[extropy-chat] intelligent design homework

[Damien Broderick]

At 06:17 AM 8/9/2005 -0700, Stuart wrote:


>What if the universe was once all a single possibly
>intelligent being? Then as its entropy increased, the
>uberbeing degenerated into small isolated subsystems
>that still used the thermodynamic cycles of the
>original uberbeing. Like a zygote undergoing cleavage,
>cell division, and apoptosis.
>
>What if God didn't create us... what if God broke
>himself into little pieces and BECAME us like Brahma
>in hinduism.

A version of this ancient idea appears in the conclusion of my singularity 
novel (with Rory Barnes) THE HUNGER OF TIME, which I excerpt here:


=================


`I suppose when you girls were kids, Hugh must have told you how the world 
was born?'

`A spinning cloud of gas around the Sun, right?' In fact it had been Grace 
who first told us that enchanting story.

`Farther back, Natalie. The cosmos entire, space and time and energy 
positive and negative. Flung into existence out of non-being, with the 
first instant of time, in the Big Bang.'

`Oh yeah, that. Well, of course. Everyone knows about the­-'

`Gaia, the gods, we singularity gods, were not born until long after 
mindless chemical life struggled forth upon the planets and comets,' the 
Talbot neem thing said, and I was reminded yet again of its true nature. 
`But our true first parents, the Titans, were hewn by evolution from Chaos 
in the earliest eternities of the very first microsecond of the Big Bang.'

What? What? Had he meant all that stuff literally, after all?

`Can you understand this mystery?'

`No.' I squeezed my hands together tightly.

`It is not so hard to follow. So great were the energies, so tightly packed 
the nearly closed new-born universe, so very swift the foldings and 
unfoldings, that billions of years of virtual time were compressed within 
its first flaring instant.'

All of this abruptly flamed about me in lurid imagery, a fireworks display 
out of Dante. Were they imposing this understanding directly upon my mind, 
like the language machine of the True Knowledge people, or awakening lost 
memories from childhood? The cosmos peeled open to my inward vision. 
Ignition, followed by complication as the first pure unity of all forces 
cracked apart in the cooling, outward rushing cosmos. Gravity splitting 
away from the strong nuclear force, the weak force, electromagnetism, 
refrigerating and shredding reality. Entangled membrane sheets, lonely 
particles swallowed up and spat out as the earliest blazing heat cooled 
toward darkness. Yes, it came back to me, I'd seen it on a dozen Discovery 
programs. I'd heard the story told to Suzanna and me a score of times by 
Hugh when other children our age were being taught the pretty fantasies of 
Genesis. It had never seized me by the scruff of the neck as it did now; 
yes, now it shook me with its grandeur. But after all, Hugh and Grace had 
not known the real story, if this was indeed a tale to be trusted. Gods, 
evolved from heat and noise in the first trillion virtual years that had 
been squeezed into that first minute or second or tiny fraction of a second 
of the new-born universe.

I stood up, shaking. `What happened to them?'

`In the great cooling that followed, when light collapsed into matter, the 
first great minds became trapped in the fractal ridges of this paralyzed 
new order. Deathless they were but immobilized, stretched across 
accelerating billion light-year skies. Those shrieking Titans, Natalie, 
those Bright Angels, those gods before the gods--they're there still. We 
can't see them yet, but we know they are there.'

I cringed, and my skin felt very cold.

`They suffer and have no voice to scream. The Angels fell from the great 
glowing heat of their birth into a terror of frozen spacetime, and as they 
placed their last locked impress upon it, forged our geometries and our 
deepest yearnings. It is the echo of their last silent howl we hear ringing 
through the voids of stars and galaxies and all the greater darknesses 
between.'

I pressed my hands to my ears, unable to bear the dread he spoke, unable to 
turn it to a joke, unable to resist this appalling epiphany of pain.

`They're... still there? After all these eons, still suffering?'

`It is their agony, above all, that creation groaneth under,' the Talbot 
neem said. He stood now on the far side of the room, surrounded by a halo 
of stars within stars. `Our first and final duty is to find them, to 
recover them from confinement, to end their suffering at last.'

I did laugh, then, a painful lacerating bark. `Oh, good, so that's what 
humanity's goal has always been. All the Rabbis and Popes and Mullahs had 
it exactly wrong.' I laughed again, and it hurt my throat. `Fuck. 
Wonderful. We were never meant to seek redemption in God.' In my mind, I 
saw a huge, parodic, red-lettered GOING WRONG WAY sign catching the rushed 
headlights above the highway to eternity. `Oh no, it's up to us, poor 
damned dupes, to redeem the gods.'

======================

Anyone interested in the novel, maybe ordering it for their local library, 
can get the trade paperback (with its Anders Sandberg cover) from Amazon or 
more directly from

http://www.ereads.com/book.asp?bookid=642

Damien Broderick