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Path Semantics from the perspective of philosophy of religion
Philosophy of religion is "the philosophical examination of the central themes and concepts involved in religious traditions". For more information, see wikipedia article.
The application of Path Semantics to philosophy of religion is limited to the perspective where people use aesthetics of logical language design as a basis for religious reasoning. In this perspective, the central themes and concepts involved are archetypal patterns of thought that shape personal beliefs about the supernatural, personal identity and group identity.
Concepts in religions such as the afterlife, free will and religious rituals are not covered.
Religions often forge fake history, so the approach taken here are ideas based on archeological findings and scientific evidence, but overall, this is philosophy. This means that some freedom is taken here to think creatively about this topic. If you disagree with these ideas on a fundamental religious basis, then have in mind it is not our job to explain in detail how path semanticists think about controversial ideas in a particular religion. Path semanticists are not committed to organized religious beliefs.
There might be bold claims here that could offend people. That is just how this kind of research and following debates work.
If somebody says "here is math equation describing God's nature", then this would very likely cause a lot of controversial debates. Religion is something that people are passionate about and conflicting views might even sometimes turn into violence. It is important to remember this when talking about Path Semantics from the perspective of philosophy of religion.
We do not want people to think that Path Semantics has the "answer" in the sense that it dictates what people ought to believe or not. It is more like "here are some interesting ideas" and followed by debates about possible relevance to human history, belief structures and doctrines, traditions and studies of ancient religions.
Path semanticists study the branch of mathematics that has to do with foundations of mathematics and physics. Of course, when making progress in these studies, there will be ideas that might seem potent for religious debate. However, it is important to remember that what path semanticists work on is the "language of thoughts" that underlies mathematics and physics, not necessarily the models that are built in mathematics and physics. Hence, one can view philosophy of religion through the lens of "language of thoughts" and infer a lot of interesting patterns that occurred in history as various belief structures.
To claim that Path Semantics models a lot of "language of thoughts" is not controversial. This is kind of the point of doing this research. However, since any thought, or most thoughts, can be modeled in Path Semantics to at least to some degree, it would be wrong to cherry pick specific models as representations of central ideas in e.g. religion. There is in some sense a requirement that only central ideas in Path Semantics can be used as philosophical topics for central ideas in religion, otherwise it would be very hard to justify why exactly these ideas and not alternative ideas that are also modeled in Path Semantics just fine.
That said, the study of Path Semantical Quality is of such great importance to Path Semantics that it is very tempting to draw parallels between this logical language and belief structures in religion. There are also very solid arguments that motivates addressing these topics from a perspective of fundamental physics and hence philosophy of the cosmos. The human species is not an exception from unified models of physics and therefore our place, our belief structures etc. come into question when discussing how the fundamental ideas of Path Semantics relate to how we think.
When presenting this material, it is important to be careful, such that people do not jump to conclusions. Nothing is certain here, these topics are just ideas and they are not direct claims about truths. Instead, they are meant to be interpreted as using some formalism to gain insights into how people think religiously, how people reason their way into these ideas and why it seems such an intuitive approach that it occurred multiple places in the world, in disconnected regions and in many forms.
How people think about God, or the idea of God in general, is a very complex topic. At first, it seems so complex that one would expect that this topic can never be fully understood formally. The very idea that a formal expression can be suitable, might even seem impossible or absurd. This requires elaboration, both to people who are experienced in religious reasoning, and, of course, mathematicians that might be interested in the formal aspects. Understandably, satisfying both groups can be challenging. On one hand, the intimate aspects of religious reasoning must be taken seriously as a language of thoughts. On the other hand, Path Semantics can be very technical and the ideas that are expressed can look deceptively simple. Therefore, the approach taken here is to just jump directly into how path semanticists think about this topic and flesh out the details, going in the directions of religious reasoning and technical details at once.
To readers who do not understand the technical details, it is recommended to skip paragraphs or focus on sentences that summarizes ideas.
When not interpreted literally, God might be thought of as the "qubit" operator ~ applied to some proposition x.
~x
This is the same as x ~~ x (self-quality). Notice that Path Semantics uses "quality" as in "equality" without the "e", because ~~ is a partial equivalence relation. One can define quality from qubit and vice versa, so it is not wrong to write ~x as a way of talking about the most central operation of study in Path Semantics.
What is curious about ~x is that it does not look like the idea of God from first impressions.
For example, how can it make sense that "God is everywhere" formally? The technical answer is that ~x in the classical model can be interpreted as "any proposition". The sense that God is everywhere is a projection onto every possible proposition.
How can it make sense that "God knows everything" formally? The technical answer is that ~x is congruent by tautological equality. It is not sufficient to know x == y to prove ~x == ~y. One must use (x == y)^true to show that (~x == ~y)^true. It is a kind of stronger statement that requires tautological reasoning. Translated into spiritual thought, that knowledge about everything is required.
How can it make sense that "God has a son" formally? The technical answer is x ~~ y implies ~x and ~y. When witnessing quality between two propositions, one can conclude self-quality of each proposition. In Christianity, the disciples witnessed Jesus' life and could infer the existence of the Father from the belief that Jesus was God's son.
These interpretations are biased toward Judaism, which is a small subset of the total space of religions on Earth. One might e.g. mistakenly believe that x ~~ y is a "proof" that Jesus exists, while the actual way path semanticists think about this topic is that x ~~ y is related to avatars. Since Jesus might be thought of as an avatar of God, x ~~ y does not point toward Jesus in particular, but to any equivalence class of avatars associated with the idea of God. In other religions, e.g. Hinduism and Buddhism, such avatars might be thought of as incarnations. There are different ways to think about incarnations, different branches of interpretations of holy texts etc.
Why this exact qubit operation ~ and not other operations, is a complex topic. One argument is that the qubit operator ~ extends Intuitionistic Logic in a way that seems "supernatural" in relation to the rest of logic.
