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.
In the afterlife, you discover that your Creator is a species of small, dim-witted, obtuse creatures. They look vaguely human, but they are smaller and more brutish. They are singularly unintelligent. They knit their brows when they try to follow what you are saying. It will help if you speak slowly, and it sometimes helps to draw pictures. At some point their eyes will glaze over and they will nod as though they understand you, but they will have lost the thread of the conversation entirely.
A word of warning: when you wake up in the afterlife, you will be surrounded by these creatures. They will be pushing and shoving in around you, rubbernecking, howling to get a look at you, and they will all be asking you the same thing: Do you have answer? Do you have answer?
Don’t be frightened. These creatures are kind and innocuous.
You will probably ask them what they are talking about. They will knit their brows, plumbing your words like a mysterious proverb. Then they will timidly repeat: Do you have answer?
Where the heck am I? you may ask.
A scribe faithfully marks down your every word for future record. Mother and daughter creatures peer out at you hopefully from observation decks.
To understand where you are, it will help to have some background.
At some point in the development of their society, these creatures began to wonder: Why are we here? What is the purpose of our existence? These turned out to be very difficult questions to answer. So difficult, in fact, that rather than attacking the questions directly, they decided it might be easier to build supercomputing machines devoted to finding the answers. So they invested the labor of tens of generations to engineer these. We are their machines.
This seemed a clever strategy to the elders of their community. However, they overlooked a problem: to build a machine smarter than you, it has to be more complex than you—and the ability to understand the machine begins to slip away.
When you wear out and stop functioning, your software is re-uploaded into their laboratory so they can probe it. This is where you awaken. And as soon as you make your first sound they crowd around you to learn one thing: Do you have answer?
They don’t realize that when they dropped us into our terrarium, we didn’t waste a moment: we built societies, roads, novels, catapults, telescopes, rifles, and every variety of our own machines. They have a hard time detecting this progress of ours, much less understanding it, because they simply can’t follow the complexity. When you try to explain to them what has happened, they cannot keep up with your rapid and unfathomable speech, so they set about their dim-witted nodding. It makes them sad, and the most insightful among these creatures can sometimes be seen weeping in the corners, because they know their project has failed. They believe we have deduced the answer but are too advanced to communicate it at their level.
They don’t guess that we have no answers for them. They don’t guess that our main priority is to answer these questions for ourselves. They don’t guess that we are unable, and that we build machines of increasing sophistication to address our own mysteries. You try to explain this to the creatures, but it is fruitless: not only because they don’t understand you, but also because you realize how little you understand about our machines.
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.
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?
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?