Cloudscape - spirituality

Believe

noreply@ (Oneiromancer) — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 15:03:48 +0200

If you can't trust in God, who or what can be trusted? And if you can trust God you can trust everything, for God is everything. And if God has allowed everything to just be as it is, so should we. Faith is not about believing in God, but about believing in what God believes: that everything is in perfect harmony.

Sans ceiling hypothesis

noreply@ (Oneiromancer) — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 11:00:00 +0200

As any system inherently controls itself, any system can also inherently be controlled: we need only to know how it controls itself to control it. There must be some interaction between the system and part of the rest of the universe as the existence of the system would otherwise not be relevant. By controlling that part of the universe we could control that interaction, and in this way, interact with this system. If we find out how to do this, we can fully control the system, and any phenomenon that is part of it. With that knowledge, we can control anything. The only barrier to omnipotence, then, would be a barrier to omniscience.

It follows that anything in the universe can be controlled, merely because the universe itself can control itself, and we are part of that universe. If it is connected to our universe, it can be controlled - if it isn't connected to our universe, it doesn't really exist to us. There is therefore no limit to what we can achieve except for the limit to what the universe itself can achieve - that is, the limit to what exists in the universe. If the complexity of the universe is infinite, so the complexity of our knowledge of it will become, and therefore so will the complexity of our technology.

The idea that there is no limit to technology is known as the sans ceiling hypothesis.

For a discussion on whether or not the universe can be infinite in complexity, see the Infinity Principle:
http://cloudscape.blogspirit.com/archive/2008/04/28/the-infinity-principle.html

Related entries, on the eventual "theosis" (deification) of intelligent species such as ourselves:
http://cloudscape.blogspirit.com/archive/2008/04/28/god-theory-part-i-analytical.html
http://cloudscape.blogspirit.com/archive/2008/04/28/the-god-theory-part-ii-holistic.html

A Gift to God

noreply@ (Oneiromancer) — Sun, 25 May 2008 23:19:26 +0200

Your own happiness is a gift to the Universe, as the Universe is more aware of your feelings even than you are yourself. Yet even one’s unhappiness, too, is likewise of value to it. Creating happiness, either by oneself being happy or making others happy, is the best thing one can do to the Universe.

Wondrously Mundane

noreply@ (Oneiromancer) — Sun, 25 May 2008 18:15:07 +0200

God is present even in the most mundane things; only, there it is harder to see it. You pass God by every moment and might not see it.

Eyes of the Truth

noreply@ (Oneiromancer) — Tue, 20 May 2008 11:05:00 +0200

Everywhere you look, you look into the eyes of God. God sees you everywhere, but you can also see God everywhere.

Universal Acceptance

noreply@ (Oneiromancer) — Sun, 18 May 2008 08:43:40 +0200

If God doesn't do anything, that is because he is in acceptance of all things. If he were to remove that side of the universe we find unacceptable, it would be incomplete. But as all things have a value, he would let them all be.

The Great Society

noreply@ (Oneiromancer) — Sun, 18 May 2008 08:40:00 +0200

In essence, God is a society; even more, a unification of the infinite individuals of infinite societies. Combined, all people in the universe would be equivalent to God, for God is in essence their unification.

Profundity

noreply@ (Oneiromancer) — Sun, 18 May 2008 08:30:00 +0200

Most people are just dabbling in the waves of the infinite sea; only when we seek to immerse ourselves in its waters can we truly become part of it.

Here and Now

noreply@ (Oneiromancer) — Mon, 05 May 2008 16:55:00 +0200

For Unity, now is always and here is everywhere: past, present and future converge into the present, as the infinity of all time is contained within the infinitesimal of the present; for Unity, even the infinitely small is infinitely large.

The God Theory - Part II: Holistic

noreply@ (Oneiromancer) — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 23:55:00 +0200

With all the disgrace the church has brought to the very word "God," if you are an atheist you might find it almost offensive to hear -- so let's just start by discussing ETI.

Extra-terrestrial intelligence, that is. You've doubtlessly thought about it, and you've doubtlessly heard the argument that the universe being infinite, there should be some other life outside our own planet. For many years I've doubted this argument, at least for our own universe, thinking that while our universe is indeed inconceivably huge, the chance of all the stuff in a cell to arise by itself from molecules was inconceivably small.

Then I heard about Oparin. "There is no distinction between life and molecules" - and I read about the many theories put forward about how life began with molecules. I later read about the hundreds of exoplanets we've already found, and the possibility that we've already found terrestrial or even inhabitable ones (like Gliese 581c, for instance). It appears the most important factors in the Drake equation are already pretty high: the number of intelligent civilization equals the number of stars (a whopping 7 · 10^22 in the observable universe), times the number of planets per star (which also appears to be rather high, seeing how we can detect some very exceptional types with our still very primitive methods), times the fraction that's inhabitable (which *could* be rather high too, as we've already found some planets which come close), times the fraction that actually develops life times (which seems to happen more often than not when you think of the many ways it might slowly but surely develop, such as according to the Graham Cairns-Smith theory), times the fraction that develops intelligent life… and even if that wouldn't be enough, there are many, many more universes in the multiverse.

Now the big question is: why don't they show themselves? That's just the same big question as in religion: why doesn't *God* show itself? The former's the Fermi paradox: "Where is everybody?" If the bacteria beneath our microscopes could think, maybe they'd ask themselves the same question -- this idea, that we're being observed but the "aliens" don't care to show themselves, is known as the zoo hypothesis… I believe they/God wouldn't want to change anything because to do so they/it would be harming the diversity of the universe.

Essentially, these questions are one and the same - God is just a next stage, beyond the stage achieved by those extraterrestrial intelligences that have already reached us. We're talking about a process of evolution here that's never really begun - it's lasted forever, since infinitely long ago. It's obvious that an intelligence that has evolved throughout the universe for an infinitely long time will attain an infinitely advanced state - a state of omnipotence or omniscience, if you will. More crucially, because the universe is infinite and such intelligences are occurrences with a certain frequency, like all other occurrences in the universe, there must have been an infinite number of such intelligences which at some point met one another and subsequently became one. This is a point where we speak of theosis - deification.

Stating the idea in a different way, in an infinitely complex universe there could be an infinite number of connections made, including causal relationships. This would mean that everything is possible, that everything could be achieved if only one knows the right connection. Essentially, this means that science could achieve anything at all - in futurist jargon this idea is known as the sans ceiling hypothesis. If this hypothesis is correct and the universe is infinite, it is inevitable that there is a God.

I hope that clears my views on this subject, although I imagine it's dense. If you can't understand, though, don't judge my spirituality.

"As man is, God once was. As God is, man may become."
— Lorenzo Snow