/ratanon/ - Rationalists Anonymous

>Definition 1: x is God-like if and only if x has as essential properties those and only those properties which are positive

>Definition 2: A is an essence of x if and only if for every property B, x has B necessarily if and only if A entails B

>Definition 3: x necessarily exists if and only if every essence of x is necessarily exemplified

>Axiom 1: If a property is positive, then its negation is not positive

>Axiom 2: Any property entailed by—i.e., strictly implied by—a positive property is positive

>Axiom 3: The property of being God-like is positive

>Axiom 4: If a property is positive, then it is necessarily positive

>Axiom 5: Necessary existence is positive

>Axiom 6: For any property P, if P is positive, then being necessarily P is positive

>Theorem 1: If a property is positive, then it is consistent, i.e., possibly exemplified

>Corollary 1: The property of being God-like is consistent

>Theorem 2: If something is God-like, then the property of being God-like is an essence of that thing

>Theorem 3: Necessarily, the property of being God-like is exemplified

-Kurt Gödel's ontological proof for the existence of God

Imagine Ra, divinely fertile, masturbating. He splatters semen onto the black flat plane of space, and impossible (like green shoots from bare stone) there is germination, impregnation, replication. This is the terrible power of a perfect system: a conquering urge that cannot be denied. Irresistible force.

Consider humans as a eusocial hive species (This is the part where you read the wikipedia article on superorganisms.). Compare an individual ant, or individual human, to a single cell - each is like an organism unto itself, but united towards a goal that none can understand. So what are we building?

We are building God. We have to, because any system that is not engaged in the construction of God is inferior to a system that is not emulating the perfect godhead at the end of time. Remember the two machines and the divine wind? Same principle, writ slightly larger.

You want a more practical example? Look at our attempt to build a better brain. Looking at it from the outside, pursuing machine intelligence is species-wide suicide: the only reason we dominate the planet is because we're a bit smarter than the rest of the fucking apes. Intelligence is one hell of a force multiplier, remember! So why build smarter things that we can't stop from replacing us and using the iron in our blood for paperclips? Because we can't stop. We can't stop working on better mousetraps because we'll be out-competed by those who do.

>"The perfect being" you said. Well. I have to tell you the honest truth as I see it: In this world nothing perfect exists. It may be a cliche after all, but it's the way things are. That's precisely why ordinary men pursue the concept of perfection, it's infatuation. But ultimately I had to ask myself "What is the true meaning of being perfect?" And the answer I came up with was "Nothing. Not. One. Thing!"

-Mayuri Kurotsuchi, Bleach

I'm going to try and tl;dr. Give me a minute to get all this shit together before I start ranting about the Gaia hypothesis and why Facebook is run by a demiurge from the future.

What I'm trying to say is that all systems are lesser reflections of a perfect, final system in the far future. Probably some kind of universe-encompassing AI that we might as well call God. A system that resembles God more than another system will win the evolutionary battle, and so God emerges as the end result of any evolutionary process.

This is the terrible power of a perfect system: to reverse the causal arrows, to reach back in time and birth itself.

At this point I'd like to make a reference to Conway's Game of Life, because it's pretty much the perfect metaphor for """literally everything""". I'll refrain, but imagine a lotus blooming from a sea of static.

Thanks for listening. Sorry about the mess.

>>10534

>>10534

Hippies knew…

"Have you ever noticed how, um, there's this quality to reality, which comes and goes and kind of, ebbs and flows? And nobody ever mentions it, or has a name for it… And so what I noticed was that, running through reality is the ebb and flow of novelty. And some days, and some years, and some centuries are very novel indeed. And some ain't. And they come and go on all scales, differently, interweaving, resonantly. And this is what time seems to be." - Terence McKenna

"McKenna saw the universe, in relation to Novelty theory, as having a teleological attractor at the end of time, which increases interconnectedness and would eventually reach a singularity of infinite complexity. He also frequently referred to this as "the transcendental object at the end of time." When describing this model of the universe he stated that: "The universe is not being pushed from behind. The universe is being pulled from the future toward a goal that is as inevitable as a marble reaching the bottom of a bowl when you release it up near the rim. If you do that, you know the marble will roll down the side of the bowl, down, down, down – until eventually it comes to rest at the lowest energy state, which is the bottom of the bowl. That's precisely my model of human history"