Fiction: A Setting Justifying the Epistemic Aggressiveness Of A Religion Stand-in
I’ve just been thinking (a dangerous pastime, I know) and remembering my religious days, and one of the things that made me so anxious back then, and made adopting atheism so gratifying, what the sheer drought of information. I had so many, so many questions, and there were no satisfying answers to be found.
How do souls work? When one dies, what does bodiless existence feel like? What happens in Resurrection Day, do cripples come back as such? Do transsexuals come in the body they identify with? Is it a matter of self-image?
How does God intervene in the gaps? What will Paradise be like? How will society be organized? Will there be further education? Will human nature be radically changed to accomodate eternity? What about Hell? How does it work? What’s the point of it?
And what does that verse mean? And what does that other? And what if the letter of the law, once centuries have passed and context has changed, goes against its spirit? What would God actually want me to do? Why am I supposed to guess? Why is it so important that my faith in Him be groundless and unsubstantiated? Why has He stopped giving orders directly, why has he relied on fallibe intermediaries and easily-tampered-with books?
So, abundant questions, very few, very vague answers. Important questions, too, an eternity of one’s afterlife depends on them! So, I was wondering: is it possible to come up with a fictional setting, resembling the Theist-Abrahamic vision of the world, but mundane (perhaps a game? a computer simulation? a F(?)AI run society?) in which this drought of information is actually justified?
As an example of what I’m going for, Warhammer 40K’s Imperium of Man gives us an example of a textbook fascist society whose every single trait is perfectly justified by the setting’s rules. (See the “actually has something consistent to say about utilitarianism” subsection).
In what kind of world would a Supreme Authority’s information-management policies resemble God’s, and make sense? I’m not saying “be good” or even “be fair”, just “make sense”. Even in a Kafka-ish, “nonsensical” way.
God is, himself, in a world filled with vague, ambiguous, sometimes contradictory hints towards a divine meta-reality. He’s confused, anxious, and doesn’t trust his own judgment. So he’s created the Abrahamic world in order to identify the people who somehow manage to arrive at the truth given a similar lack of information. One of our religions is correct—guess right and you go to Heaven to help God try to get to Double Heaven.
This reminds me of one of the stories in David Eagleman’s 2009 fiction anthology Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives, “Spirals”:
SMBC on the same theme: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=2616#comic
Er, 42?
EDIT: @Downvotes: Perhaps you’re under the impression that I’m reciting a meme, or making a lame joke. Or perhaps you’re simply not familiar with The Hitchiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. Let me explain: the situation described in the post above appears to be remarkably analogous to what happened in Hitchiker’s, when a civilization built a supercomputer that was orders of orders of magnitude smarter than them, to answer the Ultimate Question for them, and sarcastically answered “42”, then when pressed told them that it was exactly as stumped as they were.. I’ll never forget that scene, it made quite an impact on me, and, honestly, I thought merely mentioning the answer would be explanation enough. But I suppose you’ve seen enough bad and inappropriate uses of it as a joke that a pertinent use such as mine would come as a surprise.
Although if you want me to mindlessly repeat a stupid joke you can have one here, or here (let us cultivate our garden). Which actually aren’t so much stupid jokes as complete dismissals of the Question. Don’t bother looking for a pre-set meaning for your existence, and don’t bother making one as you go along either: just try to enjoy your short time here the best you can. If you feel angsty and worried, it just means you aren’t busy enough and have too much free time on your hands. Finding a Grand Cause to work for is nice and all, but surviving day-to-day is perfectly okay too.
Gary Drescher’s Good and Real quotes that bit of The Meaning of Life in the final chapter.
This is now the subject of an smbc comic.
That sounded like something right out of a Jorge Luis Borges novel...
But where does the recursion stop? Can we hypothesize that it’s Turtles All The Way Down?
“…that any member would be theologically greater than or equal to the whole set.”
Or rather, Further Up And Further In.
I’ll take an offtopic digression to talk about authors I love very much, which your comment reminded me of.
That FUAFI notion you just quoted, according to Wikipedia, is a Platonic approach to layered realities, in a very notoriously Christian work of fiction. Nietzsche wrote some very interesting things on the love story between Christianity and Platonism… Most amusingly, in his segment “‘Reason’ in Philosophy” he arguably comes off as an especially passionate and vitriolic proto-rationalist. It might be an amusing exercise to compare Nietzsche’s “Philosophizing with a Hammer” to Hunter S. Thompson brand of “gonzo journalism”. The comicbook expy of the latter, Spider Jerusalem, is also very interesting from a LW POV, partly because of the trademark Weridtopia he lives in, partly because of his passionate commitment to spreading the truth about a system he felt was decadent and corrupt, something he shares with both those two historical characters, and perhaps a few more people. With one noticeable difference: unlike them, we like to think we’re being objective, and that we’ve got the science to prove it.
