Steel-man case for God and Idealism

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I had a few bits of info I was chewing on link up and the outcome was pretty interesting.

I'm formulating a bridge to the philosophy of idealism (the universe and everything in it is made of mind) that plays with naturalistic rather than supernatural motifs. This part isn't new but I do need to describe it first before I get too far.

I've considered 'What could create a God', although I'm already cringing a bit with saying that - not out of any particular disdain for the word 'God' but because, at least brought up in the west, that's almost inseparable from YHWH, and this 'God' that I'm describing is not the Abrahamic one (at least not the exoteric one), rather it's closer to fitting Atman and the emanationist monotheism of Neoplatonism. I'd say this is also the God of Spinoza.


Lets start with a blank canvas - an infinite empty space with no time bounding it. It's like opening an three-axis map on your computer that you haven't defined the contents of, like a space in Blender. It's not exactly a black space but at least slightly gray, ie. there's energy distributed throughout. Give random events... infinite time.

How many minds will be created in that process? It depends on what consciousness ends up being but if we assume that there's nothing extra special about neurons (it seems like Michael Levin has been saying gap junctions do just fine - neurons are faster but not absolutely required), I'm getting the impression that consciousness is not locked to the very specific recipe that makes up neurons, neurons are just well built for carrying it. If that's the case - I have no idea how many minds would be created in that other than infinitely many.

How many of those minds would be bounded vs. unbounded? We're used to having craniums so we have a fixed amount of real-estate upstairs that has to go through very specific pruning procedures to keep development on track, plus our brains need lots of fat and protein - not much of that in outer space so we're up against our intuitions there. If we're assuming substrate independence - if it's not a meat brain in our context, does it necessarily have to be bounded? Could that brain grow forever?

What that last pattern is reminiscent of is Ray Kurzweil talking about the Singularity, the idea that man-made AI's will have exponential intelligence growth once AI's can start building better AI's. Hugo de Garis coined the term 'artilect' to deal with machines more intelligent than humans, and I've often seen this term thrown around for things absolutely dwarfing human intelligence.

So if I can proceed from there - what's there to stop an infinite cosmos from coughing up other forms of unbounded mind which would constitute themselves as natural artilects?


That's somewhat old ground.


Newer ground - the question of WTH is idealism. It's a description of an idea that the 'universe is made of mind', and at least one Youtube naturalist who was taking Bernardo Kastrup to task for his take on analytic idealism was claiming that idealism is incoherent because the claim that the 'universe is mind' is incoherent and useless (I've seen this argument against panpsychism as well). I'm getting this idea now to wrap idealism in the ideas I mentioned above.

So discussion of simulation theory (popularized by Nick Bostrom) has been somewhat the rage, and to be fair to that idea - we live in a world with hard lines and rules, to where if it's not base reality it sucks enough in terms of unforgiving limits that we wouldn't know the difference.

What's the difference between us being in a simulation run by some unknown computer, like Nick Bostrom would consider or, what I found wild that Neil DeGrasse Tyson gave either 50 or 70% likelihood to (Isaac Asimov panel from several years back) vs. a simulation running on an artilect?

Isn't the idea in Hinduism that the world we're in is the dream of Atman? That sounds like an artilect simulation claim. There's also the lady in Australia who had an absolutely terrible childhood, something like 2500 dissociated alters (selves), and she said something, metaphysically speaking, absolutely chilling - that she never created any of them without a purpose (I've heard that somewhere before).

To that end this approach to idealism would still be local rather than absolute, because it makes no claim about absolute existence literally everywhere but makes a claim that our universe could be inside the mind of an organism, to which we have no idea whether that organism has an outside, what it's made of, or where that outside would be. If we were something like a simulation on a hard drive we would not be able to understand the hardware from inside the hardware because it has a transformed relationship with the hardware and similarly we'd have a transformed relationship with the mind of God.


None of this is 'proof', but what I'd call it is a good steel-man case for idealism.

I hate to be the one who always says the same thing but there is probably no God and never was.

Religion is probably a natural phenomena but I think it divides and controls people instead of uniting and freeing people.

