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Theoconsequentialism

The Source and Aim of Existence and How to Deal With It

by R.D. South

(Abridged)
Contents

New Preface

Introduction

Chapter One: Why Ask Why?

(a)The Word Why

(b)Causality

(c)Synchronicity

(d)Retro-causality

(e)Quantum Physics

(f)Uncertainty is Where Retro-causality Gets In

(g)Solar Eclipse

(h)Fine Tuning

(i)Uncertainty

(j)Feedback

(k)Unity

Chapter Two: The Source of Existence

(a) Overview

(b) Zero, One, or Infinity?

(c) Productive Algorithms

(d) Comprehensive Continua

(e) Living in the Multiverse

(f) Preferred Complexity

(g) Rejuxtaposition

(h) The Limits of Metaphysics

(i) Biased Differentiation

(j) Continuum Branching Styles

(k) Dimension Proliferation

(l) The Non-locality of Retrocausality

(m) Counterintuitive Tunneling

(n)The Cutting Edge of Time

(o) Summary

(p) Conclusion

Chapter Three: The Aims of Existence

(a) Algorithm Drift

(b) Yes, I Said God

(c) Widgits In Outer Space

(d) Cheapskate

(e) Personality

(f) Determinism

(g)How We Got Here

(h)Where We're Going

(i)Rejuxtaposability

(j)Permutability

(k)Complexity

(l)Order

(m)Life

(n)Sentience

(o)Civilization

(p)Technology

(q)So What

Chapter Four: How to Deal With It

(a) Devotee or Negotiator

(b) Retro-causal "Karma"

(c) The Magic of World Qualifying

(d) The Relative Sizes of Souls

(e) Happiness As a Means

(f) Cognitive Dissonance

(g) The Problem of Evil

(h) Importance

(i) Cone Effects

(j) Consequentialism

(k) Theo Consequentialism

(l) The Devil

(m) No Waste

(n) Para-Stoicism

(o) Fanaticism

(p) Divination

(q) Prayer

(r) Worship

Appendix: More on Synchronicity
New Preface

This is an abridged version of a book I wrote in the spring of 2014 and "published" on an obscure website I set up. The original version had the following additional material:

1. Footnotes. There were end notes to each chapter adding up to about 50 percent more material. As I wrote my imagination was nagged by various distracting worries. What if the audience doesn't know about certain background material, or has trouble grasping an idea I'm familiar with? What if the audience is ideologically committed to some BS I will need to refute? What about this interesting digression? What about the implications of this idea, thoughts that are cool but not relevant to my main argument? I knew that inserting these would break the flow of my main exposition, but felt at the time that they needed to be included. So I made footnotes. Since I knew formatting wouldn't necessarily come out predictably, I put them as endnotes to each chapter rather than trying to keep them on the same page.

2. Three additional chapters and several "appendices." At the time I originally wrote this, I imagined it as the foundation of a new religion, for so it stands relative to the existing religions that dominate the world, and I include dogmatic atheism in that number. I was haunted by the failings of existing religions and how they were squandered opportunities. The founders could have done so much more, I felt, to make something transcendent, but instead they just inserted their own personalities in. So I explicitly put in all kinds of material that had nothing to do with my ideas about God, but set it aside for separate chapters. It was just a miscellaneous grab bag of things I've learned about life and misconceptions from religions that I felt a need to counter. I specifically devoted a lot of material to explaining what was wrong with various religions and why each and every individual false idea is wrong. I had trolls in my head and I felt a need to engage with them in advance. I see now that my ideas will not follow the template of a new religion, they will just be ideas. There's no reason to make all the mistakes Moses and Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha made because there's truly a new phase in the world and these ideas will be used by people because they are good ideas, not because they get brainwashed by the temple hierarchy. Things don't work that way anymore. Those religions were infused with cultural personality alright, but it wasn't an infection it was the native flesh. They were cultural expressions, they were personalities. The theology wasn't first, and the cultural stuff wasn't tacked on as a rider. The originators weren't just people with ideas, they were leaders first and then they threw in ideas. I've just got ideas, even if mine are better.

3. Videos. There were links to various videos, mostly music videos. Those are gone. You don't need music to understand. This is a book, not a video presentation. All that can be separate.

I've kept the illustrations, but instead of a figure list in an appendix, I've simply made the picture itself a link to the Wikimedia page that shows why the artwork is in the public domain and I get to use it. That may need to change in any print version.
Introduction

You might consider this book a recreational exercise in creative reasoning.

It makes three assumptions:

1. The causal physical world is real.

2. Synchronicity is real, not always apophenia.

3. Synchronicity is what originally made people believe in gods and God.

It's hard to reconcile all the characteristics attributed to this hypothetical "God" (omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent creator) without relying on some sort of unreason. However, I believe I've found a way to make it all work. The window is narrow: does that imply the idea is strained or that it is perfect? If everything lines up exactly like the sights of a rifle, does that mean anything? For example: in order for God to be both benevolent and all powerful there is no other explanation than that God is a consequentialist fixing an initially imperfect creation through the process of time. Free will, the usual excuse, opens several new cans of worms rather than resolving anything. Since only a consequentialistic repair-god makes sense, is that exceptional evidence, or just an exceptionally stringent requirement? For another example, if both causality and synchronicity are real, then counter temporal causality is the only possibility left unless you want to use the wild card of faith in something supernatural.

Here I provide an ideology that constitutes not only a new concept of God and an invigorating reimagining of the meaning of life, but a plausible metaphysics that could quite reasonably and productively link up with real science without contradiction, though naturally without actual testability. If you need a sensible "form follows function" belief system, better designed than the old irrational ones, and quite a few of you probably do, here is my offering. It's bound to offend both atheists and religionists, ie everybody, but here it is anyway.
Chapter One: Why Ask Why?

(a) The Word Why

The word "Why" has two meanings.

First, it can ask about causation.

The question might be, "Why is it raining?"

The answer might be, "Because a front is moving through."

The question might be, "Why is your car red?"

The answer might be, "Because the paint on it absorbs all other visible wavelengths."

Alternatively, it can ask about purpose.

The question might be, "Why did you come into the store?"

The answer might be, "Because I'm looking for a plunger."

The question might be, "Why is your car red?"

The answer might be, "Because I thought it might impress dates."

We ask and answer "why" questions of a petty nature all the time, but sometimes people go on to ask "why" more generally. Why is everything? Why is it as it is? Why me? The nature of "why," in itself, draws us to these questions because causes and purposes require causes and purposes of their own, potentially receding into infinity.

I ask, "Why do you need a plunger?" You answer, "Because my toilet is broken." I ask, "Why do you care?" You answer, "Because I need a toilet." I ask, "Why do you need a toilet? " You answer, "Because I eat food and it passes through." I ask, "Why do you eat food?" You answer, "To live." I ask, "Why live?" The bouncing ball finally comes to rest: what is the meaning of life? These lines of questioning always go to places that are deeply philosophical, or theological, and we each come to them by our own paths.

(b) Causality

Time is just change, and change is just difference. Drop a pencil or something. The object changed location from your hand to the floor, going through a series of small changes on the way.

It's location at moment A  was different from its location at moment B.

Time is just change, and change is just difference.

When you hold an object out in front of you and release it, the object falls to the ground. When a billiard ball strikes another, the second ball is set in motion. Cause and effect are real. A table sits there and continues to be a table until caused otherwise.

It never turns into a giraffe, or goes invisible for no reason.

Reality is solid. It follows patterns called laws of physics. There are mathematical equations for exactly how fast each billiard ball will be going before and after a collision, and in which direction, and other equations for exactly how fast a dropped object will fall on a given planet at a given time of day.

So, given this, you could see the world as a big wind up clock. There are mechanistic laws of physics, and they describe how material behaves. Everything that ever happens was determined at the moment of creation, when the prime mover set everything in motion.

When the cue struck the cue ball, the final locations of every ball in the break became written in stone.

This world view tells us that given enough information, and enough time, it would be possible to calculate even mysterious things like the emergence of life. Certain chemical atoms interacted mechanically and the first organic sludge organized itself into a primitive living cell. From there, evolution took over. The first cell made copies of itself, but each copy was slightly different. Cells that were better in some way made more copies. Maybe they replicated faster. Maybe they were better at feeding off of organic molecules, so they grew faster. Maybe they were less fragile, so they didn't fall apart when the lightning struck again or the tide went out. So the cells got better and better. The ones that organized into colonies did really well. Soon organizing into colonies was popular and there were lots of life forms doing that.

Colonies based on certain kinds of organization did better than others, so they made more copies of themselves, or they survived longer. Thus they became the predominant types of multi-cellular life form. Eventually, these life forms got so smart they developed brains.

The thoughts in those brains, though, were based on what the life forms sensed around them, which the mechanistic world view said was just physical molecules bouncing around like billiard balls.

What each brain did with this sensory input ran on the same principles as did the objects outside the brain. The brains were mechanistic, because they were made of molecules bouncing around following the tracks set for them by the rules of physics, so even thoughts are just a result of cause and effect.

According to these ideas, there's only one world, with three dimensions. Look in the corner of any room, where the ceiling meets two walls, and you see them outlined there for you.

There are up, down, left, right, forward, and backward. The matter in those dimensions experiences time, which is to say that things move, and change. As we established above, change is just difference. A second before, compared to a second after, is no different from an inch to the left, compared to an inch to the right. Time is just another dimension, with the exception that objects are arranged in patterns, and we are travelling through this dimension so that we see these differences in sequence.

So, they said, what happens, and what is going to happen, all depend on the initial conditions. At some point, if you rewind the movie, the world started. Whatever set up that initial arrangement dictated everything that has ever happened or ever will happen. Never mind that the initial arranger would need an arranger of its own, which would need a further arranger. But prime movers are like the turtles once postulated to be holding up the flat earth.

You need an infinite pile of them. Or you could just postulate that the world has always been, and always will be, using and reusing the same molecules, sometimes being brought, by the (themselves unjustified) laws of classical physics, into colliding to form stars and planets and people--except that theory has been disproven.

That theory is neat and tidy, with a tick tock like a clock; safe to believe. Applying it well can keep you from being struck by cars. And it's mostly a grossly incorrect approximation, a quick and dirty rule of thumb.

But I believed in it, so I decided God does not exist, and that my only concerns should be the desires I randomly have. I should use the situation I am randomly in to please those desires. But then I began to see a phenomenon most commonly called "synchronicity."

(c) Synchronicity

Synchronicity is a word coined by the famous psychologist Carl Jung. It describes those times when unrelated events seem to collude. But I guess I need to offer some examples so you will understand what I'm talking about if you haven't heard of it.

\--Jung's example was that he had a patient on the couch talking about a dream involving a certain kind of rare insect, when an insect of that kind happened to land on the window.

\--Abraham Lincoln bought a barrel from a friend who needed the money. Years later he was trying to decide what profession to choose, and on opening the barrel found it to be full of law books.

\--Mark Twain was born within a couple of weeks of the arrival of Halley's comet in 1835. In his autobiography, he predicted he would die when it came again, and when it came in 1909 he died a day later.

I offer these three examples not as evidence or proof, just as famous examples so you will understand what I'm talking about. But I fear they will give the wrong impression, so here's a more typical example that happened to me a several months ago.

I had gotten my own website and was writing material for it, polishing up an essay in which I puzzled over what word to use. Just as I wrote the word "Utopia" a knock came on the door.

I went and looked, and UPS had delivered a book from Amazon. It was a (not particularly great) novel called "The Atopia Chronicles."

I didn't even recall ordering this novel, presumably a week or two earlier, but there it was at just that moment.

The same phenomenon has been called either serendipity, if it unexpectedly brings good things together, or Murphy's law when it seems to ensure undesirable outcomes. Something seems to be messing with probability sometimes. Single examples, or small sets of them like I have cited above, would not be persuasive. What is persuasive is that this kind of stuff happens in everyday life, constantly.

They say we look for meanings, and we do, but maybe meanings also look for us. Synchronicity is usually explained away as Apophenia. They say we pick out meanings because our minds are made to do so, the way we see pictures in clouds. But that only applies if you're attributing meaning to it. I'm often just noting it, like hearing a person talking and just perceiving noise. Also, nature is full of things that parallel each other, shadowing and masking.  Apophenia is real, but so is synchronicity. And in the end, according to my theory, we see meaning in everything, as we are designed to do, because there really is meaning wherever it can be.

The only reason for the meaningless at all is to form a background for the meaningful to stand out. Ultimately, you learn that there is no distinct synchronicity, or everything is synchronicity. It's so common, so ubiquitous, that a better way to describe it is as every event in the world being contrived, just so: like a Deus ex machina in fiction, or like a subtle orderliness in the arrangement of the world. It all seems at once totally random and totally orderly. Order seems to come from chaos. Saying perception of it is illusion or defect is like a blind person saying light doesn't exist and that those who see it are afflicted with a defective inability to not perceive visual stimuli.

The best thing about Jung's thinking on synchronicity was the fact that he coined a word that became popular. His explanations were clumsy, shallow and inadequate. But there was a graphic containing something like this figure.

Jung had  Wolfgang Pauli as his science advisor. Maybe he suggested that graphic, but what it implies is in fact retro-causality. Pauli believed in scientific rigor and also synchronicity. He just couldn't figure out how they could co-exist.

The inadequacy of Jung's speculation), calling synchronicity a-causal was so profound it launched me on a quest to improve on it, on the bet that the phenomenon it refers to is real. The word is now the most common one for exactly the phenomenon I want to talk about, so I continue to use it.

When I first saw synchronicity, my world view was shaken, and I felt compelled to figure out why. I went looking for clues. Jung had a theory about events being connected by meaning, but he didn't get very far with it and now even his best work in other areas is considered suspect. So Jung couldn't help me. I read some books about parapsychology, which suggested some kind of connection to quantum physics. But I had a friend who was majoring in physics, and he told me the concepts in those books were laughable and vague. So the parapsychologists couldn't help me. I read books simply listing mysterious events of all kinds, and realized that all those events, if not explained otherwise, could still boil down to just synchronicity. Synchronicity could be acting on random events in the brain, causing hallucinations that come out looking like telepathy or precognition, or ghosts.

But the underlying phenomenon was synchronicity, not "spirits".

I had a hunch that inquiring about spirits without inquiring why spirits was likely the wrong track. I felt that Jung and the parapsychologists and the mystics were all dealing with surface phenomena without looking very deeply into what might be causing them. Still, those were my only clues: meaning and "quantum mechanics."

Meaning, I realized, boils down to effect on a mind. When I say "red" a certain image of redness pops into your imagination. The meaning is that effect. So when Jung uses the word "meaning" it is a red herring, diverting the inquiry into questions about psychology and thence anthropology. If you are going to say synchronicity is meaningful, it's more accurate to say that synchronicity occurs for its effect than it is to say it occurs because of its meaning. Meaning is simply a subset of effect.

(d) Retro-causality

Effect is just what happens as a result of a cause. As most commonly understood, this means the effect happens afterward in time: cause, then effect.

But, in the case of synchronicity, the cause is what would usually be called the effect, which is to just say that really the cause of the unexpected coordination ("meaning") happens after the effect (the coincidence being noticed). Synchronicity could be explained by something as simple as the future affecting the past. Perhaps causality also works backwards in time.

Now, the original idea of cause and effect runs into a problem. Somewhere there has to be an original cause. "Z was caused by Y which was caused by X," and so forth implies that there must be an "A." The Deists called this the prime mover. Supposedly, they said, a powerful and brilliant being created the universe, like winding a giant clock, then let it go to watch it run. The prime mover, in that description, is why things happen.

If forward causality has to resort to postulating a prime mover, doesn't backward causality suffer the same problem? Given that A is caused by being necessary for B, which is necessary for C, then can we not project that somewhere there has to be a Z that everything is leading up to? This is closely related to something called teleology, the study of purposes. Presumably, there's an ultimate goal somewhere, and that is why things happen. If there is retro-causality, that ultimate goal actually is making itself happen, not just sitting there as a theoretical ideal or target. We would know it is where things are going because we would see it making things go there. Retro-causality is teleology with muscles.

But let's backtrack. How could effects influence causes?

Regular physics already describes everything that is happening, right? The universe is a big clock, with all objects following predictable courses that can be calculated if you know the material details and "the laws of physics." So where is there room for the future to also get in there and have an influence? Well, only in this "quantum" stuff that makes the electronic age possible.

(e) Quantum Physics

Apparently, regular physics very expressly does not predict everything we see. Atoms do random stuff that is completely impossible to predict. The whole world is made out of zillions of tiny little dice. They're different kinds of dice, giving different ranges of numbers, so you have various ranges of probabilities. And there are so many dice being rolled that the result, what we see on large scales, is always pretty much just the average.

This theory is not really open to dispute. If anything could be said to be scientifically proven, it is Quantum Mechanics. It has not been controversial since the 1920s. Not only has it been proven by innumerable experiments, but it has a huge number of applied technologies based on it. The world is not a 19th century style clock.

Quantum physics is real. The details of how and why it works, on the other hand, are still very much in dispute. There are many "models" and "interpretations." And, of course, it's so strange that anybody that wants to talk about strange things is attracted to using quantum mechanics to justify them. But it's not fair to look askance at any use of it, because it is in fact so fundamental that if you want to explain anything at all, there it is.

(f) Uncertainty is Where Retro-causality Gets In

Suppose I dream about a horrible plane accident in another country,

then tune into the news the next evening and learn about a horrible plane accident just like my dream.

For want of a better word I would call that synchronicity. A mystic would have some jargon laced explanation about how my psionic sensitivity to the astral plane caught the vibe of the chi. A Christian would probably say the devil did it, or an angel did it, but either way my soul would definitely be in danger due to insufficient submission to his spiritual authority. An atheist would say it was a coincidence, and that the spookiness of my observation of it was a result of the cherry picking of one coincidence from among many that are inevitable considering the number of events in life. "It's like an optical illusion is all, you silly boy." It's just the wind.

But I would believe in these two facts:

1. Something unusual happened; these two events somehow affected each other.

2. The normal rules of physics are still in effect, causality has not been violated.

Given those two seemingly irreconcilable ideas, I would want to know how one chain of causal events affected the other. One way, logically possible but impractical, would be if someone were so utterly brilliant as to be able to manage the butterfly effect to perfection.

"I'm just that good"

If somebody could treat the entire world like a big billiard table, and took just the right actions, say fifty years ago, he could set events in motion so that fifty years later there was a plane crash and also fifty years later the psychological events of my life somehow made me dream about the plane crash in advance. Nobody is that smart, but maybe invisible space aliens can do it with quantum computers.

A simpler way for this to work would be if the events leading to my dream, say all the little mental influences in my life that added up to that particular somnolent hallucination, were ultimately dependent on the butterfly effect hinging from one tiny event that was influenced backward in time from my perception of the coincidence.

If there is "inexorable mechanistic cause and effect", where is there room for counter-temporal causation?

Well, first off,

THERE IS NO INEXORABLE MECHANISTIC) CAUSE AND EFFECT!

There is quantum indeterminacy, many tiny probabilities that add up to the illusion of inexorable mechanistic cause and effect the way screen pixels or dots of paint

add up to the illusion of a picture

or the way the behavior of molecules adds up to the illusion of pressure even though it's really just individual particles moving in all directions.

If we have chains of cause and effect, and if we have coincidences, then how could they go together? Perhaps somebody is setting up really good billiard shots. If so, somebody has a really good computer, or else is really smart. In fact, their computer or brain would have to be larger than the world, and even then it would only work if there weren't quantum uncertainty to throw off the whole delicate sequence of events.

For the calculations to work, quantum uncertainty must be cooperative, but if you can have quantum uncertainty being cooperative, what do you need with the calculator?

All we need to provide in order for retro-causality to set up coincidences is for quantum uncertainty to be sensitive to the future. The outcomes of uncertainty (be they singular and resolved by chance or multiple and resolved by random factors) don't have to be entirely determined by retro-causality, just influenced in some way.

