I was recalling some past discussions about the possibility of a Omniscient Being. Some people argued that the idea is ludicrous, and actually made a pretty good case. In order to know everything about everything all at once, you would surely need to be larger than the universe.
My thought was this:
Couldn't even a regular person be "effectively omniscient" if he had the right tool?
For instance, I can very quickly come to "know" all the lyrics of every Aerosmith song by typing a few keywords into a Google screen. If I had that capability *without* that tool, I'd be considered an incredible savant.
So, what if our Omniscient Being just had a really good search engine?
Here's where I'm going with this:
Imagine that He had a computer that was, say a trillion, trillion times the size of the known Universe and that computer was running a program that simulated our Universe. It would need to know the state of every subatomic particle, but we're talking about a really, REALLY big computer!
To bracket the task, consider that the computer would not need to model everything, just the particles that have a threshold affect on this earth. Rather than simulating every atomic interaction of every star in every galaxy, the computer could keep track of the few photons that might reach earth. Simulating a whole galaxy would then become (relatively) trivial.
Given a starting point where every particle's location and state is known, our Omniscient Being need only run the simulation backward and forward to *learn* anything at all. Without needing to know everything all at once, he'd still be "effectively omniscient" because he could answer any question about anything past, present, or future!
Help me find flaws and/or consequences of this scenario.
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