Intuitionistic Logic, also called "constructive logic" is perhaps the most important logical language in the world today. There are other languages, e.g. linear logic, but these are often considered more at the "research stage" at this point in time, although they are fully formalized. Most of formal mathematics today can be considered related to Intuitionistic Logic. This logic is characterized by the property that one can not prove that x is either true or false. One needs a proof of x being true, or a proof of x being false. It is possible to assume a proof of x being either true or false and this results in classical logic.
Path semanticists are very good at leveraging Intuitionistic Logic. Most people, even mathematicians, think about e.g. propositions has having "truth content" in the sense that one "ought to" derive its truth value. This view is rejected in Path Semantics, where propositions are more like general building blocks of language. All forms of deriving truth values from propositions are related to some notion of "collapse" of the space of propositions, which is considered more rich and colorful than the "cartoonish" version where propositions "ought to" be either true or false. At the same time, path semanticists do not consider such collapses catastrophical. This is just part of the nature of propositions. Both the collapse of propositions into truth values and preservation of their rich structure belong to the same mathematical language.
It might be easy for some mathematicians, due to bias of tools and techniques they use in daily work, to falsely believe that Path Semantics is a kind of "trickery" exploiting minor technical details in Intuitionistic Logic. The argument against a such view is that Path Semantics also has classical models that are richer in expression than normal logic. Among path semanticists, it is more common to believe that particular views attributed to propositions suffer from history bias, where the development of logic had a kind of coincidental trajectory where e.g. ancient views of religious thought was overlooked. This might have happened out of technical difficulties, the lack of proper computational devices and background knowledge about history and mathematics. However, it is also acknowledged that, given the large amounts of attempts to formalize some ideas that have not been satisfactory from an intellectual point of view or perhaps over-simplified, thereby trivialized, that it just very hard for people to make it correctly and representative of the underlying philosophical ideas. To help with these developments, Path Semantics give people more tools to understand how these ideas can be constructed formally.
The reason one can use x ~~ y to talk about how religious reasoning works, e.g. "God has a son" is because there is a natural structure to these thoughts. The formal expression can only be used to talk about the reasoning itself, not whether the sentences are true or not. In fact, one can not prove ~x or !~x from an empty context in Intuitionistic Logic. This reflects the fact that God can not be proven to exists or not. It does not even make sense to say that either God exists or not without some kind of belief or evidence, since the underlying logic is Intuitionistic Logic. However, even in the classical model, ~x might be thought of as undefined or undetermined. It forces classical proofs to become probabilistic in some cases. Yet, "undetermined" might make it seem a bit arbitrary. Here, it is important to understand how this indeterminacy is related to partial equivalence and how partial equivalence form local pockets of total equivalence. It is not just that the truth value of ~x has some kind of arbitrariness to it. It is also that ~x necessary follows from x ~~ y. There is a choice of belief, yes, but there are multiple ways such beliefs might be formed. Since there are many ways, but each of them can be interpreted from the perspective of philosophy of religion, this supports the arguments that the logical language is not coincidental. There is a difference between being able to model arbitrariness and the arbitrariness of the language as a whole. At the surface, it is easy to immaturely reject the interpretation of Path Semantics from the perspective of philosophy of religion. This mistake might be done by focusing too much on specific details, and building on arguments with implicit intuition from the application of these ideas in other parts of mathematics while overlooking other important technical aspects.
There is so much going on here technically, that to understand every piece might take a lot of time. However, it is important to not jump to conclusions, because humans like to confirm their own beliefs and disqualify other people's beliefs out of a desire for competition. Path Semantics is much deeper that the superficial desires that people have. Likewise, religious thought as a whole is a much more deeper topic that deserves respect on its own, regardless of whether people interpret these thoughts from within a given framework of ideas.
Think about this as logic having a kind of "normal language" for thinking, which is Intuitionistic Logic. One day it is discovered a kind of "portal" into another world using the qubit operator ~. This world does not only extend the normal world of thoughts, but also connects the normal world of thoughts with other worlds that are very strange and rich in expression. Some mathematicians, without knowledge about the details of the qubit operator, might think at first that it should be covered by introducing predicates, which is done in First Order Logic. Mathematicians love First Order Logic in formal theorem proving. However, the qubit operator ~ is not like a predicate, because it is congruent up to tautological equality, while predicates are congruent by normal equality. With other words, the qubit operator demands more of the language. In turn, these higher demands are related to tautological and paradoxical reasoning. Sequents, natural deduction and modal logic are derivable from consequences of making the qubit operator ~ "behave" properly. One can say with certainty that the qubit operator ~ is kind of a "puzzle" that encodes a lot of deeper knowledge about mathematics. Of course, these developments are not given for free and must be worked out, but Path Semantics has now progressed so far that one might consider the qubit operator ~ fully formalized and bridging this formalism with other parts of logic is underway.
The appearance of God in language of thoughts, is kind of like being "touched from the outside" yet from the inside, as if somebody are poking you from another dimension. This does not imply that there is another dimension, but it might feel that way through introspection and intuitive understanding of the "taste" or "flavor" of normal logic versus the extended universe that is introduced by the qubit operator ~.
The qubit operator ~ introduces an enormous complexity that makes normal logic seems like some game mathematicians played in kinder garden. In quality homotopy level 1, where ~ is used zero times, we find the usual 16 binary operators that can be expressed in normal logic. In level 2, where ~ is used at most one time, there are over 4 billions. The number of binary operators grow super-exponential with levels and soon passes the number of atoms in the observable universe. This is in base 2, which works for classical logic. In constructive logic (Intuitionistic Logic), the base is 3 and the complexity grows even faster, having over 18 quadrillion binary operators in level 2. Each of these binary operators are ways to relate two propositions to each other as a "thought". It should be obvious to mathematicians that the expressiveness of language increases dramatically with quality homotopy levels. However, one can also trivialize this growth of operations by truncating to some finite level of many-value logical languages. The qubit operator ~ is not only the portal that makes these extensions intuitive, but it also allows infinite levels. The analogue of trivializing these infinite levels would be like to talk about computation in general.
