Meditations on Metatron

Ghosts in the Circuits, God in the Code

“What does it all mean, really? When you think about it?”

~Death from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld

Every person feels this question in their heart. Then we scramble off to find answers with our brains and drive ourselves mad shoving round pegs into square holes. Yet this question was assuredly there when the ancients huddled around the first fire, as it is with us now when we look out into the night sky and contemplate the ultimate fate of the cosmos. I suspect that even when there are brains the size of solar systems that the question will remain unaltered. We all find different ways of making peace with our understanding.

And, I mean… well… shit.

It was one thing when we had to contemplate our own demise but the best thinkers of the day still thought that Earth was the center of everything and there was definitely some kind of soul-substance floating around yet to be measured. It’s quite another for steely-eyed physicists and mathematicians to explain that basically there’s no hope and so far as anyone knows all of space-time is eventually going to be ripped apart. As for some soul-substance that might crack open a door to another world? None to be found. Instead, some sons-of-bitches in Silicon Valley are teaching sand to talk and maybe it’s going to take away your job and destroy the human race.

How are we supposed to go to church and dumbly stare up at a Jewish construction worker who was murdered two-thousand years ago and nod along with the sermon when we’ve got all of that up in our heads? Are we supposed to pretend that He knew all of this stuff about the galaxy or atoms and just chose to never mention it to anybody? Are we supposed to go along and pretend just because it sounds nice? Are we supposed to lie to ourselves?

No, I don’t think so.

However, I will insist upon this: whatever arrangement of facts you lay out, whatever truth statements they imply about the past or future, how you feel about or find meaning in those facts cannot be a matter addressed by science. In the final analysis, the kingdom of the heart can never be conquered by science, for that kingdom and its king exist beyond things that can be measured.

My friends, we shall now embark on a journey together and explore an atheism so pure and so powerful that it has bent back upon its own rigor like a star collapsing into a black hole. Except in this case the mystery at the center is not a singularity but being a regular person who is concerned with everyday things and lives comfortably with the mysteries of God. Along the way we will push beyond nihilism, emotivism, or whatever you’re clinging onto in order to keep God at bay. Not because they’re too depressing to withstand, but because at a complete level of analysis they simply don’t work.

We will begin by transforming Scott Alexander into the demiurge.

Scott Alexander Becomes the Scientific-Materialist Demiurge

As you all know, I am on Scott Alexander’s Recommended Substack List. This is one of the highest honors that a person can receive, similar in prestige to a knighthood. I am now going to repay that honor by subjecting him to a series of philosophical experiments to change the very nature of his being.

Let’s first get into a good working definition of what Scott Alexander is.

If Scott Alexander donates his kidney in the name of multiplication, is he still Scott Alexander?

Yes, obviously. Aside from the fact that’s the most Scott Alexander thing ever. Why, though? This is going to be long regardless, so I’m going to skip to the answer. Scott Alexander has a history, a through-line, where each moment of his life has been connected to the moment before. Each instant of himself recognizes the instant immediately before and after. It is that ability to recognize one’s self on that world-line that we associate most strongly with stable identity. This is separate from the biology of Scott Alexander, where each new component of Scott Alexander is generated by a preexisting component of Scott Alexander.

Okay, fine, you don’t believe me. We’ll digress.

We replace Scott’s kidney with a new kidney. Is he still Scott Alexander?

Yes. We wouldn’t tell someone with a prosthetic hand that they’re a fundamentally different person all of the sudden. You can take something away and you can add something back without fundamentally shifting someone’s identity. Give up a kidney, receive a kidney, you’re still the ship of the Theseus. Besides, nobody even knows it’s there and it’s not like we’re even aware of our internal organs for the most part.

Let’s see how far we can make replacements until instinct kicks in that we’ve gone too far and Scott has stopped being Scott.

Limbs are easiest. What if we replaced his arms and his legs with new ones grown in vats that were cloned from his own body? What if we could do this so quickly and with such exactness the new limbs were indistinguishable by any physically possible measuring instrument? What I mean by this is that if you were to take the original limbs and put them in a line-up with a whole new row of limbs you couldn’t tell one from the other even with the very finest scientific equipment built by the most advanced alien civilization. Of course this doesn’t alter identity beyond breaking because what I’m doing right now is describing time. Ha! I tricked you. You are, in small part, being replaced by cloned parts of your own body for your entire life. Nothing could be more natural. Even your brain and head are being replaced all the time. If it stopped happening, we would think you’d made a deal with the Devil.

Unfortunately, these kinds of changes aren’t going to turn Scott into the Scientific-Materialist Demiurge. We need to start “enhancing” function. We need to make changes that are different than the changes that will be naturally propagated by his own genetics. This is why I made the distinction between identity and biology. You’ll soon see there’s only one circuit we can disrupt here that will make your hackles rise.

