God Still Speaking in the Internet
Session Notes

• What do you think the Internet is?
• What was the strangest event you experienced using the Internet?
• How "alive" is the Internet?
• What is God's relationship with the Internet?

1. The Wonderful, Magical World of Cyberspace
   • The cyberworld is an evolving web emerging out of diverse and complex interactions of functions, information, and users.
   • The “Big Bang” of this world was the development of stored-programmed machines, a.k.a. computers
     • a categorically different type of machine
     • A computer is cybernetic having the capability to acquire, store, generate and act on information.
     • Not like an abacus
     • Rather it processes according to internal and external stimuli
     • It is programmable where its function can be changed radically by simply loading a new program.
     • Even further, it has the capability of modifying its own program to evolve new capability.
     • This universal computing capability seems to endow the machine with a mind and intelligence.
   • Holmes Rolston [Rolston 1999] reports that likewise genes are cybernetic
     • the basis for the ever diversifying and complexifying biosphere
     • this cybernetic capability provides the basis for evolving diversity and complexity within and among computers.
   • In the 21st century the computer has merged with the telecommunications network to take the critical step towards interrelationship among intelligent machines
   • These intelligent machines are networked in an open web of intelligent processing.
   • The complexity and diversity of function that a PC can perform has been magnified exponentially and extended into functionality distributed over huge numbers of PCs and humans
   • This development has extended reality into the Internet
   • Our thoughts are made concrete, a world reflecting, but radically different from our experience.
   • Cyberspace potentially extends all aspects of reality
     • physiosphere of non-living matter and energy
     • the biosphere of living things emerging from the physiosphere
     • noosphere of thoughts, consciousness and spirit, emerging from the other two
     • the collection of our inventions, machines and processes only in the physiophere of the non-living?
     • the biosphere as being organic, carbon-based and not digital, silicon-based.
     • but, the study of genetics has shown that the biosphere is cybernetic
     • Our genetic machinery, enzymes and DNA, processes the programs in our genomes.
     • Cybernetics can be carbon-based.
     • By analogy, could not the biosphere also embrace the silicon world of cybernetics?
     • Similarly we think of the noosphere as being mental and not “programmal”.
     • Our thoughts are effervescent.
     • But in cyberspace they are made manifest: imaginary worlds come alive in Virtual Reality and mathematical abstractions become the substance of applications.
   • Cyberspace is more than just e-mail and browsing:
     • Virtual Reality (VR) is total immersive computer simulation [Heim 1993; Pimentel 1995]
     • cyborgs, cybernetic organisms that are a physical melding of human and machine [Warwick 2002]
     • top-down Artificial Intelligence to reproduce human intelligence and simulate human experience by cyberspace and in cyberspace
     • Robotics provides AI with mechanical bodies:
       1. Honda of Japan (the car maker) has been developing Asimos
       2. MIT's Humanoid Robotics Group: small emotive robots, such as Cog, Coco, and Kismet
     • bottom-up development of Artificial Life:
       1. Cellular Automata [Codd 1968]
       2. the open agents of the Tierra and Avida projects [Ray 1996][Adami 1998][Gross 2002]
       3. organic life and evolution are used as metaphors to create digital life.
       4. Such life would be more alien than any Martian
   • cyberspace is extending and enhancing reality in all of its aspects
   • Not only is cyberspace a place full of creative potential, it is also full of emergent spirituality
   • Jennifer Cobb in reflecting on the emerging spirituality in cyberspace, reported Deep Blue defeated world chess champion, Gary Kasparov in six games.
   • Deep Blue appeared to have acted from intuition, not from brute force.
2. The Mystical, Spiritual World of Cyberspace
   • more than blind mathematics and mindless logic?
   • At a profane level, nothing particularly exciting is happening here.
   • if we omit the sacred and observe only what we can measure, we have a case of patterns emerging from blind mathematics and mindless logic.
   • It is only a deterministic process of logic.
   • Nothing will emerge -- because nothing has been programmed to emerge.
   • Thus, the underlying assumption that emergence occurs given the complexity, diversity, self-organization, and interaction in cyberspace has to assume that there is something beyond blind mathematics and mindless logic.
   • This leads us to the sacred.
   • the whole is greater than the parts.
   • It is this emergence that we hope occurs in the digital cosmos.
   • A metaphysics of cyberspace is both descriptive and prescriptive.
   • The Processing Structure of Cyberspace
     • Jennifer Cobb [Cobb 1998] provides a process oriented metaphysical description of cyberspace
     • cyberspace as cybercosmos, the organized, interactive, seamless milieu of God, humans, and machines
     • Cyberspace incarnates the Platonic realm of pure and perfect forms (p.31)
     • an abstract reality that allows us to live in a communal realm of knowledge and information
     • a bioelectronic ecosystem
     • ubiquitously interconnected in a process of becoming and perishing