Here, it is easy to mistakenly believe that Path Semantics only talks about computation in general. Path Semantics goes much deeper than that by introducing the core axiom, which allows interpreting path semantical quality over path semantical levels that are orthogonal to quality homotopy levels. It is like this extended world of logic using the qubit operator ~ on its own is just a one-dimensional perspective of Path Semantics as a whole. Now, this is a very impressive development of Path Semantics, that extending into quality homotopy levels of many-value logical languages can be unified with general computation. Path semantical levels on the other hand, unlike quality homotopy levels, can be interpreted as cumulative universes of types, which is important for mathematical formalism, and time, which is important in theoretical physics. These topics are complex on their own, but the overall idea is to just introduce the qubit operator ~ to build the logical foundation for the core axiom.
Path semanticists think that the qubit operator is a natural development to make the core axiom of Path Semantics work properly. Hence, if the core axiom is taken as a primary motivation to enable reasoning about uniqueness in abstractions, there will be something like a language that follows naturally, suiting the philosophy of religion. This explains how people could have created such belief structures independently of each other around the world, throughout history. Some component of this is the physiology of human beings, but it might not be coincidental that religious thoughts were among the first written texts, expressed in relation to the general idea of God.
Yet, the qubit operator ~ is not the only operator necessary to make Path Semantics work formally. For example, path semantical order < or exponential propositions ^ play very important roles in the formal theory. However, should one pick one operator, it would be the qubit operator ~.
It is like, should logic be extended in some way that allows more expressive thoughts, connecting physics, logic, mathematics and philosophy, but not more than the bare minimum, then the qubit operator ~ might be the easiest way to do that. The importance of this operator in Path Semantics is paramount.
Yet, this is not the full story. The qubit operator ~ alone is too abstract to form specific biases of language that are associated with the idea of God. Instead, one talks about its meaning in relation to applying it to some argument x. It does not matter what x is, but it is of vital importance to understand that x here means a proposition. A proposition is like a "thought" in logic. Propositions can be arbitrary complex.
What is special when applying the qubit operator ~ to some argument x, is when one says ~x, it does not mean anything in particular. To be more precise, its meaning depends on x, but ~x can be taken to mean "any proposition". One can think about it as a "hole" in the space of ideas. This hole can be filled with some meaning that people choose. At first, this seems a bit arbitrarily, because when people say "this is my opinion", they do not put as much into it as when they say "this is what I choose to believe". The latter is more personal, intimate and expressive of the person's character and person-hood. Perhaps even, in many cases, people identify themselves, individually or in groups, with how they think about God. The argument that ~x expresses formally that particular scenario when people say "I choose to believe" (faith), comes from how ~x fits with the rest of the logical language. It relates, in some ways, to an "non-being other" in a spiritual way that emphasizes its own "being". What we mean when we say "mere knowledge" can be thought of as normal logic. This ~x sits so close up to the usual intuitive understanding of knowledge, yet also being set apart from that kind of knowledge, kind of pointing in another direction or dimension of thought. This intimate intuition, where "mere knowledge" is kind of disowned as personal property, but where ~x feels like it can be kept, or "held in thoughts", at the same time that it fills these connections to other worlds of thought, generating a kind of sensation of being embraced. This association, full of personal attribution, is summarized as the word "God" in religion.
One argument for why ~x seems to be able to relate people to their own inner experience, is the particular property called "sesh" which in the classical model relates ~x and !~x == ~!x. This property makes ~x | ~!x provable in classical logic. This sesh property kind of unites the qubit operator ~ with the logical language. It is like, the new operator has to "socialize" with the other ideas, learning to fit in, creating its own little pocket of harmony. There is no formal justification why this is so, other than path semanticists finding this property mathematical beautiful. There are also models of Path Semantics where this property does not hold. However, sesh is assumed in the standard model of Path Semantics. This is why it can be brought up in debates about philosophy of religion.
Historically, sesh might be associated with religious ideas about the female aspects of divinity. The choice of sesh as an axiom is of significance when path semanticists talk about Seshatism vs Platonism. Seshatism vs Platonism is a whole branch of Path Semantics that deals with duality of language bias. Again, this is another complex topic. Seshatism is about inquality and aquality in relation to quality. Quality is often considered biased toward Platonism due to the normal choice of the core axiom being asymmetric.
One can also argue for bias toward Platonism from the perspective of Intuitionistic Logic, since for any proposition x, the statement !!x is biased toward x. Logically, one can interpret x biased toward false, but is uncommon. Most people think about statements as meant to be true, not meant to be false. This is also known as over-determined vs under-determined 3-value logic.
Many mathematicians think about mathematics from a Platonic perspective. Applied mathematics and programming is often biased toward Seshatism. Yet, there are ways to make Seshatism a perfect mirror image of Platonism, which is why it is treated as so in e.g. Joker Calculus that is used to reason about higher dualities.
It is like, one starts with a simple extension and this gives room for thinking about various biases that gets categorized into dualities and soon there are many perspectives of the divine and supernatural. Compare this to Jesus and his disciples, or the many gods in Hinduism. Each added character to mythology provides a new perspective. This ability to form new perspectives is one motivation for developing this for philosophy of religion. Seeing the math from new perspectives might help to fill in gaps of understanding. There seems to be many pieces, but they relate to each other in a similar way that is found in religious belief structures. This does not imply that some belief structures are "wrong" or that Path Semantics is "correct" in a naive sense. Path semanticists think about Path Semantics as open ended and this approach to thinking about the whole of language of thoughts is carried over to philosophy of religion. The point is not that there are many ways to form beliefs, which is true even from trivializing the extensions that Path Semantics does to logic, but that there are certain biases in the combinations of extensions that fit the particular patterns that various belief structures seems to have.