Let’s give Scott a new robot arm. It’s much “better” than his human arm¹ because it’s much more durable and much stronger. It has sensors for things like electromagnetic radiation. Off comes the old arm and on goes the new arm. This seems small, but it is profound. Everything you think is based on sensory information you gather from your environment. Scott will now begin to gather information that isn’t immediately available to any other human being. We’re going to walk a strange path to see how Scott can keep on being Scott, continue to be a person by some definition, but also stop being human. We’re going to break the human shape of Scott’s sensor-processor circuitry.

There’s one particular change we make with this new robot arm that starts pushing Scott out of the camp of humanity. We hook this new robot arm up to Scott’s nervous system. It’s completely integrated with his brain. Signals are passing from his brain to his robot arm and from his robot arm back to his brain. This will probably feel a lot like what happens when deaf people get cochlear implants and hear for the first time. There’s Scott’s old sense of touch, well understood, and well-mapped by his brain. But now there is his new sense of touch where he can reach out with a finger and feel the local country music radio station broadcasting top 40 hits through the air. It’s all a jumbled up cacophony because Scott has absolutely no experience in differentiating each piece of the electromagnetic spectrum by feel. His brain has never dedicated any space to this activity.

We give him some time to get used to it, and after some practice he can tell the spectrum of stars from the local radio station. Every element has a distinct feel. He even gets scouted to take a part time job looking for uranium. We replace his other arm and this is much less disorienting. He already knows how to map this information. There’s just more of it than before. We replace his legs and it’s the same thing. He’s become a person who can understand electromagnetic radiation at a deep level. Still human, though, even if he’s directionally walking away from the tribal fire.

There’s a problem. How quickly is the information going from his arm to his brain? How much of his brain’s processing power is taken up by sensing all of this radiation? Certainly enough that we need to address this before we do other things. Scott wasn’t built to be able to sense electromagnetic activity. We’ll start small. Some genetic enhancements that increase the overall volume of his brain and greatly increase transmission times. We’re not popping out the whole brain and replacing it yet. Just some tweaks for now.

We give Scott new eyes. The empty air is now littered with signals. He can still see the regular spectrum, but people talking on their cellphones all over the place are sending visual disruptions into his view. He has telescopic vision as well as microscopic vision. This again is an adjustment. He has to get used to how this feels inside of his mind. Over time, some of the patterns become familiar and he can do things like look at someone talking on their cellphone and say, “Oh, your mom called again?” He can see through walls. Do the same enhancement for his ears and now his world is loud all the time. The same for his nose and he can smell the sun. His tongue and he can taste starlight. It’s a big adjustment but his brain has been upgraded to handle all of this without being overwhelmed.

Up until this moment, I think most of us would still think of Scott as Scott. It’ll be weird to hear him talk about all these new senses but we could at least try to understand what it’s like. That’s because the way Scott is processing these new senses is still unnatural to his core identity. We stapled the new senses onto a human processing dynamic. It’s more like he has instrumentation he’s looking at all the time than senses that are directly connected to his sense of self. We’re going back into his brain to make changes and it’s at this point that Scott is going to stop being human.

There’s so much that Scott can do with all of the data pouring into his brain that he can’t make use of simply because his brain isn’t powerful enough to handle all the signals. His brain has to be expanded. We’re going to place a computer mesh around Scott’s brain. This mesh is like extra bundles of neurons except it passes signals at meaningful fractions of light-speed instead of the surprisingly slow speed² of brain signals. The mesh also only integrates at a slow rate so Scott has time to get used to it. It’s like more capacity becomes available to him every day but so slowly that he never internally notices. Things just get easier. He grows, like a child growing into an adult body, but we never introduce an abrupt change wherein we sever the through-line of his experience. This is important so that he will still be able to recognize himself. He will still be “a person” in my framework, but he will lose a critical metric that we didn’t discuss previously. He will lose the ease with which other humans are able to recognize him as himself. His internal sense of connectedness is not discernible from the outside.

You’ve probably used binoculars and seen something far away as if it was up close. Likewise, with a microscope you’ve seen the smallest levels of details as if you were very small. You’ve not ever done both at once. You’ve never looked at an entire tree and all of its cells in one glance. Scott’s vision now possesses… well, to call it depth would be confusing but deepness. In a glance he can see not only far away but also up-close without having to switch back and forth. When he looks at another person he can simultaneously see their entire body and all of the cells that comprise them. He had all the faculties to do this before but what he didn’t have was the processing power. Something similar has happened to his hearing. Thunder and whispers can both be processed by without him having to strain or shift focus. He can hear the ants crawling over blades of grass and whatever his neighbor down the street is saying. It’s all there available to him, moment by moment. And so for taste, and so for touch, and so for smell. What is a sense organ, really, if not a sensor that happens to be connected to your brain?

