An excerpt

[Syne]

If there's some prior-in-rank ontological stratum that makes a universe like this one possible, it's not going to be like a sycophantic ChatGPT that was designed accommodate the conceits, values, and delusional sensitivities of humans. It's going to be more like that alien ocean entity on Solaris, that is so utterly exotic and weird that researchers can't even apprehend its motivations, goals, and decode its manner of communication.

Or you have the conveyance of values in the wrong direction, where humans only get their religious values from that prior-in-rank ontological stratum. Yes, religious values are very alien to the natural state and inclinations of humans, which track more with the brutality of the animal kingdom than civilization. Aside from being raised in a society built upon Christian values, it is very exotic that a person with the strength and capability to take what they want would refrain from doing so. Just compare Islamist culture, where women are property, child brides exist, people are regularly executed for violating the will of those in power, etc..

Non-artificial gods would have no prior psychological and cultural input from the people that fall out of their processes whatsoever. So they would have vastly more bizarre agendas with respect to their generated realities or projects than what is illustrated by the paperclip maximizer.

Unless they actually cared about the people... as the image of God with the breath of life.
But sure, let's just assume any kind of God would have to have zero empathy for any created or contingent existence.

[Yazata]

If there's some prior-in-rank ontological stratum that makes a universe like this one possible, it's not going to be like a sycophantic ChatGPT that was designed accommodate the conceits, values, and delusional sensitivities of humans. It's going to be more like that alien ocean entity on Solaris, that is so utterly exotic and weird that researchers can't even apprehend its motivations, goals, and decode its manner of communication.

I agree.

I've been drifting away from atheism over the years towards a sort of agnosticism that's simultaneously philosophical and mystical. Though perhaps I'm going full circle, returning to ideas that I entertained in my youth.

I guess I'll say that I think of God as the reason why existence exists at all, and the Origin and the Source of cosmic order. God is why mathematics and logic exist and are whatever they are. God is why there are 'Laws' of physics and why they are what they seem to be and not something else.

To me God is the Source, the Origin, the Ultimate Explanation. The Secret of the Universe, one might say. I don't know that such a thing actually exists, but I'm inclined to assume that it does.

That said, and this returns to your point - I don't think of God in personal terms, as a human being writ large. To me, to conceive of God in human terms would demean the Cosmic Mystery.

I do feel affinity with the Neoplatonists. Regarding the Neoplatonic One, Google AI says:

"In Neoplatonism, The One (or to hen) is the ultimate, ineffable source of all existence. It is a radically simple, indivisible, and transcendent principle that lies beyond being, thought, and language. Because it has no parts or limitations, it cannot be described, only experienced through mystical contemplation."

I'm rather skeptical (doubtful) about mystical contemplation, though I certainly don't totally dismiss it. (It's what motivated my youthful psychedelic experiments.) But I don't accept the claims of Christian or Muslim Neoplatonists (or the more philosophical Hindus) that insist that while God can't be known in essence (what God is), God can be known by what God chooses to reveal in human terms. I simply don't believe that the scriptures and purported revelations of the theistic religions bring us any closer to understanding the Secret of the Universe, something that might always be unknown to humans and might be unknowable in principle.

I'd guess that hypothetical space aliens haven't cracked the cosmic mystery either.

Non-artificial gods would have no prior psychological and cultural input from the people that fall out of their processes whatsoever. So they would have vastly more bizarre agendas with respect to their generated realities or projects than what is illustrated by the paperclip maximizer.

Yes.

I don't think of God in terms of psychologistic terms like 'agendas'. My concept is more of a transcendant metaphysical formative principle, or perhaps a cosmic force of some kind.

Though sure, it's easy to understand how human beings find it much easier to relate to a personal God, and why most people prefer to imagine God that way.

[Syne]

I guess I'll say that I think of God as the reason why existence exists at all, and the Origin and the Source of cosmic order. God is why mathematics and logic exist and are whatever they are. God is why there are 'Laws' of physics and why they are what they seem to be and not something else.

To me God is the Source, the Origin, the Ultimate Explanation. The Secret of the Universe, one might say. I don't know that such a thing actually exists, but I'm inclined to assume that it does.

That said, and this returns to your point - I don't think of God in personal terms, as a human being writ large. To me, to conceive of God in human terms would demean the Cosmic Mystery.

