{"id":309,"date":"2004-12-28T10:18:18","date_gmt":"2004-12-28T18:18:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/wordpress\/?p=309"},"modified":"2004-12-28T10:18:18","modified_gmt":"2004-12-28T18:18:18","slug":"god-without-god","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2004\/12\/28\/god-without-god\/","title":{"rendered":"God Without God"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today another quote from The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul<\/i><\/a>, upon which I'm laboring these days. This quote is (C) Copyright Rudy Rucker, 2004.<\/p>\n

Let's start with a looooooooong picture of a one-dimensional cellular automaton in action. Think of space as the horizontal direction, and time as the direction running down the page.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I want to mention a touchy subject: God. Let me immediately say that I’m not out to advocate religion. If you want to keep things more neutral, think of “God” as a convenient and colorful synonym for “the cosmos”. Or think of the “God” word as convenient shorthand for “the unknown.”<\/p>\n

My reason for mentioning God is that there’s a particular connection between God and free will that intrigues me: When in dire straits, people sometimes ask God to help them change their behavior. And, often enough to matter, this seems to help them get better. What might this mean?<\/p>\n

I would say that becoming desperate enough to turn to God involves recognizing a current inability to alter one’s mental patterns, and a desire to attempt some higher-level change. The plea expresses a longing to jump out of a loop; a desire to move from one attractor to the next; a wish to experience a chaotic bifurcation.<\/p>\n

If the plea works, does that mean that the Great Author, the Ground of All Being, the Omnipresent-Omnipotent-Omniscient One has reached down to change the parameters of some suffering character’s mental computations? And, more to the point, does this destroy determinism?<\/p>\n

Well, we can<\/i> keep determinism if we allow for a less supernatural view of reform-by-supplication. We could simply say that asking God for help has an organic effect upon a person’s brain. In other words, expressing a desire to have a spiritual life might activate, let us say, certain brain centers which release endorphins that in turn affect the threshold levels of one’s neurons. And these changes nudge the brain activities to a new strange attractor. A deterministic chaotic bifurcation occurs.<\/p>\n

Do I really think it works like that? Well, to be truthful, I’ve always felt comfortable about reaching out for contact with the divine. The world is big and strange, and we have only the barest inkling about what lies beneath the surface.<\/p>\n

But even in this less materialistic view, a person can still be deterministic. Asking God for help in achieving a chaotic bifurcation is really no different from asking a doctor for penicillin. You can’t will an infection away, and you can’t will yourself to abandon some deeply ingrained bad habit. But at slightly higher level, you may<\/i> be able to muster the will to get help. And this higher level is, after all, simply part of your brain’s ongoing deterministic computation.<\/p>\n

For that matter, God, too, could be deterministic. In the context of the theory I suggested in an earlier entry<\/a>, God could be a deterministic non-reversible class four paratime metaphysical cellular automaton.<\/p>\n

But that sounds so dull. Better to say the cosmos is dancing with us all the time. And that God is in the blank spaces between our thoughts — like in the white regions of the picture of the deterministic “China CA” shown above.<\/p>\n

Regarding the image, it follows a one-dimensional CA through six hundred generations. The world of this CA is 128 cells wrapped into a circle, meaning that the right and left edges of each strip match. If we were to paste everything together, this picture would be a cylinder like a baton. Notice the characteristic feature of class four rules: they send information back and forth between different regions by means of the moving patterns that we call gliders. I discovered this rule after about fifteen minutes of a Blind Watchmaker-style directed search. I call it China because it looks a little like a silk fabric design. Image made with CAPOW<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today another quote from The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, upon which I'm laboring these days. This quote is (C) Copyright Rudy Rucker, 2004. Let's start with a looooooooong picture of a one-dimensional cellular automaton in action. Think of space as the horizontal direction, and time as the direction running down the page. I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=309"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}