God as a thought in philosophy of religion is much more than a sensation of personal connection with a language filled with meaning. God is also an idea that is shared among humans. There is a lot of controversy around this idea, for example, whether there is one God or many, whether God exists outside space and time, whether God created the universe and so on. At first, one might think that Path Semantics only has something to say about God as a kind of logical statement or an idea. What is more surprising, is that logic as language is connected to fundamental physics.
For example, hypergraph rewriting systems can serve as models for constructing physics from the bottom up, at scales shorter than the Planck length. This is very, very tiny, even compared to atoms, so the only thing we know about these models, depends on which scientific predictions we can extract from them. It is shown mathematically that these hypergraph rewriting systems are equivalent to Intuitionistic Logic. Should we extend these models in some way, that allows a richer language, perhaps something that could explain how it is possible that we are conscious and aware, from a metaphysical point of view? Again, the qubit operator ~ is a good candidate.
This means, we have walked in a full circle, from the psychological perspective of language where people are "filling in" their personal narrative in their internal analogue of ~x, to the fundamental philosophy of physics where we are trying to understand something like "There is a lot of emptiness in space and time, how it is possible to experience the world?".
As if by magic, this idea that God created us, or is creating/destroying us moment by moment, changing, helping etc. can be expressed concisely as ~x, in both the sense of having a kind of personal attributed space of thought, and in the projective sense where God is an idea "out there" in the world. This projection is kind of an attempt to understand one's own inner experience and relating it to the physical world and how it works and perhaps how the physical world might be "hiding something" that expresses the portal of ideas to the supernatural.
There is no actual scientific evidence that underlies this argument. The argument comes from a kind of formal point of view, where statements in logic are expressed and interpreted. The study of these logical structures seems to have a "shape" that makes it sometimes intuitive to think about how religious beliefs are formed. The current state of experimental research into fundamental physics is far from pinning down any constraint on extensions to e.g. hypergraph rewriting. There might be clever ways to achieve this, some time in the future, but this is also not the primary motivation to develop ideas around philosophy of religion. It is sufficient that some ideas, when being central and of importance to Path Semantics, also can clarify or express ideas around thoughts from a religious perspective. It is also important to mention that path semanticists are not necessarily religious people. They might believe in God, or not. The argument put forward is not an attempt to justify or disqualify religious beliefs. It is more like talking about religions in general. However, doing so can be controversial precisely because people have their own views of what is a "correct" religion. Path Semantics does not point to e.g. monotheism as more "correct" than polytheism. The use of the word "God" here is a kind of general category of associated beliefs that are commonly found in religions around the world and through history of mankind.
At the same time, choosing another word than "God" can make it harder to understand for people. For example, the Monad is another word that might be used. However, to most people, this word is less familiar, so when one talks about the intimate relation that people form with their religious beliefs, it can be confusing. Some people who understand what the Monad is, might disagree that their view of God is similar. This means, regardless of which word one chooses when using Path Semantics in philosophy of religion, one risks causing unnecessary controversy. People usually prefer the word "God" when referring to their own personal experience of these ideas. There are also people who are put off by the word "God", because they associate it with a kind of distorted collective trance, or group-think, that can mislead people. Therefore, it is difficult to choose a word that satisfies everybody. One approach to solving this tension, is to think about it as ~x being a more "precise" notion of God that in the philosophy of religion can be helpful when debating how religious beliefs are formed.
Some people also feel that any debate or investigations into language of thoughts concerning God, might be a violation of the natural private space that people use to form beliefs. There is kind of a sense of fear for losing something valuable by too much analysis. Religious beliefs are formed through associations. The use of words and debate about ideas can change some of these associations. What is common in religion is that some people feel scared when their beliefs are challenged. This can lead to attacks on other people. However, most people understand there is a healthy balance possible, between "gardening" the inner space of thoughts and the sharing of ideas out of desire to express one's own views more clearly and listening to other peoples' views. Therefore, it is important to not jump to the conclusion that ~x is an expression of God in a direct sense, but more like a formal expression that can be used to talk about the belief in God in relation to belief structures. The point is that ~x has a specific meaning in logic, that resembles how people think about God in relation to their religious views, as if these two ideas follow the same underlying abstract principles.
Now, even with consideration of ~x as a more starting point to address these topics about God, it is still easy enough to misunderstand how deep Path Semantics can be used in this direction. Some people might notice that there are perspectives of God in various religions that do not seem to follow the same rules as others. Therefore, they might, mistakenly, believe that Path Semantics only says so much and not more, not including these other perspectives.
To be more precise about which perspective of God one is using when expressing this idea as ~x, one needs to add modifier words in front of the word "God". There are two major perspectives:
- Platonic God
~x - Seshatic Goddess
!~xor~!x
These two perspectives requires going more in depth about what they mean in the philosophy of religion.
When talking about the Platonic God, it is important that one considers it as a kind of character or stereotypical view of God. People do not have commit their religious belief system belonging in a such category. The more we go into details about what a statement in Path Semantics might mean in philosophy of religion, the more "comical" it will sound to people. This is because religions are not as rigid in their structure as in logical language. The flexibility of thought in religious beliefs is an important part of the practice of religion. Therefore, one can not substitute directly e.g. God with ~x and think that this will reflect exactly how people think about God. That would be absurd. Instead, one can think about the Platonic God as a kind of projection back from some stereotypical view of God into formal statements.
The Platonic God (~x) exists outside space and time and created the universe. The universe evolves kind of autonomously from that point, having a kind of "agency" on its own yet without the agent, set apart from the Platonic God. It is actually a kind of non-agency, that is attributed to the world, lacking the association of it with any kind of personality or character. By using this non-agency of the world, the Platonic God is understood to have an agency, yet still being separated from the world, but in a weaker sense than how the world is separated from its creator. It is like, the world is separated from the Platonic God, but the Platonic God is not necessarily as separated from its creation as much as the creation is separated from the creator. This sense of asymmetric separation, attributes a kind of "superiority" to the creator. In return the created universe is kind of "inferior" both through its non-agency and in a spiritual sense.