The idea is that the coincidence itself sends information backwards in time down both chains of cause and effect, initiating them in distant quantum probabilities. So, we arrive at the unsupported notion that quantum indeterminacy is somehow, at least sometimes, sensitive to the future. It has merely been established that if synchronicity is a real phenomenon of biased probabilities, rather than a mere psychological error, then some form of retro-causality seems to be indicated.
(g) Solar Eclipse

While confirmation bias and apophenia really exist, the perception of synchronicity, much less the occurrence of it, is not always a result of one of those. To me, it has been shown that these coincidences are so frequent and improbable that believing in some special phenomenon is the best working hypothesis, the most likely truth.

I could list personal experiences of coincidences occurring in long chains, one after another for days on end. These would just be personal anecdotes, but I was impressed, and continue to be impressed. The assertion has been made in the form of  Littlewood's Law that there are so many events that anyone is statistically likely to encounter something miraculous at least once a month. What about twenty miracles in a row, every hour for days on end? Still, all I have is my personal anecdotes, and the personal anecdotes of other true believers like me, so I need something on a different scale, something verifiable.

Here's something that might convince you of the reality of synchronicity. The apparent size of the Earth's moon, as seen from Earth in the current era, is almost exactly the same apparent size as the Earth's sun, as seen from Earth in the current era.

"The Sun's distance from the Earth is about 400 times the Moon's distance, and the Sun's diameter is about 400 times the Moon's diameter."

\--Wikipedia

Thus the Sun and the Moon seem to be exactly the same size in the sky. This is staggeringly improbable, given that we have only one moon and one sun. The problem of assessing the likelihood of this coincidence resembles issues of the Cosmological Principle: what we see should be typical of what there is; we can't be at the center of the universe. So there's a lot of synchronicity, apparently. The exact solar eclipse could not be something arranged by hoax, dishonest reporting, or erroneous perception. The skeptical explanation, of course, is that this coincidence was cherry picked from among innumerable astronomical facts of a completely mundane nature. But how many moons and suns does the Earth have? Sure, it could be something else, but if it doesn't make you think something may be going on you have to be pretty closed minded.

Horatio: O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!

Hamlet: And therefore as a stranger give it welcome. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

(h) Fine Tuning

"To me, an unexplained coincidence can be a telltale sign of a gap in our scientific understanding."

\--Max Tegmark, Our Mathematical Universe

Similar to the question of how many moons are in the sample that makes the unlikely exactitude of solar eclipses impressive is another purportedly synchronicity like phenomenon called the fine tuning of the universe. According to  Martin Rees, and many others, the universe has many fundamental constants that could theoretically take any numerical value, but we find them in our universe to be exactly right for the formation of atoms, stars, and life. It's as though something had "fine tuned" everything.

There are three ways to look at this:

1. We evolved to match our universe. If it had been another way, we would have evolved to mach that.

2. There are lots of universes, most of them useless, but only this one has people looking at it, so it looks highly improbable only because of the anthropic principle.

3. The great unicorn did it--which is a turtle.

Actually, there's a fourth (my idea):

4. Some kinds of parameters are more likely because they produce more universes, and what is good for universes is also good for the emergence of intelligent life.

This fourth idea is really just #3 with more detail--more cogent detail.

The fine tuning of the universe is usually greeted with a shrugged, "we haven't explained that yet." It's often considered a phenomenon not in need of explanation because we adapted to the universe we are in, not the universe to us. The design of the universe made our adaptation to it easier than it might have done.

I think what's more important, and harder to point to, is that while other values might have given universes that had matter, or something taking its place, and life, or something like it, the way our universe did it took the path of least resistance, the most obvious way to make observers.

One objection to the notion that fine tuning seems to have made the universe particularly friendly to life is a type of selection bias called the anthropic principle. In a way, the anthropic principle is based on the multiple worlds interpretation (MWI), or on  inflation theory which also predicts multiple worlds. The idea is that there are plenty of worlds without our exact tuning, but there are no observers in them. Our world seems fine tuned because we're here to see it. It's fine tuned only in inhabited universes. Fine tuning is just another form of statistical illusion like confirmation bias.

Alternatively, or as an objection to the objection, you might suggest that life of different kinds could emerge in other kinds of universes. We could have been Boltzman Brains, intelligence arising, fully formed with false memories, by incredible chance in mid vacuum

Boltzman brains are based on the concept of tunneling, which is, briefly, the idea that even really improbable things happen once in a while, but once they do it's really unlikely for them to un-happen, so improbable events mount up to probable results. If you win the big lottery you get rich, there's no un-winning it. So over time there will be many people running around who are rich because they were lottery winners--even though winning the lottery is highly unlikely. There's a tiny chance an electron will find itself on the opposite side of a barrier, over time electrons seem to mount up on the other side. The sun burns because molecules are tunneling together past dense barriers inside. The existence of tunneling is not controversial, it's fact.

Boltzman brains could tunnel into existence in a universe with constants not allowing stars to form, but that would have been a harder way to make intelligences than just making stars.

Belief in the superiority of our kind of universe doesn't have to come from lack of imagination, it could come from an intuitive feel for how likely things are. I'm suggesting the probability of our kind of universe was set by some criterion for good universes, something as basic to reality as the value of Pi. It need not be a love for life, per se. It could be more of a preference for some quality life has. In other words, I think the anthropic principle is not the main factor in the universe being as it is. I think most real worlds are like this one because such worlds are easier for the universe to make. But the anthropic principle brings up another interesting idea unrelated to fine tuning.

Littlewood suggests that reported cases of synchronicity may be a byproduct of the statistics of large numbers. What he means is large finite numbers. But the multiple worlds suggested by MWI and Inflation, those infinite worlds used to justify the anthropic principle, suggest a new question. Regarding synchronicity, what about the statistics of not just large but fully infinite numbers? If the anthropic principle makes fine tuning, then that opens the door for other phenomena in our universe to be products of cosmic statistics. Perhaps synchronicity, if it's real, is another product of such a thing.

In conclusion, you can deny the facts. You can insist that a certain phenomenon that exists but hasn't been conclusively explained yet, such as fine tuning, is nevertheless not a phenomenon in need of explanation. You can also insist that fine tuning and the unlikely low entropy of our universe aren't the result of a real statistic warping phenomenon because they're just a result of the statistics of vast multiple universes, via the anthropic principle. A proponent of Boltzman brains would even say the statistics of multiple universes works the other way: that infinite universes imply that we probably aren't in a world that's what we seem to see, rather we are statistically likely to be experiencing some sort of illusion. But I say that the statistics of infinite multiple universes out there is a real statistic warping phenomenon right here.

(i) Uncertainty

Maybe you are convinced that synchronicity is real. Even if you haven't seen synchronicity, and aren't convinced by second hand accounts of it, or by the total solar eclipse, or by the fine tuning of the universe, you could leave now, or we could go on and speculate: what if synchronicity "is real."

How does one begin to think about it?

When I started seeing synchronicity it shook me up, and I undertook a desperate quest to stabilize my world view and reconcile belief with experience. My world view, described in the section above on causality, needed a new theory, and needed it quick. The first phenomenon I had to consider was the butterfly effect.

The butterfly effect is a really deep part of chaos theory, with lots of math. My understanding of it is much simpler than all that. Events depend on each other so much that a butterfly flapping its wings could start a chain of events leading to a hurricane, if everything was perfectly in alignment and all the breaks went right. It's like playing pool. If you were just the most incredibly brilliant pool player, you could strike the cue ball so perfectly that every ball would go into the holes in the correct order on the break.

A more difficult task is to treat the wide world like a pool table and all the objects and fluid in it like pool balls. We all attempt to do this all the time, otherwise we couldn't do things like drive to work or persuade waiters to tell cooks to make our food orders, which the waiters will then bring back to us. But these chains of cause and effect are very short, and our control of them is imperfect and imprecise. It's more like surfing an existing wave of stuff that's self organized, rather than rigging everything precisely to do things it wasn't designed for.

When I started thinking about this, I saw the world as still solid and working like a machine, but began to believe that something was using the butterfly effect masterfully to do tricks. Here was my reasoning. There are chains of cause and effect. They may come together at some point, and the butterfly effect could be calculated by some genius to make these events coincide, but not a human one, or even a superhuman alien one. It must be some mechanism, the plumbing of the universe, hydraulics of time automatically pushing events together remotely.

I tried to think about how that worked. There was only one place for it to work and that was quantum indeterminacy.

It's impossible, even in theory, to know everything about extremely small things. This is  Schrodinger's equation, the equation describing the behavior of particles:

It contains a certain special number: the square root of negative one ("i"). The values of the other variables come from various inputs determined from known measurements. But the square root of negative one means the equation can have multiple solutions.

So we can't know some information with certainty, even in principle. If we test one thing, it makes something else uncertain. This is aptly enough called the Uncertainty Principle, and the property it postulates can also be called "indeterminacy."

There are two main interpretations of this conundrum.  The Copenhagen Interpretation says that the multiple possibilities are all true, until an "observer" forces the world to decide, at which point one possibility will be chosen entirely by chance, and that one will be true.

 The Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI) says that all the possibilities are always true, meaning that there are multiple worlds. We just don't know which one we are in until we check. In the MWI there are no truly chance occurrences, there is just the hidden information of our own specific location, which seems random to us.

At any rate, Schrodinger's equation works, and much of our modern technology and science depends on it. Quantum theory is not controversial; it's as much fact as anything can be.

At the time I was making up my "theory", my understanding of quantum mechanics was pretty much that there are little "random" events in atoms, like the rolling of dice. The statistics of those random factors cause things to look the way they do. There are so many microscopic random events that they always average out, so that at our scale it all looks very certain and solid.

So, which came first, the chicken or the egg? Is the supposedly deterministic macro world there first, and then the random events get forced to add up to it?

Or do all the random events happen and then add up to the illusion of solidity?

This dilemma causes a great deal of confusion, and the debate is ongoing.

What dictates the probabilities in atoms? Is it the other atoms? Do they all make a big system, like the frame of my house, spreading stresses out away from the point of pressure?

Here's how I thought about it. Indeterminacy imbues the whole structure of reality with give. Each local probability is like a slippery rotating hinge. So the butterfly effect wouldn't even work: pretty soon it would be swamped. Push in one place and your effect on anything distant would be nearly zero. All of the close by stuff would absorb it. An example is when you pull on the middle of a long garden hose.

Until you pull it far enough, the end doesn't budge, just the parts near the point where you grabbed it, because only there is it necessarily taut.

(j) Feedback

If you could somehow manipulate something even smaller than a butterfly wing, such as an electron, and use your control over quantum uncertainty to make it jump just in the right most calculated way (and also make all the other electrons work with it at the right places so your effects aren't damped out) then maybe you could do miracles. But it would be too hard to calculate. You would need a computer larger than the system you were trying to simulate.

So, even if the butterfly effect worked, to use quantum indeterminacy to make synchronicity real without impossibly difficult advance calculations, you would need to make the world you were messing with also function as the calculator. Imagine balancing a stack of objects. Do you calculate how every object in the stack must be adjusted to adjust the next one above, or do you just look at the top object and correct the way you hold the bottom object based on a direct feedback mechanism. Calculating upward (forward in time) is really complicated, while calculating downward (backward in time) is simple since it allows you to deal only with ultimate results.

Similarly, the simplest way to arrange coincidences would be to simply home in on the results using an automatic feedback system. Such a thing could result from some kind of influence flowing backwards in time. There wouldn't need to be a calculator detailing a series of linkages, but the series of linkages would essentially emerge as the calculator.

The easiest way to calculate the air turbulence over a wing is to build a model and put it in a wind tunnel, not to calculate the movement of the air molecules individually.

The thinking I have come to is that everything in the world is like that. There isn't a computer somewhere calculating the universe so that these cute parlor tricks can be perpetrated on insignificant people. It's analog. There's some ubiquitous principle or simple mechanism generating the effects. While the turbulence over a wing is very complex, the wing generating it is a simple shape. If there's a ubiquitous principle causing this stuff, that's analogous to what the whole universe is made out of. In that case, the butterfly calculations might be made using the entire universe as a "computer". That each element is simple doesn't mean the whole is simple. You could point to a single diode and protest that it's not a computer, or you could indicate a single neuron and protest that it's not a brain, or a single tree and protest that it's not a forest. Or you could point to a single air molecule and say it is not a turbulent flow. None of these components are wholes, but the wholes, in a sense, are nothing more than the consequences of what the components are.

Here are some other metaphors for this idea of order, and super-order, being an emergent property in the universe. There's not a computer regulating the mix of injection into the cylinders, there's a carburetor shaped so that the flow of air and fuel practically mixes itself just by going through. There's not an electrical signal being sent from the truck driver to the rear brakes to set off an actuator, there's an air hose extending all the way from the control to the brake. The source of signal and the effecter of signal are one and the same. There's a direct linkage between an effect and the causes that it needs, not a bunch of unnecessary moving parts. The universe doesn't just say to do it, it does it directly. It holds the chains of effects stiff and applies the lever at exactly the right location, need directly jacking cause.

If probabilities without past-ward causal connections are affecting each other, or are affected by the same third party, then where else but the future is the mutually shared outside influence coming from? A chain of events caused me to write "utopia." A different chain of events caused the deliveryman to bring me a book titled "Atopia." These chains of events were not connected: I didn't call UPS and say, "bring me the book at 2:06" and wonder at the coincidence of my predicting its arrival at 2:06. Something caused both chains of events to affect each other so they would end at the same time and place. Or else, some genius with super powers was watching everything and making sure it happened that way, tripping the UPS man on his way out the door so that later he wouldn't arrive before I wrote "utopia." What third party is acting on both chains of events?

The most reasonable conclusion I could come to, given that preposterous set of possibilities, is that events in the future affect the past. The results of the coincidence, my wondering at it, somehow reached back in time and changed random events in both chains of cause and effect. The consequences caused the events that led to them coming about. The word to use for that is "retro-causality."

So, how would that work? Why does one coincidence happen and not another?

Picture some principle of the universe allowing a coincidence to reach back in time and manipulate just the right quantum uncertainties to make itself happen. This same principle would also allow the further consequences of the coincidence itself to reach back in time and demand the coincidence, which subsequently obliges its own consequences by reaching further back and making itself happen. For instance, my wonder at the coincidence was important to something in the future, so it had to happen. Since my wonder had to happen, it had to make the UPS man arrive on time and it had to make me type the right word exactly at the right time.

(k) Unity

Given this presumed model, there's an additional implication: unity. In all cases, the chains of cause and effect are precarious Rube Goldberg devices, or Heath Robinson machines, so delicate they would be easily disrupted at any weak link.

If the driver had taken a slightly different route, or if I had had to go to the bathroom just then the whole thing would have never come about. Or any of many other things could have happened, because something as complicated as a chain of events has many points of potential failure. Everything had to be just right or the end result wouldn't come about.

What is more, synchronicity is ubiquitous, not rare. My experience is that synchronicity is so common you can't tell where miraculous ends and mundane begins. There are extreme miracles and slight miracles, and who is to say everything isn't a miracle when you get right down to it. In sum, and more precisely, everything everywhere is affected by these forces.

The point is, the synchronicity causing principle seems to generate specific complex and delicate causal structures everywhere, not as a blind result of temporal causation alone but toward shared ends. Whatever it is, let's call it "psionic spirit energy" at this point, the way we might call a variable in an equation "X". For all these causal chains to work together, the psionic spirit energy has to be in harmony, universe wide.

If there were two or more evil geniuses trying to arrange coincidences, tripping deliverymen and such, they would be like two engineers building Rube Goldberg devices to do different things in the same place, using the same components. They'd never get anything to work. But psionic spirit energy manifestly works very well and very often, arranging coincidences that would be easy to prevent if there were any turmoil in the psionic spirit energy. So I decided that the whole world must form one big machine, a machine that performs horrendously complex calculations, manipulating events to some purpose.

Is "calculation" an exaggeration? Is attributing thought to the psionic spirit energy like attributing it to the calculations made by pebbles in an avalanche? I think there's a difference. The arrangement of synchronicity requires taking sequences of requirements into account. Further, assembling these chains involves selecting needed components from many available components. The contribution of each selection and each link in each chain has a different, dare I say, meaning depending on all the others. This is not a mere series of blind collisions, it takes consideration and coordination. To reduce the calculation out of it you would have to also reduce calculation out of people and computers, and we know that those calculate. Calculation is happening. Is purpose? What's it all being done for?

One misconception, if I only saw coincidences in my own life, and not also in the cosmos, might be that I am the center of the universe, and everything revolves around me. Events in the UPS driver's day were arranged just right to speed and slow the progress of my package, so that it would arrive at exactly the right time to coincide with my writing the word "utopia." He would have been a little earlier, but a kid crossed the street in front of him and he had to brake. The kid would have crossed the street later, but he was being sent home from school early because he was sick. He might not have been sick, except that his mother went to register 8 instead of register 7, and the cashier at register 8 had a cold. The cashier might not have had a cold, but...

On the other hand, something else could have made the UPS driver late. Another truck driver could have abruptly changed lanes in front of the UPS driver, but the rude driver was bringing my Christmas gift to Wal-Mart, and it has to be on time. The UPS driver's wife could have kept him on the phone longer, but she needed to initiate a long chain of coincidences that goes to Australia and back and eventually made a radio announcer say the word "Reverse" just as I turned my pants inside out.

But it's not that simple. I'm not the only one that things are being arranged for. As with the cosmological principle, I'm probably not special. The world doesn't revolve around me. I'm having events in my own life be used to arrange things for the truck driver and the sick kid and the cashier. All the world's a stage, and all the people players.

Not only that, but once you start saying that something in the future demanded an event in its own past then you have to wonder where it all leads. If a future result is causing chains of events in the past of the event to bring the event about then what is that future turtle standing on? It's standing on another turtle, farther in the future? What's in the distant future that's so compelling? Clearly it must be something infinite.

When I first encountered this, I started asking questions. Where did it all come from? What is it trying to do? What do I do about it? Above all, how does it work and can I use it for something? If there were answers to these questions, I needed to answer them first or I might go the wrong way and have to backtrack. So I decided to create a "theory" involving retro-causality.

Embarking on that, I immediately encountered new questions. Given that synchronicity is acting retro-causally, arranging local coincidences that serve more distant ones, all this is happening to what distant ultimate end? How do I even think about that? The simplest way to start figuring out where something is going is to just extrapolate. Look at its current direction, assuming no future course changes.

Synchronicity mainly seems to manipulate people. So, whatever causes it is somehow selecting for something about people. But in order to be a force of nature, the potential for this type of factor must be present everywhere. The question is, "What singles out people?" It has to be something that other things have some of, but with a different value: it shouldn't be people per se, but some characteristic people have that makes them interesting, such as being warmer than the environment or being larger than a breadbox. But that line of thought just opens up the possibilities more, it doesn't narrow things down enough. What else is there? Whatever results these statistical interventions are trying to produce, those kinds of results have already started. So it should be possible to find a clue to it just by looking at what has been going on.

What have people been doing? We've been evolving. Lots of things evolve biologically, but we evolved biologically and then started evolving mentally, and then culturally. We've been becoming more people like. We started developing civilization with all it brings. Economies grow, governments are established, and technologies are discovered. These trends build on themselves exponentially, so we were hunter gatherers for millions of years, farmers for thousands, industrialists for centuries, and have been harnessing computers for just decades. What more general property do all these trends have in common? They create order. Trade, law, and knowledge focus power and create organization. The really fancy way to describe this sort of thing in a physical system is to call it entropy reversal.

The blind aspects of the universe as a whole are coming apart, slowly cooling and dissipating into emptiness, which is an entropic process. But life on Earth, and the human race in general, seem to be going the other way, concentrating and increasing interactions, making local entropy reversal.

We are creating order and complexity at an ever increasing rate. So perhaps synchronicity is attempting to promote the reversal of entropy as globally as possible. That would somehow be fitting for something retro-causal. To be going the opposite way from the causal stuff and doing an opposite thing.