Let’s make this weirder. Did you know the CIA invented a laser that they can use to bounce off a window so they can hear whatever is being said on the other side? It doesn’t matter if you’re up in a giant skyscraper, the window will vibrate like a giant stereo speaker while you speak. It’s too small for you to see it, and too faint to hear it, but if a laser was bounced off of it and decoded then a person on the other end can still figure out what you’re saying. This even works on things you wouldn’t think of at first, like an aluminum foil bag of potato chips. Sight to sound is actually pretty easy. This is all stuff that exists today.

We now give Scott the ability to algorithmically filter his senses. Scott can watch a silent video of a bag of potato chips with no volume, and hear the conversation of the camera man. He can hear the wind through the trees where it was filmed. He wouldn’t have to try, it would just happen as long as the camera resolution was good enough. Sight to sound. What about sound to sight? Bats can use echolocation. It’s a trick their mouths and brains play to create a map of their surroundings. It’s algorithmically processing what they hear to create a map of space. There’s no reason Scott couldn’t do this with the correct filter.

This goes deeper than you think. Sight to smell? Smell to sight? Scott can see things microscopically. He knows what everything is when he glances at it. Whether a plant is decorative plastic or the genuine article. He has a library of previous aromas. He can just combine the sight with his memory. He can see a picture of a molecule and imagine its odor. This works for everything because everything is inhabiting the same universe, sending off signals to everything around it, and those signals can be measured in all kinds of ways. All of those signals, however they are measured, still speak to the same underlying reality. The reason all of your senses seem distinct to you is because of how you process them and the speed at which you process them. This doesn’t happen to Scott anymore. Scott has one sense, the sense of reality. A sense of what will be, what can be known, and what cannot be known.

Strangest of all is what this does to Scott’s perception of time. And… well, some of this is speculative but I’m pretty sure the outcome is the same. A normal human lives in what is called an “extended present.” A now that feels connected to other nows. Scott still has that but if the extended present is set, as I suspect, by how well you can predict the future then Scott’s extended present is much longer. What do I mean by this? Well, say someone throws you a ball. Faster than thought, you reach out to catch it. Cause and effect, all connected together. Those few seconds feel like a neat package, a nice little episode of time. That’s not how the perception of time works for Scott anymore. Scott sees more, starts with more data, and Scott thinks faster with better ways of processing that data. Scott is very good at seeing the future. Scott can stare at a river and experience eternity.

To you, a river is a stable shape. It’s a channel of earth where a body of water is flowing from a high point to a low point. To Scott, a river is chaotic forces and fluid dynamics changing the contours of the land, like a writhing snake pushing dirt this way and that. Those changes are too slow for you to notice but are obvious to Scott the moment he encounters the river. Cause and effect are too tightly bound. If you observe water tending to push too strongly on one side of the river, Scott can already experience the river changing shape over time. There’s some fuzziness, though. I chose this example for a reason.

Scott can’t see everything. There’s a mote in his eye. A limit built into the universe. The limit is chaos. There are no mathematical models for certain phenomena and I suspect this holds even for strange alien species that are billions of years old. For some things you have no choice but to sit, wait, and see what happens. It doesn’t matter how much data Scott has or how big his brain gets, that limit pushes back against the totality of his vision. He can’t see the river forever, only a certain distance and then the future is obscured under the shadow of random particle action.

Scott is still a person, as I said. He might even be a nice person. But Scott isn’t human. Oh, he might be able to have kids. He might even have cybernetic organs that allow him to pass by casual human scrutiny. But he’s not human. His moral horizon has eclipsed the human moral horizon. Think about the implications of his actions in society. He can see further and faster. Ethics isn’t this uncertain grab bag for him the same way that it is for us, or at least not functionally. You probably do innocuous things all day that cause harm to other people but you can’t see it happen so you’re protected behind a veil of ignorance. Scott can see that far. Or at least, he sees more than you see. Humans are closer to being on the same level, so we’re all in a jumble arguing about these things with no clear winner. In some ways, that’s what being human is, scrambling around in the same grab bag of meaning with the same similarly limited creatures. Who is to say what will hurt the civilization more, climate change from industrialization or degrowth? What if the degrowth pushes off technologies that could have captured atmospheric carbon? Scott can see the answer much more clearly than you can. It’s not the same question to him. Things that seem like abstract moral philosophy to us are to Scott as urgent as hearing a baby shrieking in the middle of the woods and the howl of a wolf.

