No one can know if there is a God or not, at least not in the sense that there is a Christian God. By his own definition, he is unknowable and mysterious and certainly not the bearded man floating in the clouds looking down on his flock.
Each of us is one node in a machine that creates reality as we know it. The universe would exist without us in it, however, at least in this corner of it, there would be no one to perceive or define it. The reality that we create dictates our interactions with the static components of the universe – the rocks, the fish, the trees, and shapes them to our presence. The totality of our environment represents a group creation, a shared experience, that emerges from our subtle interactions with one another and with the world. In this way, our freedom to interact with each other creates an emergent higher order organism. Could this be said to have consciousness? Do we create something that is self-aware of which we have no perception? Could this be said to be God – or at least the Holy Spirit?
Our reality and how we create it depends entirely on our organic interactions with our environment. Certainly we each temper one another and every subtle encounter with one another changes how we view each other and the world. But these are pure and real interactions.
As we move into the metaverse, our interactions are controlled and limited by a set of rules derived not from a natural order that has established itself over millenia, but by an intentional and directional force. That force could be a set of rules of “healthy” conversation – not yelling, not calling people names, respecting cultural differences. The community guidelines of a platform like Facebook seem to exist to promote meaningful and cordial conversation. But they do so at the cost of eliminating our organic interaction with one another. Once we were free to insult, to denigrate, to ostracize. It was in choosing not to do so that we showed nobility. By being forced not to do so, by being channeled into a particular line of thought or behavior, we begin to eliminate future possibilites of thought and action.
Imagine these babies cannot speak anymore but can only communicate through their devices. They cannot lash out at each other in anger. They cannot insult one another. They can only interact within a defined space that limits them to cordial conversation. What is lost here? Certainly one might have ideas, but that is not the point. We don’t have to understand the system and how it works in order to recognize that diminishing the options available to each node will limit the diversity and robustness of the entire group. Even if the traits we eliminate are “bad” ones, we will handicap the capabilities of our species.
How can it not be good to take away brutality? Force? Murder? Anger? Because at an individual level, those are hurtful traits. No one wants to be insulted or beaten. We don’t want groups of people to be systematically killed. War can be seen as an ultimate failure. But if, in our history, we had never had war, never had murder, and never had hurt feelings, would we more or less robust of a species as we are now? It is hard to imagine that we would be anything but worse off if it weren’t for the worst traits that we have – because we would fail to develop real and organic measures to overcome them.
The metaverse seeks to control human experience. By all reports we will be able to shape the nature of our own reality, smooth the edges, and live in a virtual world as we want to live. But it will be a controlled experience with an aim that only those in charge of it understand. The distinctiveness of human interaction will be blunted and the options available to us will diminish to those allowed by the system. If God is the emergent intelligence of the universe that we live in, the Meta can only interfere with and destroy that intelligence. In essence, the Meta is the destruction of God in this context, and those would would bring it about are in point of fact, the Anti-Christ.