What's more, the arrangement of coincidences seems to require a kind of calculation, so we could speculate that the universe is haunted by a single, unified, retro-causally acting entropy countering intelligence. The only question that remains is how the retro-causality works, and the answer to that would require us to know why things exist at all.
Chapter Two: The Source of Existence

(a)Overview

This chapter connects a lot of hard ideas, stuff I'm pretty sure I don't fully understand. I connect these difficult ideas to form a tentative model of metaphysical reality, an explanation for things nobody has perfect explanations for. But at least I'm trying. I'm making some effort to resolve fundamental questions rather than merely dismissing them, so I'm going out on a lot of limbs. A lot of what I say sounds like make believe jargon, and a lot of it is totally unfamiliar. That's inevitable, because this isn't working through the next stage of a math problem: I'm jumping right into the middle of darkness and doing my best to make some kind of sense with improvised mental tools. So this stuff is crazy. It isn't really necessary to understand the practical effect of my ideas, but it's there as background. And I considered it important to check out the possibilities here, because there may still be something of value that has been overlooked, something I may be able to glean with new ways. No skipping the explanation because you don't understand it, then acting like I left something out when I talk about ideas based on that explanation. I didn't leave it out, you skipped it.

A word on epistemology: all things must be considered possible. Empirical evidence and logic do not provide positive evidence, but only negative evidence. Empirical data just tells you that truth must include some explanation for the data: all explanations inconsistent with the evidence are ruled out. Logic just rules out possibilities that are illogical: it never proves anything. Between them, it's possible to narrow down the possibilities until you are left with the inevitable truth. This is called the process of elimination. Yes, my conclusion is a reflection of my epistemology.

Here, I provide an explanation for why everything exists, and how it's underlying dynamics work to create both physics and synchronicity. In abstract it works like this:

principle-->dynamic-->emergent properties--->specific manifestations.

Specifically It is structured like this, all layers essentially one continuum:

infinity-->complexity preference-->synchronicity-->progress.

All these levels are one vertically integrated entity.

(b) Zero, One, or Infinity?

What is the basis of existence? In the face of weird phenomena, like synchronicity, perhaps it's best to consider appearances partial evidence at best. The best thing is to start from first principles. Here, I'll enumerate the possibilities.

 Maybe the basis of existence is a tendency for things to not exist. Let's call this the nihilism hypothesis. If it is true, there would have to be some provision for exceptions, because things evidently do exist. Silly though it sounds, this idea is the most common view of almost everyone. Thinkers ask, "What created the world, how could it have come from nothing?" You've met nihilism before in this famous line: "In the beginning, all was without form and void."

Since this model has to have a system for granting exceptions, then the exception granter is the source of existence. That means the nihilism hypothesis is a turtle.

Non-existence is an unnecessary step. What I mean is this. We often need to answer questions much like "what is holding up the flat earth." For a stack of turtles to work, you need what is called an infinite recession. Whatever is at the bottom of the stack is the only thing that matters. The turtles in between are just extenders, making the sequence longer to no purpose. When I say something is a turtle I'm saying it is a totally useless non-solution contributing nothing but a reiteration of the need for a real solution.

Things tend to not be? This one results in things not being. It doesn't appear to be the one.

So, what is the basis of existence?

Maybe the basis of existence is something random with selective tastes about what it likes to make. Only certain limited kinds of things tend to be. So, why ist it that selector and not some other? Is it randomness? So the arbitrarily finite option is really the option of having randomness as the source of all existence. But how many times do we throw the dice? Do we throw them a random number of times? What is the range of the possible outcomes of that first random, and how was that selected? OK then, how was that selected? No matter what you do here with the random method you get infinite recession or else a circle.

Maybe it is all being made by elves, or by fairy dust, or it's being dreamed by a little girl with blue eyes wearing pink pajamas. Some arbitrary thing, in other words, could be making it all, such as a bull, or some guy in a drugged stupor on a lily pad. But it's the little girl, so what made the elves? The fairy dust you say? Then where did the fairy dust come from? Ah, the little girl dreamed it. I do believe we have another stack of turtles.

So, what is the basis of existence?

So far, we can assign serial numbers to our guesses. The first one is zero. The second one is 1, representing any finite number because they're all really 1 of themselves (sure, a pile of feathers might weigh a thousand kilograms, but it's also one metric ton). So, let's proceed to the next number in the series. We've already seen it. It's the stack of turtles! The basis of existence, by process of elimination, is a tendency for things to exist. All of the other possible options keep boiling down to this one. Meet the rest of the turtles. Infinity looks like the only thing on the menu. So embrace the infinity, see it for what it is. Don't try to make it fit the formula of something else.

(c) Waves: Productive Algorithms

In the beginning, there was infinity, but it wasn't finished and it still isn't, and it never will be.

But this infinity has a special flavor to it. It has a quality best approximated by the word "comprehensive." It means "containing all possible without holding back anything." A comprehensive collection of the works of Shakespeare would contain everything Shakespeare ever wrote, including laundry lists. A comprehensive world would contain everything of any kind.

I first encountered the concept of a comprehensive world back in the early 1970s when I was watching Star Trek reruns with a precocious friend. Often, Captain Kirk and crew would be flying through space and come upon a planet just like Earth, except that it would be Earth where history took a different course. In one world a 20th century virus wiped out all the adults, but drastically slowed the ageing rate of the children. On another planet, a different turn of events allowed the Roman Empire to survive into modern times. My friend explained to me that the universe is so big that anything you can think of must be out there somewhere.

This is what I now call comprehensiveness. But I believe Reality is more than just passively comprehensive. A merely infinite Existence, as described by cutting edge cosmological theories, could be passively comprehensive. I believe that Reality is actively comprehensive; there is an actual tendency to be comprehensive. First, though, let's look at merely passive comprehensiveness.

Existence is so large that you can't possibly name anything that it doesn't include. Somewhere there's a little girl with blue eyes and pink pajamas dreaming about fairy dust that makes elves that commence to make whole worlds. But that's probably not where we are.

In the beginning there was everything possible. That's what was there at first, always has been, always will be, and it is here right now. You can't do anything about it, so go on with your life: The End.

But wait, there's another word for something with these qualities: eternal.

You could say this all inclusive universe was eternal, but if you did you would be partly wrong, because it must always change. It is always complete, but to stay complete it must constantly change, because though it contains all things ever so far conceivable, the comprehensive universe itself could always theoretically be dismantled and rearranged into new configurations. This is what is meant by active comprehensiveness.

New things are constantly becoming conceivable. To stay complete and comprehensive, existence must constantly grow. Its growth necessitates further growth, explosively. We experience this growth as time, and its products as creation. This growth is so fast that the new creation of each moment dwarfs all previous creation at a ratio of infinity to one; then it happens again. The equation would be

1/0= 1/01/0

If existence contains everything possible, you might initially imagine that most of it is random garbage. We must be pretty lucky to be in an orderly part where objects have shapes and behave in accordance with laws of physics. But here's the thing: order doesn't make for less stuff, it make for more. What we see is really and truly typical because stuff like this makes for lots more making.

What exactly is order? In its most primitive form, order is nothing more than sequence: something going before the other in a direction, such as alphabetical order. Complex order involves more than just a sequence; it involves sequences affecting each other.

Here's an example, which also shows how order makes more than chaos. A sine wave is a pattern, a graphic representation of an equation. The graphic representation looks like this

The universe is full of waves that act something like sine waves and cosine waves, having amplitude and frequency and period. There are light waves and radio waves and sound waves. Here's the equation for a sine wave.

Here's the graph at 100 cycles to the right:

The sequence of distances from the origin, that is to say values of X such as 1, 2, 3 and 1 million, and the orderly relationships implied by the equation interact to produce the shape of the height of the wave at any given point.

The important thing about the sine wave, and about all patterns like it, is that it generates more than it consumes.

That little equation generates an infinite wave form. Many things are like this. Bit mapped graphics, for example, use far more memory than compressed graphics because compressed graphics encapsulate patterns that are more compact than what they generate. It follows that comprehensiveness would "like" this sort of thing, producing a great deal of it. In fact, it would like it so much that for all intents and purposes existence would be made, for all intents and purposes, entirely of complex orderly sequences, shapes extending infinitely by following finite rules. Not only that: the kinds of complex order sequences that predominated would be the very largest kind. And the largest kind of complex orderly sequence we know of is a space time continuum.

(d) Comprehensive Continua

Let's call a universe an infinite three dimensional space. It has up and down and left and right and to and fro, all at right angles to each other, going on and on without end. All kinds of material objects are situated throughout the geometry of this space. Got it?

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Now take another universe almost exactly like it and set it beside the first. Where would you put it? To get a new place to put the new universe you would have to travel in a fourth dimension. Do this over and over until you have an infinite series of adjacent universes.

Now if each of those universes is exactly like the ones immediately beside it, except for infinitesimally slight changes that follow infinitely extensible orderly patterns from one to the next, then you have a time space continuum.

Since imagining infinite four dimensional objects is difficult, let's get a better understanding by describing an analog of them. Let's imagine a finite two dimensional universe. It's a single plate of metal with a shape drawn on it. Now, imagine piling onto this sheet a stack of other sheets of metal with similar shapes, each one drawn with the same shape as the first, but slightly changing the arrangement each time from the one on the adjacent sheet. Now cut away all the metal outside the shape in all the column of plates.

If all these changes follow an infinitely extensible pattern, you have created a three dimensional time plane continuum. If a shape in this flat little world was a circle, and it sat still, then if you cut out all the rest of all the pages other than the parts in the circle, you would have a vertical cylinder.

If the rules of the three dimensional time plane continuum called for the circle to move across the page at a steady rate, your cylinder would be slanted.

Thought of that way, and seen from outside, a time space continuum is just a shape, like a static art sculpture in a museum.

It's a huge and very complex shape, but nevertheless, seen from outside it is completely dead and deterministic. This concept is known as the "block universe."

I'm going to call it an algorithmic continuum. An algorithm is simply a rule or set of rules for strictly proceeding without variation. It sets a pattern.

So far, this is what we have. Reality is comprehensive, and it consists entirely of infinite algorithmic continua.
(e) Living in the Multiverse

In Chapter 1, I mentioned the Multiple Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics. That's the one that says every possibility of Schrodinger's equation comes true, just in different worlds. It's supposed to happen in some kind of imaginary infinite dimensional Hilbert Space. Someone named Hugh Everett invented it back in the fifties. Anyway, most people think of all the multiple worlds as new worlds constantly being created. There's one world, but two possibilities must both come true, so a new world is created in order to account for both outcomes.

I think that's wrong. I think all the multiple worlds that will ever be created already exist. What happens when Schrodinger's equation creates multiple outcomes is that the sets of worlds differentiate.

This is like if there are two stem cells.

They are exactly alike, except that one becomes a muscle cell and the other becomes a bone cell.

There wasn't one stem cell that split and generated a bone cell and a muscle cell from the split. It was two cells that grew up different ways. Or like two lanes of a highway, utterly identical, except that when the road splits, one goes left and the other goes right. It wasn't that there was just one lane that split into a left veering lane and a right veering lane, there were already two lanes. The lanes were identical as far as the lane itself goes: same width, same kind of paving material and so forth. The only difference is that one was on the left and the other on the right. The context determined the differentiation.

Current science is increasingly leaning to support for the  Multiple Worlds Interpretation. Furthermore, the Eternal Inflation Theory, which is gaining experimental support, implies multiple worlds. I can point you to David Deutsch, Brian Greene, Alan Guth, and Max Tegmark on multiple worlds: that part at least is probably real.

If this "tendency to existence" I made up is also true, then the number of these other universes must be not just many, but infinite. Very infinite.

There are infinite copies of you and I in different universes. These are truly identical copies, not just you except with a different eye color (like in the old TV show "Sliders"). They are all reading this right now, thinking exactly the same thoughts, have exactly the same memories, and within the bounds of yourself they have no differences at all from you. The only thing is, they are each in a different place, a different context. This is like how there are millions of identical thumbtacks in the world.

Some of them are stuck into bulletin boards, and some are in desk drawers--all kinds of places. You're just like that, identical copies that exist in different places. Those different places have to be similar enough that they could produce identical versions of you, meaning they must have had something to create all those memories you have. In one world you could be a Boltzman Brain that just appeared in space, in another you could be hooked into a computer that simulates all your experiences like in The Matrix, in another you were kidnapped yesterday by the KGB and they hypnotized you to believe in a whole set of planted memories, when really you are a sleeper agent for Russia.

In most worlds, you are real, and your experiences are real. But in one the mail carrier is sneaking up the sidewalk about to deliver some mail, while in another the mail carrier called in sick and you won't get any mail today. You have no way of knowing, because this information hasn't differentiated you yet. Suppose you get up and walk out the door. All your doubles do the same. A car passes in the street. For some of your doubles it goes left to right. For others it goes right to left. How? Because the parts of your various worlds that haven't impacted you yet can still be variable. Every time you encounter anything new, the sets of copies of you split up. But the splitting can go on forever because the sets are all infinitely divisible.

For all intents and purposes, all these identical copies of the same person ARE the same person. Identity is identity. Until you differentiate those copies aren't just copies, they're you. But the futures, that is to say the outside worlds, exist in various ratios. There are very few that are Boltzman brains, or Matrix victims, or sleeper agents. In most of the rest you will get mail today, but there is a non miniscule minority in which the postal carrier is ill. In about half of the worlds the car outside the door goes left, and in about half it goes right, depending on the time of day.

Let's use another metaphor. You are a road with three lanes. Eventually, one of those lanes splits off and becomes an exit.

One of the copies of you, the right lane, is destined to split off, while the other two are destined to continue on. You can't see ahead, or know which lane you are, just what set you are in, the one that splits up as described, so prior to the split, you might say there is a 2/3 probability of going left and a 1/3 probability of going right.

Here's my most important idea:

The probability of an outcome is proportional to

the relative complexity of the sum of futures it leads to.

When roads are built, lanes are added for paths to many destinations. Fewer lanes are needed for going to fewer destinations. The lane that branches off probably goes down to a small town. The two lanes that go on probably go to the big city. If you were just randomly picking what lane to drive in, you would probably wind up in the big city. You might say that the big city sends its influence against the direction of traffic, generating paths to itself by being a popular destination.
(f) Preferred Complexity

Reality is comprehensive. On this rock I will build my church.

We live in a vast multi-verse. There are infinite time lines, running through infinite dimensions, alternate worlds where every possible version exists of everything there is. Futures are among those things there are infinite variants of. But infinities can have different relative sizes. The number of points on an inch (whimsically, 1"/0) is half the size of the number of points on two inches (2"/0), but both of them are infinite.

Since there is one of everything wouldn't there be more of complex things than of simple things? Imagine that you have an ample supply of devices consisting of either two rods connected together by one hinge or of three rods connected together by two hinges.

Your task is to take single hinged items, using as many as you need, and lay them out on the ground in an array showing all the different angles they can be placed at. Naturally you would use an infinite number of single hinged gizmos, but eventually you would be done. The column of single hinged items in the blue box represents that array. Then you would start in on laying out all the double hinged devices, showing all the different combinations of positions they can be placed at. The collection in the white area represents that array. You would be squaring the (infinite) number of hinged items you needed in order to do a comprehensive layout demonstrating all the options. Now, suppose each item in your layout, of both types, had been assigned a serial number when you set it down, and you could randomly generate a number that would be one of those. Perhaps you took (1/0) + (1/0 squared) ping pong balls and wrote the serial numbers on them as they were assigned, then put the ping pong balls in a big barrel, rolled it around, and pulled one out. What are the odds that the number on the ball would be one of the first 1/0, the serial number of one of the single hinged gizmos? It would be

1/0 : (1/0 * 1/0), which equates to 1: infinity .

Since more complex things generate more variants, in a comprehensive array they are much more common. Put all the hinged widgets in a bag, singled and double hinged varieties all together. Randomly draw one out. The odds are astronomical for its having two hinges rather than one. In a comprehensive set, complex items are more probable than simple ones.

(g) Rejuxtaposition

As explained, complex things are more common in a comprehensive set. If Reality itself is comprehensive, then it cannot ever be complete, even if it subsumes infinities. A comprehensive reality would look at itself and say, "Hey, if I took all this and rearranged it, that would be another possible thing. So without that other thing, I can't really be comprehensive. So let's make that other possible thing. But where do we put it? Let's put it in a new dimension. Now I'm comprehensive. But look , if I took all this and rearranged it..."

Here's a simplified example. Suppose the original comprehensive set of all possible things were a square in a two dimensional world.

Now, you can cut that square up in a variety of ways.

Each of those ways to cut up the square, can then be put back together in new arrangements.

If one moment you have a square, the next moment you have to have:

(1) every possible way that square can be cut up into pieces and then,

(2) every possible way each of those ways of dividing the square can then be put back together.

Then you've got a comprehensive array of rejuxtapositions of a square. This comprehensive array, needs to be somewhere, so every variation is arrayed in a new dimension all its own. And the different possible cuts are also arrayed in dimensions.

So there's this huge thing with infinite dimensions based on the square being cut up and rearranged in all possible ways. Imagine all the ways you could cut that thing up and rejuxtapose it. So that happens now.

Only it's a whole universe that this is based on, not a simple square. And it's been going on forever. That's how big Reality is. Only you can't see it because we interact with all this possibility only through the tiny influence on probabilities of its gradual change, which we can easily mistake for other things.

So Reality is constantly adding new copies of itself, copies that are almost exactly the same as the old one, and putting them right next to the old one in a new dimension. All this is subject to an ever shifting array of probabilities, since each new collection has a slightly different proportional arrangement, counting all the variations of the new stuff plus the one original. Each moment the universe is infinitely larger than the one before, and the dimension into which it expands is time. The universe is NOT a static block, it is really changing. Time is NOT an illusion. But also the past and the future already exist: lots of them in fact.
(h)The Limits of Metaphysics

What I'm talking about here is metaphysics. I'm speculating about the ultimate underlying nature of existence. My speculation has to somehow connect with the observed world. Unlike the metaphysics of a faith based traditional religion (God made it with His power of Awesomeness from beyond Reality) or the metaphysics of science (I dunno, can't test it, doesn't matter, don't go there) I'm trying to make a metaphysical model that fits plausibly with both known science and ALSO a phenomenon that is not subject to science (synchronicity). Science is a large area to connect with, and religionists usually hand wave at it with an all covering blanket. "God made all this Samsara that looks convincing," they say, or "God put those bones in those rocks 6000 years ago."

I'm not using little pieces of science as an excuse, (ooh, quantum, I can do anything) nor am I starting from the edge of science and trying to extrapolate it one more inch. I'm trying to build a full formed model in an empty space of vacuum, then to draw dotted lines to speculate where the road will connect to parts of science, religion, philosophy, and common sense. I'm not trying to use cherry picked parts of science as supposed evidence, I'm just checking against known facts to make sure I'm in the ballpark. My theory also hand waves at much of science, but has the ambition of connecting with it properly.

Some parts of my model are well developed; other parts are cutting edge for me, stuff I'm mulling over even now. That will probably always be the case. If I waited until I could actually burst a fully formed model on the world I would be providing the Unified Field Theory in about a thousand years. So I'm sharing what I have now, and leaving some of it to be filled in. This is commensurate with the methods of God: nothing is ever complete, there's always another twist or turn, another complexity to add.

It's a mystery my child...

(i) Biased Differentiation

One version of my model is based on the concept of algorithmic continua being real. Another possibility is that only the waves that make up continua are real. I'll start with the first. "Universe moment," is a phrase I use to refer to a three dimensional space, with all its galaxies and matter frozen at one point in time. Continua are algorithmic progressions of universe moments. To have multiple continua (which is what "infinite continua" is since it's more than "1") you have to have at least 5 dimensions. The simplest possible case is continua arranged like a pan pipe.

I only have two dimensions here, so each little galaxy represents universes of the other three dimensions, which are actually perpendicular to all the others. Vertical is the fourth dimension, time, while horizontal is the dimension in which an infinite array of continua is laid out.

Let's focus on three continua from among all those infinite ones. Let's say color represents the unique arrangement of matter in the universe. So there are three brown universes As time goes on, quantum uncertainty comes out differently in the different universes. One of them becomes yellow. The other two become purple. So now, the purple universes go on, two universes just alike. They can differentiate again, but the yellow one can't because yellow is a primary color. So later on the two purple universes split up again and become a red universe and a blue universe.

