it's common to see God as "everything", but if so then this is necessarily a non-agential God, because everything does not have an environment in which to be an agent
Two Gods: "everything" versus the supercooperation cluster
17 tweets · May 2024 · 85 likes · 3 retweets · read on Twitter
this God—"everything"—has a direction in which it unfolds. in that sense it has something like will, desire, intent, purpose, preference physics has studied some of the small-scale & simple patterns here: entropy, gravity., free energy minimization is about larger-scale
but the God called "everything" does not match our normal intuitions or frames for talking about agents, because part of what makes an agent is the boundary between it and not-it (its environment). eg when I'm using a tool, me+it become a new temporary agent
the God called "everything" is also not a dissipative system in the usual sense, which most other agents are (certainly all living ones, including in some sense companies and cities) the universe is, ultimately, the only true closed system we can find
another main sense I have of God is the "supercooperation cluster", ie the self-organizing coordinated* collection of agents making the world a better, funner, more collaborative & workable place to be an agent, for all *in-part-atemporally-acausally
this semi-coordinated collection of agents is itself an agent, not just because it has agency within it (the "system" of {me, peru's youngest lawyer} is not an agent) but by - having some capacity to coordinate - having a shared purpose & shared skin in the game
the supercooperation cluster is not merely an agent, but necessarily the LARGEST agent incomplete sketch of a proof by contradiction: cooperation scales better than defection, so any larger agent would also know how to cooperate thus would itself be/join the cluster
the supercooperation cluster is more able to be aware of its existence and its nature than it used to be, thanks to (among many many other things) people like @RomeoStevens76 combining modern game theory with ancient buddhism and sharing their findings
the supercooperation cluster's capacity to coordinate is limited, but it's substantially more now in some ways than it was decades or centuries ago, in part thanks to global connectivity of humanity (tho maybe in *other* ways less so as religions have broken down)
note that the supercooperation cluster agent is super loose and incoherent, and in many ways WAY less mature than a toddler. arguably about as mature as a fetus, in some sense. not yet born. but again, way less coherent. distributed and stretched thin.
a 3rd notion of God I have, which maybe bridges these two, is God as the universe's creativity. which is both an aspect of how the everything unfolds, AND centrally the means by which open-ended supercooperation is possible
but even if bridged, they can't be quite the same. the universe does everything that happens the supercooperation cluster has vast but limited agency cosmic creativity creates both beauty & banal harms the supercooperation cluster's will is to love
I almost contrasted it as "cosmic creativity can be used for evil", but I really like James Carse's point that evil originates in the desire to eliminate evil, which might actually be the behavior of a sufficiently confused attempt at supercooperating
I can tell there's something I'm missing here, which is holding me back from surrender because I don't quite trust my sense of what to surrender to. I feel good about that, for now, tho I want to get more clarity and be able to gently share it
there's a deep connection between the supercooperation cluster (who) and the metaprotocol (how)
as Romeo says in the original supercooperation cluster video, the test of whether you're ready for first contact is the extent to which you've derived the obviously tautologically necessary first contact principles
and we're still figuring it out. this moment—me writing these words, and you reading them—is us participating in that creative unfolding. hi 👋