“God” Is Not What You Think!

The fundamental unit, the prime mover of all life, is the replicator. A replicator is anything in the universe of which copies are made….Once a replicator has come into existence it is capable of generating an indefinitely large set of copies of itself”–Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

If the gene is directed by a “purpose”, therefore, its purpose is to replicate and maintain equilibrium with its surrounding environment in order to keep replicating. In order to replicate, as Dawkins has already shown us, the “purpose machine” we call the gene “Measures the discrepancy between the current state of things and the ‘desired state’, and it is built in such a way that the larger the discrepancy, the harder the machine works“.

Eric Hoffer, in The True Believer, pointed out this same parallel, whether he realized it or not, when he asked, “Whence comes the impulse to proselytize?” What Hoffer described as an “insufficiency at the center” could also describe the “discrepancy between current state of things, and the ‘desired’ state”.

This is also the principle of “negative feedback” described by Norbert Weiner in 1943 on the study of Cybernetics. He wrote a paper titled “Behavior, Purpose, And Teleology“. Robert Wright describes this process in a book titled Three Scientists And Their Gods:

“One point of the paper was that, with the aid of the concept of feedback, purposeful behavior could be explained in a concrete, scientific manner, without attributing present events to future events, and without reference to states of mind. Thus, a working toilet is a perfectly mechanical thing, and it complies entirely with the laws of physics. We presume that it has no sensation of ‘wanting’ to be filled and that there is no sense in which the future state of fullness is ‘causing’ the alteration of its present emptiness. Rather, the information is set up to flow in such a way that the toilet will behave as if these things were the case. So too with the bacterium: the causes and effects lying behind its relocation have nothing mystical about them; perfectly concrete , abiding by the laws of physics, just flows in a way that fosters the illusion of guidance. And, really, it’s not an illusion; these flows of information amount to guidance.”

Now we can look again at the statement of Dawkins. “The larger the discrepancy(between current state and “desired” state) the harder the machine works“. Now, we can return to a parallel presented by Hoffer:

“The proselytizing fanatic strengthens his own faith by converting others. The creed whose legitimacy is most easily challenged is likely to develop the strongest proselytizing impulse”.

Think about it in terms of Weiner’s Cybernetics. Why would his proselytizing zeal become stronger the more easily his creed is challenged? Because the larger the discrepancy between the present state and the ‘desired’ state, the harder the machine works.

If the proselytizing fanatic feels driven by a compelling power greater than himself, it is most likely that he is! His “feelings” will be driven by the desperate need to create equilibrium between himself and his environment! In truth, however, he is merely operating according to the laws of physics, and serving the needs of the “replicator” within himself.

Hoffer continues:

“It is doubtful whether a movement which does not profess some preposterously and patently irrational dogma can be possessed of that zealous drive which ‘must either win men or destroy the world.’ It is also plausible that those movements with the greatest inner contradiction between profession and practice–that is to say with a strong feeling of guilt–are likely to be the most fervent in imposing their faith on others.”

Hoffer has merely described purely mechanical conditions that follow the laws of physics according to Cybernetics and Information Theory! An individual who senses a strong inner contradiction between current state and desired state will work with the greatest zeal to achieve equilibrium between the two! This is not something mystical. it is not something that requires a “higher power” other than the “higher power” of the replicating gene seeking to gain equilibrium for successful replication. It is a simple and basic description of a mechanical process defined in Cybernetics.

We may begin to define “religion” as a perceived disequilibrium between the current state and the desired state. Instead of adapting the replicating process to the current state, religion increasingly seeks to make the current state adapt to the desired state, an actual reversal of biological processes of nature. The greater the perceived discrepancy, the harder the religion works to establish equilibrium between the two. We use words to describe this, such as “narcissism” and “anthropomorphism”, making “man” the center of all purpose, and extending it in a linear fashion into our environment.

This takes us back to the earlier essay on the Tower of Babel and the “Gray Goo”. The people, aware of their ability to organize and and define goals, focused on one goal, the building of the tower, not realizing that their goal would create an even greater discrepancy between their desire and the current state of their environment. By focusing on the building of the tower to the exclusion of more direct needs of survival, they were destroying the very environment on which they depended. This is the fundamental principle we recognize as entropy. The more you organize in one area, the greater “chaos” results in related areas, because energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It must be ” borrowed” from another system to “organize” the system on which we focus. In their attempts to focus on a singular goal to “reach unto God”, the people created a humanly devised religion, and they were creating a discrepancy between the existing state of the environment on which they depended, and the desired goal of getting to God.

According to genesis 11 therefore, “God” did exactly what religions do NOT do: he confused their languages so they had to respond more as individuals to their environment. The harder we seek “God” by following “internal circuitry” the greater the discrepancy between existing state and desired state!

In seeking “God”, human nature actually works ass backwards!