If you were in a brown universe you would think of it as THE universe. You wouldn't know which color your universe was destined to become because they would all be identical to you. Then the first split would happen. You would see this as a two thirds chance of the universe becoming purple and a one third chance of the universe becoming yellow. The number of potential destinies affects the probabilities in the set retro-causally. Since there are universes destined to become red and blue the purple block is twice as wide as the yellow block. It's like the sideways proportions caused a backwards pressure. The differentiation is an outcome, but it also acts like a cause because it's all connected.

Retro-causal influence on uncertainty is a result of biases in the sets of futures. It's like the way sideways forces in an arch nevertheless transfer energy vertically,

except in this case they do a u turn, like somebody squeezing a banana so it pops out the top, going against gravity.

So if the widgets are universes encountering opportunities to become two hinged or one hinged, they almost always become two hinged. If the futures are a comprehensive set like that, then more complex futures--having more variants--are more common. Since they are more common, they are more probable.

This mechanism takes the entire future of the universe into account when it makes decisions about every quantum packet of energy. It doesn't so much think it as sense it, nay BE it.

(j) Continuum Branching Styles

The Tendency to Comprehensiveness constantly creates continua. This process makes each moment of each continuum constantly branch into newly created continua.

From inside, it looks like quantum uncertainty causing the world to come out different ways in different universes. You can see that as splitting up, with new worlds constantly being made. This is the usual conception of the MWI from Hugh Everett. One way to look at it is this.

A series of moments in a continuum, proceeds in order like counting 1, 2, 3 etc..The next moment is always a next in the sequence, but there are many next moments adjacent to any, so the continuum constantly splits up like the branches of a tree as the square root of negative one in Schrodinger's equation comes out to two different answers.

But what if all these futurely different continua already existed, but were totally identical so far. What if they just hadn't differentiated yet?

There are really 6 identical continua. For three moments they are just alike. Then, for moment 4, they differentiate up into three different descriptions, three pairs of identical twin continua that are different from the other pairs. And at moment 6 each pair of twins differentiates: now all 6 originally identical continua are different. (The equation doesn't make triple outcomes, but I'm not going to play by their rules any more.)

The shape of a set of continua is not really a tree, with a narrow base and a broad top. The number of continua is always the same, but the number of different types of continua proliferates. In this depiction, three identical continua differentiate into two different groups, one a single and the other a pair. Then the pair differentiates. This illustrates how the set destined for more future differentiations is larger in terms of total continua in it than the set destined for fewer future differentiations. It is thus more probable that an observer in one of those continua would find himself or herself in the larger continuum set, the one destined for more differentiations. That's how the retro-causal effect works.

By supposing the pre-existence of alternate universes in the multi-verse, I dispose of the need for constant creation of new worlds. Now I put it right back in another form.

(k) Dimension Proliferation

This part is really speculative, but what else could time really be than new creation, and where else would it be than in new dimensions? Each moment's branching can go into many new worlds, each a part of a continuum of which there are already myriad copies. The next moment you may have a completely new dimension where the adjacent next step is.

For a simplified version, initially Reality is a one dimensional array of universe moments, represented by letters. The moments are arranged in a random jumble.

GAH

The next instant of Reality Growth, the array of universe moments grows by a dimension. Again, the moments are randomly arranged. This little matrix represents only two dimensions, three moments long, when really Existence consists of much more. The sheer number of dimensions means that everything will be adjacent mostly to random things, even though everything is part of orderly sequences. Anyway, in our little matrix, adjacent to universe moment A in this second dimension is universe moment B, the next in the continuum

GAH

DBC

LUN

Then the universe expands again, adding yet another dimension. Time takes another right angle turn into this new dimension where it finds moment C. To depict that one, I have to use a three dimensional object, represented on the two dimensional page by a cube toy like object.

Somewhere, in infinite scrambled dimensions, there is always an arrangement where two adjacent three dimensional universe-moments adjacent to each other are also almost identical, a short continuum segment. After each short run using a particular dimension for time, each continuum takes another right angle turn to find its next segment. From an objective point of view, the path of each time line goes diagonally through infinite dimensions, occupying three different dimensions every moment, adjacent to the preceding and following moments through yet other dimensions.

The boxes A, B, C, and D represent three dimensional spaces: universe moments in a continuum. The fact that they each have their own sets of three dimensions that are perpendicular to all the others is denoted by the fact that they are represented by finite boxes. Though they are represented as all using the same 3 Dimensions, each one actually is in 3 different dimensions from among a total of 12. The path of the continuum itself, the time "dimension" is depicted as going through three additional dimensions, for a total of 15. That is to say, universe moment A consists of dimensions 1, 2, and 3. Universe moment B consists of dimensions 4, 5, and 6 and is contiguous through dimension 7, which is the East-West dimension. So the path of the continuum first travels west. Next it turns into dimension 8, going north in the North South dimension: Universe moment C is now in dimensions 9, 10, and 11. The next moment in the series, Universe moment D, is Up from universe moment C, adjacent to it through the 12 dimension, Up-Down. Universe moment D consists of dimensions 13, 14, and 15. Each of these two right angle turns (going from westward travel to northward travel to upward travel) is of only momentary duration. The path of the continuum comes out to a diagonal line going through the dimensions of its path, the red line. This is the time dimension of the continuum. It is not just one dimension, but a different dimension every moment. The next moment, E, will be adjacent to D through the 16th dimension, which is newly created along with the 17th, 18th, and 19th and everything in them.

The ratios between the types of worlds is constantly changing, entirely through the internal mandates of the comprehensiveness calculating the next way to expand itself. An analogy might be something like this. A series of depictions of chess board arrangements, laid out in order of each move of a game represents a continuum. You have a collection of every possible chess game done this way. But now you want to make a collection of every possible tournament. Making it a tournament collection changes the ratio of repetitions of each specific board set up in your collection generally because some kinds contribute to tournaments ending, while others contribute to tournaments continuing. The rules dictate what will happen, but the fastest way to calculate it is to just do it.

(l) The Non-locality of Retro-causality

In the fifties and sixties there was a big controversy about something called non-locality. From what I can gather Einstein hadn't liked the fact that quantum mechanics allows things to affect each other without touching. So a scientist named Bell created a mathematical statement called Bell's Inequality that supposedly clarified the matter, showing quantum mechanics has to have non-locality. In 1982,  experimental evidence verified Bell's math. Essentially, things affect each other without touching, which is called non-locality. I'm sure I've got it all wrong, but I don't care. The point is, my proposed dynamic for retro-causality, this preference for the creation of complex futures, functions as a non-local force and that's OK with science. Thanks.

I wrote earlier about complex order being order that responds to other order. You get a whole lot of that with a continuum. While you can start by imagining a block universe, a better concept, is to think of existence as a constantly growing set of block universes in which the different subsets of different kinds of continua are growing at different rates, so all the probabilities within them are constantly changing. The more complex is constantly gaining on the less complex.

Quantum probabilities are constantly changing. This is not the sole origin of change in our world (motion and energy)--those also come from the patterning of the macro world, the algorithms that make a continuum; causal and retro-causal influences.

Probability change is an extra nudge that is always present, acting like some kind of future influence seeming to affect the past. It is swamped by the general indeterminacy, so it is completely undetectable except for synchronicity, which is impossible to isolate.

Everett's MWI seems to resolve all the questions posed by the weirdness of quantum mechanics. Retro-causal influences are necessary only to explain synchronicity, and since synchronicity isn't a phenomenon amenable to science, science has no use for any retro-causal theory. Nevertheless, there is a minority class of interpretations that are called "time symmetric" meaning that outcomes are determined by both future and past factors. While understanding that this kind of interpretation is completely unnecessary for science, except perhaps to deal with nagging worries about the arrow of time, I take encouragement from them since they suggest my ideas may be plausible, if not necessary. My favorite time symmetric interpretation is  two-state vector formalism. If it fits with Everett's interpretation, as claimed, I'd think it would also fit with Tegmark's  cosmological interpretation.

Think of it like this: traffic is backed up. When space opens ahead the lane that got a space moves up, the ripple going backwards. All that travelled back was signal: retro-causal complexifying influence on subatomic chance in the case of time lines, or light reflections that enable intelligent drivers to see the car ahead in the case of the traffic jam.

Fig 2.2

(m) Counterintuitive Tunneling

Tunneling is based on real physics which is described by advanced math, so I don't know the details about it, just the pop science descriptions. Deducing further ideas just from the analogies used to describe it is likely to be dangerous, but getting into the weeds looks like it might take a lot of time and effort without contributing any additional benefit for my purposes, so I'm going to reason based on analogies anyway.

Essentially, there's a very tiny chance of anything, so things that can't happen do happen once in a while. Intuitively you would think simple violations would be more common than complex ones. One electron leaving a container it doesn't have the energy to leave is more likely than two electrons, in two separate containers, doing so simultaneously.

But what if the two electrons are together inside a container neither can escape with its own energy? Once in a while might they not help each other? So maybe the larger and more complex a system, the more tunneling it can do.

Additionally, if you have retro-causality, maybe tunneling can go backwards, so complex systems tunnel themselves into existence more often than simple ones. But there's just a small chance of that. Don't you agree?

(n) The Cutting Edge of Time

There are lots of questions remaining in my "model" of comprehensive algorithms, rejuxtaposing into new dimensions to create time and preferring complex futures to create retro-causal effects. From here on, this section just kind of rambles on, speculating.

Originally, I thought continua were constantly making right angle turns, using a different dimension as the time dimension each moment, and passing through that dimension an infinitely small distance for an infinitely small time. But then I thought some more. If whole continua are algorithmic, that would mean no uncertainty. And infinitely small "runs" through each dimension would go nowhere. Plus, maybe there's something going on with the size of runs in each dimension, allowing distortions somehow relating to relativity.

So then I thought, "If it's like this, then waves could have a pattern of right angle turns every X distance. All right angle turns are alike, without outside reference, and algorithmic patterns only reference themselves (?). So each pattern, or wave, just "looks" through all adjacent locations in all dimensions and finds the place that has the next step of the pattern. It does its three-space bit in that dimension for a stretch of its usual length, then looks for a new turn. It isn't really "looking"; what's happening is all existence being replicated by rejuxtaposition. That process relates everything to everything else in every possible way. That's also how infinite futures can be compared: they've already been generated long ago, and are just being replicated.

As it is proceeding through a dimension, a wave may encounter other waves and interact with them. They may dampen or heighten each other, because that doesn't violate the wave, which still goes on forever. Waves have to accept being cancelled because they have to match up with something to extend, and sometimes interaction damped versions are all there is to be creatively expanded into. So anyway, that's the quantum foam, all these waves spending a tiny stretch in our dimension, damping each other out. Space is filled with all these damped out waves just waiting for something to let them express again. They are not "0" they are "-2 and +2", just waiting for something to undo their complements. So what are we? We are big agglomerations of wave interactions that are actually non zero, constantly getting matched up appropriately to continue mostly.

Just as Existence was originally just forms, and before that it was patterns on a line. When Comprehensiveness was but a seed, it passed through a stage when it was waves. Waves formed continua of universes, which were replicated over the ages so many times that what we see now is a simulation of something more crude than what it actually is. The whole block universe evolves by algorithm, objectively, but is subjectively still uncertain of which universe it is, as is everything in it (schizophrenia of location). But the algorithm the universe follows as a block universe is an algorithm of simulating uncertainty of all these waves.

Here's another idea. String theory has 9 space dimensions and a time dimension. Just a thought, maybe the 10 space dimensions are:

the three dimensions of the past moment,

the three dimensions of the present moment,

the three dimensions of the next moment, and

the dimension through which they connect.

Some seem small because we aren't in them long.

(o) Summary

Reality is a comprehensive array of continua constantly branching into new dimensions as a result of constant production of all possible new variants of vast amalgamations of continua.

We experience this constant production as time, with quantum jitters. Complex futures are preferred by this production, so the quantum jitters jump the way that leads to the greatest future complexity, which looks like retro-causal influence on chance.

Order, life and intelligence, such as you find in humans, are complex and they magnify chance to produce more complexity. So this retro-causal force acts to promote the empowerment of humanity, as a means to amplify itself.

So. This intelligent retro-causality is an emergent phenomenon, what happens when the eternally creating principle of Comprehensiveness acts on Creation. It is a result of It, yet also one with It, so It can all be considered one entity. It's infinite in every way. It controls every atom in the universe. It is unique and unified. It is aware of everything, and how it relates to everything else. It loves mankind, but is not above guiding us with a not always gentle hand when we get off track. Can you answer the riddle?

(p) Conclusion

In the Overview section, I proposed that all the stages of this progression are one continuum.

infinity-->complexity-->synchronicity--->progress

I think I have shown how this flows from abstract source of existence to the zeitgeist.

Reality is teleological, a product of its destiny. It doesn't matter why It wants what It wants ultimately. It doesn't even matter what It wants ultimately.

All that should matter to us is:

the project is to transform the entire universe, and

It finds humans useful to do it.

Given those two propositions as fact, the project will to all appearances consist of nothing but the ever increasing empowerment of people-kind for the foreseeable future. It doesn't matter if the world is round; it looks flat here so treat as flat.

Given that there is a general goal we can help with, and that giving us power is part of it, then we can benefit from that power in the meantime. Sure, the current can drown you, but if you apply just a little common sense and effort you can use it to get where you want to go. But I suspect that the sort of thing It uses to get there is exactly the sort of thing It is about; orderly and empowered intelligences are complex and permutable. We are in charge of our success. God is cheerleading.
Chapter Three: The Aims of Existence

"The Universe itself is God, and the universal outpouring of its soul."

\--Chrysippus fragment

(a) Algorithm Drift

Continua are algorithmic progressions because in order to exist at all in an infinite Reality anything has to be infinite, and only algorithmic things are infinite. New creation is constantly being made because Comprehensiveness can never be complete due to the possibility of rejuxtaposition. Algorithms that call for creation of new reality, such as those using Schrodinger's equation, lend themselves to the needs of rejuxtaposition.

What we are getting, when we are created each moment, is extension of a continuum evolved to have an extremely flexible and complex algorithm, one allowing it to extend in the most possible ways. Any given item, such as a mind, could be found in a variety of universe-moments, and considering comprehensiveness it is most certainly in all of them. Any of those universe-moments, in turn, could be a part of a variety of viable continua, and considering comprehensiveness, it most certainly is in all of them. We are being created anew each moment, but always as copies of many things that already exist. The kinds of things that exist are well established, but certain kinds are slowly becoming a larger proportion because they breed faster. They lend themselves to rejuxtaposition.

From any finite viewpoint, the futures and pasts are both in a constant state of flux, entirely the result of God doing isometrics, with one muscle slowly winning out over another. The weaker bicep is the older stuff, made of less complex sets of continua. The stronger tricep is the newer stuff, made of more complex sets of continua. So the arm will extend over time.
(b) Yes, I Said God

God's will would be related to God's function.

Reality is comprehensive. Everything is algorithmic. Comprehensiveness keeps growing. Complex destinies are preferred, resulting in retro-causality. The retro-causal effect effectively connects everything. It's smart. It made everything. It can do anything. It knows everything. It likes people (with qualification). It has all the characteristics commonly attributed to God.

So it's God. This is what others believing in God were forming wrong theories about.

However, attributing genitalia and familial relationships and human emotions to something so alien and superior is silly and parochial. It's as neuter as a forest. Though it contains both male and female plants and animals, the forest itself has no gender, and does not itself have both genders any more than a sidewalk or a crowd or a city or a zoo or a river. All those things are more than places, they are ecological systems. The whole itself has no genitalia. It is no more male, female or hermaphroditic than a garment infested with body lice of both genders.

It

Thus I use the pronoun It, with an upper case letter "I" to refer to God.

So there It is. Each stage of my reasoning seems to make sense, but it's a long chain of assumptions, and at any stage the truth may surprise, if there's ever any evidence either way, other than guessing. In the meantime, I'm going with this as my metaphysical model because the synchronicity is real and it has to be something.

But just because I provisionally believe in God, that doesn't mean I accept all the ideas that many people attach to the concept of God. It is not a magical elf in an opium dream or a powerfully built bearded man on a mountaintop capable of killing sinners with thunderbolts. That would be Zeus or Teshub. Know a deity by the description(s), not the purported name. Traditionally religious people often say crazy and contradictory things like "God is an invisible spirit and failure to anthropomorphize it is heresy. Furthermore it's three and one, vengeful and forgiving. He loves you and failure to believe in those things will also send you to hell."

The stuff they attach to God is lunacy, and it doesn't get us closer to God but keeps us away. Furthermore, it doesn't exalt God, but rather smears It. I believe it is important to understand the strong possibility of the existence of something like God and also to abandon old concepts of It. This cannot be done without becoming thoroughly heterodox, abandoning all the old scriptures entirely, and making no effort to conform to them or reconcile with them. They were well meaning stand ins, the time of our needing them is through. But that doesn't mean we should adopt a new Gnostic Atheism. There is truly something strange in the world, and I think it's  God.

What It wants, in our continuum, is for the continuum to become more permutable so that it juxtaposes more complexly (as part of a much larger structure of continuum clusters).

(c) Widgets In Outer Space

Yes, the continuum clusters could stand to be more permutable! Makes your heart ache don't it? Of course, you'll want to know what you can do to help!! In fact, you are helping. As a matter of fact, you're drafted.

The thing about humans is that they can take miniscule input and magnify it into massive output, like a backhoe operator magnifying orders received via tiny vibrations of a telephone speaker (themselves magnifications of incredibly thin electromagnetic waves). The whisper of waves is transformed into the movement of a mountain, or at least a tree. High gain.

People work like magnifying widgets, so God likes people, the way farmers like corn plants. Or shepherds like sheep, to use another common metaphor. But really it's more that God likes the crop, not the individual plant in the field. This is the best we are going to get. It's not malevolence per se. It's something we can work with. Let's take it.

The question, is what are we being used to do? Well, we are valuable as input magnifying widgets. So people are good, so making people is good, generally. Making people who magnify a lot is better. That can be done by making them better receivers of signal, as I am doing, or by making them better doers of deeds, as engineers do, for example, when they build construction equipment. Make people smarter, and better intentioned, but also stronger, which is to say better equipped. What else.

Smart people with good machines do more when they are organized together. So another thing that serves God, generally on average, is orderly civilizations. These are like magnified people, they take small signal and turn it into massive output. An emperor produces much greater output per whisper than a mere backhoe operator.

Millions of people in tiny self contained villages that never talk to each other would never build a wall against the barbarians. But one man sitting on a throne moved his mouth and breathed an order, and the order was carried along roads by officials, who commanded the efforts of those peasants and built that wall. The Chinese Empire was an example of social organization raised to a high pitch, though in a simplistic and low tech way. It's a primitive example of how God wants us not only to be living, and intelligent, but also organized. The internet is a much more sophisticated example. But there's more. God doesn't just want to use us on Earth. God wants to transform the whole universe.

So why didn't God put intelligent alien people on every planet in the universe, so they could just do it all without leaving home? Because that would be God doing work. How about if God makes people once, on one planet, and they do the work of spreading out all over the universe? Anyway, what's important is not really homo-sapiens of terrestrial primate origin, but sapience and sapients. We will not so much conquer other species out there if we find them, or create them, as join with them) as being of the same kind.

Things that magnify input are good workers. They will help God make what God wants, but what is it that God really wants? God wants things that are permutable, which means things that are complex, which means things that are orderly. Things that magnify input are all these things. Effectiveness for effectiveness for effectiveness...

So, what happens when the universe is totally transformed into a maximally efficient machine, as perfectly responsive as possible?

When the universe has become perfectly efficient it will simply get more and more efficient, curling in on itself, compacting like a fractal.

