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?
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?