Epistle to the Curious

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Multiverse
The multiverse is a sci fi concept that has recently gotten mainstream attention (Sliders, Everything Everywhere All at Once, the Marvel Multiverse), so you probably responded to the ad knowing what it is.  "Multiverse" doesn't refer to poetry, it's short for "Multiple Universes."  Many scientists reject the concept because they don't believe there is experimental evidence for it and because it doesn't make testable predictions.    They are free to be wrong.  My thinking assumes the multiverse and goes way beyond it.  I'm not interested in pretending to be a scientist presenting a theory that compels belief.  The truth will out and that stuff will get done.  I'm speculating to produce a vision of reality that I hope plausibly fits with all evidence, including things people consider supernatural or that they consider impossible to explain.  I'm not doing physics, I'm doing metaphysics. 

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It's based on the idea that there are different worlds that are copies of this world, but where some event in the past went differently.  So there's a version of you there that's different.  Maybe that alternate you made better grades or had a different marriage outcome.  On a larger scale, there may be worlds where history went differently.  William the Conqueror lost the battle of Hastings, say.  How would that have affected everything else?  

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It started with Everett's theory in 1957 and was instantly picked up by comic books.  It was a great way to keep characters alive after they had died.  Viola, they live on in an alternate universe.  Real science fiction was already using the concept before Everett.  

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Intelligent
Consciousness is what happens when two complex systems interact to produce unpredictable results.  Think about chocolate.  Think about peanut butter.  Synthesis results: Reeses Peanut Butter Cups.  Thought is when those systems use certain techniques to predict the synthesis process.  Systems think when they take other systems into account based on limited information.  Thought uses abstract concepts and patterns to predict outcomes without fully manifesting them: it models on less than full scale or isolating incomplete subsystems.  Intelligence is just the capacity for effective thought.  Time seems to think.  Random things in the present take their far future consequences into account.

Intelligent Multiverse
So anyway, the multiverse concept became a thing.  Separately, there was a creative but unpopular scientist named Fred Hoyle who wrote a book called "the intelligent universe."  Long before that there was a philosopher named Spinoza who created the idea that the universe was God.  Actually, pantheism is older than that.  The world is an intelligent organism and we're inside it.  Nothing new there.  Nothing weird.  What's weird is the idea of saying the spooky intelligence is outside the universe.  That one's a stretch if "universe" means "everything".  That which is outside reality is unreality.  It's alternative facts.  

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Take that concept of the intelligent universe up a notch and make it the multiverse (all those alternate worlds): suppose that is itself the intelligent organism.  How could that be?  The universe is mostly isolated rocks and clouds of gas and dumbly burning fusion furnaces.  Obviously there are no neurons carrying signals between galaxies, so there must be some other way it works.  

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The signals are between alternate worlds right beside each other.  Possibilities interacting.  It's quantum!  It's magic !  And it's really smart because it's infinite.  Or rather, it's smart because it's alive and aware and it's alive and aware because it's growing and it's growing because it's infinite.  That's my theory and I can explain it please don't go away.  

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Church
So people tend to either believe in God and not care about explanations or they tend to believe in explanations and not care about God.  Explanations and God are conflicting concepts that can't go together.  "It's a mystery my child, just make out a blank check to my foundation. " 

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I tried it though.  I explained God.  Is my explanation compelling, like lab results?  No, you don't have to believe it to be rational.  But its irrational to think you have to be compelled to believe something before  you believe it.  That's called skepticism.  "No working theories, just proven facts."  Well, I have my doubts about that degree of skepticism.   In the real world we have to stumble around in the dark and operate off of working theories that we constantly revise.  Too much caution is dangerous: we have to act on some basis, not wait and see.  Sure, you do that in a controlled manner, and it's called an experiment.  But some things aren't subject to experimentation.  For that, I like my "theory".  I think it's beautiful and a perfectly reasonable possibility that fits the evidence, and that if more people believed it the world would be a better place.  It's also unfalsifiable, so it can't be science.  When did I say this is science?  There's a huge amount of ground that can be consistent with science but not compelling.  It's perfectly reasonable to believe that there are realities that will never be susceptible to the scientific method just as there are places no telescope will ever be able to see.  And to sketch in speculation, dotted lines through those unchartable territories.  

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Those people who believe in explanations but not God aren't interested so I should stop talking to them. This isn't for you.  Go away.  Members only.

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Most people who believe in God but not explanations already have a church, which says  "Don't try to take advantage of them you charlatan, they're already in use." 

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But not necessarily.  The "spiritual but not religious" are like the undecided voters.  Much in demand.  But tricky because they're still independent because they tend to be independent.  They resist church because they're plain common sense people and church doctrines are obviously hooey.  But they stubbornly believe in God and interact regularly with God.  They don't need church. Why would they band together?  Why would they believe my new brand of hooey?

 

Such people are what sociologists call "atomized."   We are each alone in modern mass society in ways people were never alone and isolated before.  This is a recent innovation in social engineering.   The consequence is that we each struggle in a vast challenging world.  We come to think we are free individuals and just losing at competition in a rat race but really any individual loses to the degree that individual is isolated and people win to the extent they are organized with others.  (Here's a secret: it's church.)

