God is real, and is a set of nonlinear PDE.
Please do not just jump to conclusions here about what I am trying to explain in this post. Yes, the opening sentence is ambiguous and incomplete, but it points to a radical alternative both to common extreme forms of religion and of popular beliefs about science which are equally bind and unscientific in themselves. This post will define that alternative, which i hereby name as "Hard Core Scientific Understanding of God (HCSUG). God is hugely important to all of us, and nontrivial and serious.
Here is a brief summary of what I really mean to say, also in need of further explanation but less cryptic:
1. My foundation here is the work of John Von Neumann, whose book The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior includes the concept of personal or subjective conditional probabilities. His concept was explained and applied in great work by Howard Raiffa. On that foundation, I firmly believe that no sane human is justified in attributing more than a 60% probability to any meaningful story about "God". (See my published papers linked to at werbos.com/religions.htm giving science-based definitions of two levels, two types of "sanity".) This post defines and partially explains HCSUG -- but I continue to work hard to be alert to anything with real evidence beyond that view.
2.HCSUG includes HCER, hard core einsteinian realism. (See werbos com/mind_brain_soul.htm section 2 for a few of the many sources on HCER.)
HCER postulates that anything we have any real contact with is just a pattern in space-time across a finite number of classical force fields, as described in the great classical book Classical Fields by Moshe Carmelli. That book was written for people who fully understand the mathematics of Einstein and of John Wheeler, but it is quite solid, and we have a duty to explain it more to the public in the future.
In a way, I am saying that God did not create the universe, that God IS the universe.
Many modern thinkers -- proGod magical thinking theologians who inherit the top down theologies disseminated by Sargon the great of Sumeria -- would regard this as an intolerable insult to God or to sacred human languages like Sanskrit or pali or Hebrew or English or ancient Chinese Many others would say this is a reactionary scientific viewpoint which implies some variant of hard core modern atheism. Both are incorrect, because they do not understand the full radical power of new mathematics and its solid emergent properties,
and its direct connections to our lives .
3. The key issue here for real humans trying to understand their relation to God is the question of whether there exists any kind of intelligent personality out there, encompassing the entire universe, whom we can relate to -- and if so how.
How could a set of nonlinear pde constitute a personality?
The claim here is that a "personality" is just another way of referring to the full state (current state and underlying dynamics ) of a system possessing General Intelligence, as defined for example in my patents (patents.justia.com/inventor/
The universe as a whole (under HCER) does not fall within THAT concept of intelligence or personality . But why? Only because it does not need to learn approximate predictions . It already KNOWS the state and dynamics of the entire universe! It maximizes its U , its Lagrangian function, based on complete perfect information.
Should we view a system as less of a real personality if it knows too much about its environment? In the limit, if we know more and more, and converge towards complete knowledge, does perfect knowledge make us less real and less personal? Is the universe itself less of a real personality than the lesser intelligent systems which inhabit it?
BUT for us, these are not the real issues. The real issue for each of us lesser intelligences is how to interfaces with the greatest and most powerful system, the universe itself. Since the universe does gave its own motivating force, it's own gargantuan or utility function, we will achieve OUR goals better if we understand more clearly how IT works, and what it is striving for,
and we remember that it manifests an optimization far more overwhelming and focused and complete than what even the highest and most intelligent finite minds within the universe is capable of.
4. HOW CAN WE DEVELOP AND STRENGTHEN THAT UNDERSTANDING?
Like life itself, this question opens up a huge ladder of possibilities. It calls for us to reconsider many things we may have known or read in the past.
One great source to remember is the great novel The Sirens of Titan by Vonnegut. What if our lives and our world and our history are being by a great plan .. but not a plan centered on what WE want? It would be stupid to fight such a reality but to be true to ourselves we all have a great balancing act to perform .
Each of us individual humans are like employees of the bottom level of the management structure of a vast tightly focused large corporation organized to maximize ITS bottom line over all space-time. The payment to each of us is personal not identical to the universal bottom line, This analogy goes much further, but this post is just an overview.
The collective intelligence of our solar system is just one of the intelligent systems with personality higher than we are as individuals, but small compared to the universe as a whole. Some people think of that person as Gaia, but I prefer the name Amaterasu for reasons beyond the scope of this post. The reinforcement signals or "payments " sent by the universe to or through Amaterasu are a more complete reflection of the bottom line of God than the local signals sent to us as individuals, but signals to us from Amaterasu have a huge effect in bringing us good luck or bad luck or other things which surprise us.