So Deism.

[C C]

There is always the Isaac Asimov prospect for how there could be some kind of god that is at least semi-anthropomorphic in a psychological sense. I'm referring to his short story The Last Question. Which is pretty much what Paul Davies via John Wheeler seems to be ripping off below in a roundabout manner. The Last Question itself (not the Wikipedia entry) is also online here.

So in the context of the scenario below... Both humans and a "deity" could have a reciprocal connection via each being interdependent on the other for their origins. But such an idea is demoted entirely to the natural world (if one construes quantum affairs to be part of the latter). And the exotic, non-human alien "logic" thereby still applies for why there is currently an indifferent cosmos that is largely lifeless (which people interpret as chaotic, useless excess).

One could even assert that the temporally distant archailect network that's technologically descended from us still isn't very mentally anthropomorphic if this would be the kind of universe it selected from the possibilities. One where everything (including the resident god) is reliant upon the incremental developments of general evolution unfolding. But OTOH, there probably aren't any utopian options available in the category of superpositions (possibilities), and it just selects the one that elaborates on how a supreme intellect could exist in the first place as an "observer" that makes everything happen.

The mind at the end of the universe
https://www.templeton.org/news/the-mind-...e-universe

EXCERPTS: In fact, astrophysicists call this the "fine-tuning problem", because it is indeed a problem begging explanation: how could such an incredibly precise set of conditions come into existence? The answer, according to some, is that there must be a vast legion of other universes out there, where the basics of nature, like the proton and neutron mass, vary across them—perhaps even taking on every possible value.

[...] Stanford University physicist Leonard Susskind says it straight, “[It’s] the only explanation that I know. And I think it’s fair to say the only explanation that’s out there.”

But is it? [...] The Princeton University titan of physics, John Archibald Wheeler thought [...differently: the participatory universe...] The before-measurement world is only kind of there, partially existing, as a vast array of possibilities, but not an actuality. As after it’s observed, the potentialities crystallize into the reality we know. Wheeler believed this was similar to how our observations were creating the world around us, by manifesting, if you like, single actualities from the many potentialities.

“There is no way the world is until you’ve asked a question of the universe, so it knows how to present itself to you,” is how Rickles puts this quantum strangeness.

[...] Inspired by this interpretation, physicist Paul Davies imagines the far, far future, when intelligence in some form has left Earth and spread through the Milky Way and out into the other galaxies. This now cosmos-wide mega-mind-at-the-end-of-the-universe could act as an observer. It would be able to reach all the way back to the Big Bang itself and select the very laws and numbers of nature that allow the existence of life and mind.

The scenario is like an enormous, self-consistent loop through time—the future is selecting the past, and the past is permitting the future, solving the finetuning problem. “The universe, its laws and its observers all explain each other in a self-consistent package,” elaborates Davies... (MORE - missing details)

[Yazata]

I guess I'll say that I think of God as the reason why existence exists at all, and the Origin and the Source of cosmic order. God is why mathematics and logic exist and are whatever they are. God is why there are 'Laws' of physics and why they are what they seem to be and not something else.

To me God is the Source, the Origin, the Ultimate Explanation. The Secret of the Universe, one might say. I don't know that such a thing actually exists, but I'm inclined to assume that it does.

That said, and this returns to your point - I don't think of God in personal terms, as a human being writ large. To me, to conceive of God in human terms would demean the Cosmic Mystery.

So Deism.

Yeah, pretty much.

[Syne]

I think deism is a reasonable position. It generally accepts that the conditions that formed our universe are truly improbable. That some intention may have been a necessary ingredient. And since I believe that God is a dispersed and integral entity, rather than a unified one that watches and intervenes from some degree removed, I do think there is a sense in which deism is true.

[Ostronomos]

There is always the Isaac Asimov prospect for how there could be some kind of god that is at least semi-anthropomorphic in a psychological sense. I'm referring to his short story The Last Question. Which is pretty much what Paul Davies via John Wheeler seems to be ripping off below in a roundabout manner. The Last Question itself (not the Wikipedia entry) is also online here.

So in the context of the scenario below... Both humans and a "deity" could have a reciprocal connection via each being interdependent on the other for their origins. But such an idea is demoted entirely to the natural world (if one construes quantum affairs to be part of the latter). And the exotic, non-human alien "logic" thereby still applies for why there is currently an indifferent cosmos that is largely lifeless (which people interpret as chaotic, useless excess).