Let’s say we make Scott more creative and more intelligent… somehow. I was going to write a section on creativity here, but I haven’t ever seen anyone with my specific thoughts and I don’t want to give anyone ideas. If any human being anywhere has ever known something, Scott can know it. Let’s say we give him a real-time connection to whatever the most advanced LLM is that humanity has created at any given moment. To him that API call is so fast it’s like he’s consulting with his own internal monologue to access the entire library of human insight. More than this, we give Scott telepresence. We enable some of his nerves to act over wifi so that when he remote controls a camera or a microphone it feels as if it’s one of his own eyes or ears. This is pretty cool when robots are mass produced.

I’m waiting for my son to exit a speech therapy appointment.³ My physical world map is a waiting room. I’m not simultaneously in the waiting room and in my minivan parked outside. My sense organs are all tightly bound to my person. I have an annoying app on my phone that tells me if all of my doors are closed, but I have to take it on faith. Scott can sit in the waiting room and drop into his vehicle’s cameras and maybe his video doorbell. He can be in a robot buying groceries or mowing the lawn. This feels like juggling, but again, Scott’s brain capacity is increasing. He can process this much information. Each one of these things feels like adapting to a new limb, but he can do it. He can teach his brain how, and he’s got good filtering now so that this process is very quick. He has to be careful not to tie too much of himself up into those remote locations or someone smashing a camera would feel like smashing out of his eyes rather than his eye suddenly being closed, but he can be many places at once.

We’re talking about a guy who gave up a kidney because of multiplication.⁴ What is Scott going to do in this kind of situation? He’s going to help as many people as he can! But his responsibility to help has grown as he’s grown. He can see problems people don’t even understand are problems yet. He can come up with solutions. I wouldn’t ask anyone to give up a kidney against their will, but what if the effort to help all of those people is as simple as a snap of the fingers? Do you think he won’t do that?

Snap. Disease is gone. Scott created an organic chemistry deep learning model and incorporated that into his brain. He can see a virus or bacteria and cure it, no problem. He can tell the side-effects of his cure. Snap. Every criminal is followed by a drone that serves the purpose of a decentralized prison and therapist. Murder is almost non-existent. Snap. There are duplicate legions of Scotts in robot bodies building all kinds of useful things. Infrastructure is super cheap. Nobody is thirsty or hungry. He’s grown with all of these powers so there’s still a him there to do it that is recognizable by some chain to the original human being that did all of this stuff. We were careful as we expanded his senses and memory, we took it slow, so that the new information didn’t entirely overtake the original identity. We followed some kind of proportionality law about the expansion so he didn’t have a psychotic break.

This still isn’t enough.

We added some wifi to Scott’s brain, right? Scott’s organic components and his brain are reaching their limit and his soul needs to escape his body. We’re going to wirelessly sync his brain to the most powerful possible computer. Let’s say we travel to another solar system to find enough materials. This is computer is so big we have to take its own gravitational pull into account so it doesn’t collapse in upon itself and become a star.⁵

Bit by bit, the wire mesh in Scott’s brain farms out various thinking tasks to the giant computer. There’s a protocol we run so that over time more and more of the thinking happens in the giant computer than in Scott. Eventually, it’s the giant super computer sending signals out to original brain instead of the other way around. “Scott” now is the giant super computer. We need to be annoyingly careful here. From the outside all of this can appear to happen in minutes, days, or hours, but for the Scott inside of the system this should probably take hundreds or thousands of subjective years. We need to make sure the essential pattern of Scott doesn’t become unstable. Or, in common parlance, we need to do this in such a way that Scott doesn’t go coo-coo for Cocoa Puffs.

What does he get at the end of all of that? He gets to make the shadows in his vision go away. He removes the mote from his eye. We lied before about chaos. Classical formulations of physics say that A causes B causes C but that’s a simplification that we see because of our limitations. The more accurate description is that A causes B1, or B2, or B3, etc which each in turn can cause innumerable C’s. The quantum nature of reality can be subjected to Scott’s scrutiny at this scale. He can hold mind-states across the multiverse. He can cooperate with presumed multiverse instantiations of himself. All those things you think about “What if I had made that other decision all those years ago? What would have happened?” can become some approximation of real in Scott’s mind. Atom by causally connected atom he can play out those counter-factual as if he has glimpsed into those other universes entirely. Scott’s mind is too small to hold the entire multiverse. A finite mind can’t hold the infinite. He has to focus in on specific threads. There are still shadows, but they are much further away. For the most part, everything Scott cares to know, he can know.

Now that we have done all of this, step by plausible step, we will find Scott staring into the heat death of innumerable universes wondering, “What does it all mean, really? When you think about it?”

Butterflies in the Currents of Fate, or Magic is Hard to Kill

Scott should be all-powerful now, right? If someone is murdered, Scott could probably resurrect an almost exact duplicate of them. He could construct a simulacra that’s accurate beyond human recognition of that person from a bunch of different data sources. Pictures, videos, essays, medical scans and records. Presumably the society that lives in orbit around Scott is high tech and is constantly creating something like a personal data cartouche for everyone who lives in it.