To understand this asymmetric form of separation, one can think that ~x extends normal logic. When the qubit operator ~ is thought about as the basis, instead of normal logic, we do not know exactly what we are talking about. There is no analogue in Path Semantics that the qubit operator comes "before" normal logic in some sense. However, this is the premise of the Platonic God. Thus, one should view the logical aesthetics as starting from within the universe, using the Intuitionistic Logic as basis. The extension by ~x is a way of "opening up a portal" into the divine and supernatural realm. It is believed that this divine and supernatural realm existed before this universe came into being. Just because one finds a door into another world, does not imply that the other world is created the moment one opens up the door. A proof in logic is in some sense possible to do, before any proof is found. Thus, when viewing the spiritual world from the perspective of the Platonic God, the world seems closer to it, than the world to invent the extensions required of thought to reach the Platonic God. It is in this sense where superiority and inferiority has a higher understanding of abstract meaning.
This sense of superiority versus inferiority, comes with an underlying understanding of "purity" versus "impurity". The world is, to be blunt, in ways "cursed" or "filthy" in some sense. One can present nuances of these perspectives that are more balanced within some particular perspective of religion, but that is the gist of the stereotypical view of the Platonic God.
When we say "Platonic God" it sounds like a joke, because using a modifier in front of the word "God" makes people take it less seriously. Yet, there are many stereotypical attributes of the Platonic God that one takes seriously in various religions. For example, that God is outside space and time. Some people think this is an important belief, due to the expression of superiority that God has in relation to the world and beings within it. There are also some aspects of the Platonic God which, when easy to make fun of, are attributed to those of other gods that people worship. Perhaps, this is a form of psychological projection of aspects of some ideas, that might feel intuitive at first, but sounds a bit stupid after while. These aspects that are not liked, are attributed to other people's beliefs one wishes to undermine in a competition.
The Platonic God takes up no space nor time in the world, yet tends to consume it as a kind of abstract Symbol of Power. A Symbol of Power is a system that is:
- not well defined (undecidable)
- manipulates on a massive scale (powerful)
- has long reach across space and time (potent)
- never manifests physically directly (immaterial)
Another example of a Symbol of Power is money. Symbols of Power are important in the research on AI safety.
It is often from the perspective of the Platonic God as a Symbol of Power, that the "irony" of God existing outside space and time appears. Psychologists refer to this phenomena as "self-fulfilling prophecies". When people believe something, they might make it come true, just because they believe it. However, no amount of effort can make the Platonic God become absolutely true. This is because the Platonic God is not provable, by definition, in Path Semantics. Yet, if people believe the Platonic God to be absolutely true, then from within that language, it seems absolutely true. To distinguish between beliefs that assume something and beliefs that holds in all possible worlds, one uses tautological reasoning. A self-fulfilling prophecy is tautological in the sense that (~x => ~x)^true. This means, that when one assumes ~x, one can prove ~x in all possible worlds.
While the Platonic God can not be proven to be true, a self-fulfilling prophecy might come true out of belief in the Platonic God. For example, working together has real physical consequences even when the people who work together do so out of unsound reasoning.
It is known from Game Theory that rational agents might lock themselves into bad Nash equilibriums, such that no single agent can get a better outcome by changing their own decision independently of the other agents. A way to get out of a bad Nash equilibrium is to announce the change of decision in public to make all agents synchronize with each other. So, there are games where irrational behavior pays off more than rational behavior.
In a human society, there can be competing beliefs in Platonic Gods. One group of people might be in conflict with another group of people due to differences in their beliefs. Sometimes, it not the gods as such that causes the conflict, but that they work as a social label on groups of people. Studies have shown that dividing people into groups might be sufficient to cause conflicts.
So, it is possible that many wars throughout history have been fought due to erroneous reasoning about Platonic Gods, due to higher rewards in bad Nash equilibriums and due to using beliefs in Platonic Gods as labels on groups of people.
There is no theoretical reason why two or more Platonic Gods can not coexist. The argument that conflicting beliefs in Platonic Gods exist, comes from the idea that the Platonic God created the universe. There is only one universe, so there is one Platonic God who creates it.
The reason that one does not consider multiple Platonic Gods creating the universe, is due to the attributed agency per Platonic God. The agency is thought of as a a kind of will or plan that the Platonic God has. Different Platonic Gods might have different plans, so they would not work together to create a single universe.
It is also common to believe that all worlds beyond the universe are "owned" in some sense by the Platonic God. These worlds are considered inferior to the Platonic God's superiority.
Formally, ~x might be written qubit(x). It is possible to extend the qubit function to some list,
e.g. qubit[i](x) that allows multiple Platonic Gods to exist side by side.
However, since the qubit operator ~ is often used to formulate other stuff that in turn is used to prove things,
it might not be very ergonomic to have a whole list of different qubit operators.
There is a sense in which the models want to share a common qubit operator that synchronizes their internal definitions.
In this sense, a model is assigned a qubit operator that functions as a "social label" for a group of people.
In many models, the qubit operator is used behind the scenes, such that it does not appear in the final model to the user. This means, without a way to referring to the qubit operator, that the user has no control over how it is defined. In turn, this makes it difficult to reason from within models about how qubit operators ought to be controlled. The consequence is that it is easier to assume a common qubit operator when generalizing over multiple models and integrating them.
From within a model, the perspective of the qubit operator might seem as if it is "outside space and time". In some way, it is inaccessible, but if the internal language of the model is powerful enough, one can open up a logical "portal" which gives glimpses into the possible underlying logic of the model itself. This is essentially what is done in Path Semantics, where the qubit operator is defined using mechanisms that allows constructions of logical models. Path Semantics can not prove stuff about the "actual world" in the sense of having direct influence over the world, but it allows constructing models which properties can be formalized logically.