To better understand Amaterasu, it helps to have serious full clear understanding of the real concrete story of life on earth. For that I highly recommend the book by Ward and Kirscvink, discussed and cited only in part at biild-a-world.org, in our paper on risks to humanity in the climate block. For many millions of years the search for better animal DNA populations was the main obstacle faced by Anaterasu in fulfilling the directions received from the universe as a whole. There are many important lessons to us there.
And of course this is a huge universe. My recent book chapters and journal articles fill in many details of the collective challenges we face now.
Many of the lesser but powerful "gods" affecting humans do exist -- as archetypes , and as patterns within the neocortex of amaterasu. Carl jung's red book is another essential source, the first ofamy I would cite to map more closely what most of humanity now faces.. but the future goes much further into many threads of real possibilities, as new quantum physics reveals.
,,___________
Appendix: selected FAQS
1. What DOES God want, more concretely?
There are two main aspects to the answer:
A. What is the utility function U, called the Lagrangian measure, maximized by the universe?
The most advanced relevant science on earth is only just now becoming more specific in a testable way. And it considers a more general formulation in principle, minmax subject to equality constraints, as required even to replicate Maxwell's laws without ad hoc injections. For now, max seems to work, but minmax does not yet seem to change the important part, B.
TO BE MORE PRECISE: the universe is not exactly us to maximize the sum of L over all space-time. Even in the most general case included under the HCER theory, it pushes us towards a state of maximum entropy AS WORKED OUT in my con-mat paper I will now say more about.
B. For any U or L, where could the universe be trying to take us? Which possibility is the real one?
Many early courses on science teach the students that our universe MUST be moving us to a "death death", a state of maximum disorder where all life is extinguished, and all consciousness or brains connected to life are also impossible. This is a dangerous and obsolete viewpoint , just as obsolete as the ideas of flat earth and phlogiston which were also taught long after they were obsolete.
HCER itself does not say whether our universe is taking us to a heat death (“fire"), to a frozen fixed point outcome (" ice”), to Big Crunch (like a Big Bang but time reversed), or to a whole set of different threads of possibility in our quantum universe. That depends on the list of force fields, on the soecif Lagrangian function L and on boundary conditions . However, there is important circumstantial.evidence and prior work giving us clues.
For example, at arxiv.org/and/cond-mat/0411384
2. How does this affect us individual creatures?
Again this also calls for a full book of explanation, to balance and integrate the many cases, more complex than the broca regions of any single mammal brain.
Amaterasu is like a small recently hatched goldfish in a big aquarium, full of friendly kin, hostile predators and more, in an unknown mix Those of us with “second order sanity" (as defined in papers linked to at werbos.com/religions.htm), tuned in to Amaterasu enough to be ever more useful team members, we support “her" three supreme U imperatives: to survive, to grow and to develop situational awareness of the larger aquarium. But to “grow" means learning in a way which reduces the probability that the.himan species makes all of us extinct, in this difficult time of growth.
3. God as Optimization
HCUG, including HCER, says that the one God of our universe is governed by (a metrified form of,) a particular TYPE of nonlinear PDE: Lagrange-Euler equations . This has important implications even after we generalize the mathematics to consider monmax and equality constraints
Above all it implies that understanding the mathematics of optimization is essential to understanding God and understanding what he/she/it is struggling to advance . "What does that God guy really want, and how do we deal with that?"
Someight ask:" If God wants more progress here on earth and is omnipotent and omniscient why doesn't know how he could get more progress fast by his power of miracles,?, "
We usually live in a state of the universe S(t1) at time t2 such that there exists an allowed state S'(t2) with higher value U(S'(t2)) than the value of the actual future state S(t2) predicted by the all-powerful Lagrange-Euler equations. HCER predicts that the universe will not choose the "miracle" of any abrupt change , to S' at time t2, because the histories of S between time t1 and time t2 which lead there are more expensive (as measured by U) than the benefit of S'(t2) compared to S(t2). God chooses the simpler, less expensive smoother path to the long-term goal. When human thought is part of a new state, giving God new options, he pays attention, but dumb ideas impress him only in the same way they would impress a psychiatrist who understands the bigger picture.
As a practical matter, I listen more to my wife and to "Amaterasu" (,my name for the shared collective intelligence of our solar system) than I do to God, because of the sheer bandwidth of everyday communications. None of us is omniscient or omnipotent and we all need to learn the middle way between too much learned helplessness and not enough humility. But we all together benefit from remembering and better understanding the greater universe we are part of.