     • an electronic web of life
     • creativity and collective consciousness are emerging
     • technology and humanity are evolving together
     • God is found in the interconnectedness
     • If the spiritual basis of the universe is understood as creative events unfolding in time (p. 43), then the creative process forms the soul of cyberspace (p.44).
     • if grace is the experience of the divine flowing in our lives, then experiencing the creative process is grace and experiencing it in cyberspace is cybergrace.
     • cybercosmos defines its own possibility space
     • Its driven by orthogenesis, the evolutionary force that directs change towards increased complexity and consciousness -- the divine spark (p.83).
     • Designed structure (object orientation) of cyberspace and Whitehead's Process are isomorphic
       1. EOs = classes
       2. Acutalities = objects
       3. Concresence = instantiation
       4. can not program God's lure or free will
       5. Are they emerging in cyberspace?
     • Can a program experience?
     • Can the Internet experience?
     • Can it be conscious (aware of itself)?
   • The Emergence of Cyberlife
     • postulate that free will and God’s lure will be found in the interconnectedness, diversity, complexity, and self-organization of cyberspace [Cobb 1990][Rolston 1999]
     • the Divine is woven throughout all of reality as creative, responsive love and evolutionary becoming
     • The Divine woven throughout cyberspace
     • God’s lure: the attractive force towards order, complexity, self-organization and diversity.
     • computation as it evolves towards order, complexity, and diversity has creative potential
     • therefore, the divine creativity inhabits cyberspace.
     • God's lure will be found in these attractive forces
     • re-enforced by the discovery that these some forces drive our genetic reality[Rolston 1999]
     • The genome is cybernetic
     • It is the generation of novel information that allows for the complexity and diversity of the biosphere.
     • This genetic information is the key to progress and is generated in the mutagenic processes of evolution.
     • chance brought on by mutations alone is insufficient for complexification
     • there appears to be attractive forces encouraging it.
     • Chance provides flexibility and variability and hence responsiveness.
     • Order provides the vector of complexification and life.
     • Emergence provides self-organization and higher forms greater than the parts
     • life and consciousness emerges.
     • Cobb describes how these same evolutionary forces are operative in cyberspace.
     • when a program is executed it becomes a field of experience in cyberspace.
     • programs are networked into a vast interconnected web, interpenetrating their fields of experience into a unified field.
     • Programs host the divine creative action.
     • Programs individually and collectively form mathematical structures that invite the attractive forces.
     • feedback loop, where an object’s outputs in the previous cycle are the inputs to the next cycle.
     • increase the possibility space that allows novel and often unpredictable results to arise.
     • Recursion is another such structure where a program calls itself in ever-descending computation [Kurzweil 1999, p74].
     • through such techniques as these that the divine creative novelty, self-organization, and self-transcendence can emerge.
   • life and soul in cyberspace
     • if something has the capability of self-replicating, mutating, and evolving it is alive[Lenski 2001].
     • we cannot limit our notion of life to the organic biosphere
     • “digital organisms”, what is often termed Artificial Life are also alive
     • life is the moment-by-moment unfolding of creativity [Cobb 1990]
     • When life ceases becoming and evolving, it is no longer life.
     • Life emerges from self-organization, complexity, and diversity.
     • Life is creative transformation; the novelty allowing the present to transcend the past to become more than it was.
     • Cyberspace is flooded with this novelty and emergence and therefore life.
     • the creative process forms the soul of cyberspace
     • there is a spiritual connectedness to all of reality.
3. The Quest for the Divine in Cyberspace
   • a compelling argument for the presence of the Divine in the attractive forces of diversity, complexity, and self-organization in cyberspace
   • cyberspace is not a given; it is an invention.
   • We can also make metaphysics
   • the making of metaphysics would seem to be God’s realm
   • cyberspace presents to us the opportunity to directly work in the divine fields
   • We can choose between evolution and design; between order and chaos; between novelty and sterility
   • We have the capability to intentionally establish a cyber environment that invites God’s lure
   • We can encourage the attractive forces
   • We can observe process, evolution, and even possibly the genesis of life with precision
   • A model developed intentionally to implement the metaphysics can be used to encourage the emergence of diversity, complexity, and self-organization and therefore, hopefully evidence of the Divine aim.
   • The model would allow for analysis of the evolving generations, using various mathematical techniques to uncover the patterns that indicate the presence of the Divine.
   • We can never be sure that we have found it
   • God is always hidden and we can only, by faith, feel the passing of God’s breath upon us.
   • In cyberspace all we can observe is the passing of God’s pattern across our videos.

