michael-dean-k/

On my walk this morning, I had a few strange ideas, building off the white hole / black hole thing, but also around what “God” is. The universe is a chaos engine. A blackhole sucks in a particular profile of material, and it shoots it out the other end, through a “big bang.” It is mostly noise, collision, non-sense, or nothing, but a separate system is harmonizing, filtering, grouping, cohering, ascending. You might call this “God” or “intelligent design.” (Excuse me for all this imprecise folk science; perhaps one day I will properly research this and upgrade my terminology).

An important caveat is that God is not an architect, not a designer, drawing floor plans, or even a “plan” for everyone or anyone’s life. God is an emergent intelligence. From chaotic explosions, God is the unbelievability that 2 of 2 trillion things can combine or cohere, and then sustain on, and continue moving up the abstraction ladder. The fact that anything can cohere at all is a miracle, and the degree that it can move up the chain is even more so miraculous.

I think this model helps explain “why is there evil the world?” Why floods and bombs? It’s because God is not as all-controlling as we think; he spawns reality as we know it, but does not tinker or micromanage. In no way is God conscious. In some way God is the pairing of things to generate life, and so in a very literal sense, I get now the phrase, “God is Love.”

Love is the fusion of two things that produces a third thing, and that goes to parenting, art, or whatever. Worth noting that love is not absolute. There may be loveless universes, ones that never cohere, that are just noise and nothingness for trillions of years. There could also be universes with far more love.

(...A sublime lens to see your surroundings on a walk is to realize that everything around, your whole world, the history of your society, and all possible realities on Earth, are all within a single sliver of what is possible in the physical engine of the Universe...)

Now, another extension of this thought is that human beings are at a certain level up the chain of the system that they have become “like Gods” or “in the image of God” which means that they’re able to both generate a lot of noise, and also cohere into even higher and higher things; arguable the human is the next link in God’s chain, and we are not the end state (there is no end state!) but our ability to make coherent things is a continuation of God’s process. This means technology isn’t evil, but Godly, but of course, most harmony decays and wobbles, which is what is happening.

I wonder if there’s even a limit to the advances of God into harmony and complexity in the material world, and the task has now been handed over to humans, who can make things beyond the complexities of atoms and galaxies. In that sense, God has made a population of Gods. And somewhere along the line, Christ comes in.

Christ, not as the literal embodiment in Christianity, but more like the logos imbued within the the "sons of God." If our father is a human, then we as his child is human too; so if God is our father, are we not Gods ourselves? But to be Christ-like is different, because God has no morality. In some way, God is unconscious, just an intelligence engine, trying to bring harmony, and to escalate matter to higher levels. God’s counter force has to spray and pray for the hope that God can find some unlikely combination. Christ however, attempts to limit generation, be more intentful with it, and to aim it towards good. Christ is an attempt to steer the self, the other, society, towards higher levels of harmony.

Paul Graham’s idea of makers/managers is helpful when thinking about AI agents. The cost of being unreasonably productive is that all your time will go into management. I’ve heard people celebrate this, as if elevating above the work itself and only making high-leverage decisions based on taste is the place we want to be. Disagree. Without actually being in the weeds and making thousands of unbearably slow decisions, you won’t develop taste, and (probably) won’t be a great manager either. I guess the ideal (for me) is to be in maker mode as often as possible, and then let my synthetic managers come in to process my deep work. (Currently have a “proseOS” where I can riff 5k words into a daily note, and then agents come in to route my logs to different interfaces). Ideally, you build the manager once and forget about it. But realistically, a maker can find fun in making manager bots and management apps, and it’s quite easy to slip into a managerial goon loop. What I mean is, similar to masturbating with no intention of ever finishing (aka gooning), it’s very possible to make your own task manager app, and a writing app, and an idea Kanban linked to Obsidian, and why not a new personal website, and a 1,000 day calendar because you can, and seriously anything you can think of, and it’s very possible to just numb out over how unbelievable it is that code, markdown, and interface are now liquids that shape around your every intention, but actually, you never quite finish anything. PKM procrastination is timeless, except now it’s multiplied to new levels. The brute velocity of execution means you’re bound to make many little mistakes, which eventually compound into your own megamachine that traps you with endless bugs and feature ideas and system decay. This is all quite dramatic. I love Claude Code and insist everyone IRL and IFL try it. But now that it’s shockingly trivial to build your own personal software for free, I imagine there will be all sorts of unanticipated psychic costs. For one, it’s dangerous if building your own tools is equal to or more fun than the work the tools are for. I’m sure that wears off. But I generally think this all leads to both extremes: individuals who are unbelievable prolific, and individuals stuck in a goon loop who feel unbelievably prolific.