Does omniscience cause infinite regress?

[Rye]

Just thinking about it, if an omniscient being knows everything, including everything aobut itself in perfect detail, does this mean it sees its own intellect in similar detail? If so, does that knowledgeable representation of its own intellect have another knowledgeable representation of its intellect inside it that is also omniscient, so you get all the information repeating infinitely?

[Starglider]

Consider a smart computer program with a copy of its own source. If this program happened to be smart enough to understand the code, it would be able to read its own source and in-memory data, thus knowing everything about itself. This program wouldn't need infinite memory or processing power to do that - it simply needs to know where the file is to look at.

The source code is an algorithm for generating the in-memory state of the program, not the state itself. For trivial systems (i.e. quine programs - which don't read their own source file, they actually embed their own compressed source such that they can create an exact copy of themselves using no external files) it is possible to have a lossless and complete compressed self-model, but clearly it can't ever be expanded into a complete model of memory state because the model exists within the memory state that you are trying to model. For nontrivial systems like a general intelligence, it is impossible to have a static, unitary self model that is both lossless and complete, but you can add active reflection mechanisms that create fully detailed self models as needed (i.e. an AGI examining its own memory state directly). You can never model everything at once for capacity reasons. Usually this doesn't matter much, as no normal tasks would require such a complete unitary model, but this does vastly complicate attempts to prove things about the behaviour of logical general intelligences under reflection (which is to say self-modifying general AIs).

But anyway, for practical purposes, it depends on whether you define 'omniscience' as 'able to know anything about the universe they want to know' or 'able to actually attend to every single thing in the universe simultaneously'. The former is fine, the later is an infinite regress if the intelligence is part of the universe.

[Darth Wong]

I don't know why people keep saying that the Christian God is omniscient. In the Bible, he had to send scouts to Sodom and Gomorrah to see if it was as bad as he'd heard. Seems like a huge waste of time if he's omniscient.

Similarly, the Jews were able to make a golden calf and start worshipping it during the time that God was talking to Moses on the mountain, and when God say it, he became furious and wanted to kill them all. That doesn't make any sense if he's omniscient either; he should have been completely aware of their actions the whole time. They weren't even very far away, for fuck's sake; they were just at the bottom of the damned mountain.

[mr friendly guy]

I don't know why people keep saying that the Christian God is omniscient.

Most because its been hammered into them so many times they don't think to question it. Its the same denial that the Christian God is omnipotent when he can be stymied by iron chariots and needs to rest on the seventh day. When confronted with this blatant contradiction, they start going along the apologist route, usually involving semantic whoring.