The Metaphysics of God and the Ontology of Human Information Sets.
The meaning of God is actually very simple.
As a natural philosopher I will explore with you the underlying themes across human history that give rise to spirituality and its bureaucratic shadow, religion.
Why do humans die and kill for God? What is God to begin with? These issues are highly contentious and our modern societies cannot talk about these topics without causing outbursts of global warfare. The problem today is the lack of a common underlying cohesive framework for discussion. There is no grand unified theory.
This is a metaphysical perspective on how and why spirituality and religion arose in the first place. In this respect I will focus on the process upon which the theory of “God” springs forth independently in the hearts and minds of each human irrespective of geography and timing in homo sapien history.
I am relieved to note that it is beyond the scope of this article to say which religion has the correct interpretation. We will merely look at the first principles that govern how humans think and how societies are structured.
Let’s begin shall we.
My main point to you today is that the concept of God is the human’s way of dealing with the concept of uncertainty. Keep in mind that modern economists and even quantum physicists are still grappling with the definition of ‘uncertainty’ and what ‘rationality’ means. There is no clear consensus. Let’s just say for now that uncertainty is information about the universe that is mathematically impossible for us humans to acquire (Godel Incompleteness Theorem). So how do humans deal with incomplete information?
Akin to the unsupervised analysis algorithms used in artificial intelligence, we humans are able to logically cluster observed natural phenomena and attribute characteristic sets to these clusters. In this way the minds of early humans developed useful heuristics that adapted to incomplete information sets in ways that these interpretations had real utility in dealing with uncertain events. For example when primal cave dwellers saw clouds and then subsequent rainfall, there simply were no tools that let these ancient people understand the phenomenon of precipitation and how water transitions states of matter. They would crudely assume that the clouds meant that a rain god, like Zeus or Tlaloc was stirring and soon to take a piss on something. The actual details of worship differ across tribes and is irrelevant to the point that ancient parents taught their kids that when the rain god was stirring and becoming cloudy that they ought to prepare for rain to come.
The lessons in the myths of the Gods gave early humans an evolutionary advantage. Their religions let them transmit information en mass by word of mouth with their fabled stories and characters. It distributed knowledge scalably outside of the immediate family unit to unify tribes and thus early society under common core values of what is considered good and to be truth. Tribes without common stories/mythologies were less able to pass knowledge intergenerationally in comparison to other human tribes who had more wisdom passed down from their ancestors. The latter conquered and killed off the former. This runs true today. That’s why the evolutionary equilibrium that defines today’s global political military affairs is defined by a highly religious dynamic.
I must stop now because using the evolutionary argument is intellectual laziness. I’ll get back on point: God represents our neural network’s way of trying to understand information that is not accessible and it is how humans make sense of uncertainty in nature.
Spirituality at it’s core is every human’s attempt to mentally represent the concept of objective reality in it’s total sum while at the same time recognizing that they might never know the full picture.
Even though the second law of thermodynamics states that entropy increases across time, our brain’s neural networks have the capability to find order and patterns from the emergent structures that invariably arise from chaos in it’s raw and natural form. In this regard our minds are continually building interpretations that require the least amount of contradictions to prove the same argument or set of hypothesis and minimize uncertainty in our knowledge sets as best as we mathematically can (Or potentially non computationally with quantum information processing via biological coherence in the micro tubules in our sub neuronal structures in our brains, see ORCH-OR). The brain is basically so awesome it can figure stuff out and make useful predictions on things that it’s never even seen before.
In the ancient world when we early primal philosophers first put our minds to find meaning in the world around us, we started small as any animal baby must.
We saw that a rock is a rock is a rock. That a rock will stay a rock and has predictable characteristics. Once there is no more uncertainty to us regarding how the rock moves and behaves, we then shifted our exploration and innate human intellectual curiosity onto more fascinating objects in our universe. First externally we examine objects like plants, animals, and other people. Then inward to begin mastery of one’s own mind via self analysis. Eventually the early human then began to try and understand the SUM of it all. What does EVERYTHING mean? This where the seed of the modern idea of God was planted in our ancestors.
When society evolves and develops new knowledge sets and technological tools, the old concept of God becomes obsolete and becomes modernized with the current observations of the day. When people understood how rain manifested through evaporation the theory of a Rain God that controls the weather became obsolete.
This reflects the underlying dynamics that every society has a unique thesis of what God is and a respective anti-thesis.
Over a couple thousand years ago paganism was the main religion in the Roman empire, this was replaced by its anti-thesis Christianity.
The ideas of Christ existed together with paganism but ultimately won out. Early Romans embraced Christianity as a better way to deal with the uncertainties regarding morality and how people should act with each other: values of compassion, thinking that every human was part of God’s kingdom, a potential brother or sister in Christ.
While Paganism and tribalism worked in small groups it could not scale with the growth of civilized society. So Christianity as a new representation of ‘God’, with its respective heuristics and lessons, gave roman society a more useful way to organize itself. So Paganism was replaced by Christianity and the same thing happened with Christ’s abrahamic twin sister, Islam, to the East.
In the modern age we see the personified mythologies of God being replaced with science and the study of physics of uncertainty. Young people no longer believe in the religions that their parents and ancestors have held true for centuries and millennium. The age of digital information has given us unprecedented knowledge sets. For the first time in history we are all sharing the same stories. Right now as I write to this you we are in the midst of a global spiritual revolution.
I want to end this letter with the note that our life experience is an uncertain and unpredictable one. That’s okay. But at one point or another we all have to draw a line in the sand somewhere and stand up for what we believe in. To me this is where the true pioneers of spirituality lie. People who see the good and bad in the world and still find a way to meaningfully live as a part of it.
I am reminded that when you understand yourself, when you understand the world around you, and when you figure out how to act in accordance with your nature, then you become an instrument of God.
The universe does not need to tell a stone to obey gravity.
A man does not need to be told to be good to be good.
Just as it is in the nature of masses to attract, it is the nature of our human consciousness to stare into the unknown universe and derive meaning, purpose, and actionable moral values from whatever observations we glean from it’s beauty.