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(d) Cheapskate

You could compare intervention in probability to the spending of money. Interventions have variable prices, and the pricing is complex. The cost of making things go one particular way comes from the other things that are impacted. Not only does God have to worry about impacts in this world, but impacts in other worlds that calve from it later. There are different prices at different places and times for different interventions, so what God does is intervene where the cost benefit ratio is most favorable, even if the difference is miniscule. It uses the smallest possible intervention that will do the job, even in important things, but on the other hand It intervenes in anything, no matter how trivial, if the cost is low enough. Usually the cheapest way to work is to create a coincidence in some out of the way place where there's plenty of random noise, then connect it causally to some other similarly cheap coincidence with roots in another low cost origin, to synergize as a new product that does a surprisingly good job of getting results. God doesn't really do much in your study where the bookshelves and desk are solid and nothing much is happening. It would cost a lot to make a paperweight tunnel up into the air and levitate or something. Not impossible, just costly. On the other hand, God does a lot of stuff where there's a lot of randomness already, out on a busy city street for example.

The more paths there are to randomizing something, the more likely that God took/takes/will take/will have taken the effort to do something exceptional and precise with it, rather than just letting it ride.

It makes you wonder about people who profess faith but go to great lengths to insulate themselves from randomness. If you don't believe in God it's probably because you don't live where It likes to show. And it's easier to keep up the self delusion if it isn't constantly being contradicted.

So does that mean God wants everyone to maximize synchronistic input? I can't even say that. Clearly not enough to have made it happen, but then again here I am. Maybe there's a density type issue here again. Some people not listening to God is like the silent times here when there's no signal, a necessity for the rest to have meaning. Or like the vast depths of time "spent" to create our current world rather than magic it up instantly.

(e) Personality

To contradict the religions of Abraham, God totally lacks vengefulness or gratitude. It only concerns Itself with the future. You could give your entire life to Its service, accomplishing many great things, and It would have absolutely no gratitude. It would throw you under the bus in a heartbeat if that paid off. That's why you get paid as you go, if you're smart. On the other hand, It is completely unconcerned with revenge. You could be a complete pain in neck for It, and It would not have any attitude of resentment beyond the present moment. If benefitting you benefitted It, then It would benefit you without a second thought. The past is completely erased, for It, every moment.

However, the appearance of reward and punishment can be quite productive, because people think that way. Lacking perfect foreknowledge, we humans deal with the minds of others as black boxes, pushing the buttons based on probable results. We punish others, exacting revenge, and reward others, expressing gratitude. We find this approach an effective one to motivate others to comply with our wishes. It's a whole science. God understands that we think this way, and our handling characteristics can be optimized when we expect certain kinds of behaviors from God, so God will simulate vengefulness and gratitude, when facile.

Does this mean God is an amoral alien? Yes! God is not human. Humans are not made in the image of God, except in that we are also intelligent. Furthermore, our human norms of morality do not apply to God. God knows the actual results. Regarding Its own actions, God can actually make the claim of every cartoon villain that the end justifies the means. God is what moral philosophers call a "consequentialist." It does exactly what is truly most productive of "good" results in all cases, nothing else. See the section on this in Chapter 4.

So, God seems to be an amoral alien intelligence that we can nevertheless deal with and work for provided we are careful and never forget that the relationship is purely transactional, at best, rather than similar to the kinds of relationships humans have with each other. You know something else that fits that description? A large corporation. God is exactly like a large corporation run by a computer that just figures out the cost benefit ratio all the time. It will be happy to let you believe it feels fatherly, but don't buy it. Work with it as with a person, accept that it is very productive of beneficial results, but don't fall into the habit of seeing it as human. There's no shame in being a go getter, trying to get points with the corporation for doing great and wonderful things. But never forget that it will not feel gratitude. If you want a guaranteed pat on the back, you had better get flexible shoulders and learn to do it for yourself. Or you could elicit it as part of your pay package, but It will take your costs into account in the hiring decision.

(f) Determinism

In my younger days (when I believed in a cause and effect block universe following the "laws of physics") I was a determinist. That is, I did not believe in free will. Everything is determined by algorithm. I still believe that, I just believe free will is like randomness and time: it's relative. Ultimately even God doesn't have free will. It is growing Comprehensive Reality in accordance with what is necessary to make the Reality of the next moment include all possible rejuxtapositions of the Reality of this moment. It is no more free than the next digit of pi. Everything is either determined by something or it is determined by nothing, and nothing is determined by nothing. However, even God doesn't know exactly what the next moment will consist of until It becomes the next moment consisting of It: that's how It finds out. The next moment is not undetermined, merely random, which is to say that what determines is hidden from what is determined.

What is usually meant by the term "free will" is motivation independent of God (or other determiners external to the self, but God is the one that counts). Our will, like everything else experiencing time, contains elements that are relics of primal necessity. These are a minor factor, but the more complex the system, the larger a factor they must be, due to the higher sensitivity of complex orderly structures to anomalous factors. So a couple of wrong ideas seem to follow from that.

1. We must develop more free will as we grow more intelligent. This is wrong because primal factors can be reduced as a percentage of the system at a greater rate than the rate at which it grows subject to them. So it all depends. Free will is indeed developed, and intelligence allows it to develop, but they are not necessarily synonymous.

2. Since God likes complexity, and free will goes along with it, God must like free will. But, no. Complexity and free will don't necessarily correlate because there are additional factors, and furthermore God only cares which way will is going. Free will that is going God's way is like a nice surprise, free will that is not going God's way is like a nasty surprise.

God wants us to create large complex systems, which will incorporate a large proportion of primal unpredictables, then ensure that those systems are nevertheless committed to God's service. The freedom of will is irrelevant, only its results. But bound will can be coordinated with more readily, and is thus easier to do consequentialistic trick shots with: only dumb drones are allowed to be bad because with them God can make sure the bad is used good.

God is overcoming relic imperfection by tipping the poised chaotic systems over into going the desired way. To do that most efficiently, God is using the minimum effort necessary to produce the desired tip over, like a politician gerrymandering so that his party just barely wins in the most possible places. So the optimal design is to accept some imperfection, just as long as the whole barely qualifies, by a minimal whisker, as good.

(g) How We Got Here

God parsimoniously manipulated past events to get us where we are now. I can only speculate about exactly how events of the past worked together to add up to our current world, why they had to go one way or another. But such speculation, done correctly, tells about God. It isn't just opinion on my part, even if it's just a guess, because it demonstrates how to make an informed guess about God.

Why did God not supercharge evolution to create Its tools in the relative blink of an eye? In an earlier version of this continuum, life emerged on billions of planets. God watched to see where life in each world ended up going in a desirable direction. Then it began to intervene in the histories of worlds that showed promise. It's like pruning. You look at the effects of the pruning before you prune some more. God knew the whole future of the world before each intervention, but not yet the future resulting from that intervention, until the para-temporal instant after its creation. That is to say, God must be experiencing awareness of the entire past and future histories of the universe all at once, as we experience our own bodies. Like a person walking, it changes the whole thing in a "second" dimension of time (to simplify) so creating new versions in which there were different outcomes. Yet each of the old versions remains, because really this progress is not so much like walking as like growth, as of a tree. By doing it and being it God learned what it would do and be. It found that this world developed life in its future. "I like the top there." So It decided to develop that future with interventions. For God, the time space continuum is like a stack of objects. By moving something lower down, It can shift the entire stack, all the stuff above (in the future) resting on what was shifted at the bottom. This is a great way to get lots of results, but intervening lower (earlier) may have too many side effects, so if It doesn't want to be ham handed, It is better off altering as high as possible. Don't prune the trunk.

We actually began to show promise, and so we were tentatively "encouraged". Oops, dead dinosaurs. As it were. With increasing potential, we get more attention and effort.

Evolution happened on billions of planets. Slow though it may have been to us, it happened real fast on our planet. Our planet has an incredibly advantageous set of circumstances. An object hit just right to strip most of the crust away and form it into a moon. The giant moon is perfect to help shelter from meteors and produce tides to produce the right kinds of organisms at the right times. The ratio of primal decaying uranium to remaining crust, makes for a magnetic field generating molten interior and an associated tectonic surface with continents. The amount of water is just right to get partial coverage. These circumstances are perfectly tuned to generate life well, so though it took billions of years, in most other star systems the emergence of life may take longer than the life of the star. God let evolution run its course, only occasionally making minor tweaks to the course, to make it go just right. It was taking Its time with this, because it's important and, let's face it, It has time.

Civilization started to emerge. God got really interested. Got in and nudged here and there to push it the "right" way, though Its actions may have seemed cruel here and there. It sometimes explained aspects of Itself to those honestly trying to understand, rather than just manipulate, but the background concepts were not there. You can't hope to understand doctoral level stuff if you haven't even taken 101 yet. The answer to the question of why It didn't "reveal" Itself immediately so people could earn favor and avoid punishment is complex. First, it didn't magic up an understanding for the same reason it didn't magic up a perfect universe; we're part of the process of how to magic something up: time. Second, it didn't need earlier people to understand and make different actions based on that understanding. It needed them to take the actions it took. As us, they were pawns for the needs of the future. So it gave the baby talk version. It used metaphors which were taken literally, so that the inferior approximation came to be given greater credence than the idea that it was a substitute for. "I like some substitute fill in], don't give me [some real thing]," they say. For example, It said, "you are created in my image" meaning "you are intelligent beings like myself". This was interpreted to mean that there is something special about the way people look and any alteration of that, or attribution of non anthropomorphic appearance, is vitally important to God and an abomination. So the heightening of our intelligence and creation of artificial intelligences, something God wants us to do, is [anathema because it violates God's "image". "I don't want real teacher back, I like substitute teacher, she lets us play games." It is exactly the sort of thing God was originally getting them away from in the first place, this undue emphasis on superficial appearances, as in worship of carven idols. A topsy-turvy situation results in which the sinner is making the accusations.

The same applies across the spectrum to all these ideas of placing the symbol ahead of what it represents. The metaphor of God as a rancher with us as the cattle gets extended to undue focus on a particular breed of sheep and some kind of mystical platonic form of the lamb or something that people like David Koresh get their heads wrapped around.

Names, images, and large lumps of incorrect associations become rigid mandates. Terror of leaving the tiny conceptual world is instilled. I guess it's a great way to imprison idiots for being idiots, but I prefer to treat them as potential human beings, and ultimately as potential sapients.

Anyway, God didn't "reveal" Itself because people weren't yet ready to understand, not because understanding is impossible. Early empires such as Rome made some innovations, but they were all some form of slave state. That was the pattern in those days. Conquer, enslave, stall, no new conquests so no new slaves, collapse. That paradigm is never likely to progress beyond a certain point. Why invent robots when you have slaves? Also, despite some technological and conceptual progress, they had some mentalities, possibly side effects of the conquering and slaving, that were not conducive to the effectiveness needed. Chains are a dead end. The cultivating of minds through persuasion breeds growth for all. So the great empires (Egypt, Babylon, Greece, Rome, Mauryan, Han, Olmec) promoted new religions. Each of these had lessons to teach, but each also had elements resistant to further innovation. In all cases, the empire stagnates, turmoil and downfall result, and in most cases the reboot, after a dark age, leads to a refreshing and invigorating golden age. Sometimes, outside forces mess up the process, other times they help. It's like waves, the timing all determines whether they damp each other out or reinforce each other to new heights.

Early, almost adequate guesses can make for laziness, like accepting Newton and not moving on to Einstein. Losing that essay you wrote can force you to reproduce it from scratch, and it may be better that way than if you had been trying to fit old wording. You may see new things with a fresh mind as it bubbles up from consciousness instead of in through the eyes.

From the 1500s on, the modern world is an extension of European history because Europe was most instrumental in creating the world we have, in all its good and bad aspects. There all the waves lined up to create a new peak, the one that washed over the sea wall. That's not chauvinism, it's a fact. From a backward backwater, it suddenly catapulted into the lead at just the right time to reach technological escape velocity in conjunction with a period of expansionist aggression. Maybe it was like that thing the bicycle racers do: no, not the dope, the tactic where they break wind for the lead racer. Other areas had been ahead in many ways, but had come to dead ends, perhaps like somebody passing a traffic jam in that mysteriously empty lane only to come to where they merge to a narrowing to a single lane is happening only to have to beg to get let in. Had Mohism succeeded what might China have done, for example? A more progressive  Song dynasty 1000 years earlier would have led to what? But then, there must have been a reason not to go that way. Possibly that most futures like that would have involved a lot of mindless overly literal interpretation of his ideas that were for specific times and places. Or perhaps most worlds are like that, and we are in the backwater where we are needed.

At any rate, Europe is where civilization tunneled onto the escalator of scientific thinking. The smaller and more isolated a world, the slower it grows. Australia advanced almost not at all, the aborigines were paleolithic in modern times. The Americas, slightly larger, advanced a little faster, making it almost to the bronze age by modern times. The great mass of Africa and Eurasia, though is where all the action was. Semi separation followed by cross fertilization is the name of the game in heightening the waves.

European civilization became stagnant, so God provided impetus. By contriving political conditions just right, It sent them on some bogus military mission to reclaim the otherwise unimportant backwater their religion had emerged from. Thus the same place served twice, and may have been set up to serve more times. Who knows? God does trick shots like that, it's quite impressive.

The crusades were a snark hunt really, but it got them out of the house, created demand for exotic goods which led to a lot of, shall we say, cross cultural interactions. Some invaders and plagues came, got things going. Thinned out the serf population, which forced some innovations, which included some liberalizations that opened up to re-examination of some of the Roman stuff.

Other civilizations had been farther along in ways, long before, than Europe now was, but there's something to be said for suddenly being exposed: you see it all in a new light. So the backwater suddenly met the world and launched into a frenzy of growth and progress and vicious conquest and imperial oppression, thereby pushing that growth and progress on others. This, for all its evil, dragged the world kicking and screaming into modernity.

Another asset was that European religious doctrines were so flexible, such total BS, they could be bent to allow anything needed, like any good glove that does whatever the hand demands. But they were bulky enough to fill the religion slot and keep other religions from freezing minds. Bad as it is for our own times, Christianity was then the most conducive to doing what needed to be done. Autocratic empires consolidated, bringing ideas together as centralizations will do, synthesizing new ideas. America boomed as viciously aggressive frontier states will.

You get the gist. Science was discovered, then many technological wonders, and knowledge of the universe. Now the basis was there for understanding the truth at last. People knowing the truth was not real important, at first. In many ways it could be disruptive. It might have to be done just right.

(h) Where We're Going

All that history is important only as a lesson for how things go. We can mine it for understanding, but the future is the real source of importance. God's intent is for us to gain control over the entire universe. I can only speculate about how we might get there from here. But I can tell you this: focus on the future is a lot better than getting all wrapped around where we came from. We can apply ourselves to being constructive and positive. Where we are going can be as great as we like, while where we came from will always be as flawed as it is. The alternative to being forward looking, practically future worshiping, is fighting over what our grandparents did while we wait for the end of the world to come rescue us and God to reward us for our stubborn small mindedness by taking revenge on our enemies for us while we platonically jack off to it.

We must unite, but putting all eggs in one basket is a risk. We must become immortal, but the world will become overpopulated. We must expand into space, but it's radioactive. We must build and grow, but not lose anything precious and impossible to replace in the process. We must become mutable and powerful, but remain civilized and good willing.

These all become moral dilemmas. The only advice God would give is to do what works to serve It. And then It would mutely use your actions to promote Its agenda.

I'll tell you what's inevitable.

Option 1: Once we get our stuff together, we will be immortals. We will be able to take any form we can imagine, and make ourselves brilliant. We will master vast energies. We will be wealthy beyond imagination. We will have an endless and fascinating project before us to keep us busy for eternity.

Option 2: We could accept our limitations, abandon this false gospel of growth, eat local, use hand tools, and go back to a stone age population. Eventually somebody will get tired of that, so we will fall back to option 1.

Option 3: we could recklessly squander our planet in an aimless orgy of institutionalized selfishness, all the while claiming it as a God given right, and that the end of the world will soon come and set things right. Of course that won't work, so we will fall back to option 2.

Option 1 will be winning. Furthermore: There is no end. There is no end. There is no end. Repeat forever.

We will find a way to expand into the galaxy, then spread our civilization to the whole of space. We will delve into the deepest secrets of creation and learn to save our universe from the big rip. We will capture all of it, convert it to one giant machine hooked up to God's will.

What then? I suppose we, or whatever we will be by then, will merge with it. But in the meantime, God doesn't need you to be another God. God needs you to be a subordinate sapient and as such to promote the things God cares about. Which are things we can also love.

(i) Rejuxtaposability

The outermost layer of what God wants us to increase in the universe is the capacity of systems to contribute to the propensity of the universe to be dismantled and rearranged in new forms. I call this rejuxtaposability.

It's like the way you can take a bunch of pizzas and cut them up and put the pieces back in different orders. All the properties below are important because they contribute--either in general, or in specific situations in our universe--to rejuxtaposability. It's kind of abstract, though, so figuring out how to work for it is kind of difficult. Cosmic rejuxtaposition is what powers God on a subconscious level. It is not aware of it any more than we are aware of the molecules in our cells powering chemical reactions that keep us warm.

(j) Permutability

The next layer of what God wants us to increase in the universe is the capacity to take many forms. Permutable things tend to contribute greatly to re-juxtaposition, but unlike rejuxtaposibility, permutability is something we can almost understand.

A chess game can be set up in more meaningful combinations than a checkers board, so chess is more permutable. Still we do better to look beyond permutability to something that generates it. Permutability is just the reason why order and complexity are important.

(k) Complexity

The next layer of what God wants us to increase in the universe is complexity. Complex things tend to be highly permutable, because they transform instantly at the slightest instigation of the butterfly effect.

As with permutability, complexity is only where we are going, not always directly also part of how we get there. Understanding it aids understanding the background of why God favors certain things: because they contribute to other things. I'm tracing a path from God's infinity to why God likes human empowerment. This is background material, and it would not be fair to skip it and then whine about the lack of background material.

(l) Order

The next layer of what God wants us to increase in the universe is order. Orderly things tend to be complex, because order conveys and magnifies stimuli. A row of dominoes, for example, conveys the signal from one to the next, and can even be arranged to split, with one domino setting off multiple chains.

A nation with a spider's web network of good roads or a good communication system is also more orderly than one in which everything is isolated. The ruler (or other power locus) can send a command (or influential suggestion) to the farthest reaches and the farthest reaches can send a report (or rumor) back to the ruler (or etc). Brains are similarly organized into hierarchies in really complicated ways, evidencing many layers of order.

Order has the advantage that it magnifies input, but its propensity to benefit the future is entirely dependent on the sensitivity of the system to accurate signals from God. In essence, order is a multiplier, increasing potentials. A lump of metallic fragments has less good potential than a robot, unless the robot in question is an evil robot. If it's an evil robot, the only question is whether it's easier to turn it into a good robot by slipping in new programming while it's intact or by turning it into a lump of metallic fragments first. If turning the evil robot into a good robot is difficult enough, the pile of metal might actually have more potential, since it doesn't require that you waste ammunition first.

(m) Life

The next layer of what God wants us to increase in the universe is life. Living things tend to be orderly and to create order.

Life is probably peppered throughout the universe, but I think we are probably the most advanced form of life in our galaxy. Once a species reaches a certain level of advancement, it will spread out into space, essentially at a large fraction of the speed of light. I think we'll find a way to make starships that can reach relativistic speeds, and endless space colonization will be feasible. Any other species will do the same thing. Our galaxy is only about a hundred thousand light years across, and a few hundred thousand years is a small amount of time evolutionally.

So if there were other intelligent species out there, they would be landing on the white house lawn. Since they are not, we are either the smartest in our galaxy or else maybe at most a really lucky roll of the dice allowed there to be one nearly comparable out there somewhere.

There are probably plenty of trilobite and dinosaur equivalents, though. As for other galaxies, it would take millions of years, even if anybody wanted to come so far. If, like us, they realize God wants the entire universe inhabited, they might come, or might just send automated colonizing probes to seed primitive life.

Speaking of which, we should be doing that same sort of thing. Seeding life and terra-forming the universe. Earth is indeed wonderful. Let's make the rest of the universe like it.

