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God's eye view

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This is a page for God's Eye View

Community entry: God's Eye View (DeusNatura)

The concept of a God's eye view is inherently troublesome. God, by definition, is omniscient - s/he knows all that there is to know. Therefore s/he can see everything that is in existence. If God itself is existent, then s/he has to see itself (apologies for the grammar - someone needs to develop some for gender-non-specificity). The concept then arises of God seeing itself seeing. An infinite regress proceeds from here.

Cosmology, when joined with Quantum Mechanics, faces a similar regress. If it takes an "outside observer" to resolve a wave-function into a concrete occurrant reality (see Schrodinger's Cat), how can the Universe itself be determined? One cannot step outside of existence itself in order to confirm its existence.

In computation, there is Gödel's incompleteness theorem, which also turns on the inability of a system to entirely represent itself. Here the system of Mathematics is exposed as less than perfect - it cannot answer certain questions about itself, and when extended in order to remedy this, secretes new obscurities.

This frequent appearance of self-reference is highly relevant to today's world of science and computers. Fractal geometry is based in self-referencing algorithms, and is used in 3D rendering and socio-economic modelling, as well as pretty posters.

Spinoza conceived of God as being ultimately identical with Nature, read as "all that exists". "God's eye view" might for him refer to the entire abstract workings of the universe - the algorithms and patterns that govern all from the galaxies to quarks. These rules are themselves the thoughts of God.

Leibniz on the other hand, conceived of all individual things as containing within them a reflection of the composition and workings of all the rest of the universe - necessary to avoid them having to actually interact. Thus, we would all have a God's eye view, whether we knew it or not, as would every other individual. (I have bent Leibniz's concept of "individual" somewhat, here.)

There is much more to be said on this general topic.