Dr. Robert G. Brown's view of the rest of "Pandeism: An Anthology"

[Of all the contributing authors whom I have communicated with over the course of this project, Dr. Robert G. Brown, Professor of Physics at Duke University, has always engaged me most thoroughly; I recently wrote to ask his opinion of the book, which has seen an author's edition circulated to the contributing authors in advance of publication. This was his response:]

I spent the last couple of hours reading the many entries.  I find that I disagree with nearly all of the arguments (of course, being an empiricist:-) but nevertheless found them reasonably entertaining.  I very much liked your "nested God" observation, which dovetails perfectly into my own argument and example with a bitstring -- even if a being exists that IS somehow sentient and omniscient of its Self and all of the visible Cosmos, it cannot ever be certain that it is not embedded in a still larger dimensionality, any more than six bits of a bit string can "know" the true value of an 8 bit string it is embedded in.

Similar recursive arguments have been made before (Turtles all the way down, or IIRC in Godel, Escher and Bach by Hofstadter) but these arguments do fail to take into account that in order for a hypothetical deity at some intermediate level to >>think<<, they require two things: time to think IN (and an entire dynamical system capable of change, as thought is a dynamic process) and entropy.  The latter >>requires<< that they be embedded in a larger, and unknown, dimensionality.

But this breaks the recursion.  In order for meaningful sentience to exist, the sentient being requires a source of entropy.  This is a provable statement in switch-based computation (including neural models):

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle

To put it another way, "thinking" produces entropy at a very fundamental level, the level of the dynamical change within the switching systems themselves, and this entropy is irreducible relative to the thoughts encoded on the switching units.  In the case of our own sentience the entropy source/sink is obvious -- the unknown or imperfectly known state of everything that is NOT us.  There is no reason to think that a hypothetical God would be able to think, in meta-time, without a similar entropy source, which provides the "directed randomness" we associate with "free will" -- thinking thoughts that are not obviously Searlian Chinese Room entities produced by a lookup table.  But this means that true extensive omniscience and sentience are mutually exclusive -- an omniscient structure has zero entropy and hence cannot "think" in any useful sense of the term.

Hence if a very "large", "powerful" (in deliberate quotes), Cosmos-scaled being DOES exist AND can think, it cannot be omniscient because thinking is a process of ongoing discovery of previously unknown thoughts.  We are knowING right now, we are not knowING all times.  A being for whom "now" exists cannot be omni-whatever and hence cannot be God.  For example, suppose that we are actually not observing a real Universe at all with our senses, but rather we are playing in a very, very fine-grained virtual reality simulation being generated by a Game Computer that is, in turn, programmed or operated by an Artist that is crafting every scene.  That Artist (or the Game Computer) are not God, any more than the programmers of World of Warcraft are God(s).  They exist, think, design, plan, in an entropy-filled world one level up.  If you want to imagine a Game Computer one level up that DIDN'T require engineering or a programmer but that is providing my experience of reality as a simulation, well, that really takes something unlikely (the existence of an apparent Universe in which I have objective existence) and makes it EVEN LESS likely -- there is a Universe in which a Game Computer has objective existence that is creating the ILLUSION of a Universe in which I have objective existence.  And a programmer/designer of that computer less likely still.  And a Universe -- that isn't a simulation itself in which that programmer/designer can have thoughts in a nested set of simulations, each less likely than the one one before.

IMO it makes little sense to postulate even the first level of this recursion from the mere fact of our own sentient existences in what appears to be an objectively real Universe that is NOT a simulation presented to our senses by a still-more-complex computer.  So I do have a lot of difficulty with the assertion that a Creator god existed and "became" the Universe -- when did this happen (in some sort of time, because "becoming" is a dynamical process occurring in time)?  Where did it happen (in some sort of space with information structure capable of supporting thoughts and decision making and planning and all that)?

But now you have space, time, stuff capable of representing a dynamically changing state, and you are stuck explaining what Created >>that<<.  If the answer is "nothing", then space, time, and stuff -- all that we observe our own Cosmos to be -- doesn't logically require a creator.  If the answer is something, you shunt your problems up a notch AND introduce your meta-God where you have to (using your own argument) ascribe ever more complex properties to the one-notch up deity and explain why it created a Universe in which pseudodeities created one-notch down sub-Universes all the while thinking that THEY were the highest-level God -- or not.

