What does God* want**?

Any normal sane person seeing this subject line will immediately start to worry. Even I remember a woman who burned herself in front of a local pregnancy advice clinic because she thought God wanted her to sacrifice to that cause. (See below for discussion of the meaning of * and **). 

There are many people who have deep and irrational attachments to beliefs which are internally inconsistent who ask this question. People like myself usually would not talk about this question in public, any more than they would talk about their sex lives in public. Yet I agree with Freud that some of the things which are the hardest to talk about really need to be discussed, by some people in a calm and rational way. Failure to discuss and examine what is most important to us makes it possible for incoherent and costly mistakes to stay alive and even grow in the dark.

Whenever we try to face up to a question like this (similar to “what is consciousness?”), it is important to begin by analyzing the question itself before suggesting an answer. This is the first time I have ever written down this question or discussed it in public, but in fact my wife and I often raise the question in the privacy of our house.

Why haven’t I raised it before? Mainly because I avoid using the word “God,” knowing that people have so many wild knee jerk reactions when that word is used. Even the word “consciousness” is hard to work with in normal conversations, because people are so attached to different definitions and theories, and they tend to hear themselves and their stereotypes and their personal imagination instead of what I say when I talk about it. With the word “God,” that difficulty gets multiplied a thousand fold. Long, long ago, I heard how ancient Jewish mystics refused to utter the name of God in public, and I instantly resonated with many reasons.

So what are we really asking when we ask ourselves “what does God want?”, and does the question really make sense in the end?

In our natural consciousness, before we start to become verbal or formal or philosophical or scientific about it, we have a feeling that there is a greater mind around us or even in us somehow, and that our actions in this world are not like pushing meaningless mindless toys around. We sense that we are interacting with some kind of intelligence – and any real intelligence normally has thoughts and values of its own, which we need to account for. When we ask ourselves “What does God want?”, we are initially just trying to be realistic about what to expect from our great and mysterious environment. (Many times in control engineering, I have looked at little flow charts showing “system” and “Plant” (environment), and smiled to myself about just how huge “plant” really is for us. Like Yggdrasil? )

But then, when we follow nature and try to make sense of the word “God” when we ask the question… we next ask ourselves what the word really means to us. Here, it is not a matter of semantics, but a matter of asking ourselves just what larger “hidden” intelligence do we think is really out there (and here).

My new paper coming out in Cosmology and History addresses that question to some degree, building on the general framework of my new paper in Activitas Nervosa Superior (available online for the past month, coming out in hard copy soon). The Activitas paper begins by remembering that WE DON’T KNOW exactly what is out there, but I personally feel there is a 70% probability that the noosphere species theory (presented in detail in the new paper) is correct. (It is a coherent picture, but leaves certain questions open. By analogy, it would be a coherent picture to say that our cosmos is a Minkowski space governed by Lagrange-Euler equations, even if one leaves open the question of which Lagrangian function it implements.) In that picture, I translate the word “God” into a fuzzy combination of three different interacting intelligences:

(1)     OUR noosphere, the emerging intelligence of our solar system, of which we are part.

(2)     “Pater galacticus”, more mature intelligence from the immediate ancestor(s?) of our noosphere

(3)     The Lagrange-Euler equations of our cosmos as a whole, whether it be a curved Minkowski space or something like Fock space.

It is amusing to ask what relation this trinity has to the older one of Son, Father and Holy Ghost, but with 2/3 probability I think that this is the real one, and that the other is just a fun house mirror reflection of the real one. (Didn’t Jesus talk about seeing through a foggy mirror, and say that he had to speak in parables because people didn’t have the prerequisites yet?) Another reflection of this same reality is the old idea of (1) as dearth mother (pachamamma) and (2) as sky father (pachatatta), and the old dualism of people like Kurds from before power-seeking demagogues twisted it into Zoroastrianism. Likewise, the words “want” and “telos” and “purpose” are reflections of U, of cardinal utility function as defined by Von Neumann.