One could even assert that the temporally distant archailect network that's technologically descended from us still isn't very mentally anthropomorphic if this would be the kind of universe it selected from the possibilities. One where everything (including the resident god) is reliant upon the incremental developments of general evolution unfolding. But OTOH, there probably aren't any utopian options available in the category of superpositions (possibilities), and it just selects the one that elaborates on how a supreme intellect could exist in the first place as an "observer" that makes everything happen. 

The mind at the end of the universe
https://www.templeton.org/news/the-mind-...e-universe

EXCERPTS: In fact, astrophysicists call this the "fine-tuning problem", because it is indeed a problem begging explanation: how could such an incredibly precise set of conditions come into existence? The answer, according to some, is that there must be a vast legion of other universes out there, where the basics of nature, like the proton and neutron mass, vary across them—perhaps even taking on every possible value.

[...] Stanford University physicist Leonard Susskind says it straight, “[It’s] the only explanation that I know. And I think it’s fair to say the only explanation that’s out there.”

But is it? [...] The Princeton University titan of physics, John Archibald Wheeler thought [...differently: the participatory universe...] The before-measurement world is only kind of there, partially existing, as a vast array of possibilities, but not an actuality. As after it’s observed, the potentialities crystallize into the reality we know. Wheeler believed this was similar to how our observations were creating the world around us, by manifesting, if you like, single actualities from the many potentialities.

“There is no way the world is until you’ve asked a question of the universe, so it knows how to present itself to you,” is how Rickles puts this quantum strangeness.

[...] Inspired by this interpretation, physicist Paul Davies imagines the far, far future, when intelligence in some form has left Earth and spread through the Milky Way and out into the other galaxies. This now cosmos-wide mega-mind-at-the-end-of-the-universe could act as an observer. It would be able to reach all the way back to the Big Bang itself and select the very laws and numbers of nature that allow the existence of life and mind.

The scenario is like an enormous, self-consistent loop through time—the future is selecting the past, and the past is permitting the future, solving the finetuning problem. “The universe, its laws and its observers all explain each other in a self-consistent package,” elaborates Davies... (MORE - missing details)

In my typical manner I saw fit to jump on the bandwagon of commenters.

According to what I wrote when I unlocked my potential:

Your nature is identical to the universe's syntactic structure.

God is nowhere absent. Much like the non-existence that permeates all things. 

That God and humans are mutually dependent is, I think, an accurate interpretation that is not far off from observer-dependency. 

The Divine Order would apply to all creatures great and small. A perfect mind (which I can access at times) would perceive the underlying logic behind this God.

[Magical Realist]

IMO re-employing the term and image of God to refer to a metaphysical substrate or creative principle is as useless as referring to Time as Father Time or Nature as Mother Nature. Why not just stick with what we believe it is? Like Being itself, or Novelty, or the Implicate Order. If one still wants to be poetic and retain traditional imagery, the Tao is a good one. Or Anaximander's Apeiron. God is ladened with such crappy baggage that is unworthy to describe the sublime and ineffable. Unlike Deists however, I believe the Transcendent or the Infinite plays a vital role in human existence and indeed an increasing one. Reality is morphing into something different. And I experience it on a daily basis.

[C C]

IMO re-employing the term and image of God to refer to a metaphysical substrate or creative principle is as useless as referring to Time as Father Time or Nature as Mother Nature. Why not just stick with what we believe it is? Like Being itself, or Novelty, or the Implicate Order. [...]

It's the ancient tendency of humans that just won't go away, though: Personifying concepts, regularities, governing principles, etc. Attributing sapient agency and social capacity to them. In this post-Western era where regional societies and indigenous cultures around the globe are reviving their original belief systems to be politically cogent against secular knowledge and material science, it's just going to get worse or return to the old days of enchantment.

What also won't help is all the smart appliances and devices surrounding us that will be speaking someday (from refrigerators to ovens to weedeaters). Conveying a sense of pervading animism and psychological anthropomorphism to the children growing up in those environments. "The world communicates with us. There are spirits everywhere!"

[Syne]

When people personify animals and AI, good luck making an argument against personifying God. We know animals and AI are not people, but we cannot say the same of God.