A lot simpler to just assert that the Universe is what it is, no God (logically) necessary, no empirical evidence for a God, no DIFFERENCE in how things are if an unnecessary and unobservable God is lurking somewhere, so why bother with religion/God (pandeist or not) at all?

[At this juncture, I sent in response, the following:]

In short answer to your objection to the necessity of it, I would respond that Pandeism is more of an if/then proposition.... if ours is indeed an intelligently created Universe -- which surely can be assigned at least a nonzero probability -- then Pandeism offers the best explanation as to why it would exist.

[Dr. Brown replied:]

And there we definitely agree.  But it is very difficult to imagine what would constitute "evidence" for an intelligently created Universe, and according to the way I define Universe, it would be literally logically impossible because I cut off the nonsense involving recursive chains of pre-Universes that aren't really Universes but are only (at most) space-time continua IN a larger Universe by defining the word Universe to (correctly) refer to the whole thing, NOT just the apparent Cosmos (spacetime) we find ourselves in.

If one does that, one has no possibility of referring intelligence and design back to a higher order, and one has no possibility of "creation" as there is nowhere to be and notime to do preceding Universe.  That means that fundamentally, the Universe itself is NOT the result of intelligent design, and if our Cosmos is, it could only be because intelligence arose in the greater Universe without any intelligent design.

Now you are up against Mr. Ockham.  Why multiply (invisible) causes?  No argument you can make for intelligent design of the Cosmos will not equally well apply (at an even lower probability) to a super-Universe containing the Cosmos and supposed intelligent designer(s).  The Anthropic Principle presents us with a fait accompli either way, but believing in an intelligent designer of Cosmi that spontaneously arose in a superset Universe we have absolutely no evidence for leaves one with an enormous engineering problem (how exactly do you design and build a Cosmos?) PLUS the problem of figuring out why the designer -- faced with the same anthropic principle for its own intelligence in whatever Cosmos it is standing in in order to do be doing the job of designing and building -- is to be considered a "deity".

To me this is EXACTLY what you argued AGAINST in your article in the anthology -- trying to determine what color suspenders the hypothetical Creator wore when Creating our space-time using meta-physics in a meta-cosmos that supported the spontaneous evolution of its meta-intelligence WITHOUT INTELLIGENT DESIGN OR TUNING OF ITS COSMOLOGICAL CONSTANTS.  Why bother with all of that?  It is so very, very unlikely (given the evidence of our senses and a bit of reason). Not impossible, no, but however unlikely you think spontaneous evolution of intelligence, well-supported by empirical evidence galore, is in THIS Cosmos, it is that unlikely squared -- literally -- to have taken place one level up.

There is plenty of time to "waste" belief in the invisible when it becomes visible.  In the meantime, it just distracts us from building an ethical world with the entire responsibility for doing so resting on OUR shoulders, because there is no evidence whatsoever that we're going to get help from a deity, whether or not one "exists" or is a "creator" or just another really powerful transdimensional space alien with a hobby.

Let us yaw toward a fruitful discussion, for I fell we must reach much the same ground, if only by different paths....

So that we are clear on the fundament of what we are discussing, I will outline the pandeistic theorem from first principles -- we may agree, naturally, that we are thinking, and so thought is going on and the framework for thought must exist, and must have an origin.... having no more probable option than our physical Universe existing as it presents itself to us, we ought to proceed as though either what appears to exist, exists, or there is some reason for it appearing to us to exist, and so ought we to try to figure out why things appear as they do....

Our Universe exhibits order, and not just any sort of order, but order of the type which generates complexity, ie life, and not just complex life, but self accelerating complex life, ie evolving life forms (as Dr. Theobold has just this summer so aptly proved) which inevitably eventually develop the intelligence and use such intelligence to discern the governing dynamics of our Universe and use such knowledge to consciously self-advance-- we, humans, are near that stage, have not reached it yet, and are presently but an absurd fraction of what we might become-- will become if we survive long enough to do so.... and what we stand to evolve into in perhaps a thousand years is something of actual elucidatory use to the Creator of our Universe....

