technology god fractality

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Ninjastroni

Deity Chat: Episode 7 – How Well Can Humans Know the Divine?(A Serious Comedy)

‘deity chat: episode 7’ is a farcical play about the relationship between technology and god.

there are many relations between the philosophy of technology and the philosophy of religion.

i

birth

creation ex nihilo, creatureliness, and imago dei position god as the one who creates the universe and the organisms and humans in it, to fit god’s image.

similarly, high technology, biotechnology, and the anthropocene, position humans as the ones who are attempting to recreate the universe to fit its image.

ii

death

eschatology describes the ultimate destiny of humanity, and the realization of a divine kingdom i.e. a state of eternal peace.

similarly, the singularity describes a destiny where technology creates abundance and eliminates aging and disease.

iii

fate

idolatry, e.g. apotheosis and false gods, is the worship of physical, human-made objects or concepts as if they were god.

these idols are often created as trojan horses to bring in a specific future in the guise of being a fate brought by the idol.

similarly, technological determinism states that technology is an autonomous, self-determining force to which humans must adapt.

the persuasion for the adaptation comes from the idolization of the properties of the technology, e.g. productivity gains.

iv

habit

rituals and liturgies are habits that shape one’s disposition to fit the divine.

similarly, albert borgmann stated that daily interactions with technology function as secular liturgies.

this is because these habits shape one’s disposition to fit technology.

for example, slang that was created due to technological limitations, e.g. character limits, become a norm in face-to-face interactions.

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in the beginning, flora states,

Our starting assumption will be that God exists. Our challenge will be to determine how well humans can know God.

this sets the discussion between natural theology, and a collection of theologies that roughly belong to revealed theology.

natural theology is the study of god based on natural sources, such as the environment and life.

revealed theology is the study of god based on supernatural sources, such as scriptures and religious experiences.

the main difference between them is whether “god exists” is a falsifiable statement.

a statement is falsifiable if it belongs to a theory capable of describing an empirical observation that contradicts it.

science deals with falsifiable statements, and nonscience deals with unfalsifiable statements.

a good example is mach’s dictum, which states “where neither confirmation nor refutation is possible, science is not concerned”.

the main reason science deals with falsifiable statements is because it is technology that does falsification.

for example, “the sun rises in the east” is a scientific statment.

the theories that describe why this is so are the heliocentric model and the nebular theory.

these theories can also describe the falsification of this statement, e.g. “the sun rises in the west”.

this is roughly because, even though the rotation of the earth must be reversed to achieve this, since angular momentum is still conserved after this, it is valid in the theory.

this means that “the sun rises in the west” is possible in reality.

with this, it is possible to create a technology to reverse the rotation of the earth, and hence, to falsify the statement “the sun rises in the east”.

technology does falsification on a statement’s conjunctive fragments.

for example, in “(a or b or c) and (d or e)”, (a or b or c) and (d or e) are conjunctive fragments.

the utility of a technology is proportional to the number of conjunctive fragments it can falsify.

for example, a technology that can falsify “the sun rises in the east and it rises at 6:00am” has more utility than “the sun rises in the east”.

this is because the former can also change the time at which the sun rises, e.g. “the sun rises in the west and it rises at 9:00pm”.

this ties into francis bacon’s idea that usefulness is the ultimate test of truth.

he stated that if a scientist truly understands how a part of reality works, i.e. truth, they should be able to alter it to achieve a specific result, i.e. utility.

with all of this, it can be said that natural theology aims to make “god exists” into a falsifiable statement, whereas revealed theology aims to make it into an unfalsifiable statement.

this is necessary because the falsifiability of “god exists” sets the maximum limit on how much control the technology of humans can attain.

the reason is because god is also an entity that does falsification.

for example, god can do miracles, i.e. actions that falsify physical laws.

and akin to a scientist’s credibility being tied to their ability to falsfiy, a prophet’s credibility is tied to their ability to show god doing falsification.

some instances,

i

the sun standing still in the sky during a battle in the book of joshua.

the splitting of the moon in islamic tradition.

ii

the falling of manna from heaven to feed the Israelites in the wilderness.

jesus multiplying a few loaves of bread and fish to feed thousands.

iii

healing leprosy, restoring sight to the blind, making the paralyzed walk etc.

restoring the lives of the dead, such as the raising of lazarus in the new testament.

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since humanity is currently not at the level of god, their technology cannot falsify all statements.

meaning, there are certain truths of the universe that humanity cannot modify.

the residue of technology’s falsification can be viewed in two ways,

theology: some examples are hubris, promethean pride, and creaturehood.

ecology: some examples are pollution, the exploitation of natural resources, and knock-on effects.

as science progresses, falsification necessarily improves.

for example, in the eighteenth century, steam engines were used in trains.

these only had an efficiency of around 2%. as a result, they polluted a lot, and wasted a lot of resources.

then, in the nineteenth century, sadi carnot developed carnot theory in order to improve the efficiency of steam engines.

he created a theoretical model of the most efficient heat engine possible, now called a carnot heat engine.

with this, the science of thermodynamics began, and many inventors learned it and realised that alternate statements had to be falsified.

at the same time, faraday and other were developing the science of electrodynamics.

and in the second half of the nineteenth century, the switch to electric trains began.

currently, most trains are electric, having an efficiency of around 90%.

however, the power plants used to generate said electricity still use steam engines, now having an efficiency of around 30%.

as a result, some trains are now being powered by electricity from solar power plants.

but these plants require large amounts of copper and other rare earth minerals, which are obtained through open-pit mining, which creates a lot of waste.

and hence, this needs to be falsified as well, and so on.

however, as technology progresses, falsification does not necessarily improve.