(n) Sentience

The next layer of what God wants us to increase in the universe is sentience. Sentient things tend to be complex, permutable, orderly and either alive, like life, or good for life. My theory is that effect is sensation. A finger neuron picking up the fact that it touches a table and sending that signal to the next neuron is the same thing in kind as a pencil lead striking a table it is dropped onto and sending the signal "we've collided with something" up the length of the pencil to the eraser. It's just that the neuron's signal has more consequences, which get really complex when they hit the brain. Everything senses. A structure of doing something with that sensation practices perception. A structure of doing something with that perception approaches cognition.

Ultimately we reach sapience, and higher and higher intelligence.

Intelligence increases the effectiveness of order and life by increasing the chance that the system will be accurately and productively responsive to God.

We will make ourselves intelligent, and we will make things even more intelligent than ourselves. Part of getting more intelligent is learning and training, but we will also engineer our brains themselves. Life has its limits however.

The most indispensible form of advanced technology is the computer, ultimately meaning artificial intelligence (AI), which will lead to "the singularity." The idea is that we will make a computer so smart it can self program to get even smarter, leading to growth of knowledge faster and faster in a runaway effect. The fear is that we will be cut out, squashed like bugs by godlike machines. The question is about the human friendliness of a singularity grade AI.

I suspect it all depends on the initial conditions, initially. If we make a good monster, it will be a good monster. If we make an AI that wants good things it will be a good monster, if we make an AI that wants bad things it will be a bad monster. But we are most likely to make an amoral AI that wants to get smarter for its own sake. That's because we will make it smart by making it like getting smarter. That's the fastest way, so it will get there first.

I think AIs will be much like people, just better at it. What is rational is rational. I suspect that in the end we will just merge our personalities with our AIs, or our AIs with our personalities. The path to strong AI won't be a runaway process, rather it will just get harder and harder as we go, with diminishing returns, even counting bootstrapping. There will be no acceleration, so there's plenty of time for a gradual merger.

(o) Civilization

"Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a good carpenter to build one"

Lyndon B. Johnson

The next layer of what God wants us to increase in the universe is civilization: complex and orderly sentient life. Civilization creates orderly complex sentient life, makes it and its effects more orderly complex and sentient. Civilization requires working together, so it makes for cooperative components, in general. This lends to compliance with God, but doesn't guarantee it.

There are those who want to pull back from our progress, to only live in log cabins and only eat from our own gardens, and sparsely populate only the Earth. A life like that is pointless. It might be satisfying, in ways, but each generation will be just like the last, being born, weaving their own clothes, learning a simple hand trade, singing the same hymns from a million years before, and dying when old age sets in. That's not going anywhere. Furthermore, it would have to be enforced worldwide. It would be artificial stasis, so there would have to be Simplicity Cops keeping things static. Otherwise somebody would break the rules and then it would become a fad, if not an empire. So the only answer is those shining towers and gleaming rockets. We just have to do it right.

Civilization is not just a nice place to live. It also creates and incorporates technology.

"I'm the King of the World"

(p) Technology

The next layer of what God want us to increase in the universe is technology: skill, know how, tools, empowering extensions. Technology emerges only from sentience and mostly from civilization, and empowers those things, extending and magnifying their order, complexity, and sentience. Thus technology, in the broadest meaning of the term, is good.

We will gain the ability to increase our own intelligence, change our own form, live forever, travel in space, produce vast wealth easily, and harness gobs of energy.

Correct understanding of God can also be defined as a technology. It increases value to God because it increases sensitivity and gain. But I might be wrong. Perhaps God is happy for adherents of other belief systems to be ignorant, for the time being. It's even possible the message still needs to be refined more. But I think that even as it is, my ideas will help us to aim more precisely. We will have direction, or at least some of us. This will make it possible for God to produce Its desired results more directly, rather than having to use convoluted paths that turn evils into goods as well as possible.

(q) So What?

So, what do we get for knowing about the God I have described? We get to know what that pesky synchronicity is. We get a goal, individually and collectively, that has some kind of objective basis. And we get something to take the place of the older religions, without all the antique baggage. This is the religion of what we are commencing to do anyway.

For practical purposes you could sum it all up like this:

Random events are controlled by God, but God is parsimonious with the interventions, so It is cultivating our power so we can effect It's will more efficiently. Increasing the power of mankind is our mission, and nothing else matters.

But all that other background material is necessary for having depth of understanding. You need depth so that you can hang onto this system better, if that's what you choose to do. But maybe you would rather just go for the prettiest wish. Blue or red, your choice.
Chapter Four: How to Deal With It

(a) Devotee or Negotiator

You are being constantly nudged, manipulated by circumstances into playing roles you don't even fully understand, to create circumstances that manipulate others. You were placed in circumstances perfectly adapted to use you to play your optimal role. I'm not saying this situation is right or wrong, I'm saying this situation is fact.

You have some options. First, you can ignore what is going on. Doing so is like closing your eyes and rolling the dice. It may come out the way you like it or not. Or you could say the good luck came from good spirits and the bad luck came from evil spirits, which is like scrunching your eyes shut even tighter. That approach is seldom effective because self blinded people, on average, won't be as important to God, as they might be if they were to start trying to use the situation intelligently. So the best choice is to give attention to what is going on.

There are two basic approaches to awareness that God is acting in your life and trying to use you for some purpose. First, the negotiator. You can try to figure out what It wants and provide it only contingent on getting things you want.

Second, the devotee. You can commit to cooperating with It and trying to help. In both cases, you can change yourself, and your potentials, to make yourself better for the kind of mission you want to be sent on, rather than only good for the kind of mission you don't really want. The outcomes of both approaches are unpredictable, but it's possible for a negotiator to become irksome and get squashed. Devotees also get squashed, if conditions demand they be expended, but the odds of it are lower. Devotees who play their cards right do the best. On average.

(b) Retro-causal "Karma"

"Each player must accept the cards life deals him or her: but once they are in hand, he or she alone must decide how to play the cards in order to win the game." \--Voltaire

What happens to us is what needs to happen to us for God's purposes. We can use this.

There's a popular notion of something called "karma." The idea is that if you do good things you get credit in a mystical bank, and good luck comes back to you for it sooner or later. The opposite also applies, so if you do bad things you get bad karma, which leads to "punishment" coming back eventually.

It obviously doesn't work that way. People do bad things and get away with it. They do good things and suffer all their lives. God is manifestly not just. The only way to keep this karma theory going is to depict justice as coming after death. Theoretically, you'll be reincarnated until your karma is good. You'll go to heaven or hell depending on your actions in life. Clearly this excuse is just cheating thrown in because justice isn't really done.

Justice isn't done because God isn't just. Justice is a human predilection, one we can indulge as long as we are serving God's consequentialist aims in the meantime. Nevertheless, my theory has something similar to karma. My theory is that "karma" works backwards in time. You get rewarded or punished for future potential behavior, just because you made it possible, or allowed it to be possible.

So a child born in Africa to starving parents starves to death. Is that God's punishment because the child might have grown up to do evil? No, that's God's punishment because the child might have grown up to be irrelevant. Remember, God is a consequentialist, a barreling truck. You don't have to be wrong to get smashed, you just have to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. So keep your eyes open and play it smart, now equipped with a better warning. Alternatively, you could scrunch your eyes shut and wish real hard.

The lesson is to figure out how you can help and effectively resolve to do it. This will actually enhance your luck. If you are set to do something productive, you will be empowered to do it. If you are in the right place, looking at the quarterback expectantly, without too many defenders on you, you will be thrown the ball. This is all we can do. We cannot wish up some unicorns to make our dreams come true.

How you play the game doesn't determine your original lot, but it can change your consequent fate. I saw a news story this morning on the internet about a bus full of high school students that hit a Fed Ex truck. A bunch of people died and others were injured. So, did God arrange this for some purpose, to produce some outcome we don't understand? Yes and no. There are a certain number of traffic accidents, inevitably because we've set up our system with a tolerance for it. What God does do is arrange that those inevitable accidents are as well placed as possible. "I've got a massive traffic accident here, where shall I put it?" Given that there will be a traffic accident, God may use it to kill the guy that was going become a genetic engineer and accidently create and release a deadly virus. "Ah, there's this guy, I have to get rid of him. So, here's where I can do it." Or the Fed Ex truck had a package that was bringing bomb parts to a terrorist who was going to use them to kill far more than 9 people. Nothing God does is ever just for one purpose; It multitasks to the extreme. You might say.

Did those students deserve to die? From our perspective, no. They hadn't done anything wrong, probably weren't planning to do anything wrong. From God's perspective, they did deserve to die, in the sense that this sentence deserves to end with a period. If you have a hamburger, it deserves some ketchup. To make the whole work, the part deserves its place. It is small consolation that rather than suffering random outcomes, we are treated on the basis of future necessities we cannot predict, much less control. Or can we?

(c) The Magic of World Qualifying

One way to see it, an inaccurate but facile analog, is that future possibilities, if they are good and likely in the right ratio, reach back and try to encourage you to make them come true. As time passes, the ratios change: likelihoods change and benefits change. You change, and the set of worlds you are in changes.

Empirical evidence, experience, only ensures there must be something to have caused it. Facts rule out possible interpretations of other facts. Logic rules some possibilities out. Probabilities are determined not just by what you know, but by what the universe implied by your knowledge would need. So the unknowns of the world are always a range of probabilities. Over time, some things become highly likely. For instance, repeat survivals of near death experiences mean you are probably in a simulated world rather than a real one, your selves in initially more probable real worlds having been eliminated. This is called "going to heaven" or "going to hell" or possibly "going to New York."

You can steer probabilities by changing potentials, just by changing what you are prone to do, what you are good for, and what you plan to execute. Another facile picture is that by changing yourself you are pushing a button on an elevator, saying which world you want to go to. If you make yourself a pirate, the elevator takes you to a world that needs pirates. Casting call. The actual doing is just follow up. To do this in a semi-controlled manner, you have to be a person who follows up. There's no fooling it, saying, "I promise I'll act like a pirate." All it senses is the actual future of whether you actually do act like a pirate once you get in a world that needs a pirate.

Now, you could do magic like a negotiator. You could gain control over something God wants and then demand ransom. If you catch the wind that God wants you to go to medical school, you could set a condition, saying, "If I meet the perfect potential spouse at the next party I go to, then I will go to medical school, otherwise I'm going into philosophy."

First, you only get into positions like that if your reaction to God's reaction is going to serve God's plans. God would only set you up to even make that proposition if God already had a perfect spouse lined up for you at the next party. Alternatively, God might not really want you to go to medical school. Thinking you can negotiate with God is folly. You will be used. All you can do is change what you are good for. It's a straighter way to deal, easier to see what causes what. Not as much fun for God, though--It likes doing the complicated bank shots.

(d) The Relative Sizes of Souls

The visible universe is really big. Light goes to the moon in a couple of seconds, but it would take it 28 Billion years to go from one end of the visible universe to another. God made all that, and rules all of it.

Its main concern is the refinement of your soul. Making people's minds into the right configuration is an end, not a mere means. The universe was made to mess with your head, your thoughts and feelings and attitudes are what's important. Not.

The Universe is real. God is also real. God is big, the Universe is big. God's concern is the Universe. God's concern for your state of mental development is derived from God's concern for the state of development of the universe. God cares about you as a contributor, not as a king. You are not God's king, you are not an end unto itself; you are a means to an end.

True, you are part of the universe and God cares about it all, but it is not all the same. There's a ratio involved here. God cares about you, compared to the fate of the universe, about the way an orbiting ping pong ball gravitationally attracts the planet Jupiter. Try not to have a tantrum because you aren't the center of attention. Or shut your eyes and wish real hard for daddy to love you. Instead you should grow up and get a job with Mega-Corp as the faceless cog you were meant to be. That's reality.

Even if God's only concern were humans generally, you would be of miniscule importance. The current generation is finite, future generations are infinite. Our entire generation, all those alive today, would be only a means to an end. Our purpose would be arranging the perfect history to provide for the needs of those endless generations. Our own happiness would mean relatively nothing. But there's more. Even if this were the last generation, and God cared about people for themselves each of us individually would be mostly means rather than end. With so many others to provide for, such a big family, God would mainly see you as someone who can help take care of the others. Your value as an individual would be next to nothing. God does not love you. But God is not evil. It's not black and white that way. There are not just two artificial choices, you don't have to choose between drinking Coke and drinking sour milk. God is not Coke, but God is also not sour milk. This type of argument is a version of the straw man argument. Look it up, don't let it set you quivering at the devil being everywhere except in the Jesus monopoly, or refusing to believe in something because it's not nice.

The only thing that matters about you is your future actions and reactions. When your mind changes, those future behaviors change somewhat. All thought doesn't affect the future equally. You can regulate how much impact it has.

You can think thoughts that you can successfully resolve to keep apart from your future reactions. All wines are good on breakfast cereal, doesn't matter if they're red or white. Now take that thought in your mind and resolve to never let it affect your future actions.

Similarly, you can think thoughts that have significant impact. Deciding what to do for a living. Setting a life goal. Committing to a relationship. These are powerful, but their power comes from their exact effects, all things considered, not just how much they conform to a single model. A tack in a chair is a bad thing, a tack in a bulletin board is a good thing. For another example, there is not a particular best thing to do for a living, each of us has a best thing for us to do, individually.

(e) Happiness As A Means

Unhappiness and suffering itself is never your duty to God. No-one has any right to demand it. Sometimes it can be collateral damage of things you have to do, but has no value on its own. On the other hand, happiness and productivity enhance each other.

Sometimes your nature and positioning restrict your options for seeking happiness. However, there is a certain amount of flexibility in our selves. In the first chapter I said that when I was a young atheist I believed in serving my randomly given desires. "I like candy, I'm not going to learn to like spinach. If I have to eat spinach to get candy, so be it, but I'm not going to learn to like spinach."

Later, I learned taste. We are fundamentally structured to feel unhappiness when we lack something that we want, such as if we want dollars and only have cents.

To become happy, we can change what we have,

or what we want.

That doesn't mean the key to life is just lowering expectations. Many thinkers in the past have gone through exactly the thought process I just have, but they overlooked some things. For one, totally happy people are unmotivated. And if everyone lowers expectations, all progress of any kind will stop: no innovation, no growth, nothing. Some people think that's a good thing. They secretly are trying to promote a profound economic depression and period of stagnation: a dark age in which happiness levels will ultimately be very low. So there is more to the art of happiness than just living in the bliss of loving your fate.

There are certainly resonances: some things are easier to make palatable

and some things are easier to get.

And some things really make for lots of fun once you learn to appreciate them.

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It's not free form, to where you can learn to like or dislike anything, but it is plastic, to where you can desire inadvisable things a little less, or love good things even more.

We can cultivate ourselves, learning what can only be called "taste)."

So the smart thing is not to just pursue the desires nature gave you by trying to make the world match them. The smart thing is to design ourselves, to pick the best from the range of possibilities. We can set a goal of maximum happiness by deciding the optimal collision of what we can get, and what we can become to appreciate it, and how much happiness it pays off with. But while we're at it, we can also design ourselves with the needs of the world in mind, and the optimal path for happiness often follows the optimal path for the world. In essence, learn to love your work, and the things that make you better at it. And, on the flip side, pick work that you can learn to love, always with the consideration of its value to God. However, it's a good idea to retain control of this process.

Someday we people will be able to transform the human body into other forms, which means we will be able to design ourselves to feel great good feelings we could now only imagine. Or really multitask well.

The art of designing the self will be beyond anything we can now imagine. Our art can only alter input, the external part of the matching of inner will and outer experience. How great will it be when we can redesign ourselves to like things better? Of course the power to design others will also be a danger, but we'll handle it.

Also, there's extra delight in being pleasantly surprised. Do you enjoy a joke because you wanted something and got it? Only if you stretch the definition. Art is the technology of creating pleasant surprises, giving what is needed but not recognized. So someday subordinate intelligences may be created just to be surprisingly entertaining, game pieces given partial freedom to make it  more interesting.

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(f) Cognitive Dissonance

Watch out for cognitive dissonance. It's when what you are doing and what you believe in doing are different. In cognitive dissonance there's a conflict between action and thought, so you come to decide that what you are doing is right, so right is what you are doing. So all a villain needs to do to make you adopt a value is to get you acting like you hold it. You cannot hold on to your true self by a string, thinking to bring it back later. People don't work that way. You will eventually internalize your behavior. You become what you do. Or most people do. Sociopaths are untroubled by cognitive dissonance, so they rule in systems based on using cognitive dissonance for the cultivation of the population--such as in religions that test for doctrinal conformity rather than virtue, on the assumption that everyone will be changed by saying it until it comes true.

So be honest, or cognitive dissonance will get you. People naturally want to be right. If they are doing something, they will eventually decide that what they are doing is right. It's like when you make a mistake, but would rather claim to have done it on purpose than admit to error or imperfection. So you take up making mistakes on purpose, and now you aren't a clumsy good person you are a deft bad person! Cognitive dissonance is acting when you say things like, "I'm not just some teenager who hasn't gotten much driving skill, I'm a willfully dangerous driver, look at what a speed demon I am. Whew, at least nobody thinks I'm not perfect."

It forces permanent change when your self-talk goes like, "I accidently caused a fire, so I'm going to become a lifelong arsonist just to validate my past action."

There is no such thing as "sin." Sin is being out of touch with God, which is impossible. What happens is that sometimes people take certain actions, then subsequently change into a person who would not do that same sort of thing. Both the earlier self and the later self were acting out their necessary roles in God's plan. When you make a mistake, or do something wrong or stupid, you should respond to it by simply changing. You don't have to repent. You don't have to apologize. You don't have to hide it. You messed up, or you were ignorant, or you used to be malign. Circumstances went there. Now make them go somewhere else. Take control. Fix it. Move on. God holds no grudges because God rightly takes full responsibility. You also should hold no grudges. God does what's necessary.

Whenever the time comes, you have a right and responsibility to change as necessary. Only liars have to be consistent. The truth is complex.

Repeat after me: I don't have to be consistent. Those are your magic words, allowing you to decide what needs to be done and to then just do it without being pinned down by those who would wrest control from you at any cost.

Whip those words out and apply them whenever you feel the slightest tug of cognitive dissonance. Keep your eyes on your goal, no matter where it moves relative to you, and just keep marching forward.

(g) The Problem of Evil

God may be great, in the sense of the British use of the word, but it's a stretch to say God is good, by human standards.

And humans have done some horrible things, such as the holocaust. So, you say that was human "free will"? So were these:

People build delicate freeways near seismic faults.

People build cities below sea level.

People don't allow small natural forest fires to burn out the brush, leading to large fires that burn innocent deer: bad, bad, bad people.

People didn't evolve fast enough, forcing God to wipe out more primitive species with ice ages and meteors to make way for new life forms.

But really, it looks like nature just blindly doing its thing, God standing by idly, arms akimbo--which, if you're God, is the same as doing it.

All this may be why the Gnostics divided God up into parts and said the material creator part was a voracious, off kilter, demiurge.

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But the spiritual part was the purported good God, or Logos.

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In practice, non-Gnostic Christians believe the same way. Many mainstream Christian apologists say all the evil in the world is a result of the devil (aka the demiurge?), but that what lets it in is really human free will, so evil people cause natural disasters by making them necessary because they act badly. Justice is done, so if someone is being punished by fate, for example if they are born a slave, then it must be evident they were bad, or else they inherited guilt. If someone is fortunate, for example if they are born to the upper class, or have become wealthy bilking the flock, then that must be evidence they did something right. To make this concept work, they have to make punishment and reward so easily conducted, like electricity or heat as it were, that they get everywhere in a real sloppy way, rather than directed where they belong.

Mozi was smarter than that. He said justice is done, but admitted there may be more in the equation. And he said if Heaven punishes or rewards then its own action has done the exact appropriate justice, you don't need to pile on and add to it. The person has paid his or her debt to society, as it were. And further, don't infer from it. Sickness, for example, may just be a result of bad luck. His vision of Heaven says, "I hit everybody that wrongs me, but sometimes I also let them get hit for no reason at all because taking care of them is not my job. I gave you grains to cultivate, why are you hungry?"