This activity, of constructing models using the qubit operator, resembles the idea of how the Platonic God creates the universe. Basically, the Platonic God is kind of like a programmer in some sense, where the stuff that happens in a universe are proofs that the programmer construct. The events happen at the choice of the programmer in the external space and time, such that one can say from the coherence of internal events that the space-time of the universe is separated, by choice, from the Platonic God. However, should the Platonic God one day decide to interfere, it might do so, due to the agency that is attributed to it. Thus, the Platonic God is less separated from the world, by being enable to act its will upon it, while the world is less able to enable agency onto the spiritual world of the Platonic God. The agency of the world is not necessarily given and various conditions are imagined to allow "escaping" the physical and natural realm.
Some notion of interacting with the spiritual realm is associated with "purity".
A common form of such religious worship is to empty one's own mind, which can be interpreted as tautological congruence of ~x.
To change ~x into ~y, it not sufficient that x == y, but one needs to prove (x == y)^true.
Thus, the influence is only possible when there is some kind of extra truthful equivalence, associated with emptiness and purity.
One naive interpretation of ~x as the Platonic God is that it points to the Platonic God "directly".
However, a less naive interpretation is that it makes room for religious thoughts.
In this space of possibilities, the ideas of the Platonic God can take shape and form.
This is possible because ~x does not belong to normal logic and thereby not belonging to the physical world by logical necessity.
The ideas about the Platonic God are also a kind of separation between one's own thoughts about the physical world and
the thoughts about the spiritual world.
In general, separation from the divine and supernatural world is an important part of the perspective of religious thoughts that are biased toward the Platonic God. Without the separation, there is no desire to be reunited with the creator of the universe.
While many aspects of the Platonic God might seem familiar to mainstream monotheistic religions, there are also many aspects which are not part of the belief structure about the Platonic God:
- Afterlife (heaven or hell)
- Judgement after death
- Angels or demons
- Free will
- Messianism
These beliefs might have come from Zoroastrianism and influenced later organized religions.
The Seshatic Goddess is often the perspective of the universe itself as a divine entity, that sacrifices itself for its children. This process of sacrifice is time. There is no separation between people and the Seshatic Goddess. At the same time, there is an ambiguity in the ethical predictions such that the sacrifice happens regardless of whether people will be good or bad. This idea comes from a mother who loves her children unconditionally.
!~x or ~!x
From !~x, one can prove !(x ~~ y) for any y. In some sense, this means that the !~x is a statement about the non-copy-ability, hence originality. By negating self-quality, one asserts the uniqueness and being of oneself.
In Path Semantics, the choice of the core axiom is often asymmetric, such that aquality does not propagate in the same way as quality. Aqualty is actually indistinguishable from quality when swapping places. There are no theorems which can be proved one way without the other. Therefore, the negation might be thought about as a difference, or mirror image, where the difference itself is only understood internally in some language. Between languages, the internal, invisible differences are acknowledged as secrets of the carriers of the language, humans. Every person is attributed some originality which is how the person has inner experiences. These experiences are inaccessible to the outside world and this common understanding and acknowledgement of people's experiences and thereby respecting their dignity, is the source of divinity embodied in people. However, to the mad and power hungry king and conqueror, this divinity is ignored by corruption and forging fake history. Thus, the worship of the Seshatic Goddess focuses on secret, hidden and forgotten aspects associated with the divine or supernatural.
-
x ~~ y(quality) can be written(x == y) & ~x & ~y -
x ~!~ y(aquality) can be written(x == y) & ~!x & ~!y
The Seshatic Goddess might be thought of as a perfect mirror image of the Platonic God, forgotten formally and rediscovered through a spiritual journey. In relation to the choice of the asymmetric core axiom, the duality gets a meaning by difference. One often thinks about mathematics as being biased toward Platonism and this bias becomes an example of the "forgotten mathematics" that is its duality.
In Path Semantics, one can divide theories into Inside and Outside. The philosophy of Inside is Seshatic Platonism and the philosophy of the Outside is Platonic Seshatism. An Inside theory might be thought of some logical language where an unknown object is some expression modeled in the language. An Outside theory might be thought of some language with at least one symbol that is intrinsically unknown, forcing reasoning to be interactive as it can never be finished or completed by termination.
Translated into spiritual thoughts, life is a process which is never complete. The experience of life is through an "outside" which reflects how we are at the "inside", with this inside being an illusory mental representation of reality. We are constantly living in ethical ambiguity where problems need to be solved on a pragmatic level, without knowing the full consequences of our actions. We interact ethically, pragmatically and socially with the world.
Just like the Platonic God is about separation, there is an entirely different perspective of God, the Seshatic Goddess, that one can think about it as the dual or opposite, focusing on non-separation. This non-separation is a kind of intimate relationship where secrets of the divine or supernatural is revealed. It is important to remember that this duality is kind of an illusion. In mathematics duality is very important and notions of equivalence are often generalized to cases where two objects opposite to each other are considered equivalent.
The Seshatic Goddess is the universe itself with an associated pluralistic agency. In ancient religions, it was common to worship Mother Earth who gives birth to all life. The thought that the universe is a god, might seem strange from a monotheistic perspective. It might even sound like embracing a point of view of physicalism. However, monotheistic religions in western countries have in many centuries suppressed pluralistic religions to a degree where the underlying ideas are no longer associated as "true" faith. For many people, some process is needed just to understand the fundamental principles, not even to question one's own belief structures, but only to begin understanding how this way of spiritual thinking works. When the identity of a religion is strongly biased toward the Platonic God, it can be difficult for people to relate their inner spiritual experiences in a way that is not completely overwhelmed by their cultural background.
