The universe was created a week ago Thursday.

In the beginning there was nothing.

No space, no time.  No matter, or energy - nothing.

Well, almost nothing.

There was, in fact, a mind.

I'm as surprised at this as you are - because for the history of human history no one has been able to demonstrate evidence that a mind can exist without a brain to make it run.  Minds are funny that way.  All of our latest, up to date neurological science indicates that a mind is an emergent property of a brain - or to put it in layman's terms, "A mind is what a brain does."

But here we are, before time started, before matter existed, there was a mind.

But before we discuss what it was that this mind thought, let us discuss the manner in which it thought.

Electrical engineers and software programmers know and use parallel processing. This is where you use multiple processors to split up a software task and accomplish your task faster. More processors in parallel equal faster tasks.

But what if you only have one processor, and it exists without time and space?

Without time, one task doesn't happen before another task, because there is no "before", no "after". Without space, the signals that make up the task instructions don't have anywhere to travel.

In "Jonathan Livingston Seagull", by Richard Bach, Jonathan says to Skully:

But overcome space, and all we have left is Here. Overcome time, and all we have left is Now. And in the middle of Here and Now, don't you think that we might see each other once or twice?"

Obviously science is wrong... without space and time, thought doesn't stop - instead thought becomes infinte.  All thoughts that occur to this mind happen at once, during an instant that takes zero time.  If you counted to a billion, at a rate of two numbers per second, it would take you fifteen years to finish.  But for a mind in zero time, even imagining that it would take no time at all is wrong... and confusing.  For such a mind, counting to a billion just happens.

So what would such a mind do?

Such a mind would be capable of thinking so deeply, that it could imagine new worlds, and simulate them, doing it over and over again until it understood the process so well that it was perfect.  It could simulate a perfect world, alongside of all the other worlds where it made mistakes in their simulations.

It could do this all at the same time - the word "instantly" has no meaning here.  

I can only imagine that it would become bored - being able to think all of it's thoughts at once, outside of time, is equivelent to living forever.  Eventually, where you live in eternity, or if you live in an eternal now, you will realize you have done everything you can do, and your existance has no meaning, no purpose.

So let's suppose that this perfect mind, out of boredom, plans it's own death.  To kill a mind that lives in an eternal now, it would need to destroy its environment. It could destroy the eternal "here and now" by creating space and time.

After giving it a great deal of thought, such a mind could simulate an entire universe filled with space and time, where matter and energy are emergent properties, where natural laws result in the eventual evolution of intelligence.

It could examine this wonderful simulation in detail. It could see that it takes ages for the universe to build itself up from the original Helium and Hydrogen. Finally, according to the simulation, life would ignite, and use evolutionary processes to gradually become intelligent.

"Frankly," the mind muses to itself, "the first 14.6 billion years of my simulation are incredibly boring. Instead of starting from the beginning, I think I will start along a bit."

Finally the mind exerts it's will, and in doing so creates time and space, matter and energy, and places them all in a form that meets it's best simulation, at about the 14.6 billion year mark.

In the process of creation, the mind, our creator, ceases to exist. Which was the point of the exercise after all.

So that's how we all came into existence, a week ago from this week's Thursday. We were created by a mind in the process of destroying itself. Everything that you or I think we experienced before last week Thursday was only simulated by this mind. Yes, it feels true to us, but how can we tell? It is, after all, a perfect simulation brought to life.

And for those of you who say that this is a tall tale, that there is no evidence that this ever happened... I'll agree. There is no evidence that this happened. And there is no way that you can prove that it did NOT happen.

So if I've directed you here, to read this tale, it is probably because you have said something equally silly, such as: "You can't prove that God does NOT exist!"

So true. And you can't prove that you actually existed two weeks ago.

4 comments:

Calladus said...

As a tribute to Douglas Adams, I think we should call this mind, "the Whale".

Sunioc said...

Was this inspired by The Church of Last Thursday, perhaps? http://www.last-thursday.org/

Calladus said...

Yes, I love last Thursdayism.

But in this version, the deity dies.

Unknown said...

Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) has an interesting take on the source of space time. Read "God's Debris". It is still out on the web for free I believe.