Now, consider, as Scott Adams did, if our Universe demonstrates order of a magnitude which suggests the hand of a Creator in its establishment (and does it not?) then what purpose is served by this Creation? What need on the part of the Creator is fulfilled by the exertion of setting forth what by chance has become us? (though it could have as readily yielded a different reality with different self-advancing intelligent life unrecognisable to our eyes, and perhaps it has done so in other galaxies, and elsewhere in our own).... well it is natural to observe that an entity, alone in its existence, and having such power as is necessary to set forth a Universe such as our own would be lacking in the knowledge of interaction, of facing and possibly overcoming obstacles, or dealing with the failure to overcome them.... it could not know such things as hope or triumph, fear or courage, grief, contentment, and love -- and so it would have to actually become a physical Universe (or as Einstein described it, a very persistent illusion of one) to obtain any of these experiences (that is, for the time that it exists, for ultimately all will fall into black holes, and then the evaporation of Hawking radiation approaching than the rate of c presages a universal perpetual information loss corresponding to the shrinkage of phase space volume, wherein trajectories converge towards singularities, counter-balanced only by the degree to which quantum information is regained, ameliorating root phase space volume; at which point the original Creator-entity would be restored from its experience of existing as our Universe....)

Anyway, the point there is that, yes, every rock and stream and ray of light and burst of radiation in deepest space is an aspect of our Creator, but while those aspects are attuned to existence as a physical energy, Man is on one level of which we are consciously unaware attuned to existence as exactly that, but on another level attuned to our conscious experience of the world, our troubles and toils and foibles.... this alone does not make us 'better' than anything else, but it does make us 'different' from all things which do not experience this and this difference brings a useful diversity to the experience of our Universe.... and though we are far from the 'pinnacle' of Creation, we are on the path for our future transhuman generations to achieve the capacity to set ourselves upon that pinnacle, IFF we may reconnect our conscious contemplation to our connectedness with all that exists beyond our crabbed claim of reality!!

Pandeism vs Theism: Our Destiny is in the Stars!!

This video explains why it must be so, that our destiny is in the stars!!



As the dawn of the 2010 decade approached, science quietly delivered a message that will build in realization until it reverberates with a boom forever into the future. Mankind's ability to identify planets around distant stars has evolved to a new height, to the point of being able to identify Earth-sized orbs in orbits that would make them amenable to carrying liquid water -- thus imbuing them with the potential to develop life, or at the least to be made habitable for humans. This scientific find gives us hope that we may literally reach for the stars, but it brings profound and awesome religious implications as well.

There are those out there in certain faiths who eagerly await not the day of our expansion into new worlds, but the end of this world. End-timers exist in several religions; in the Abrahamic faiths they tend to believe that the world is around 6,000 years old and, at the same time, that a thousand years is like a day to their God -- all straight from their books. So, doesn't it seem odd that after billions of infinities waiting around and doing nothing, such a God would suddenly up and create the Universe, have the whole thing exist for an eyeblink in the great span of things -- and then just as suddenly have an Armageddon and go back to the humdrum of no Universe for billions of infinities (even if thereafter surrounded by fawning souls bereft of any desire but to fawn)? And yet, these end-timers have been insisting that the end is coming right up on us (although to be fair, they've been insisting that daily and twice on Sundays for thousands of years now)....

With our technological developments and the recent discovery of other possibly habitable worlds with water on them and everything, we're really just starting to get interesting. I mean, if I was the sort of person who believed in piecemeal-purposed creation, I'd have a hard time thinking that any God created habitable planets which, at least according to theoretical physics, we could very much reach and populate, and yet this same God intended to end our days before we did what those worlds are designed to have us do. If we were expected to fail before being able to reach those worlds, such a Creator would know that in advance, and wouldn't bother to create those other habitable worlds -- which we might otherwise get to in a few hundred, at most a few thousand years (another eyeblink to such a being). The whole idea of it is like someone spending a fortune to buy a bunch of toys, to give to their children as a reward for not eating from the plate of candy which was placed in front of them and left unattended.

Now, even if for the sake of argument the scriptural accounts hoisted by the end-timers were true accounts of Creation, it makes no sense that such a Creator would end things now, at a time that would for that being be moments after Creation. That would be like lining up world class marathon runners to run a fifty-millimeter dash. Since physics itself keeps telling us of a Universe that is billions rather than thousands of years old, shouldn't we be looking towards a future that is also billions of years to come, instead of ending in thousands of years, or hundreds, or next Tuesday?

So it must be. We are meant to reach those other habitable worlds out there, just now coming onto our horizon; and because of this, the next few thousand years of human development will be particularly interesting to observe and even be a part of. Even the end-timers should now, finally, acknowledge that those lights in the sky are not angels or lesser gods or holes in a great dome, but are instead stars orbited by (detectable!!) planets, which if deity-made Creation is true, we must be intended to occupy!!