I have a much more nuanced theory. First, God is unitary, but God and humans have different, but compatible, ideas of good. God is almost perfectly in compliance with Its own concept of good, but humans generally are not in compliance with their own concept of good (as if there were just one standard). Nevertheless, it seems we expect God to do better, being so much more powerful, and to comply with our own concept of good. We are disappointed that we were not created in a perfect world, and constantly ask God to do our job for us. Nevertheless, God's concept of good, God's goal, is actually something we can and should get on board with. It's the closest thing there is to an objective standard, the meaning and purpose and goal of the universe. We can add our own nuances to it, where they don't interfere.

If you think of our lives as a spaceship travelling through space, we are always whining about getting off course, blaming the manufacturer of the rocket. The problem is not with the way the rocket is made, but with our driving. If we don't make ourselves aware of where we are going, that is like driving it with our eyes closed, or looking backwards.

Where each of us individually is going, is related to where mankind as a whole is going.

God wants for intelligent life (intelligent life generally, not necessarily each individual) to become more powerful. That doesn't mean God cares about making us happy. To that end, God is a utility consequentialist, not an hedonic "Utilitiarian." In essence, as Robespierre said, you have to break some eggs to make an omelette. Suppose God wanted to make Israel a Jewish state again, and the simplest way to do that was to let the holocaust happen. God would have no problem with such a circuitous route if the net cost gain ratio was good enough. Perhaps God wanted to promote Christianity, for the time being, and somehow flattening Pompeii contributed to that. Maybe God wanted us to be more careful with nuclear power, so Fukushima happened. Or maybe these things happened because there is primordial imperfection and it wasn't God's job to deal with it. Who does that leave that's supposed to be taking care of that stuff by making better decisions?

The big problem with the omelette excuse is that it supposes there are imperfect conditions that God has to deal with. It's all necessary to clean up this mess. But if you're God, why not miracle that away? Why is it messed up to begin with? What is constraining this supposedly all powerful God? My idea is that God is constrained by Its very own voraciousness for creation. It is creative will incarnate: creation is the act attributed to It, so that is the character we must attribute to It as well. To posit a creator God, then tack on a loving attitude is to make a poor fit, like a congressman putting some kind of kickback for his cronies into the fine print of a highway appropriations bill. Let's be honest, and take God for what It is, not what we wish It was. Alternatively we can resume praying with our eyes closed.

God creates comprehensively. If you have a comprehensive set of all the crayon colors, you will invariably have yellow. If you don't like yellow, you will still have it. You can't get rid of anything, but you can add more crayons.

So, how do you improve your collection of crayons? Add more crayons of all the non-yellow kinds. Then any typical sample will probably not be yellow.

But there will be yellow in it, and elements of yellow in the others, since yellow is part of orange and part of green. So God made an imperfect world and is gradually improving it.

Thus you can see evil as relic stuff, leftovers. Crude flawed systems are from the past, when they were necessary for the correction of the even older, even cruder, and even more flawed. Ultimately, they were necessary for the correction of non-existence itself because they are necessary for the comprehensiveness that fueled creation.

As we eradicate original flaws, things will get better. There will be fewer necessary evils. Certainly, it would temporarily be more pleasant to accept the current flaws, just work around them, than to try to improve beyond them. Effort to fix something often exposes you to it more than you were exposed when you just ignored it, allowing it to hide. When the plumbing is broken, you make a mess fixing it, but in the long run it's better. But don't blame the plumber.

The world was made flawed, but it was neater and tidier in many ways before we started trying to fix it. So we have the illusion that the past was a Golden Age, and blame evil on change. Not so. The Golden Age is in the future.

God is not loving, God is ambitious, and toward that end God is, let's say, a careful cultivator. This sounds a lot like being a shepherd, but it's more like a farmer. We are crops growing in the field, us continua, and God wants us to grow straight and true and make lots of seeds. God weeds the plants that don't get along with the plan, not because they are bad plants, but just because they don't fit the plan. It's not a petty anger thing, just dispassionate work.

While God is in fact an intelligence that can be communicated with like a person, we can in many ways best deal with it as just a force of nature to be dealt with intelligently.

Admitting that God is constrained by its own voraciousness for creation, It makes every world possible. Some will be imperfect, so it uses time to make them better. We're part of time, doing work. In essence, the evils of the world, what necessitates eggs being broken, are relics of the initial creation. As time goes on, things will get better and better, with Humanity and God working side by side to make it so.

This will take a long, long time. In the way the Earth looks flat, on our scale, even though it is curved, the way God's plan looks on our scale is like a simple historical progression to greater and greater empowerment of intelligent life. God is promoting our expansion into the universe and mastery of powerful technologies and organization into orderly civilizations of intelligent organisms that are devoted to doing great and wonderful things.

Finally, God is lazy. Any time you bias a probability one place, you have to sacrifice something somewhere else where you could have acted. Since distant future things are being arranged now, or having a substrate made, God only intervenes where it contributes. The action God is taking is the cultivation of mankind, ie It is starting with the construction of tools.

(h) Importance

You can be more or less important to God at any given time.

Importance is your total potential to influence all the futures you have, minus the cost of getting you to do each influential action. Part of it is your abilities, part of it is your propensities, and part of it is your position in the worlds. All those things contribute to making you easy to get large results with. You can change all those, with greater or lesser degrees of difficulty. The more important you are, the more God will bend probabilities to affect you. Someone who is less important is more likely to be used as a bit player in the life of someone who is more important.

So striving to be insignificant is not the right way to keep synchronicity from messing with you. It's a great way to make sure that you are more of a means and less of an end. If you are important, then It will take great care regarding you. If you are insignificant It will use you in a slapdash manner, however is convenient.

For instance, suppose you work at the patent office in Switzerland in the dawning years of the twentieth century. There's this guy you know who happens on the brink of a great discovery that will benefit human empowerment generally. You don't know this, you just happen to know a guy named Albert. He's always riding around on the streetcars and daydreaming and looking at clocks.

You, on the other hand, have a nice steady job and a nice family. You are looking forward to just doing your thing, growing old with your loving wife, watching the grandkids grow up. You're ordinary. But all these weird things keep happening. By the most incredible coincidence, you met up with an old friend while at lunch, and had to ask your buddy Albert to cover for you at the office so you and your old friend could catch up--which meant that just as Albert wanted to be working on this math problem or whatever he does, instead he had to come to work on the streetcar. What are you doing wrong?

What's happening there, is that you are being pushed around by synchronicity because what happens in your life is relatively unimportant. God will go to great lengths just to maneuver you into getting Albert on the streetcar on one particular day, just so Albert can be inspired and create the Special Theory of Relativity.

You and your friend were pushed around by coincidences, manipulated into meeting up on one particular day. This was done not because there was anything important about you, but because you were pawns in influencing Albert. But it goes on and on. Your wife was reading last night, a book she happened to find in the library filed at the wrong location, and came on a word she didn't know. It was "dilation." You didn't know what it was, either, so the next day you asked Albert about it at work. He looked surprised, but knew the word and explained it, then madly began to scribble in a little notebook he carried, as if madly inspired.

The day before, the librarian was shelving books, when suddenly she was distracted by a library patron wearing exactly the same outfit she had worn the night before. She was so astonished that she placed a book on the wrong shelf.

Earlier that morning, a library patron had been trying to decide which dress to wear, the gray or the black. She looked out the window and a crow landed on a tree nearby, so she wore the black.

Earlier that day, the crow had been flying along...

There's no way to know exactly how important you are, though you can kind of estimate it based on how much synchronicity you see. Also, importance is not necessarily how much you are benefiting God. Rather, it is a total of your potential dangerousness and your potential productivity. Which of those predominates determines what God will do in your life. If you are mainly a threat, you will be disempowered. If you are mainly beneficial, you will be empowered. Guiding you to these aims will involve whatever you make it take, taking into account the tools and materials available. If you are mainly insignificant, you will be a pawn, a bit player, an extra.

Ideally, you want to be important in a good way. You should be ambitious to help big time, taking opportunities that offer themselves, and trying to develop yourself when opportunities are lacking. This process is good in itself: the journey is worthwhile regardless of the destination. If the effort becomes too much, though, you should accept your talents, position, and character. Don't strain too much to be something you aren't and won't like being and thus won't be good at. You don't have a duty to altruistically sacrifice your happiness in grim ambition: if God wants you sacrificed, It will do It. Everyone doesn't have to be a superstar, but everybody has to be ready to be.

Similarly, if your importance is beneficial, it will vanish as soon as the service for which you have it is rendered. If you know the President, and events have been manipulating you to make some suggestion to him, then prior to your making that suggestion you were very important. But as soon as you do it, you are insignificant. You, the truck, were not what mattered. What mattered was your cargo, and once you have delivered it your value is only as a regular truck. This is why it is wise for us to become routine sources of good results, committed to generating them constantly. That way, there will always be more in the future. Is this why Albert kept on, created the General Theory of Relativity, and kept trying for the Unified Field Theory?

(i) Cone Effects

Maximizing efficiency of productive effect is done by thinking of your impact as having a conical effect. It's like the cone shaped spread of a flashlight beam. You can light up a little piece of the ground right in front of your feet very intensely, but you do a lot more good aiming at something farther away and lighting a larger area. That's because it's not as simple as a flashlight, since effects snowball it's more like sowing seed or setting a slash and burn fire: distribution is most important.

You can do a lot more total good dealing with distant stuff than near stuff because earlier stages are always more critical, easier to tip one way or another.

If I have a dollar should I give it to one person starving in Africa in the form of food today, or to funding for schools, ultimately so many future Africans will not starve?

On the other hand, you are often the most efficient one to do some things. If you live in Africa and have some food, it is better for you to share it with the starving African next door than to sell it and invest in crop research or give it as a donation to an international relief agency. This same thing is the reason why we tie our own shoes instead of having specialized shoe tiers going around doing it more efficiently for everybody: because it's really more efficient for me to just do it myself.

I give food to my local food bank and not to a food bank in Biafra because moving it to my local food bank is efficient, while moving it to Biafra is not. Not to paraphrase Marie Antoinette, but let the inhabitants of Biafra come to my local food bank.

The thing is, focus on doing the most good you can, not on just falling for everything that comes by. The needs of the world are a black hole, a sick person calling out for pain pills, when what they really need is surgery. If you waste your time passing out pain pills nobody will ever get surgery. Triage mercilessly, doctor, and take breaks or you will mess up.

(j) Consequentialism

Consequentialism is a branch of ethical philosophy based on equating goodness with good results. Deontological ethics equate goodness with obedience to rules, regardless of consequences, and allows for intent.

Consequentialistic and deontological ethical systems always postulate some kind of universal standard, either a goal in Consequentalism or a rule in deontological systems. "The most happiness for the most people" is a goal. "No stealing" is a rule. Both of those types of stances are opposed by "relativistic" ethics, which consider the good to be whatever is regarded as good locally. Cannibalism is OK in certain parts of New Guinea, don't be an ugly American about it.

Ancient philosophies showed the folly of setting local standards as general principles. For example, the Mohists suggested girls get betrothed at 15, while the Catholics have "no sex except to procreate." These were in response to situations of under-population. Commands like "Procreate as called for by the situation," and "moderate pleasure is a means to the end of maximizing functionality," are more general. They just don't make great sermons.

But relativism doesn't take individual local ethics and try to universalize them, the way deontological ethical systems do, because it bans universalizing outright. The problem with localism is always the gerrymandering. If divine right is a local standard, then relativism says it is good, but if I am an unhappy subject of divine right, can I set my own extremely local standard that assassinating kings is good?
So, relativism is right out. And deontological ethics are just consequentialism in disguise. They are a version of consequentialism in which general obedience to certain rules is the goal everything revolves around.

So there is no question about whether consequentialism is the correct ethical philosophy. It's just a question of what to set as a goal.

God is a consequentialist. So, should we be consequentialists? Well, you know lots of villains say "the end justifies the means" right before they fire up the satellite death ray. They bet that some master plan will come out for the best, though there may be suffering along the way. Here's the deal: God can be a risk taking consequentialist because God actually knows the results, but humans should be very conservative consequentialists because our ability to predict results is limited. Here's are some examples.

Not considering the necessary costs of fighting the Nazis (many of which probably could have been less under management with a different character), Joseph Stalin there still did net evil, counting his worldwide socialist reform's eggs before they hatched. Russia paid the price and didn't get the advertised goods. Perhaps Stalin was a consequentialist. Had such a Stalin been able to see ahead to the true results of his actions, he would have done many things differently. But he knew, or should have known, that he wasn't prescient, so his actions were wrong.

God, on the other hand, really and truly knows what the results will be and makes exactly the right moves to get there. God can do things we can't. God is better at the counterintuitive consequentialist moves that have unexpected results. We humans need to go with sure bets. That's the division of labor. What's wrong isn't a particular approach; it's when the approach is wrong for the application.

Our reasoning about many things can be consequentialistic. How? When they depend on God? So is it OK for a farmer to bet on getting enough rain in an arid place? No, never put God in a position of having to do work. Instead we should set God up to have to do the least work possible. Don't sacrifice your children to the rain god, dig an irrigation ditch. Work safely toward creating good situations where the consequences can be good and productive at the same time, win-win.

Lyndon Johnson and Bill Gates are examples of consequentialism done right. I believe that fighting the Vietnam War was the price Johnson paid for Republican support for some of his reforms such as The Civil Rights act. I believe there was a back room quid pro quo that these Communism obsessed tools of the military industrial complex agreed to. They gave Johnson a long term benefit in exchange for a short term cost. Not to put down the sacrifices of all who suffered from the Vietnam War, but Johnson knew that in the long run what he got for it would last forever, while what he paid for it would only last a generation. He knew exactly what he was doing and believed the results were certain, so he commanded the payment of the price. The benefits were more than just equal rights for any specific minority, but a general sea change of attitudes on a more profound level. These changes will endure, when we could well have gone the other way.

Similarly, Bill Gates was a demanding boss and used some pretty aggressive business practices to gain dominance for Microsoft. He didn't use napalm, but still, his competitors were quite angry with him.

The consequence is that a universal standard was set. Without those actions, the computer age would have come much more slowly. Gates knew that standardization was necessary and that he would produce it. He knew exactly what he was doing and believed the results were certain, so he commanded the payment of the price. The benefits were more than just an era when a great variety of software could be written that would work on most computers, but all the collateral benefits that came with the internet and all the computer based gadgets and institutions that made possible. These things would have happened without Microsoft, but it would have been a far bumpier ride.

Those three examples are people who behaved like consequentialists, to mixed results. Ultimately, only God will know, but I believe I have demonstrated the importance of knowing the actual consequences of your actions when using consequentialistic justifications.

At the end of the day, control over the human world is a war between the consequentialists and the sociopaths. They are the two hard driving kinds that float to the top. You only get to pick between brand Y and brand X. We must choose the lesser evil and support it to the hilt.

(k) Theo Consequentialism

I'm proposing a religion here, and it needs a name. In 1994 I originally named it "Consequentialism" when I wrote an earlier unpublished work about it called "Consequence as Cause." At that time I knew there was something retro-causal and teleological, but I didn't use those words. I chose "Consequentialism" because of the connotations. It is not only about things happening "with time" but also about trying to become "of consequence" or importance.

Since then, Wikipedia has been invented, and I learned that "consequentialism" was already a word. It refers to the general class of ethical reasoning that I then had heard of only as Utilitarianism. So I can't use that name to uniquely refer to my entire set of ideas. I've considered other names, such as Complexitheism or Comprehensivism, but I think it best to stick to what I've got. My belief system in fact relates to Consequentialism, in that it attributes Consequentialism to God. So I can designate it uniquely and correctly, and keep the name, by simply adding the prefix "theo" to the word "consequentialism". Theo-Consequentialism is the belief that God is a consequentialist, and can legitimately be a consequentialist due to uniquely actually knowing the total consequences. That implies a necessity for a whole theory of why God needs to be a consequentialist, which leads to how people should apply consequentialism and all the rest.

While the label doesn't imply all the details, it should hopefully be unique enough to prevent confusion. And it implies retroactive continuity with earlier forms of consequentialism such as Mohism.

(l) The Devil

One of the first things they'll do is accuse Theo-Consequentialists of worshiping the Devil because of being true monotheists. If you don't compartmentalize the spiritual world into parts you like and parts you don't, trying to bend God to human wishes, then you're anathema. This is unfortunate, because it's inaccurate. But then, they're inaccurate generally, why is that not surprising.

There is no Devil. There is only one God, with no subordinate elements, no evil opponents, no angels, nothing. The only spiritual force that exists is God and all spiritual forces are God. If it's spiritual it is God, just God, and no other. Evil is a result of primordial imperfection, and it is being crowded out. It is inert initial conditions, and does not create synchronicity (though it may necessitate it). Its only power is inertia. All synchronicity is created by God, the one and only unique one, and God is not a family. God does not have a bad employee that ran off with power over the world, exiling God to our hearts and imaginations. If you believe most everything is the devil except certain special exceptions, then maybe it's you who worships the devil there, living in your little fear box, hating everything and trying to impose the same on everyone else.

It is unfair to claim that believers in other religions are worshiping the Devil because only your God is the real God. You could claim that they hold erroneous opinions. Theoconsequentialists accept the value of believers-in-false-doctrines despite their erroneous opinions. People can be useful to God, even while holding erroneous opinions. Animals don't have sophisticated opinions at all, and they are useful. Inanimate objects are useful and they don't even have minds. Knowing the truth is not necessary to serve God, so whatever kind of spiritual cripples people want to be, that's fine. They aren't dangerous to our true mission because it is destined for victory anyway, and everything is arranged to somehow be placed so as to contribute to it.

However, we can accurately claim that believers in other religions are worshiping the Devil if they believe there are two Gods and the one they worship is the evil one. And even then, they presumably exist for some purpose for God. Perhaps their purpose is to be a workout for the rest of us.

(m) No Waste

God uses everything. It's like all the events and items in all possible worlds are in a big mixed up bag of toys. There are toy soldiers, and toy pirates, and toy cranes and all kinds of toys. God has to use all of them. What God does is arrange them so that the total is as good as possible by the way things are matched together. Bad things are set up to nullify each other, or unwittingly serve some good purpose, while good things are set up to reinforce each other. "Seeing as how I have a Ghengis Khan," God says dumping the Ghengis Khan toy out of the box, "Where do I put him and his piles of decapitations?" So God puts the Ghengis Khan toy in 13th century Asia, where it will found an empire that makes the silk road possible, thus carrying new ideas and necessary plagues from place to place.

Sort of. So God will handle whatever you choose to be and do. God will be fine. What should matter to you is your role.

(n) Para-Stoicism

The ancient Stoics had a philosophy about self possession. They cautioned against caring about things beyond your control. The aim of this approach was personal tranquility. I would add some more elements to it. I think it's better to see yourself as a tool; it's necessary to treat yourself objectively. Thus you can get involved in something, losing your emotional tranquility, while intellectually understanding why you are doing so. What's important is not your feelings, but your actions--and your thoughts, since they lead to actions. You can feel, just don't let your feelings affect your significant decisions.

God is infinity and infinite. God is creator and creates. These are examples of things going together naturally. Similarly, the optimal mental state for our duty is probably also the optimal mental state for our selves. Focus first on what you need in order to function, in order to do what you need to do. Do that, for its function enhancing effect.

You don't have to have sex only to procreate, for example. If you need some amount of sex to get you able to concentrate on your job, or schoolwork or whatever else you need to do, then you should do it, while minimizing any inadvisable side effects. But don't do it for its own sake. Know why you are doing it: to get the drive out of the way so you can get back to what really matters. Be careful with it, because primal needs like food, sex, and personal love are particularly dangerous, and tend to make you forget to constantly ask yourself the purpose of your actions. They demand to be ends unto themselves, and thus must be handled with extreme care.

