God is obviously not conscious, as @zachweinersmith.bsky.social suggests. God doesn't perceive an arrow of time due to increasing entropy, because God knows the universe exactly and doesn't need to coarse-grain. No experience of time's passage, no consciousness. www.smbc-comics.com/comic/consci... - ThreadSky

seanmcarroll.bsky.social • 264 days ago

God is obviously not conscious, as @zachweinersmith.bsky.social suggests. God doesn't perceive an arrow of time due to increasing entropy, because God knows the universe exactly and doesn't need to coarse-grain. No experience of time's passage, no consciousness.

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/consciousness-6

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sweetchilly.bsky.social•264 days ago

A reference, chapter V
https://esoteric.msu.edu/VolumeII/MysticalTheology.html

gliese1337.bsky.social•264 days ago

That conclusion relies on the unstated assumption that god's experiences are limited to the universe which he has omniscience over. He could exist on an orthogonal timeline in a higher reality in which he has linear experience.

swordsy.bsky.social•263 days ago

Following this model of God, is it the same God across many worlds or are there many Gods, one per branch?

steve-daniels.bsky.social•264 days ago

God is nature. Nature is indifferent.

timhenke.bsky.social•264 days ago

This means I guess that God has no capacity for information processing, so They can only know hard facts

It feels like this means They are disqualified from any type of understanding

cdj.bsky.social•264 days ago

I would add: no limitations means no attention*, which for many would exclude possibility of consciousness (*Augustine said it first: https://philpapers.org/archive/JENTPL-2.pdf)

kalonastars.bsky.social•257 days ago

"No experience of time's passage, no consciousness." Does this could somehow apply/matter for machines/AI consciousness debate?!🤔

justinfalcone.com•264 days ago

When you look at a page, your eyes can perceive the whole 2-dimensional plane, but you read it as a 1-dimensional sequence of words. God likewise could "read" the arrow of time even though He can perceive all time at once

chain-reaction.bsky.social•263 days ago

This reminds me of a thought I had about the idea that God is perfect and therefore must be static, since any change of state must be less perfect than the previous.

seanmcarroll.bsky.social•264 days ago

(Just one of several ways in which traditional notions of God are incoherent, because humans have difficulty distinguishing between "infinite" and "really big.")

kbkorb.bsky.social•263 days ago

Oh yeah? I can count my way to infinity.

seanmcarroll.bsky.social•264 days ago

Also amusing that the URL for the SMBC comic is "consciousness-6", implying previous entries in the series.

selfawarepatterns.bsky.social•264 days ago

The previous entries are all worth checking out.

kudzers.bsky.social•264 days ago

I'm drawn to in theology that takes the unknowability and "no-thing-ness" of of god seriously. John Scotus Eriugena as an example: "We do not know what God is. God Himself does not know what He is because He is not anything. Literally God is not, because He transcends being."

johnrgregg3.bsky.social•264 days ago

Hmm. God is conscious, and does experience time. He is omniscient, but doesn't know the future, because the future isn't a thing. It doesn't exist (yet) to be known. The 4D block conjecture is false. We know determinism is false.

fredbo.bsky.social•264 days ago

I haven't thought about it deeply (yet), but on the surface it seems the "God" debate and the "Free Will" debate are, in a way, very similar.

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