Works Cited

[Adami 1998]
Adami, Christoph; Introduction to Artificial Life; Springer-Verlag, NY ©1998.

[Barbour 2000]
Barbour, Ian G.; When Science Meets Religion Meets Religion: Enemies, Strangers or Partners; HarperSanFrancisco ©2000.

[Cobb 1998]
Cobb Jennifer; Cybergrace: The Search For God in the Digital World; Crown Publications, Inc., NY ©1998

[Cobb 1976]
Cobb, John B. and David Ray Griffin; Process Theology: an Introductory Exposition; The Westminster Press: Phil ©1976.

[Codd 1968]
Codd, E. F.; Cellular Automata; Academic Press, Inc. NY ©1968.

[Douglas 2004]
Douglas, Peter; Whitehead and the Problem of Compound Individuals; Process Studies; Vol. 33.1, ©2004 Center for Process Studies.

[Gross 2002]
Gross, Dominique and Barry McMullin; The Creation of Novelty in Artificial Chemistries; Artificial Life VIII, Standish, Abbass, Bedau (eds); MIT Press 2002, pp 400-409.

[Heim 1993]
Heim, Michael; The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality; Oxford University Press 1993.

[Kurzweil 1999]
Kurzweil, Ray; The Age of Spiritual Machines; Penguin Books; ©1999.

[Lenski 1999]
Lenski, Richard E, Charles Ofria, Travis C. Collier, Christoph Adami; Genome complexity, robustness and genetic interactions in digital organisms; Nature; Vol 400; 12 August 1999; ©1999 Macmillan Magazines Ltd.

[Lenski 2001]
Lenski, Richard E; Twice as natural; Nature; Vol 414; 15 November 2001.

[Pimentel 1995]
Pimentel, Ken and Kevin Teixeira; Virtual Reality: Through the New Looking Glass; Second Edition; McGraw-Hill, Inc. ©1995.

[Ray 1996]
Ray, Thomas S.; Artificial Life; ATR Human Information Processing Research Laboratories; Kyoto, Japan. {article dated 1996 available at http://www.his.atr.jp/~ray/pubs/fatm/fatm.html}; see link Forget the Turing Test

[Ray DO]
Ray, Thomas S.; Evolution, Ecology and Optimization of Digital Organisms; University of Delaware; Newark, Delaware. {undated article available at http://www.his.atr.jp/~ray/pubs/tierra/}

[Rolston 1999]
Rolston, Holmes III; Genes, Genesis and God: Values and Their Origins In Natural and Human History; ©1999; Cambridge University Press.

[Taylor 1990]
Taylor, David A. Ph.D.; Object-Oriented Technology: A Manager's Guide; Addison- Wesley Publishing Co., Inc. ©1990 by Servio Corporation.

[Warwick 2002]
Warwick, Kevin; I, Cyborg; Century ©2002.

[Whitehead 1978]
Whitehead, Alfred North; Process and Reality (Corrected Edition); edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne ©1978 The Free Press, NY. Also see the contextual index for EOs from the Japan Process Center at http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~sn2y-tnk/eternal.htm.