I am so angry! I hate to be angry! How could she say that? After all these years!

Stop it. She didn’t mean it, you know.

I hate it when she talks to me like that!

You started yelling first, you know.

What she said was stupid! Stupid! Stupidity makes me mad!

Listen you smarty, if you are so smart you should notice that it was her second day. She is always unbearable those days.

Interesting, if the milk was not white, what color would it be?

I’m telling you, if she starts that again, I don’t know, I will … I don’t know. Green.

Why green?

After the grass, of course.

Eh, boring!

OK, green in the summer but yellow in the winter.

Right, yellow as hay. That’s better.

Interesting, I have never seen anyone drinking milk through a straw.

If it was orange, that would be quite natural.

I know! I know! It should be all the colors all together; then people would call the rainbow the Milky Way!

Nice. And if you stir it well it would turn white!

It is white!

Ha-Ha-Ha!

Very funny!

OK, I’m going to eat something now.

Here is this young man Alan Turnet who is called the father and founder of the Church of God Who Does Nothing. Alan, tell us how all this started and what exactly is the Church Of God Who Does Nothing?

Jay, it all started as a joke, and honestly I still consider it to be a joke. One day we had a discussion about the new paradigm shift in understanding of intelligence and as it often happens among MIT students, we went quite far off topic.

What is that paradigm shift you mentioned?

Traditionally, intelligence was understood as intelligent behavior. That view on the subject suggests that we can judge an object’s intelligence based on the way it acts. The essence of that approach was formulated by Turing in his famous intelligence test. His idea was simple, if we cannot find the difference in behavior of a machine and a man we have to admit that the machine is intelligent.

That sounds quite logical to me. What was the problem with that approach?

The problem is that it does not help us understand the nature of intelligence. For many years researchers were focused on building intelligently behaving machines and did not make any progress in understanding what intelligence actually is. The new approach to that matter suggests that acting is not a necessity of intelligence.

But what would be an example of intelligence which does not reveal itself by way of some intelligent act?

Imagine a paralyzed person who cannot move, cannot speak, cannot act in any possible way. He is lying in his bed all the time. Every day a nurse comes to his room to take care of him: feed him and clean the room. Every day that paralyzed person is waiting for the nurse to come. He is lying in bed and listening until he hears her steps in the corridor. He thinks: “It’s her. She will come in in a moment. After that she will turn on the light, come to me and say, “Good afternoon my dear patient, how are you doing today?”. I think we have to admit that there is a lot of intelligence in making such a prediction.

Interesting, so what is intelligence?

Intelligence is the ability to analyze the world, understand it and make predictions about what is going to happen. That prediction might lead to actions, but it is not always the case.

OK. Now tell me how God comes to the picture?

What little we know about human intelligence should also be true of any other possible type of intelligence. If we assume that some kind of metaphysical worldwide intelligence exists then it should not necessarily produce any activity. And vise versa, lack of such an activity does not necessarily prove the lack of intelligence.

I see. In other words, God might exist even if he has never produced any divine intents in our world. So, the Church Of God Who Does Nothing is a group of people who believe in the existence of such an inacting God, right?

Correct.

Interesting. But, Alan, I do not understand this: usually when people believe in God they hope that their God will do something for them, ether in their life or after it. You should not have any hope on such matter. If your God never acts, then what do you get from your belief?

Oh, we get a lot from it. It is such a great feeling to believe that there is someone who actually understands what is going on.

Our memory is always used in the service of some interest; we remember things which we care for or which are associated with things we care for. When we wish to fix a new thing our conscious effort should not be so much to impress and retain it as to connect it with something already there. The connecting is thinking. I would say that the art of remembering is the art of thinking.

The human brain is a very powerful and adaptive system. A curious example of the brain’s ability to adapt is our bad visual memory. As you all know it is quite difficult to hold a mental picture in mind of what you have just seen. The reason for that is simple, it is not necessary for the brain to memorize the image while you can actually see that image with your eyes. In a sense, the brain uses sight as the external memory, so it adapted to not spend effort on memorizing what it is seeing.

Professor, may I ask a question?

Certainly.

Are you saying that the fact that we can see things all the time frees the brain from necessity to remember the scene around us?

Pretty much so.

Professor, what if someone has a magic vision, so he is able to see any information that he needs. Will it cause his brain to stop remembering things completely?

I don’t understand. How could that be possible?

Just as a thought experiment, professor. Any moment he needs any information he can just see it. What the weather is in Boson at this moment, what year his wife’s nephew was born, what the distance from the earth to the moon is, where the nearest coffee shop is located, what thirteen times seventeen is, what professor William James said on his lecture yesterday. Just – everything.

What an absurd idea. How about his interests?

Same thing. He can immediately see anything that he is interested in and anything in the world that is related to his interests.

OK, I don’t think it has any practical sense, but I hope this individual never loses his magic sight; otherwise, one day he might not remember who he actually is.