If there really was some kind of higher power then I think we would know it already or we would have detected it with our powerful scientific instruments but humans have already been around for a very long time on this planet and yet we have found absolutely no evidence (scientific or nonscientific) for the existence of any God.

To me this means there is no God and probably never was. People are deluding themselves when thinking there is a God because there is really none.

What many people also fail to realize is that their life and all their problems are not suddenly going to get better when believing in something which is very very probably nonexistent.

Only humans can make this world a better place.

Also I believe that only humans can solve this world's toughest problems and only humans can make this planet a happier, better and more prosperous place to live in.

Right now all I see in this world is pain, people struggling to survive and there is also a lot of sorrow, grief and sadness. Many people are also sad and are struggling to cope with the tough realities of this world but I think the bad news is that religion and God are never going to solve our problems and make us happier, more prosperous people because evidence has shown again and again that religion is only making things worse for people in the long run and that's because people are forced to believe in something that is nonexistent.

We definitely live in a Darwinian hellscape. If it were me, and I had any choice, I probably wouldn't create a cosmos that evolves the way this one does, particularly via zero-sum competition over genes.

I should add for other readers - I wouldn't recommend praying to the thing I'm describing. You could, but you'd be trying to turn it into YHWH, and even if it did exist you still wouldn't know the difference because - my guess - it wouldn't make mistakes, it would just have a very foreign set of priorities to our own (whether or not love-bombs you when you die) which means by praying you'd be asking it to alter already 'perfect' plans.

My bigger concern I guess, if reductive materialism is proven false, that people need to not all of a sudden believe that it means The Secret is true. Same world we've always known - different substrate.

Professor Lawrence Krauss is a mathematical physicist. Krauss is an expert on black holes, quantum gravity, general relativity, dark matter, dark energy, quantum mechanics, astrophysics, cosmology and quantum field theory.

Kraus believes that the universe could 'create' itself from nothing through physical means.

Kraus also said once that if the stars suddenly realigned at night and said the message "I am here" then it's something very unusual that is worth exploring but he also said that until something like that happens then there is simply no reason to believe in God or the supernatural.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTdUODzAW6o 

So two things I'd want to clarify:

1) This isn't a 'proof of God' thread, it's a steel-man case for idealism. It's not proof of idealism either, it's simply making what I think is the strongest case for it.

2) The case I'm making would technically be a naturalist one if it were proven correct it would subsume well into naturalism in the sense that it would be a thing proven 'real' that could be falsified and if proven real it would be measurable rather than simply being an 'I like that' claim (Donald Hoffman and Chetan Prakash are working on the falsification). You may have seen in my original post that I suggested that I didn't like the word 'God' because it has Abrahamic baggage and expectations, automatically loading in proof of Christianity or proof of divine Bible is exactly the kind of baggage I was talking about - my suggestion makes no claims to holy books (other than perhaps, with Hinduism or Neoplatonism the question of whether or not I'm getting the overtures right of what their 'mind at large' is).


I'm glad you think highly of Lawrence Krauss. I also think highly of Donald Hoffman and Chetan Prakash, Karl Friston, Michael Levin, Chris Fields, and a lot of people who are interested in getting closer to the bottom of living systems by looking at them both through the lens of Markov chains, kernels, blankets, etc. (mathematical energy systems) as well as Michael Levin's work on consciousness which is been seminal in the context that he's been both figuring out how cell differentiation in embryos works (bioelectric template) and he's said something even bolder on plenty of occasions - that gap junctions in cells join the metatata of cells, ie. effectively shares their consciousness - meaning he's effectively made the claim that he's solved the combination problem (which he did on Sean Carroll's podcast a year or so ago).

I'm not saying I 100% believe idealism (I think neutral monism is possible, dual-action monism, ontic structural realism, etc.), whatever I am I'm probably not a reductive materialist but I would consider myself a physicalist. I'm not saying you'd need to think idealism's real, this is simply 'strongest case' and I think my biggest disagreement would be that I don't think idealism is beyond the pale or 'crank' at this point. Too much is changing in the field of consciousness research and it seems to be reopening possibilities rather than leading us further in toward reductive materialism.