet for me. In dark energy, well, we just don’t know what it is. But it also presupposes that our cosmological model is on the right track. It works well with the model that we’re working with. And it works extremely well. But we also have to face the fact that the idea of something being uncreate having always existed doesn’t really work, doesn’t really mesh very well, at least to me, with a finite past. We can’t have all the intelligent matter in the universe suddenly appear some 13. 7 billion years ago.

Speaker 1

So what about Christine’s question, will we ever be able to see this or are we doomed to blindness to 95% of the universe?

Speaker 6

I think the answer is yes, eventually. That’s indeed one of the assurances of the Doctrine and Covenants, is that in the fullness of times, which means premillennium all the orders of the all the planets and stuff will be will be made known. And so I have great optimism that we’ll figure out some stuff.

Speaker 12

In the back, in the wall. Yeah, there are some points that were being made about artificial intelligence and a problem with intelligence arising out of anything that we can do. But it seems that in Mormon Doctrine, there should be a conflict between something that is temporally. Becoming and yet eternally being. We have a Christ who is always the Christ, who was always the Christ, who will always be the Christ, but yet had to perform the atonement to be Christ. We have us who can become gods, and yet once we become gods, we are eternal. Could it not be that to create artificial intelligence? intelligence or artificial intelligence into computer sets, you’re simply organizing matter according to the laws by which intelligence is organized, by which intelligence becomes what it is, and yet once that intelligence is, it will be eternal, just as Christ is eternal, just as we will eternally be God’s.

Speaker 6

I’ll grant you that uh our use of the word eternal and stuff like that is a little loose and and and so on. Um But if we want to create what we call a true intelligence, it has to come from something that is the cause of itself. And anything that we create will necessarily violate that condition. Now, if we can somehow incorporate intelligent matter into, say, a robot of our own construction, then we could get a true intelligence.

Speaker 12

Uh but without the I don’t see r any way around the philosophical argument that we can organize it according to the laws of intelligence, what makes an intelligence an intelligence it’s not so much creating it from scratch, but it’s it’s organizing it into this.

Speaker 6

Yeah, um going to that. One of the ideas that I that I hold is that uh intelligent matter in in and of itself isn’t necessarily intelligent. Isn’t necessarily what we’d call an intelligence, but that we didn’t really become an entity in the way that we think of an entity until we had a spirit body assembled around it. And then we became the intelligences that Abraham talks about. And if we could somehow tap into intelligent matter and manipulate it and assemble with it a body to go with it, then yes, we could make true intelligence. But in our present condition, none of our technology allows us to do that.

Speaker 1

One more question, Richard.

Speaker 13

This is for Lincoln. Lincoln, should the LDS Church embrace an official

Speaker 5

Not a specific one, no, but we should be officially, in my opinion, endorsing the value of science and technology. And I think we do to some extent, but we can do it a lot more strongly.

Speaker 1

Well we’ve come to the point where we’re going to split for just an hour for lunch. We’re going to split in the sense that there are various paths we can take. We have meeting with us today the LDS Council, which is the sponsor of this entire program. And they are going to go down the walk over to the Johnson boardroom. If you want to go out down the stairs and into the parking lot and down. And if you’ll hasten over, there’s lots of work that Joe Bentley has for you. For others, Claudia tells me there are lunches outside. We’re not exactly sure we have enough lunches for everybody because we have no idea how we’re coming. So we have preserved 15 lunches for the participants. Because we don’t want the rest of you greedy people eating up their lunch when they’re the ones who did all the work. So you can go and if you’re delayed here, there will be a lunch reserved for you. in room 110. And for the others, you’re welcome to take a box lunch and enjoy yourselves. If you want to get away from all this for a while, If you go south, we’re on the equivalent of 9th Street. If you get down to 3rd Street on Harvard or Yale, you’ll find a multitude of very attractive restaurants that I think you will enjoy. So go south and to the right and you’ll be there. So then we’ll come back, convene once again shortly after one o’clock. So thank you for all who techned this move.