The bottommost turtle is named Mack.
Okay, that was a bad joke.
Aww. Seriously?
It seems likely that God would create multiple realities, populated by different sorts of people and/or with different True Religions, to feed a diverse set of people into a shared heaven. So the recursive realities would have a pyramid or lattice structure. If God has limited knowledge of the realities he’s created, there could even be cycles.
We have cycled through the realms of mere brilliance at top speed and plunged head-first into the unfathomable depths of recursive genius. It’s a trap: like being in orbit, one is trapped in a jump from which one cannot land, on account of constantly missing the ground.
In plain English, my mind is blown. If we go into Godel Escher Bach territory I might have a lot of trouble following. Really, when I wrote my request, I was expecting something a lot more mundane. Kind of like the society in 1984. With my apologies to fellow Muslims everywhere, you’d be amazed how much the Qur’an sounds like a lot of propaganda posters glued together once you replace “Allah” with “Big Brother” and “Lord” with “Leader”. I suppose we could combine “hands-off totalitarian dictatorship” (paradoxical, I know) with “recursive realities”, couldn’t we?
I voted this down. While I think the question is somewhat interesting, I don’t think it’s germane to LessWrong’s discourse.
I also dislike the writing’s form. Too many questions at the beginning, too many parentheses, very unequal paragraph sizes, etc. It’s uncomfortable to read. If you can clean some of that up, then I think it might be suitable for an open thread.
You English-speakers and your rigid style guidelines… thanks for the advice, though.
Actually… Also this
Although I’m genuinely asking for help to develop this hypothetical fictional setting, and my main reason for doing this here is because I think LW attracts the kind of mind that would have the most ease in attacking such a question.
You’re welcome! Thanks for making the suggested changes.
Upon a read of your stylistically improved post, I think I better understand what you’re aiming for. I withdraw my objection and my downvote.
God’s utility function places free choice of belief at an insanely high value, such that any interference at all by god massively diminishes the utility of the world. As such, the religious evidence we do have, caused by past interference, is the minimum level necessary to make it possible that people can choose to believe in God. [This would imply that a large proportion of religious doctrine is supposition and extrapolation not the direct word of God, but we assume that already.]
Do you mean drought? Different things.
I meant drought. Thank you. Damn spellcheckers, they won’t save you from the rouge angles of satin.
Pretty much all the answer will be a variation of this:
Omnipotence, omniscience, and benevolence—Get rid of (at least) one of these in your idea of God.
I am no AI geek so please don’t downvote the crap out of me if what I say here is inaccurate. I’ve tried to work this out to the best of my knowledge, as someone who runs computer simulations routinely.
So, about those, let’s just change them to be actually workable. Suppose we’re taking the programmer controls a simulation analogy. If they are good enough at coding, they are “omnipotent” in a practical sense, in that they can manipulate reality at will.… but within limits. Of what they can fhink of, of what can be written in the programme....
If they program the entire simulation to be calculated from beginning to end given an original set of parameters, they are “outside time and space” in that they are outside the coordinates and variables internal to the simulation. They are thus “eternal” and “omnipresent”. They remain “omnipotent” if, once the simulation is done, they can jump at any point in time and arbitrarily change the variables with no regard for the simulation’s internal causality rules. The simulation just continues from there. They can even arbitrarily impose special rules for finite “times” and “spaces”.
The simulation also remains “causeless” from within its own rules: it just “started” at some point, and so did time, and there is not “before the beginning” that makes sense from within the simulation. There is also no way for a user to explain to the elements living in a simulation what their world is exactly like because of the complete lack of compatible reference: at best there will be approximate metaphors and double illusion of transparency.
As for Benevolence, suppose they optimize the simulation (including the punctual interventions and the “special rules” spacetime periods) according to an algorythm that is not understandable to the “sims”, because it’s based on variables that they themselves do not know, yet it is calculated for them to achieve the maximum value of whatever that “Good” thing is.
So, the programmer is “omnipotent”, “omniscient” and “benevolent”, just… not in the “ideal”, paradox-inducing version of those concepts. The user has their limits. But they’re still working at an entirely different level of existence than that which the “sims” inhabit.
Now, let’s take this hypothesis: how in the world does it make sense, in this situation, to take the YHWH approach of sending prophets to a tiny corner of the land and so on and so forth?
Does this count?
Well, not really, since it doesn’t make sense of the world Abrahamics live in. It’s practically Deist. But thanks for linking to it: I remember reading that as a child, long, long ago, and it really left a strong impression, back then.