one reason is in the relation of truth and technology to hiddenness.

in order for something to be hidden, there needs to be something to hide.

the set of all entities that can be hidden is called reality.

truth is conformity of a truthbearer to reality.

truthbearers are mental, e.g. sentences and beliefs.

for example, a flower in a park is not true.

however, if one has a belief about how a flower should be, e.g. in a flower competition, and they find a flower that conforms to it, they can call the flower as “a true flower”.

technology is reality conforming to an artifact.

artifacts are physical, e.g. machines and buildings.

generally, technology hides, and truth unhides.

a common example is the greek definition of truth.

the greek word for truth is aletheia, which means unconcealed.

it is the antonym of lethe, which means forgetting.

technology hides through various means, e.g. automation and memory.

for example, “just set it and forget it”.

it is this hiding that reduces one’s ability to falsify.

this is because, when technology mediates reality, one hands off the burden of understanding reality to it.

as a result, if said understanding of reality is required, one does so by believing or having faith in the technology’s understanding of it.

common examples are believing indicator lights and error messages for printer or computer malfunctions.

this belief and faith is of the same type, but not of the same magnitude, as belief and faith in god.

a good example is praying to malfunctioning devices to work.

with all of this, it can be said that the technological disposition treats god as a fractal, with its subsets being the technology of humanity.

the differential for this can be called, technology god fractality.

there are many examples of this in deity chat,

i

historically, theologians have often used the most advanced technology of their era to explain the cosmos.

in the nineteenth century, the mechanical watch was one of them.

by comparing the universe to a complex watch, paley conceptualizes God as a technician.

however, as hermes points out, this metaphor limits our understanding of the divine to human terms.

this is because if god is simply a watchmaker, then god is understood through the lens of human manufacturing, reducing the divine to a mechanical function.

ii

one main farce in the play is modern technology disrupting attempts to have a serious spiritual conversation.

for example, the constraints of the microphone.

this is a good example of the hiding property of technology.

the microphone hides the complexities of recording the audio of the conversation so that the content is unhidden to the audience.

however, when it malfunctions, they have to temporarily take the place of the microphone.

as a result, the positions switch, with them hiding the content, i.e. the conversation being interrupted, and unhiding the mechanism of recording, e.g. how to place the mouth.

iii

the song about planned obsolescence is a good example of how modern consumer technology create a state of distraction and exacerbate waste.

the resulting industrial-tech landscape distances humans from the “sublime natural world”, where flora experiences awe, and replaces it with landfills.

here, technology hides the natural world through its waste and desensitization.

iv

the conversation with lyreleaf sage makes the conversation go into genetic engineering.

sage discusses laboratory experiments where researchers transferred genetic sequences from a sheep to a tomato.

this is a good example of technology blurring the boundary between the natural, i.e. divine creation, and the artificial, i.e. technology.

generally, the more axiomatic a statement, the more natural it is.

in this case, genes have been essentially axiomatic to biology, and hence to life, for centuries.

as a result, when genes are modified, it ends up feeling that it is directly modifying nature itself.

v

the end of the episode discusses william barrett’s ‘death of the soul: from descartes to the computer.

since the enlightenment, western thought has increasingly viewed both the human body and the universe as complex machines (Descartes’ view).

so as technology has progressed from simple gears to computers and gene-splicing, the human soul or sense of the divine has been increasingly mechanized.

the reality modifying property of technology is also described.

i

when flora mentions “watching the stream”, hermes asks, “how are they going to see this picture if they are looking at the water?”.

this comedic misunderstanding is an example of technology (video streaming) co-opting natural vocabulary (streams).

it is a good example for technological spaces replacing physical spaces as the primary environment for human interaction.

ii

frieda defends the human mind against being categorized as a machine by pointing out that humans can pass captcha tests.

here, technology makes humans define their existence in opposition to artificial intelligence and automation.

meaning, the ‘soul’ or ‘piety’ is defined by whatever cannot be replicated by an algorithm.

iii

conversely, lyreleaf sage discusses the pineal gland descartes’s model, describing it as the point where “all sensory input is fed into this point.”

this frames the human body as a machine that receives, translates, and responds to inputs, e.g. red and blue light or melatonin levels.

iv

at the end, it is stated that “all calculation-heavy rebuttals will have to wait.”

this relates back to josephina campbell’s quote about the infinite galaxies,

“There may be wise men... who would volunteer to count the drops of water... but no one would count those Brahmas”.

here, calculation technology is presented as a human obsession that fails when confronted with the infinite.

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additionally, hermes makes the point that the synthesis of natural theology and revealed theology is technology, as given in,

Rather than explore nature as an artifact in an external sense, you seem to paint the human mind as an artifact. Just like Ms. P. links the watch to a watchmaker and artifact to an intelligent designer, you link the mind—the internal cogs of the biochemical machine—to a mind maker but through feeling.

frieda responds that,

Regarding the anthropocentrism, how else can one imagine God but from a human vantage point?

one reason is that since god, as viewed from the fractal, is a technology, extended embodiment and projective embodiment are applied to god.

the general concepts are described in the below piece,

and hermes responds,

...If we were to attempt to think about this supreme being from, say, a plant’s point of view, that would still be seen through a human filter. We cannot imagine what it is to be a plant without our humanness getting in the way, let alone contemplate the way a plant may or may not see God. If we cannot know what it is like to be another living creature—or another human—who shares the same plane of existence as we do, how well can we expect to know this supreme being? Sure, we may catch a glimpse through any combination of the methods discussed today, but that limited experience brings us to this side of the border between the human mind and the divine. We may get close, but we cannot cross this threshold to the divinity, at least while we are physically bound to this realm.

the last line describes the current state of humanity in this fractal.