Yet, the Seshatic Goddess also appears in monotheistic religions. For example, in Christianity, the Holy Spirit is clearly biased toward the Seshatic Goddess and uses the same symbol, the dove, as the older fertility goddess Asherah. Archeological findings indicate that Asherah was considered a consort of El, Baal and Yahweh depending on where people lived. The god Yahweh was a warrior god that the Hebrew elite in Babylonian captivity decided to make their only god, by claiming that it was the same as the god El. When they came back to Israel, they forbade worship of Asherah and cut down the holy trees people used to visit. Holy texts were modified or edited to reflect the new perspective of mythology. This happened approximately half a millennium before Jesus and was part of a general rewriting of history in the Mediterranean region where several ancient fertility gods from the Bronze Age were declared heretic and buried. In the oldest texts in the Bible, such as when God created the world, there are scholar translations that implies that multiple goddesses were present. However, later translations rewrote these goddesses as phrases such as "wisdom", "scripture" or "God's spirit". It is in this sense, when the same symbols are attributed to the Holy Spirit as the older goddess Asherah, that one can say that the Seshatic Goddess lives on under another name. The Holy Spirit is sent from above to mankind for guidance out of unconditional love. Obviously, this unconditional love is associated with the love a mother has for her children.
Some people might object to this view and think that the Holy Spirit is without gender. However, the very idea of removing divine female presence in mythology is typical for bias toward the Platonic God. The Seshatic Goddess is not less present as the Holy Spirit without gender, but actually even more present due to its non-thinkable property or agency-without-character in relation to the Platonic God. The idea is to sacrifice the Seshatic Goddess, not only through love, but also in the very thought about the Seshatic Goddess itself. This explicit agency-without-character becomes a universal expression of the lost agency of the universe itself. The forgotten, the suppressed, the down-trodden notion of spirituality is the fertile soil where the Seshatic Goddess keeps bouncing back. Even the phrase "Mother Earth" is still in natural languages and universally understood, after millennia of patriarchal censorship.
The Platonic God is credited without causation, but through abstraction. The Seshatic Goddess is causing everything, yet not credited by abstraction. This has a deeper relation to Seshatism vs Platonism as in knowledge obtained by causality or abstraction. The name "Seshat" comes from an ancient Egyptian goddess of knowledge. This was a time where causality of knowledge was sophistical developed. Scribes who worshiped Seshat believed that books they wrote got copied and put in her divine library. Notice the play on the lack of original attribution toward Seshat. The Seshatic Goddess is a perspective that the secret itself, contained in the inner language, is the source of originality. Hence, in the sophisticated developments of these ideas in belief structures, there is something unsaid, forgotten or secret, which is rediscovered again and again over time. This sacred knowledge, which requires relearning, fills the gaps of the perfectly preserved doctrines handed down from one generation to the next.
In Eastern religions, goddesses were not suppressed in the same way and this preserved the polytheistic perspectives of belief structures. One reason for this is simple: When there is a male god and a female goddess, it is natural for humans to think that gods and goddesses might have children. The divine unification of a male god and a female goddess without children seems to be in contradiction with fertility. In a way, once there is a female goddess in addition to a male god, there tends to become many gods and goddesses, a pluralistic spiritual world.
In some ways, Eastern religions developed very sophisticated reasoning about the relation between the Platonic God and the Seshatic Goddess. Ideas like Yin and Yang, chaos and order, dragon and phoenix are common themes. The general idea is that the balance is worshiped to keep both sides from overturning the opposite side. When one side is weaker and the other stronger, the worshipers pray to the weak side to restore order. The end of the world is when this balance is destroyed, thus keeping worshipers in charge of maintaining the world balance.
This balance poses a problem for competition among male gods for power. Monotheism solves this problem, by sacrificing the goddesses, like Asherah, to get rid of the competition to Yahweh. Yahweh became the source for what Christians today simply call "God".
The actual principles that were developed thousands of years before monotheistic religions, such as in ancient Egypt, were based on a power balance between gods and goddesses. In ancient Egypt, there was a balance principle called "ma'at", which was a principle that underlies what we could call "justice" today. The symbol of justice in western countries is a woman or goddess with her eyes covered by a blindfold, holding a weight scale. The idea is to treat people with equal dignity independent of how rich they are or how powerful political allies they have. Women in ancient Egypt had rights and autonomy in a way that even today might seem very liberal to some cultures. Property was inherited from mother to daughter, they could take abortions, marry and divorce who they wanted, participate in legal trials etc.
There were also matriarchal societies where female goddesses were dominant, for example in the Minoan civilization. Here, archeological findings imply that one or more goddesses were worshiped. There is evidence of a boy god temple which was apparently burned down, possibly using violence, that indicates social resistance to the idea of having male gods.
For many people today, the idea that God has a gender, or being seen as masculine or feminine, seems a bit ridiculous. This is based on the idea of God as unbiased or simply a higher power without any expression of characteristic gender identity. It can be strange for some people to learn more about cultures in the past who worshiped gods or goddesses in a way that feels a bit artificial. However, a good indicator of how people imagined gods or goddesses, has always been how people lived at the time. The vikings were farmers, so they worshiped gods and goddesses who had farms. Today, when people think that God ought to not have a gender, says as much about people living today as what the belief structures are.
The Seshatic Goddess takes on many names, many forms and reflects how people are. Some people in ancient times might sit around fires, looking at the stars and wonder whether these lights in the sky are people sitting around their own fires, looking down. This is one example out of many of how the perspective of the divine and supernatural reflects people. The image of the sky is reflected imperfectly, in the stirred pool of water. One common technique in spiritual practice is the silencing of emotions and thoughts to better perceive what is around oneself. Just noticing, just observing, becoming one with the world, becoming one with the divine. Non-separation.
Concepts about the afterlife and free will are not necessarily connected to the Platonic God, nor the Seshatic Goddess.
In ancient organized religions, the perspective of individual freedom was very different from today. For example, in ancient Greece, a normal person had very limited freedom through their entire life and was only viewed as an individual in a particular social context, which was their burial ritual after death. Through the ritual, the person was lifted up in a metaphorical sense, such that the entire life of the person was viewed in hindsight as fulfilling its destiny.