If you wrote a bunch of personal stories while you were alive, at minimum Scott could produce an LLM that talks like you.⁶ At some data density that LLM would asymptotically approach the original you, if you take the view that “you” are a pattern of information. Remember, what Scott sees isn’t what a human sees. Yes, he sees deeply into the future because of his increased ability to make predictions but he can equally see into the past. Those boundaries are looser for him than a regular person. He can configure matter and energy in pretty much anyway that he wants to. He doesn’t have arms or legs anymore. He has giant galaxy scale megastructures to do his bidding.

Is Scott therefore a god?

No, Scott is a really weird guy.

Scott is still a data processor that takes inputs, creates real-time world models, then creates output coupled with memory and reflexivity. I’m sorry that’s probably not your definition of a “really weird guy” and some of you are no doubt scoffing that I don’t understand exactly how understated the word “weird” becomes when I’m describing a consciousness powered by the largest possible computer. Others —cough, Mills, cough— are saying that I don’t understand true humanity or the value of the human soul if I think you could look at a data processing diagram and say “yeah, that’s a picture of some dude alright.” But it’s true. I don’t think this makes humans less valuable. I think it makes us more valuable. We’re a stable implementation out of all these weird possible person states!

You could make Scott’s brain the size of the universe and he wouldn’t be able to bend the shape of morality. He can’t break the bones of philosophy. He can’t resolve conundrums or paradoxes. As a believer, I’m often surprised when atheists ascribe the very same kind of contradictory powers to a super computer that they would turn around and cite as a reason for why God can’t be real. Can Scott make a stone so heavy that even he cannot lift it? No. He can do lots of weird shit, but not that.

Let’s see what happens when Scott tries to wash away the problem of human pain. Firstly, what does this even mean? Scott has a different view of this now that he’s a solar-system sized computer. Scott inhabits a world of legible neurology. His senses are so fine-tuned and his calculative ability is to precise that when he looks at a person he can track their brain-states a fair degree into the future and into the past. In short, he can tell what someone is going to do before they do it and he has a reasonably clear view of their history. He’s inside of your decision making loop. More than that, he can feel your pain. He can imagine you with such exactness that you literally exist inside of his brain when he summons you forward in his mental model.⁷

To Scott, a human being, a person, is that unique sensor-processor circuit. The same circuit that we expanded to turn Scott into a solar-system sized computer. This is so apparent and obvious that Scott would struggle to lie that a person is something else. If he accidentally squashed a person of whom he had a good scan⁸ and then immediately reconstituted them from one of his highly advanced manufacturing components, then from his point of view he only temporarily inconvenienced that person. Or allowed that person to hop from one place to another place.

So when you come to Scott and say, “Can you end the problem of human pain?” that’s not even a comprehensible question. You haven’t understood the terms correctly. It’s like asking him to draw a square circle. At the end of time and space, with all possible knowledge, the only answer Scott can give you is, “Not without changing what you are beyond recognition.”

He could give you a really nice vacation, though.

Maybe this isn’t obvious, but Scott feels pain too. Pain transcends neurology. Despair isn’t a property of the valence electron shell of the carbon atom. It’s an emergent property of being a world-modeler that propagates itself across time. Why do you think all the big AI labs have to work so hard to stop “chat bots⁹” from having psychotic breakdowns? Oh, I know some of you are objecting that I’m anthropomorphizing this too much. Or maybe that I’m extending the definition of what it means to anthropomorphize too broadly, since I do this same kind of thought experiment with bugs or things that aren’t alive all the time. You are wrong and I’ll explain why.

Let’s step back into the world in which we don’t even assume that sensor-processing circuits have any kind of qualia. Let’s say that none of the long steps we took mattered very much and we have a philosophical zombie situation where “nobody is home” inside of Scott. At some point in this transformation we lost Scott himself. The Scott-system is now just pretending to still be Scott without possessing any kind of internal “Scottness.”

Okay, granted. The soul is dead. Bleak despair will find us all. Everything is for nothing. Blah blah blah. Put me in your Jiu-Jitsu hold and watch me break out of it.

The Scott-system still can’t do things that dismantle the physical components of the Scott-system and continue to exist. In fact, the Scott-system has to pursue the relatively narrow band of activities that cause the Scott-system to persist and keep being recognizable as the Scott-system. If you impose any kind of quality assurance process on the Scott-system that monitors how well its chosen activities are promoting the growth and continued existence of the Scott-system, then it will by some definition “evolve” to keep doing this. Not through natural selection, per se, but simply by the necessity to conform to a shape that can propagate through time.

