(This is an edit and re-post of a previous entry.)
What if we are on our way to creating God?
Normally, I post my science fiction in my science fiction blog, but I'm not quite sure that this is science fiction, and I certainly don't want to portray it that way. Is it speculative fiction (the older term for science fiction)? I don't think it's that either, because I really don't see it as fiction.
Terrence McKenna has been on my mind and computer speakers a lot lately. I kept being drawn back to listening to him. He says a lot of things that I don't agree with, but I certainly do agree with one thing that stood out and has been occupying my thoughts: The world is moving towards increasing levels of complexity, right in the face of thermodynamics, which suggests that things should be breaking down rather than growing ever-more complicated and entangled. He's not just talking about society, either, he's speaking about the progression of existence on almost all levels.
Currently, our scientific method has helped us crack nut after nut of mystery in the reality of our universe. Granted, a lot of scientific research is tied up in politics and personal beliefs; we are not objective creatures and this is displayed by our observations. However, our simple method of experimentation has uncovered all sorts of wonderful and useful information about the mechanisms by which the levels of the universe that we can observe function.
We gone down to the subatomic level, and we're still theorizing and building models of what may underlie that portion of things. Much has been said about the funkyness of the quantum level of reality - so much so that I'm a little nervous about saying things myself, as I don't want to cultivate misunderstandings.
It seems though, that one some micro/macro level the universe responds to its observers. Magicians and mystics have known this for a long time, and every once in a while people take what a magician or mystic says the wrong way and creates a religion based off of it, which more often than not tends to exist for the purpose of social control and manipulation and self-aggrandizement than it does to help people research and engage the aspects of reality that seem to respond to us, to our intent, our will, our requests, our minds, our consciousnesses.
So somewhere down the line, there is going to be a lab that is training people to manipulate things on the subatomic level. It's inevitable, that now that we've observed that it's possible, we're going to try to do it. I'd actually be surprised if it hasn't been attempted yet, honestly. If it hasn't, it's because things like that might make the current scientific establishment very uncomfortable, and particle colliders are expensive. If it has, you can bet it's something being funded and kept hush-hush by General Buzzkill (we can always hope otherwise, but the military always seems to get to these things first.
At some point, we're going to have people trained to manipulate the finer and more casual levels of reality mentally, without the constraints of religion and with the nodding approval of the scientific method. I honestly can't even begin to imagine what the next step in our technologies, based off of this, will be. I don't know what it will mean in the short term.
In the long term, I think that I do, though. Breaking down the walls between ourselves and the universe on the most intimate level will change people. I think that it will provide levels of empathy that we can't even begin to understand now. Consider how people who claim to have, through mystical or chemical or spiritual experience felt oneness with the universe, behave. Now couple that with an intellectual certainty that they are correct, and the tools with which to prove it.
So what does this have to do with God(s)?
I'm a fan of Michael Moorcock (at least some of his work) and he has a fantastic series called "The Dancers at the End of Time" about people who live so very far in the future that they have the products of technology that are grander than even they understand, who are essentially gods, because of their ability to manipulate everything that is around them. I always thought that their behavior was kind of surprising, considering their level of power - they were very human, and their technology was very much based on a mechanistic understanding of the universe. Their egos were singular and individual - they didn't see themselves as part of anything greater.
I don't think that that's how we'll be when we develop that level of control over the cosmos, frankly. IF we get to that point as a species. I firmly believe that if we don't, another species will, or already has.
There are models that suggest that time is a convenient illusion that we participate in, that display the universe as a giant fractal crystal, a structure that takes into account the dimension of time as just part of the whole working model. I think that once people are able to manipulate things on such a fine level and experience such a powerful ego dissolution/expansion, that they will understand time that way on an intimate level and be able to manipulate it - or more properly, work with it as just another aspect of reality.
So, you have a deep understanding of all of the universe being One Thing, you have an initimate control of it on its most basic level, and time is no longer an barrier, just another current or terrain. Where does that leave you? What does that make you?
I think that makes you God. Or a God. Or someone who "makes God".
What would you do? If you could perceive and understand everything that ever was, is and will be? If you could, if you so desired, race across the time-line and share the individual perceptions of reality, the eyes through which the universe sees itself, the feelings, the emotions, the realities of reality?
Well, I like to think that I'd do what I could to help. But how? First off, I'd go back as far as possible and make sure that my existence and development was an inevitability. If uncertainty is indeed possible due to the flow of time, I wouldn't want something being changed and altering me or preventing my existence.
I'd tell people that I existed, or at least hint at it, but if I gave them outright, ironclad proof they wouldn't search the universe for me. They wouldn't tear the world apart, rocks to molecules to atoms to subatomic particles to quantum foam trying to find out how, if there is no God, the world actually works. If they didn't do that I would not have come into existence in the first place.
Sure, I'd answer prayers and requests, as long as they followed the rules, the first of which is ensure that I come to exist, the second of which is to allow there to be faith without proof because proof nullifies the need to search and examine. I'd also find a way to preserve the "quantum imprints" or "quantum signature" or "souls" of things. I could perhaps create corners or pockets or alternate realities to lodge them in, or ensure that they continue in a cycle of life by helping them to help to form new lives through reincarnation. I'm a being, and I want other beings to continue to exist, even the "bad" ones, because at the level that I'm at that "badness" is kind of relative. I might teach them some empathy, after all, I am still a being, and personal in a way.
Maybe I might interact differently with people based on their expectations of me. Maybe there are a lot of people at this level of existence that share the same space. Both explanations neatly fit polytheism, panentheism, angels, and other types of non-physical divine entities.
Heck, maybe this has already happened and we're a Universe that was created by a God that sprung up in another Universe to house the "quantum imprints" of their universe. There are a lot of possibilities.
I think that even if God(s) do(es) not currently exist, it will be nessecary for us to create it/tem, and if we don't get there, some sentient species in our vast universe will, or already has. If time is no barrier to the God(s) then it doesn't matter if they were created at the beginning or ending of the universe - they occupy all spots and regions, all times and spaces that they/it want(s) to manifest in.
They say "don't believe everything you think". The thing is, until we think of it, we can't try to achieve it and create it. So I'm thinking of it, and I'm thinking of what I'd like God to be like, because, even if it/they come into being millenia from now, they will know how I felt about the universe and that will influence their decisions on what to do with it.
So the gig is up - I know you're out there. I knew it before, but now I know that even if the world didn't start with you, it will end with you, and because you will exist you always will have.
Have fun with these thoughts.
Love and Light ('Cause I think that those are the most important things),
Laine
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