Beginning of time or no beginning of time?
Life on other planets or no life on other planets?
Creator or no creator?
[disclaimer: I am not looking for simple answers to these questions. I am merely opening up discussion on the mysteries which shall remain so.]
First I was gonna dismiss these, as asking for "absurdity" seemed a wrong approach. But Wildcat's latest post made me think.
We may or may not have been created by someone.
We may or may not have already created something by ourselves.
We may or may not do so in the future.
Given the potentially vastly different operating environments of the supposed creator and the created, it's difficult to form consistent standards as to what separates a new "generation" of creators from the previous.
A pocket calculator might not be mistaken as something "alive" and a "member" of a new life form, , but a future supercomputer with impeccable AI just might be.
Given the idea that we might become creators ourselves, it's not hard to entertain the idea someone might have created us.
We currently exist in an unknown position in the succession of creators, if any.
If we ever factually
do create something that qualifies as a creation by some ultimate standards, there's the challenge of not recognizing it. At which point the smart robot we're working on becomes self-conscious? How were we to distinguish it from programmed behavior? Are these the things we should be looking for in deciding if we've truly created something and whether or not we qualify as creators?
It may be that we, as creators, might not believe in our creations. They might believe in us before we believe in them, or then the other way around.