The stories we tell today about historical heroes (and a few heroines), comes from a kind of bragging about the accomplishments of kings (and a few queens). The literacy story arch known as "The Hero's Journey" came from a king who was bragging about his own deeds. Widespread interest in stories made fame and reputation through this medium being seen as some sort of magic. It was imagined that this magic could be generalized and applied to higher concepts of divinity. Thus, many rulers wanted to preserve their reputation in the world after death, through stories.
In ancient Egypt, people viewed writing not just as a means for recording history, but as a method to bring something into existence by repetition. The copying of written scrolls was considered a sacred act. The concept of the afterlife was developed as a result an economy around burial rituals. The stories about the afterlife flourished, being decorated with more and more details and shown on public displays. The more people in labor to honor a rich man (or sometimes woman), the higher glory and legacy. New rulers often tried to establish validity of their authority through relating themselves to earlier rulers.
In many religions, there is a concept of the divine afterlife as being related to personal sacrifice. There is some kind of duality in sacrifice where a mind being trapped in the body is, not simply escaping, but fulfilling its sacrificial role in relation to society, e.g. as a hero. Thus, the person who is giving up its freedom, but being recognized as an individual, in a higher sense, spiritual or divine, through sacrifice.
Aspects of free will might be a way to reason about sacrifice and its meaning. A sacrifice is kind of something that must be done, yet there is an element of choice. A person's life in hindsight is both considered fulfilling its destiny and also having some sort of individuality or freedom to choose how the destiny was fulfilled. The contradiction between choice and destiny is along the same line of being trapped in a body and yet escaping by fulfilling that relationship. Most religions seek to develop a healthy balance between the mind and the body.
The Platonic God and the Seshatic Goddess are not directly related to the beliefs in an afterlife or free will. This is because many religions combine aspects of either into one framework of doctrines. However, there is a tendency where religions biased toward the Platonic God see identity of people through abstractions, such that a person is considered to have a single identity during their entire life. The sacrifice is therefore evaluated at the end of the person's life, like a sum of parts, that each can be evaluated and put together. Free will in this context is seen as choices people might do during their life.
In religions biased toward the Seshatic Goddess, the view of sacrifice is moment by moment. The person's identity is in flux and changes, thus it is not sound to assign a single judgement to a person's life. That would be like to make a probabilistic measurement where the observer is biased in relation to the experiment. The person's life might be thought of something like a black box containing a hidden state that might not be physically classical, but instead in a quantum state. The secrecy of the state is part of the person's identity, instead of viewing the identity as something to be revealed in public. Therefore, society needs to respect people's privacy from a religious perspective.
- For the Platonic God, free will is associated with a personal choice and consequential destiny (duty)
- For the Seshatic Goddess, free will is a social contract that allows people to have privacy and self value (freedom)
The afterlife can be seen as significant differently between the Platonic God and the Seshatic Goddess, even though they have the same set of observables. In religions biased toward the Platonic God, the afterlife is a set of options, often two or a handful, reduced from the infinite possible options due to the veil of ignorance. These options are "given" to the person during their life which they carry through their everyday activities, as a kind of burden of responsibility. Very often, there is a set of requirements associated with the afterlife options, that overlaps with the pragmatic tasks that the person need to accomplish, in order to function as a valuable member in society. Or, in exploitative and abusive religions, the person is promised reward after death against total sacrifice where the person's resources and potential is consumed by the religious leaders for economic or sadistic pleasure.
Contrasted with the Seshatic Goddess, the afterlife is a process that happens moment by moment, like a journey or continuous transformation, which is finalized when society no longer get to know anything about what happens. Death is a moment where the person's voice goes silent and no longer shares its divine nature with other people. Society is prevented from observing what happens and has no power to control the afterlife. Therefore, the afterlife is seen as an expression of the person's freedom. Nobody knows what happens after death, nobody ever will and this secret can only be known by the individual, the divine spirit.
- The divine nature in the Platonic God is seen as eternal and unchanging (static afterlife)
- The divine nature in the Seshatic Goddess is seen as temporary and changing (dynamic afterlife)
The sense in which divine nature in the Seshatic Goddess can be viewed as eternal, is by preserving invariants over the dynamic state. This means that the state has to continue evolving, forever. However, such invariants are virtual and can only be measured, not experienced. Different religious belief structures assign different qualities to such invariants. Since the identity is in flux, the invariants can also vary locally. As this picture is closer to how physicists describe the universe using mathematics, it is easier for people to think about themselves as part of the universe, or part of a greater whole, such as the tree of life.
There is a sense in which free will in the Platonic God can be viewed as control over the environment. The environment is something that needs to be tamed and domesticated to function as a tool for the person who is executing its duty to society. The dual perspective in the Seshatic Goddess is that the environment is what allows people to live, which also has an inner, necessary complexity, not being fully copy-able into virtual and analytic states, so it should be protected against over-exploitation or preserved out of respect for its fluctuating identity. In order words, the environment is attributed agency that allows cooperative or competitive games in relation to people.
Free will in the Seshatic Goddess might be viewed as a symbiosis between the environment and people. In order to have personal free will, the environment must also be considered as having free will, since it in turn provides the resources for people. If the free will of the environment is destroyed, then the free will of people is destroyed. The agency and perspective of free will, propagates through causal relationships, that are often viewed as sacred knowledge to be learned. The best teachers are environments, playgrounds and labs, not knowledge built as a static structure or a set of fixed doctrines. People are encouraged to play with rules, modify them, test them and verify their validity. This is how the free will is exercised, by empowering people over rules and building experience as a way to enable the potential of the divine nature, transformed by unconditional love. People can both learn from the environment and teach it in return, but there is always an aspect where the future is unpredictable and ethical ambiguous, which means that safety is a concern as the environment is shared, despite allowing for experimentation.