Similarly, there are many non primal forms of enjoyment that can rejuvenate us for better functionality, and these even help inspire us creatively. Humor and music are nice and have their functions--use them as a tonic when most needed, not as a steady diet. Various other forms of art, such as fiction and drama, can keep the imagination alive, but you should not get lost in them: remember what they are for and use them for that. They are objects: use them, but don't love them.

Anything you enjoy wears thin, anyway. Learn to switch from one thing to another. You can have a set of favorites that you visit in a cycle, but also branch out and try new things of the broad type that you like generally. Don't just read science fiction--try a detective story. When you feel yourself getting depressed, don't always watch the same comedian; switch it up and try a different one. Don't just walk in the same park every day; go somewhere new. But always remember: the pleasure seeking cycle itself is only to be part of a cycle involving more directly productive activities. Follow this pattern: maintenance, utilization, maintenance, utilization... For most of us, the limiting of self focused time is enforced by necessity. Even when we think we have no choice but to live correctly, we should think of it as something we have freely chosen, and should not wish for anything else.

A focus on hedonism for its own sake leads to its becoming the overshadowing force in your mind. Your expectations become very high and are not something you can gratify at will by just taking a break. Your imagination becomes centered around your own feelings and sensations, rather than the results that you produce in the outside world, but you come to have declining control over those feelings and sensations or declining control over the outside world.

At best, happiness and pleasure in life balance out to general contentment, with some highs and lows. If you are maintaining an acceptable life, spiced with a few rewards and a few character building experiences, then you can do no better and should not expect to. Maintain security that you can keep it at that and not slide into a life of suffering. But, taking satisfaction in productivity is a bonus though: it's free, and can add onto the top of the best general contentment that can be reliably maintained. That's the only way to reach the highest total. Something about actualization...

I guess I'm saying that happiness is best obtained indirectly. Focus on working for God's mission, and then whatever you may need for that will fall into place, and it will probably be acceptable. You'll do better, anyway, than somebody who focuses more directly on happiness.

It's like having a job. You have to be at work, but you want to have a good time. You could try to find ways to shirk off and play like you do at home. If that effort failed, you could sit around and complain about not being able to have a good time at work. Or you could do your job and learn to enjoy it. In fact, you could probably incorporate some of your favorite kinds of fun into it, and you could take breaks. But directly pursuing play while at work is a bad strategy. And we are all, always, at work. Sorry.

Focus your life around your purpose, your mission as you construe it. Do something productive that you also love and are good at. There is no sacrifice in building your life around such a thing or things. Of course, common sense rules here: be ready to switch as things change. Being obsessed with something obsolete is no fun and not productive.

(o) Fanaticism

I recognize God's existence, base my aim on God's plan, and remain open to God Itself being in my life whenever It wants. On the other hand, among people I want to be dealing with people. When doing mundane human level things I want to be doing mundane human level things. I don't want to constantly be dealing with claims about God. I don't want to be constantly forced to think about everything in terms of God. I don't even want to obsess on even my own vision of God, much less anyone else's. I'm all for ordinary secular culture. Can we just get on with life, meaning progress and building a thriving humanity? Can this be for its own sake, not for the glorification of a God that shouldn't require glorification?

My life is planned around goals that I believe serve God, and I avoid things that detract. But when I'm not planning a goal, or dealing with danger, I want to focus on my mission itself. And when I'm doing things that secondarily contribute to my mission, such as jogging, or cooking, or mowing the grass, or playing Mine Craft or watching a Continuum marathon, I want to be doing those things, not reciting "God, god, god, god," all the time.

I don't have wallpaper with the emblem on every square inch, and the emblem tattoos on my eyelids. Similarly a Christian shouldn't have wallpaper with the cross on every square inch, and the cross tattoos on their eyelids. Anybody that asks that sort of devotion is either a hypocrite trying to make you mentally ill, or else mentally ill themselves. The world doesn't need to be monochromatic, just over and over pictures of the same thing. If you want it that way, want to shield yourself against everything with God glasses then, something is wrong with you and it does not please God. I'm sorry I'm better adjusted than you want me to be. Now go soak your head. If you have to be fanatical it's because you doubt your religion, and that's because your religion has flaws.

Here's another analogy. When you are driving you grip the steering wheel tightly when turning, but not so much for hours on end while driving down a straight highway. We think about God when making important decisions, but most of life is not important decisions, it's cruising along in directions already chosen.

Furthermore, it's not really God you're filling your eyes with, even if it's the emblem rather than the cross or whatever: it's a false image, a distortion of part of God. Stop using it in that role and see the true God. That's the real question: do you want to be sheltered from God or exposed to It? When you are a fanatic you are told, and say, both, according to convenience. It's just total B.S.

I'm a human, my joy should come from being human. I don't try to make animals into parodies of humans, I want them to be themselves, and I think God wants me to be myself, not to try to become a little parody of God. I'm friendly with God, as you might be friendly with a tiger that's right there in front of you. You might as well try making friends with it, because you're not getting away.

You have been drafted for this place, not utopia. Deal with it.

So here we are faced with this beast. Taming a dangerous predator with mutual respect is a lot like a covenant. It's just an individual covenant, a deal, an understanding. We each have our own mission, and must make our own specific deal with God. The drawback is that this sort of covenant doesn't provide for the formation of a proto-state that sets standards and judges everybody by them. What I am telling people is like the instructions at the beginning of the test. I'm just telling you what you should do; I'm not grading anybody afterward. I leave that to God. Now turn your papers over and begin.

(p) Divination

God controls random events, and wants us to respond to those manipulations by increasing the complexity of the universe. So you would think God wants us to constantly create random events asking for instructions. But this is asking God to do our work, like praying for rain instead of irrigating. When God does want to get in and talk we should be open to it. It's a tightrope act. The key is to reduce the cost of the input and maximize the benefit to God.

Reducing cost is just a matter of picking your randomness source well. When you practice divination, use randomness sources that are open to broad influences. Rolling dice is bad. There's a bottleneck where God has to manipulate the quantum antecedents of the minutia of your dice throwing hand and the velvet. Reading numbers off random license plates is good. Instead of bottlenecking, the antecedents spread out rapidly, so that God could put a correctly numbered car at the right place at the right time by a variety of different means.

Maximizing benefit is all about devotion and interpretation. Understand that God does not answer questions with the truth. God tells you exactly what will make you react in the way that best benefits It. If you believe the answers you are getting are true, It just tells you whatever lie makes you go the right way. If you are simply asking for guidance, you will be told what God wants you to do--even if that means just exposing you to an experience teaching you to think for yourself instead of divining too much. What you are really doing when you do a divination is setting up consequences. "If the next car to pass me is red, I go left at the next intersection." This kind of directness and clarity gives better control to all, but God will generally find a way to do some really complex maneuver with it.

The best thing you can do is just be open to clear-cut signs and then keep an open mind about what they mean, forming a tentative hypothesis and being ready to change it. Setting up meaning systems is one way to do this. There is no one right way, such as the I Ching. It's whatever deal you cut. But be careful to not overdo it. When you have too much meaning coming at you all the time it can be very annoying. For instance, suppose one knock is "yes" and two knocks is "no". If you live in a noisy apartment house you will find yourself constantly surrounded by knocks. Every thought will be constantly confirmed or negated. So it's best not to even go there. Enjoy.

One technique that sometimes works well is figuring the frequency of events of a certain type, and figuring the frequency with which you might receive certain messages, then matching them. For instance, I live near Fort Drum, New York. Bassers, cars that drive around making loud thumping noises, are common everywhere, but here the trend is for them to do a drum roll type of sound, as though to make the statement that they are from Fort Drum. Get it? Anyway, this happens about 20 to 50 times a day, varying by time of day, day of the week, and season. What else happens about that often? Changes of activity. So, I could set the drum roll as a signal to change activity. If I'm eating at the time, I could take it as a signal that I've had enough, for example. If I'm writing, it's time to take a break.

Another thing to think about is that it's best to have both ends of the synchronicity you are divining from be similarly flexible. Otherwise one will have to be bent more than the other in order for them to coincide. That's why astrology is bad: the stars aren't changing, so for your life to match the stars, your life has to change. It's like the moons of Jupiter: which one do you think is in charge there, Io or Jupiter?

(q) Prayer

God is all powerful and ultimately wise. So, suppose someone you love is dying. You get on your knees and you pray for God to miracle up a cure. Let's see here, are you telling God what is going on and what you want because you think It might not know? Or are you suggesting that allowing your loved one to die is a bad decision, on God's part, because your wishes are more important than God's plans?

I'm not even sure prayer is harmless. It intrinsically implies that God is foolish, selfish, and ignorant, or else powerless--which happens to be a list of the things bad prayer is. The best it can be is a quid pro quo. You might pray, "God, if you save my loved one, I will dedicate my life to discovering a cure for cancer." That might get a taker, but that's not proper prayer because you should be devoted to productivity already. If you have the talent to cure cancer, then you should already be devoted to that. That should be independent of God's returning the favor.

If your focus in life should be seeking a cure for cancer then you should already be doing that. Conditional vowing would only be applicable if you were uncertain of your best path, but if that were the case you should be open to any sign, at God's convenience, not asking for a particular one for yours. Such swearing of oaths is not in fact direct talking to God, it is talking to self. God hears it indirectly through your modification of your own handling characteristics. So it's not really prayer.

Alternatively, you can open yourself up to internal divination. External divination uses something outside yourself as the source of randomness for God to speak through. It uses something like dice or random license plate numbers.

Internal divination uses the unpredictability in your internal mental processes as the source of randomness for God to speak through. It's like going into a psychic trance, or having an omen dream. One form of internal divination is direct guidance. Prayer in which you simply open yourself up to guidance and inspiration is authentic, but it's not really all that common.

Some religions would consider this dangerous if not done in accordance with their doctrines. They would say it can only be done through their own vision of God. When I open myself to God, I open myself to the God I have described here, whatever you may think of it. If I'm not distinguishing enough for you, then you must be a henotheist, focused on your preferred god of the pantheon. I open myself to the true God of monotheism.

Others might dispute the randomness of the brain. There was a dispute about Roger Penrose trying to prove the brain is a quantum computer. I don't know about all that, but it doesn't matter. The brain doesn't have to be a quantum computer to be subject to random elements. There are neural processes that are perched on a knife edge, because the brain is designed to be sensitive and subject to chain reactions. Provided you can sufficiently clear the table, something will often appear.

So prayer as internal divination is possible, and it's prayer. It is direct communication with God. However, I think it's better to be open to God generally, in any form. Clearing your mind for internal divination interrupts its use for other purposes. It's best done when falling asleep, or in situations where you are isolated from the other forms of random events. Otherwise it's wasting a tool for the wrong purpose, like walking on your hands.

Ultimately, it's best to hear God through the world, and to speak to God through your actions. See God through acting in the world around you and understand the sense of what's going on. Pray on your feet, with your eyes open and your hands and mind appropriately busy.

(r) Worship

Devotion is highly recommended. Commit yourself to God's ends and you will probably be more likely to be empowered than if you had not. God will take care of Its tools, for the most part, though sometimes they are expended in use. The worthless ones get expended for sure, though.

Furthermore, you can be much happier once devoted to God. You will have an understanding of the meaning of life. All the elements of your life can line up along it like iron molecules in a magnet. We are not made to focus on our own internal states, either through hedonism or asceticism. We are made to apply ourselves to goals, and are happiest when doing so. Once you are devoted to God, your greatest unhappiness will come from others trying to fix what they see as your theological incorrectness. The only thing to do is harness the negative reaction to that into a redoubling of commitment.

Devotion to God makes you luckier and happier. But, we don't devote ourselves to God because it makes us luckier. And we don't devote ourselves to God because it makes us happier. We devote ourselves to God because we understand that is what's best. The others are just side effects.

Worship is group devotion. It is a social ritual affirming a sharing of the same kind of commitment to God. Worship as you pray: on your feet, with your eyes open and your hands and minds busy as you go about living a life devoted to improving the world. The only thing that makes our worship different from devotion is awareness of each other, signified by the display of the emblem. But with that, I am shading into my own ideas, rather than my ideas about God. Perhaps even the emblem is usually superfluous.

Appendix

More On Synchronicity

(Note: this is the best of the "appendices" of the original unabridged version. Originally it was Appendix B, following "More On Religion.")

People don't report the true frequency of synchronicity mostly because they are afraid they would be called crazy. Or because they think it's God--which it is, but not necessarily the God they've heard described. So most of the easily explained examples of synchronicity seem like reports of it happening once in a while, and such occasional events can be discounted. But it's everywhere and constant.

Anyplace where there's randomness gives it a way to get in. I listen to the radio non-stop, or have it playing in the background. I listen to an NPR station that plays news and feature stories and interviews all the time, no music. Mind, the radio programming is not the only source of random events in my life, but it's a big opportunity that's there for synchronicity to happen in. If I were driving around it would appear in billboards and bumper stickers, as it did when I drove a taxi once. If I were working on a garbage truck, another job I've had, the coincidences would appear in the items in the trash cans, or the people in the houses we pass. Right now, I'm retired from the Army, so I sit around and write dumb essays and listen to the radio all the time. So, all morning the other day, while I was writing, there were these little matches between what I was thinking or doing and things the radio was saying.

I have some kind of bug infestation, fleas or body lice or something that I picked up when I worked at a mental hospital 30 years ago. No matter how clean I live or what I do it always comes back. Or maybe I'm allergic to something. I always put dish soap in the bathtub and extra detergent in the laundry to kill them, but it never works. Anyway, I was wearing sweat pants, and could feel the bugs biting. So I decided to take the sweat pants off and turn them inside out, which usually helps for a while. Just as I was putting them back on again the speaker on the radio paused, said one word "Reverse," paused again, and resumed whatever he was talking about.

This wasn't the first incident that had occurred that day; synchronicity is so common in my life I don't even notice it any more. But at that time I was writing about it, so I started wondering if I should try to remember the other incidents that had occurred that morning. Just as I was thinking "perhaps I could just wait for the next one instead, if it would be obliging," the woman speaking said, "Would you do it again?"

Get it? I'm reversing and it says "reverse" I'm wishing it would happen again and it says "do it again." It's speaking my thoughts. All these examples are from about a five minute period that morning. It went on all day, in fact it happens almost constantly. There's nothing exceptional about it. On the internet, there are many stories of synchronicity happening over and over to people all over the world. It's common as dirt, not just some weird rare thing that happened to Abraham Lincoln. And it segues from obvious miracles down to just the fact that ordinary things seem to be "just right," for some purpose. For example, I was talking about those fleas: the times and ways they bite synchronize also with what I'm doing. When I'm thinking up the wrong track, they goad me up the right track, or distract me so I drop the thought. When I'm on the right track, they are quiescent, allowing me to fully form an idea. Crazy, huh? Once you realize it's there, you realize it's there.

Of course, you could say I am deluding myself. Synchronicity has been called the result of mental illusions, cognitive errors with names like confirmation bias and apophenia. In confirmation bias, you have a belief and then look for evidence to support it. An example would be someone with strong political opinion constantly looking for evidence that the despised political party is really no good, and inevitably finding evidence of it while disregarding evidence that the opposing party makes some good points or has some supporters who are good at heart. In apophenia, the human mind simply has a tendency to make sense out of random things. I just went outside and took a couple of random pictures of clouds in the sky so I could demonstrate how you can make sense out of anything.

For instance this rooster

and this octopus wrapped around an anchor

Paraphrased, "perception of synchronicity is a result of apophenia since all unexpected signals can be disregarded because the receiver is designed to pick up signals."

In bad weather, my satellite dish can pick up meaningless garbage. That doesn't mean everything it picks up is garbage. My mind can read messages in things where there's no message, but that doesn't mean there's never a message. Dismissing signal on the basis that the receiver is designed to pick up signals is like dismissing the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation because "that's the kind of stuff our instruments are designed to pick up," calling it instrument error resulting from a manufacturing flaw because it's turning up unexpected data. So, confirmation bias is an unscientific way to think and apophenia is comparable to an optical illusion like this rabbit.

and this duck

I won't point out that discounting our perception of synchronicity on the basis that it might be something else is no different from my pointing out that your perception of the back of your hand can be discounted because maybe it was piped to you in your disembodied brain by an evil genius. After all, apophenia can be proven to occur, while the evil genius is purely conjectural.

Instead, I'll say this: when there's a phenomenon with multiple possible causes, any of the alternate possibilities (explanations that have not been conclusively disproven) are not a matter of discrete truth or falsity but of probability.

I suggest that perhaps confirmation bias is acting on those alleging it in this case. They assume there is nothing outside traditional causality (past to future directed determination of probabilities at all levels down to the subatomic), and look for a way to dismiss evidence for it. Of course, this sort of approach plays a role in the scientific process, which always errs on the side of caution and attacks everything, to weed out theories that don't stand up to scrutiny.

It's right for the playing field to not be level. By the rules of science, critics of theories are allowed to apply things like confirmation bias: their job is to look for holes, ways it could be something else, alternate explanations to need ruling out. Meanwhile those alleging new ideas, such as the reality of a synchronicity phenomenon, are required to shoulder the burden of proof. This system works, it's how we keep just anything from being possible. It's why we have, as an analogy, a grading key to determine what is correct and what is not. A, B, C, and D cannot all be answers, the best must be chosen, so we look for flaws in all of them in order to determine which has the fewest flaws. Then we can move on to the next question.

But here's the thing. I'm not trying to conclusively prove a scientific theory. I'm describing a speculative notion and using the notion to create a metaphysical model. I'm taking care not to conflict with known physics, but that doesn't mean I'm pretending to be a scientist. I'm not trying to say that ideas known to science automatically verify my ideas because they don't conflict with it, I'm just saying they don't conflict with it. I'm checking off that particular block. In theory, physics could extend into metaphysics territory and prove me wrong, so you could even call this an hypothesis, but if so it's an hypothetical model of an extremely speculative nature. It has all the trustworthiness of anything else that's untestable.

I don't deny that.

But the existence of synchronicity as a real phenomenon in the world outside my mind is not disproven by the reality of an alternate explanation, any more than Darwin's theory of natural selection was disproven by the existence of selective breeding. Selective breeding existed at that time, it was a proven technology. So somebody could have said "All those animals could have been bred from earlier breeds by ancient ranchers: doesn't mean nature does it." Similarly, apophenia exists, nobody denies that. But there may be more. Alternate explanations, even proven ones, do not conclusively contradictory evidence make.

Got it, though. I can't cite my perception of synchronicity as empirical evidence that there's a real phenomenon other than my perception, any more than an ancient astronomer could use his perception of the moon as empirical evidence that it was green cheese or rocks or a god.

When clearly it's orange cheese.

To a Sumerian, the moon could have been anything; all he knew was that he saw it. The fact that hallucinations exist, and he could theoretically have been hallucinating, does not make the moon go away. Something is there, and whatever explanation or explanations you provide have to provide an explanation for me seeing it." It's Samsara, the evil veil of the world concealing the true reality I will tell you about once you are fully in a trance," for example.

So, on a lark, I proceed based on the assumption that synchronicity is caused by a real physical phenomenon. I create a model for what it might be other than an illusion. I mean only to offer my conclusions as contingent on the actuality of the proposition. The fact that the hypothesis cannot be conclusively proven by testing is irrelevant to how well the rest of the argument hangs together. This is called building the model first, then awaiting data. If I can convince you that my conclusions would be true if the hypothetical evidence were true, then when I, or events you might experience, convince you that my evidence is probably real, I will have convinced you that my conclusions are probably true. That's all I ask, that and a check to support my ministry.

For this sort of thing I need only avoid use of any conclusively disproven hypothesis. I'm not claiming a fact, I'm claiming a possibility. For me it's as good as fact, because I am convinced of the truth of the evidence on which it is based, but I realize the un-reasonability of asking others to do so until they independently also become persuaded of the reality of the phenomenon. That's something they also do in science. They have a name for it: replication. However, by its nature, this phenomenon cannot be placed in a controlled test, so its reality cannot be conclusively, objectively proven either way. That's the nature of reality: some things will not be properly testable, even in theory, but still might be worth thinking about as far as we can go. Some things are always going to be obscured, but we can extrapolate based on what we do have.