[A reader rightly told me this last sentence was a little too glib. OK, when we ask what God wants, intuitively, we are usually asking about the values, lambda sub i, which that intelligent system would place on variables like our behavior or other things we decide on.]

In a way, these three form a hierarchy. (3) is the most absolute; (2) emerges from it, and has all the approximations and imperfections one expects from emergent phenomena; and (1) emerges from (2). Our main spiritual challenge as individuals is to establish a better “alchemical marriage”, a better relation between our brains and the local noosphere. But we and our noosphere must also relate to (2), and then ultimately to reality itself (3). I am reminded at times of my first government job at DOE, where pleasing the boss raised questions about our relation to HIS boss and the boss about that. Talk about game theory!!

Still, the noosphere species theory gives a sense of what our local noosphere wants, not so different from what Teilhard de Chardin described -- to survive, to grow, to become stronger. A natural intelligent system. As individuals, we can choose to align with it or fight it or simply establish a mutual working relation. But fighting with the solar system is maybe even sillier and more dangerous than mindlessly throwing rocks at one’s boss in the government just because one is offended that another person exists in the world. And as one thinks about such questions, it may help to reflect on who is asking the question, and on how much one would be throwing rocks at oneself.

The same considerations apply as one moves to to (2) or (3), although (3) gets to the age old question of whether the cosmos is maximizing or minimizing its Lagrangian function or just finding a saddle point solution. In all three cases, it would be a mistake to underestimate it. It helps to remember that the cosmos described by Lagrange-Euler equations represents exact, perfect optimization, which “feels” more like perfect intelligence than no intelligence, depending on whether is aligned with what it wants.

But what does the universe want? When we write down equations for the possible Lagrange function of the universe (something I really have done), it seems weird to imagine “Is THIS what the universe wants?”

I often think back to the novel Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut. I never read that novel in detail, but I will always remember the final scene, where someone discovers the secret plan which has driven the flow of human history through the ages. It turns out to have been an effort just to send a simple message like “Hi!” from galaxy A to galaxy B. FIGHTING that plan would have been a path to self-destruction, but we as humans have other values and feelings and purpose and would not naturally dedicate ALL of our energies to something so remote from us. It is important to work for a good relation to the boss, but that doesn’t require suicide. (It does require some appreciation of what the specific boss wants and needs and so on.) Still, if the ultimate boss cares about a Lagrange function, it would be nice to have some idea of what it is and what it really implies in the complex emergent reality of our cosmos.

Obviously, your local parish priest or imam is not God. If you get that mixed up, you are in incredibly deep trouble. If he is aligned with God, he wouldn’t mind you trying to be also. If he isn’t, god help you… but actually you and he are both in trouble. This year, I am seriously happy that the current pope is more aligned than most, but I still go to Quaker Meetings which urge us to align directly as much as we can. But I also understand the need for a system of schools and teachers in all kinds of subjects, open to all kinds of students – a complex subject in itself.

OK: That’s a fist pass into what the noosphere species theory would imply. The new paper discusses why I give it a 2/3 probability of being true, and each of you gets to assign YOUR probability. That’s fine. But what if it’s not true? What is another possibility? Integrity demands that I pay some respect to other possibilities, even though I shouldn’t burden you with TOO much detail here and now.

Just for me, the next most credible theory is the “cosmic mind idealism” (CMI) idea, fuzzy as it is. (And then the “subset” idea, beyond the scope of this post.)

One version of CMI is an idea from kabbalah, the idea that we are all fragments or sparks of what was one great unified Mind/God, and that our spiritual mission is to reintegrate that Mind of which we are part. (I recommend Lindsay’s novel Voyage to Arcturus, which tries to give a more coherent version of that idea, related to Scottish Rite Freemasonry, for which George Washington was one of the teachers.)

When I first read this, I thought: “It starts out making sense, being coherent. If there was one great intelligent system, a mind, surrounded by nothing at all by itself, that would be like sensory deprivation and lack of a purpose beyond itself. Under sensory deprivation, it WOULD fragment into a kind of schizophrenia. But why bring it back to the same state to start the cycle all over again?” Where is the PURPOSE?