 

The best kind of organization takes advantage of what I call scale harmony.  A high degree of scale harmony exists in a nested hierarchy of organizational levels when the relative size ratios between all levels are similar.  Groupings with small numbers of elements are tightly knit, so loyalty of elements to the group is strong.  Groupings with larger numbers  of elements are loosely bound, so loyalty of elements to the group is weak.  When a nested hierarchy involves large discrepancies between bonding strengths at different levels the result is disharmony.  

 

If  you want your social grouping to be more powerful than a competitor, it behooves you to maximize your own scale harmony while disrupting theirs.   A major role of local religious congregations in modern society is to provide a scale of community between  the family and much larger levels such as state and market.  Larger scale religious denominations add additional levels, and succeed best when their organizations maintain consistent scales between levels.  

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Religions get away with ridiculousness because they play an essential role.  Scale harmony is not only effective, it's fulfilling.  We're hungry for connection and meaning because we're living in an engineered social environment designed to do just that to us.  So we will buy stuff to fill the hole inside.  

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I've tried to create an organizational design that conscientiously addresses the needs being filled by existing religions.   What if there was a church (technically, a sect) that didn't use the bible or any other ancient text with extra stuff trailering on?  A church that just believed in God.  What would it be like?  It would have to have answers for some questions because they would come up.  The problem is, those answers would be controversial.  There's a reason new religions tend to be small.  People would either have many individual answers or they would all agree.  If they agreed, those group answers would constitute doctrine.  To sell a doctrine to the independent minded it would have to be compelling and persuasive. 

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Evil.

OK let's say we make a "church" and we believe in God but don't ask much beyond that.  So, what does that mean?  What is this simple "God" notion we agree on?  God is all powerful and all knowing and loves humanity.

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So we immediately run into another question, "If God is all powerful and all knowing and loves humanity then why is life less than heavenly?"  This is called the problem of evil.  The usual explanation is free will.  People are naughty and if they would just behave everything would be perfect.  The one thing God can't do is force you to be good.  

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This works for a society, it really does.  It just feels like a cheat because it's a cheat.  It's a version of "God isn't really omnipotent."  So if your God isn't omnipotent then your God isn't God.  

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Another common solution is to conclude that God doesn't love humanity.  God is arbitrary and malicious.  Well, that's clearly as contradictory to the evidence as is the notion that God loves you.  Clearly we aren't in heaven or hell.  If God is real and all powerful God can't be either infinitely loving or infinitely malicious.  God is about something else entirely.  But my definition of God isn't that God is infinitely loving.  It's that God loves humanity.  There's a common misunderstanding that if God doesn't love every individual infinitely then God doesn't care at all.  That's some kind of fallacy because obviously there's room for more possibilities.   Maybe God has conflicting priorities.  People want different things and they interfere with each other.  One way for that to happen is free will, but as you'll see there are others.   For whatever reason, maybe God can't (not omnipotent?) give us heaven, just the most good for the most many.  Maybe God is a consequentialist.  Let's call this "theoconsequentialism."  We'll stick with it.  But free will means God isn't God.  So there's another reason God can't.  That whole oxymoron annoys doesn't it?  What could resist the will of an infinite power?  Itself?  An infinite challenge?  My answer to that happens to dovetail with my explanation for how God works.  That makes it compelling, to me.  

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Doctrine After All.

God's nature is to create (duh) so God is compelled to create all that can be, but that's never finished, and God has to go on creating, even bad things.  A multiverse of all kinds of stuff.  But God really does "love" humanity because we help make more stuff.  So God makes more of stuff like people, especially people who are particularly helpful.  So they're more probable.  So events conspire to create people like that.  

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People don't think these things through really, they just accept the contradictions.  Don't swallow them, they get inside and make you sick.  Also, how do we know about God?  We know about God because we see coincidences.  Sometimes these are called "synchronicity."  It's been said it's all about "meaning" but that's fuzzy thinking.  What is meaning?  It's effect on a mind.  If synchronicity happens because of its meaning it's happening for effect.  It's just backwards influence in time.  And if the future affects the past, then where does it end?  The whole future must affect every random event.  The whole universe, the whole time space continuum, has to be connected.  And what would the point be?  What's it trying to do?  We've already got that: make more.  It's the future trying to manipulate the past so more worlds get created.  Maybe its all those worlds existing in the future that directly causes themselves to be created.  Quantity has a quality all its own.  The road is wider in one place because more lanes are needed there because that direction goes to more other places.  It's really as simple as the multiverse trying to be as infinite as possible.  But that involves calculation and planning, and intelligence emerges from that.  Infinity has a will of its own.  Let's call it God.

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Church of the Intelligent Multiverse.
So the "Just God" church has to be more specific.  It's the Church of the Intelligent Multiverse.  The elegance is compelling.  What's more, it's good.  It would be good for humanity and it would be good for God.  

Theoconsequentialists are better than love addled altruists.  But there's a need for organization if they are to not be divided and conquered by atomizing society.  That means, organizational design considerations must be considered.   So, I designed an organization.  And wrote a doctrine for it.  

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Wouldn't it be cool if it were real?