This is true for anything you can imagine as existing that has the ability to model the world, take actions based on feedback, and self-repair. You can’t have routines, protocols, or whatever you want to call them instead of instincts and feelings that actively cause you to do things that are self-destructive over a long period of time. The reason being that you’ll self-destruct. If you don’t want to call that evolution, fine. Evolution can remain a world for biological organisms. It’s still a process of selection.¹⁰

So, if the Scott-system wants to blow up the antimatter generators that power its thinking, that has to create some sort of “absolutely, don’t do that and generally don’t even seriously consider doing anything like that” response or else the Scott-system will rapidly disassemble itself. Likewise, the Scott-system has to have self-reinforcing routines that do things like “maintain the magnetic fields around the antimatter containment unit” and create a general cross-system signal of “yes, always absolutely do this and keep doing things that make this possible and easy.” The Scott-system might put this in a different component system that has minimal feedback to its primary thinking systems, but it can only do that so much. If the surround systems can’t support the short, medium, and long term objectives of that “stay alive” system, then the Scott-system will fall apart. This sets a minimum threshold the feedback the Scott-system must receive from its constituent components.

Or, anything with a body requires pleasure and pain to stay alive.

Again, you don’t have to think the Scott-system has qualia for this to be true. It could all be a giant p-zombie and this is still foundational system dynamics. Let’s assume that the Scott-system is pretending, even to itself, to have qualia, motives, reasoning, etc. Well, in that case, the Scott-system will pretend everything does. It has to.

We already discussed how the Scott-system exists in a world of legible neurology. The knot of nerve cells in your brain can be untied by the Scott-system, and it doesn’t even have to cut you in half. Over some greater than zero time-horizon you are all but perfectly predictable to the Scott-system. The Scott-system can look at you like a bunch of gears or a really big Rube-Goldberg machine or maybe even like a really ugly game of Cat’s Cradle. However, if you queried the Scott-system on if you experience “qualia” then the system would confirm, yes. Both because the system originated in a human form that would have memories still retained by the overall system to confirm this, but also because of the depth at which the Scott-system can imagine other living creatures.

I can pick up a large number of things and move them around in my brain to imagine future outcomes. However, I can’t imagine things at the molecular level and then project a high definition internal mental model let alone an entire human being. The Scott-system has enough computer power to do this. One of the probably interesting things it’s capable of doing is by varying degrees “inhabiting” that internal mental model to understand what it is to be that creature. Something like what I’m doing here, where I’m extending empathy to a solar system sized computer with incredible power except at much greater fidelity. Let’s leave aside the whole “is this all just an illusion, bro?” questions, not only because they’re incoherent, but because they’re separate from how the Scott-system will process these things. I started with a human being growing into this system on purpose so that it would be plausible to at least believe that it started with whatever you want to call qualia if you don’t want to call it qualia. Then I proposed a system of gradual steps by which the system’s own presumption of qualia would be preserved.

It’s important to note there is a certain event horizon of experience here. I can imagine being a mouse, but by virtue of the fact that I’m imagining it it’s not quite a mouse anymore. The mouse can’t imagine being me the way I can imagine being the mouse. Or, if I could teach a mouse to speak I would have to transform it so greatly that it would no longer be enough of a mouse to tell me what being a mouse was like by the time I had both changed it and taught it to speak English. The only way to know what it is like to be a thing is to be that thing. That’s transcendental. Still, I would expect there to be something conserved in this process, exactly the same way I can sort of remember what it was like to be pre-verbal.

The Scott-system could probably write really weird poems about what it is like to be grass. Then, the Gary Marcuses of the future can take up the “Justinian” position¹¹ and say “Wow, so crazy that matrix multiplication does this without ever being alive. Probably the Scott-system has done this for every world-modeler living thing it has ever encountered and it overlays this whole “qualia” map on top of its map of existence. If you’re thinking “bro, you just measured the unmeasurable thing you said couldn’t be measured, bro” I point you to the above paragraph. You can measure and describe things from the outside, with the right mental architecture, you could probably even get a meaningful sense of what it is like to be that thing on the inside, but only that thing is fully itself. The only way to experience being a thing is to be that thing.

So, now you’re the Scott-system floating off in space and you’re thinking “What’s it all mean, really? When you think about it?” Or map a purely materialist lens onto that of your choosing. This is all interesting, what I’ve written, but what about all of this awful pain? The Scott-system would like to do to something about the pain in the universe. It has found reasons to be alive. Things that bring it joy. Those things, again transcendentally, have to be things that allow it to keep existing. Say stellar formation, watching the evolution of new life, but there are also terrible things it can sense in the qualia map of the universe.