If one considers various CMI theories carefully (e.g. Ramanuja’s famous dual aspect monism in India).. the practical implication ends up being pretty much the same as with the noosphere species theory, with maybe more allowance for more degrees of freedom with (3). So maybe the next step is to get a little deeper into what that theory implies, as we try to address the big question here.

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Two next issues: what of “gods” and how does a better relation work?

(1)     gods

Down through the millennia, people have often worshipped a wide variety of bosses and “gods” plural, or at least tried to establish a relation with them. I have heard people talk about the ancient Hellenes, negotiating and juggling between gods in a way which helped them also establish a thriving market economy.

The key point here is: our noosphere, as a great mind, is not just a blob of amorphous goo. Any real intelligent system has a kind of great internal complexity. It has several different types of cells. It has assemblages of cells which work together but address different tasks, and its structure adapts as well as it learns with time, towards greater complexity.  Sophisticated people, like Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, generally assume that the “gods” of the ancient Greeks or Hindus are actually just “archetypes,” specific current subsystems of the noosphere, with fuzzy and ever-changing boundaries. That begs the question of what the mathematics of archetypes is, but this post is not the right place to get into that. For now… it is enough to remember that all minds are like halls of mirrors, with reflections of models of models of models. (Karl Pribram talked about matching of matching of matching. In my chapters in the Handbook of Intelligent, I talked about fast feedforward networks trained to approximate slower recurrent networks, combine din a symbiotic kind of way for optimal overall system performance.) In India, one might talk about avatars of avatars, people channeling other people channeling others. This reminds me of some of my own experiences, but not for here and now. If you are interested in such experiences, Jane Robert’s little trilogy Oversoul Seven is well worth reading.

And so, “archetypes” .from a kind of level (0) in the system of (1) to (3) above. We are all of us directly part of our noosphere (1), but we live in a complex, changing society, and must learn to interact constructively with other people and other “souls,” including archetypes.

It is important to remember that certain archetypes, like “Jehovah” and “Allah” (as they live in the minds and souls of many people), are imperfect avatars or reflections of the real things they try to represent or reflect or channel, like our noosphere or Pater Galacticus. THE SYMBOL IS NOT THE REALITY. The refection is not what it reflects. There is a relation between the reflection and the reality, and the refection itself can have great power simply because of the people who out their energy into it. And so, as Jung warns us, it is a very tricky and serious business how we relate to the archetypes, even though they are not the ultimate reality.

It is so hard not to be more concrete here… until I look at the clock right now. But I am reminded today both of the Merlin archetype, and of advice to look up the BBC series on discussions with Jung by van der Post (godfather of one of the British royals). 

(2)     Better relations

Though I only give 20-30% probability to the CMI theory, I highly recommend the novel Vita Nostra which brings out certain core ideas of CMI (ala Plato or Gurdjieff) related to life in the noosphere as well.

How can one better channel a higher level of intelligence? Many people would rebel and become reactive about this question, but when I am facing a really difficult challenge to my intelligence (e.g. “what IS the Lagrangian of our universe?”) I try to channel as high a level of intelligence as possible. Usually in the early morning, before I even get out of bed. (Yes, it is good to focus emotional energy onto QUESTIONS the night before, but for answers and far-seeing clarity… the early time is best.) But at any time…

There is a kind of Zen exercise where one first exercises one’s mind, focusing ahead here, and then there… seeing further and further ahead. And then the teacher asks “so now focus on who is doing the looking.” Who is looking? He is not asking you to turn your head and look around. Yet as you look forward you can “walk backwards”, moving deeper back to see a wider range forward.. moving one’s vantage point back deeper but not LOOKING back, just moving back. Sensing more who you are as you do that…

And ever more levels of complex dialogue, an ocean not a firehose.

Vita Nostra also uses the metaphor of tacking with a sailboat. That certain fits the situation above, especially with (3). Much as I disagreed with Ronald Reagan on many things, I really liked the way he would try to keep asking "What is the moral highground here?" (i.e. path to Pareto optimum consistent with the complex realities of the "game".) 

All for now. Best of luck…