2.2 Progress
If we are so limited in our ability to take in the universe, how have we come to make so much progress? We have come so far and attained such mastery over the natural world that from the perspective of our tribal ancestors we live as gods. Jesus walked on water; we have walked on the moon. Which is more impressive? How can such “computationally bounded observers” accomplish all this? It would appear our observations are bounded, but our achievements are not.
In order to understand how this can be, we will need to return to our clock metaphor. If you imagine yourself in this room, looking through your narrow window, all you see are the ten clocks which fit within it. Each time they update you can take it in, but if you try too hard to remember previous times you will quickly lose the capacity to keep track of all ten. The same thing happens when you move your window. If you want to check in on the time in other parts of the room it will come at the cost of the ten clocks you’re currently observing.
But what if you weren’t alone? What if there was someone else in the room with you, with their own separate window? Then, as long as you could speak to each other, you could trade one or two clocks for the ability to communicate about eight. If each of you then keeps track of eight clocks and communicates to the other, you both now have a knowledge of sixteen clocks. Even if we imagine that communication is so taxing that you could only keep track of one clock while doing it, we would only need eleven people in the room to end up better off than we were on our own.
In Hell you are alone, with nothing but your ten clocks. This is why it’s so awful. Getting to do whatever you want might sound great. Being free to move through the room without bumping elbows might seem like it would be nice. But when you get a room on your own you discover that all you’re capable of is watching ten clocks tick over. Your whole reality shrinks down to the smallest window imaginable. Sure you can now move freely about the room and look at whichever part of it you want, but once you arrive at this new area you’ve lost the ability to remember what the original one looked like. No matter what you do, your life is now nothing more than ten clocks.
As far as your experience of the room is concerned, there may as well only be ten clocks. All of existence terminated. Just you, isolated and alone, watching the same ten clocks go: tick, tick, tick. No wonder Cain was horrified when his choices condemned him to Hell! No wonder he wanted to go back. But like we’ve said, in a shared reality your observations are tied to the observations of others, which are ongoing. Once Cain had been cut off from this dynamic sequence, it had moved on without him. There was now no way to bring him back into it.
Such a limited and meaningless existence for someone who was meant to grow up into Eternity and be united with God makes Hell the ultimate tragedy. Thankfully, God partnered with Noah and expanded the Quintentium so that it can no longer occur. While Christ hung on the cross his reality was reduced to this narrow window. He deliberately opened the door to Hell and walked into it. When he cried out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” he was echoing the cry of Cain upon discovering the desolation of complete and total isolation. Having walked through this door intentionally, Christ then firmly shut it behind him on his rise back up through Creation at his resurrection.
Having opened the door to Hell, Christ was then justified to open the door to Creation so that all those left behind by Noah at the Flood, could follow him at his ascension. Once Christ had reopened the door to Creation for all Humanity, he left it open. You and I are now free to follow him, if we choose to. We now have the freedom to enter Creation without the danger of entering into Hell. The path Enoch took on his return to Creation, which had been lost at the Flood, has now been restored.
Let’s return to our room of clocks and consider how we can take advantage of the fact that we are not alone. In our attempt to understand reality we not only possess the capacity to read clocks, we also possess the capacity to communicate. We know this allows us to expand our window by partnering with others. This then sets up the whole room of people as another computationally bounded system. Bounded not by fundamental physics, but by its population and the efficiency of its communication.
We can view this system as a computer. While not completely accurate, this metaphor will be helpful. It allows us to recognize that like a computer operating on nothing but the binary code of 1’s and 0’s, we can accomplish tremendous feats using seemingly insignificant tools. It’s hard to imagine that the modern world currently runs on nothing more than very complicated strings of 1’s and 0’s. But when enough dedicated people partner together and spend enough time on a problem, there is almost no limit to what they can do.
We’ve had billions of people and thousands of years, and look at what we’ve accomplished. What started as a single family has turned into a civilization capable of bottling the sun. We can continue to use this clock metaphor to see how this might work. If you tell me the time on your clock, but it’s not in my window, then I have the knowledge of that clock, but not the experience of it. This knowledge comes to me through language as we communicate with one another.
Language allows me to know more than what is currently within my window. Like the software that runs computers, it can then be encoded to contain more and more information. So while the limits of my window remain fixed, as time goes on, my partners and I can expand our collective knowledge far beyond those original limits. Over time, as our connection to one another grows and our communication becomes more efficient we can spend less of our energy on communication and more energy on reading multiple clocks.
Before the Tower of Babel all the descendants of Shem and Japheth shared a common language and a common purpose. Their common language and history meant they’re communication was efficient, so each of them had more computation to spend on reading multiple clocks. Their common purpose ensured this greater capacity of each individual was multiplied across their entire society by pointing it in a unified direction. This is why they were able to make such an astonishing degree of progress. The rate and extent of their progress and advancement was so swift and relentless that it forced God to intervene.
We are starting to put together an idea of how we can expand the boundaries of our window. We can start to see why language is important, and how it plays into the Tower, but we still haven’t actually addressed how progress comes about in the first place. Even if we expand our window indefinitely aren’t we just left watching clocks tick forward into infinity? No, because we aren’t actually watching clocks. In order to understand what we’re actually doing we will have to step back a bit and think about what is happening when we look out at Creation through the Quintentium.
The problem with viewing the universe as a computer or a room full of ticking clocks is it tells you nothing about where it is going. A computer just processes the information it is given. A clock just ticks forward. Neither of them account for the soul. An individual possessed of a soul always operates with a goal in mind. If you have no way to conceptualize an end goal then you’re left imagining that the process you’re observing will go on forever. Arguably this process has been going on for 13.8 billion years, so why wouldn’t it just go on forever? Well, what if we aren’t observing a clock? What if we are actually observing a timer?