In the Western model of education, there is an operational distinction between physics and metaphysics. The former gets you grants from the Department of Defense, and opens doors to working at NASA or JPL. You get to work with nuclear reactors and supercolliders and fusion bombs and Einstein-Bose condensates. The latter is stereotyped as the demesne of hippies trapped in the 1960s and undergrads who have no idea what they want to do with their lives. Generally, the discipline is called philosophy and not metaphysics, but a rose is a rose. You know you’re pretty marginal when even the social science and humanities people look at you with that “What the hell do you do?” look in their eyes.

What is strange is that this was not always so. When the Roman Catholic Church held sway over the Western world, physics and metaphysics were the same thing. If you think about it, it makes a hell of a lot of sense. Even in this present day, physicists expend a huge amount of effort into trying to figure out (1) where everything comes from and (2) where everything goes. In other words, a Theory of Everything™. The current incarnation of the most popular theory out there is called M-theory, where the M could easily stand for “meta.” The more popular nomenclature is String Theory, and it’s really just contemporary metaphysics dressed up with the trappings of mathematics since none of it is in a testable state at this time.

But I’m not here to argue semantics, nor really discuss the curious divide between hard science and philosophy.

What started me on this tack is going to midnight mass on Christmas.

If you’ve been following this blog for any amount of time, you may recall me mentioning I’ve been in a terrible crisis of faith since 2001. I was born and raised Roman Catholic, was baptised, participated in the Eucharist, and was Confirmed. I attended a parochial elementary school and junior high, and went to an all-boys high school run by Jesuits. Even all through college and most of med school, I still went to mass every Sunday.

And then a bunch of lunatic-fringe Muslims hijacked a few planes and crashed them into the WTC and the Pentagon.

This is not where everything went to shit quite yet.

We all know that religious fundamentalists are scary people who need to be quarantined and maybe even euthanized. Right? Right? I mean, it’s not surprising that a bunch of whack jobs would do such a thing, right?

That’s where I part company with most of the Western world, I guess.

The sad thing is that what we really have to chose between are Islamic psychos and the Christian fascists. Religious fundamentalists are going to destroy the world, and there is nothing we can do to stop them.

Despite my training in Western science, and despite the disappointments I’ve suffered from my faith, I still haven’t abandoned the idea that there might be a God after all. I seriously doubt that he/she is like the God described in the Old Testament, but I think that the possibility of the existence of an omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient hyperintelligence is greater than zero, meaning that, given enough time in the universe, one or several are bound to occur.

I mean, I really doubt that the God that these sick fucks worship actually exists, but I still haven’t abandoned the idea that there might be some kind of Presence™ out there that is relatively benign, that may or may not take an interest in our little pale blue dot orbiting and unremarkable yellow sun in the backwaters of an unremarkable spiral galaxy sitting in the midst of an unremarkable galaxy cluster.

The fact that it’s a possibility that isn’t ruled out by the laws of physics nor the laws of thermodynamics means that atheism can’t be right, either. I think the only honest way to go without being overly dogmatic and ramming your beliefs down other people’s throats is to be agnostic. Wishy-washy maybe, but what if the Flying Spaghetti Monster really exists? What then?

Seriously, though, from the atheists that I’ve seen who are vocal on the Internet, it just seems like yet another religion from which you can exclude others and condemn them. Not really my taste, and if you can’t disprove the existence of an omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient hyperintelligence, then how do you know what the truth is? You can’t. Simple as that.

Mind you, this is by far not an apologia for the raving lunatics who claim to have the keys to Salvation™. I think anyone who is dogmatic about anything but can’t prove their point with reproducible experiments should just shut the hell up and let people who have real talent get on with the business of discovering the inner workings of the universe. Anyone who thinks that they, and only they, know the truth is either selling something, or smoking something.

The reason I believe that omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent hyperintelligences may exist is the simple fact that we know matter can self-organize, and that self-organized matter can become intelligent (perhaps I’m using the word too loosely, but you get the picture.) And it so happens that some self-organized intelligent entities (read, human beings) are interested in trying to create artificial intelligences that have some or all of these capabilities. If AI is truly possible (and it is still an “if,” since we have yet to produce a program that can really pass the Turing Test), then it should follow that hyper-AI is also possible. While the only intelligent form of matter we know happens to consist of mostly carbon and uses a highly distributed network of networks of nanoprocessors (in other words, neurons organized into nuclei, organized into functional partitions in the brain) for computing tasks, operating in a mostly aqueous environment, we are, after all, actively trying to replicate or at least emulate this functionality on silicon. And if it can be done in silicon, why not in uranium or lanthanum? Why not in a 10,000 kelvin gas cloud with hydrogen nuclei and hydrogen nuclei encoding state and performing quantum calculations? Or in a network of quasars, in which gamma-ray bursts are analogous to the release of neurotransmitters in our brains?

So I think that it is still possible that something like a God may be out there, although I am rather certain that we have no idea what he/she/it is truly like.

In literature, such a creature is already well described. Charlie Stross describes The Eschaton, a highly distributed hyperintelligence inhabiting the galaxy, in his books Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise. And while the Eschaton may have limits, it seems pretty close to being omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient. Other distributed intelligences haunt the science fiction scene, like the Oracle and the Architect from the Matrix, Wintermute and Neuromancer from Neuromancer, Skynet from the Terminator Series. And while I have never read anything that Vernon Vinge wrote, I get the sense that he believes that our descendants are destined to evolve into similar creatures, for whom the vast vacuum of space is not a limit.

Arthur C Clarke’s laws always come back to me. The one I always remember is that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” If this is the case, how do we know that miracles can’t be explained scientifically? I think it’s because, in a lot of ways, the average human mind is lazy. Instead of wanting to find the truth, the human mind just wants a pretty story that they can use as an answer for whenever their actions are challenged. Just think of the times that real people have actually, sincerely, claimed that God made them do it. (And think of the mayhem and suffering most of these people have wreaked on the world at large. God’s name is definitely sullied by the never-ending line of cheaters, liars, bullies, and outright assholes who claim to have a direct hotline to the deity him/herself.)

But I stand by my belief that fundamentalists should be killed, incarcerated, brainwashed, or lobotomized. If we got rid of these fucks, we could probably end like 95% of the problems of humanity.