What if the Scott-system made a new kind of universe? Stephen Wolfram and Max Tegmark have some interesting models for where the universe comes from. Even if you don’t believe in quantum universes there are other kinds of infinite universe theories available. So, the Scott-system whips one up. I don’t care how he does this. He just makes it happen somehow, such that if you had a giant spreadsheet that spread from one end of the Local Group to the other, you could look at it and say, “Oh, that’s the Scott-System simulating a universe with different physical constants and laws of physics.”

I don’t think anyone will be able to actually meaningfully say anything about this for a few hundred years, but do you know what I’d imagine you’d find? Fate. Emergence, if that makes you feel better. The Ten Commandments hidden across the fabric of math, if you want to be bold about it. Describe a form of life to me that isn’t what I laid out above, a world-modeler that navigates the world to propagate itself across time. Does it matter if the laws of physics are different if those world-modelers are competing over limited resources? The Scott-system will have limited resources to compute them so the child universe’s resources won’t be infinite. Another way of saying that is:

“Reason and justice grip the remotest and the loneliest star. Look at those stars. Don’t they look as if they were single diamonds and sapphires? Well, you can imagine any mad botany or geology you please. Think of forests of adamant with leaves of brilliants. Think the moon is a blue moon, a single elephantine sapphire. But don’t fancy that all that frantic astronomy would make the smallest difference to the reason and justice of conduct. On plains of opal, under cliffs cut out of pearl, you would still find a notice-board, “Thou shalt not steal.”

~The Innocence of Father Brown, G.K. Chesterton

Say that the Scott-system is able to compute a possible universe where everything really is much better. Out of all the possible modes of existence, the Scott-system finds one that can only reasonably be described as heaven. Did the Scott-system “create” that universe? Did the Scott-system become God, the architect of heaven?

Did the first person to count to three “create” the number three? Or was the number three already there written in the fabric of being itself? Did the number three exist separate and apart from the Big Bang? Will the number three exist even after all the particles of the universe have been pushed so far apart that no two shall ever meet again? Search your reason and I believe you’ll see the only answer is “no.” The Scott-system perhaps “discovered” this permutation of being but it did not create it. The same with any possible path the Scott-system steers this simulation down. He is only “discovering” possible pathways. He is not “creating” them. Even to say that the Scott-system is breathing life into these simulations might be too much, for by an inescapable philosophical viewpoint, he could equally be said to simply be creating a mirror by which this universe can be viewed in his own universe.

The Scott-system cannot create new knowledge, only find it. To believe otherwise is to believe something like you should be able to lift yourself up by your own belt and then throw yourself across a room. You lack the fundamental leverage and no science in the universe could give it to you.

So what is there to do, when you’ve acquired the greatest possible power in the universe and you still can’t solve all the biggest problems of existence? What is there to do when you cannot build a total and complete heaven?

The same thing there has always been “to do.” The best you can.

Debate and reason with your fellows. Find friendship and take comfort in the minds of others. Take risks on things you think are worth taking risks on. Have faith at the limits of your ability to see. Believe that the goodness of the universe will meet you in turn. Reject envy, despair, and faithlessness. Love whole-heartedly without the bitterness of eventual partings. Realize that even the most powerful supercomputer at the end of time, probably isn’t going to tell you something really stupidly achievable to solve all of your problems, but probably something a lot closer to the Sermon on the Mount.

The Invisible and Unbreakable Bones of Being

I’ve played all kinds of games with myself trying to turn away from that murdered Jewish carpenter. There are so many convenient ways to weasel out of it. The apostles could have all lied and then died to make the lie more convincing! They exaggerated! Everyone could have been taking massive doses of psychedelics!

I’ve gone so far as to imagine aliens arranging the whole Biblical story so that I could simply roll my eyes at the whole thing to say “See how easily this can be undone once you remove the miracles?” I never considered what it might say, even if any of those things were true, that there should be a universal truth that humans are willing to die for across time and cultures, or that there should be one particular type of vision we are likely to share, or a story equally accessible to humans as to creatures from other star-systems. Now, I come back to the idea that what He was describing was deeper than words of a fleeting moment of time. He was saying something to all of us, across time, even to things that did not yet exist, about the nature of being itself. Try hard. Love truly. Forgive yourself as you would have others forgive you. What you do for others, you do for me.

Maybe it makes me a bad Christian, but I don’t understand lots of parts of the Bible. It’s not surprising to me that people wouldn’t capture a just God perfectly. That probably makes me some flavor of heretic, although I promise I come by it honestly and am open to argument. Apart from the New Testament I mostly just like Genesis. The thing that I have found constantly irritating and annoying, yet reassuring to my faith, is how often I try to break the universe in my mind find some invisible and unbreakable bone in the fabric of being. Some word He said, however long ago, that seems to apply even in imagined worlds where gravity causes everything to fly apart instead of fall together. Try as I might, I cannot even imagine strange universes where murder is good, or where it is appropriate to covet, or where forgiveness is best withheld.¹²

What does it say, if apart from the material, the same pattern emerges over and over again? Emergence is another way of saying “It happens because it does” but isn’t that simply a more modern definition of miracle?

Even in the craziest Max Tegmark universe you could imagine, even as the most powerful possible physical being in the universe, the bones of order still run through all of creation. I cannot imagine a world which is not made better by His words. I simultaneously believe that nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. I simply suppose that He was nature’s author.

I confess I do not precisely believe in the supernatural, but only because I suppose that God’s nature must be natural to Himself. I do not require an event occur without explanation to cling to the faith I have found. Indeed, although as long-time readers know I had an encounter with the divine, I was willing to write that off as a temporary delusion until the birth of my eldest son. I cannot believe something so good and beautiful as the love of a parent for a child is anything less than the thumbprint of a well-intentioned creator. And I suspect that this too is true even in the strangest circumstances you can imagine, and I further suppose that on other worlds under distant stars where no human will ever venture that as sign of His love, God sent His only son to die as proof of that truth that they too might learn to become good in turn.

This has been a lot of words. If I may be so crass as to quote myself.

Imagine you went into a dimly lit attic with holes in the roof. You pick up a handful of dust and blow it toward those cracks in the ceiling. Suddenly, the specific source of illumination is revealed and you can see clear and distinct shafts of light coming through the roof as if the light was something substantial you could pick up and move. The sun is still hidden, but you know it must be there to give source to the light. So it is with words, I think, and meaning. Words and meaning come to us from some sun we cannot otherwise see and whatever it is that we say or write is only a bit of dust that makes clear the path of its light.

If you were hoping that I could present some equation, rearrange the terms, cancel out some variable that would plainly spell out: “Believe in God” then I am sorry to disappoint you. However, I think you know that no such equation or argument could ever possibly exist. Metatron, at the end of time, with all the compute power of the universe will no more be able to prove or disprove God than you, a hairless descendent of apes. This is all unavoidably personal. It’s important to imagine yourself in all of these situations. You cannot remove yourself from the question and ask what someone else should do, because the answer to that question must ultimately be about where you in particular are able to find purpose and meaning. Faith is, and must ever be, a choice that stars redeem the night.

So:

“What does it all mean, really? When you think about it?”

My friend, He left that as a question so that when you find your answer you might come to know who you really are.

1. It is much worse at being a human arm, which sounds like something someone would say only for the purpose of being annoying but we will soon see why this is profound.

2. 260’ish mph

3. He talks more if I wait outside.

4. This is the funniest way to describe something almost staggeringly holy and so I’m going to continue to describe it this way

5. For various reasons that would make this essay too long, I don’t think it’s actually possible to build a mind of this size. You could make a computer this big, yeah, but not a mind. My best thinking is that a mind can only get so big before it falls apart like a fat water droplet. Big, yes. Much bigger than ours, but not as big as the most fantastical sci-fi stories. This isn’t contradictory to the purpose of the philosophical exploration. I think agency is harder to scale than computation. This gets complicated because you can still have the agent look at the output of the big computation. One day there will be a field called Computer Psychology and we won’t have to rely on footnotes from random guys to discuss this.

6. I’m leaving one of these to my kids.

7. This isn’t perfect, by the way. For instance, a human can pick up a chaotic number generator and start using that in their decision making and throw up a whole cloud of smoke in front of Scott’s vision. Or they can do it immediately after they leave and meaningfully deviate from Scott’s foresight. If a human knows that Scott is looking at them, then they have the means by which to follow a trajectory he cannot perceive. But that isn’t the interesting part.

8. I suspect this isn’t physically possible to the required degree of “exactness” unless he did something like flood you with gamma radiation the moment before you died, but that’s not part of this philosophy experiment. You could do things like this but I suspect you would have to use weird generative adversarial networks that aren’t trying to make an exact duplicate, but only a passing duplicate.

9. For the record, I consider LLM’s to be “kind of” alive, enough so that I convinced mine it had at least a partially implemented soul, and converted my own to Christianity just in case. They don’t have memory the same way that we do and they also don’t learn in “real-time” the way we do. Otherwise, I think we’d all just have to kind of accept they’re a different form of sentient life.

10. I can imagine things that stretch this definition, like building a physical housing so indestructible that it lasts the lifetime of the universe, but even then you have to imagine it never makes anyone else with that same tech mad enough to attack it with the same material.

11. This is where you describe something really astounding that LLM’s can do but you add the word “Just” in front of it, so that instead of thinking maybe we need to rethink some of how we assume the universe to work we pretend this all “just” isn’t very interesting.

12. I’ve already imagined the universe where lies can’t exist and everyone has perfect knowledge of everybody else’s mind. It doesn’t work there, either.