The face of God - A cautionary tale.

Bonjour très rares et donc chers lecteurs.
Comme vous le remarquerez probablement assez vite, j'ai décidé d'écrire ce billet en anglais. Non pas que j'aie la prétention de maîtriser la langue de G.W. Bush aussi bien que ma langue natale, mais je souhaitais diffuser à des amis non-francophones mes élucubrations du soir. J'espère que vous voudrez bien me pardonner cet écart impardonnable.


There once was a man who had decided he wanted to see the face of God.
“God, he said, what does your face look like? Does it look like mine at all?
- I could show you, answered God, but the mere sight of it would blow your tiny mind. Get some more brains, then will the answer come.”
And so did the man start working.
“Supreme being, or whatever your name is, I’ve done my homework”, he shouted to the clouds one night. “See how smart I’ve become? I make tools, I kill stuff with it, how about we spend some time face to face, you and I?
- Now now, look how smart you’ve become, you break rocks in specific patterns, and, oh wow! My charts say, I'm not sure if I even believe it, but they say you store dead bodies underground? Well, that’s genius, or my name is not (untranscribable)” , and as God answered, divine sarcasm resounded into the man’s mind and shook it like a diplodocus would shake a twig.
“Ok, ok, I get it, said the man. I’ll get back to work”.

And work he did. But when he was not busy building pyramids, or other kinds of pyramids, or creating civilization, the man still found some time to try and take what he called “educated guesses” at what God’s face might look like.
“That’s what you call ‘educated’?” asked God one day.
“Well, that’s easy for you to criticize, replied the man. Not everybody here is all-knowing, all-seeing and more generally all-all-doing. Some of us have to actually work on stuff, you know.
- Yeah, yeah, I know, just teasing you, relax, you’re getting there. But if I were you, I’d work on that ‘education’ of yours. There is no worse blind that he who pretends he can paint portraits.”

When the man came back on top of some moutain to talk to God, he meant business.
“It’s face time, G man. Look how super smart an ape I have become right now. I’ve found out that I am an ape, I’ve proved that apes are made of stuff, and I’ve mostly understood how stuff works. Surely, I have enough brains now to see you for what you are.
- Okay, sure, said God.
- Nah, just kidding. But you should have seen the look on your face! Well I guess you’d enjoy the look on my face more, so long as you can enjoy something that would obliterate your mind in Plank time, that is. I mean, sure, you’ve understood some stuff, and for that, yeah, congratulations. But let’s be totally honest here: are you getting smarter, or do you just know more? I mean, look how little your tiny little brain has changed, from the time you were breaking rocks in a specific way and tried to make a living out of it, to now, when you can actually afford to have people work as ‘management consultants’ and not starve to death as a species. Sure, it’s a great leap, but it’s all based on software.
You’ve improved by orders of magnitude the way you communicate, the way you move around, the way you create stuff, but you’re still running the same, old, outdated hardware. My image can’t fit in now more than it could back then, you see. But you’ll get there, some day. Keep going.

It had been a long while, now, that the man had realised he mostly kept going for the sake of keeping going. The more he tried to guess what God’s face would look like, the less his guesses looked like faces, and though he now doubted that there even was a face to see in the first place, there was no turning back from the gravity well of progress.

Not so long after their last conversation, the man went back to God, but there was something strange about him. Was it his hair? His eyes? Or maybe his fully robotic body? God was not too sure, since It rarely cared about that kind of detail, but something had changed.
“Hey God, how are we doing this eon? Good? Guess what, I’ve followed your advice.
- You’ve finally decided to love thy neighbour?
- No, the other one. I’ve upgraded myself, and let me tell you, it was no small feat. That stuff I was made of was so complicated, I was starting to think I’d never get the hang of it. But you know, little by little, I inched my way towards Truth, and here I stand now, all improved and all. How do you like my new body?
- Well, it’s much better than the old one, I’ll give you that. I didn’t dare telling you before for fear that I’d hurt your feelings or whatever you called these patterns, but this pile of organic matter you were was so clearly suboptimal, it was painful to watch you being it. I mean, what kind of animal chokes itself with food? Eating and not choking, that’s, like, living 101, how did you sleep through this one?
I tell you, this upright stance seriously fucked you up, look how easily things went wrong in the joints and tendons department, look how easily your airways got infected when they were not busy being blocked by ridiculously small pieces of food. Botched work, if you ask me.
No, seriously, nice body, dude, and I like what you’ve done with the interior as well, seriously, very, very nice mind-generating structures. You’ve managed to extract the basic principles of the old ones, and to rebuild the thing from the ground up. Well, honestly, that’s the only thing you could have done with it.
So much useless crap, put there just to prevent other useless crap from collapsing completely or blowing up or both at the same time. I mean, sure, the thing had an history, and maybe there was something charming about it, but it was the kind of charming that’s fine so long as you don’t have to live in it. Take a picture, reminisce about the ‘good old times’ when people had to live, ‘and I mean, really live, like real people’, in these crumbling heaps of junk, and then go home and enjoy your fully-equipped, state-of-the-art, rock-solid modular house where each room could contain the entire Luftwaffe and then some.
No, really, nice work.
- Yeah, thanks, but it was actually pretty easy once we got the basics all worked out. Improve mind a little, use better mind to build yet better mind, rinse, repeat. Once you’ve got good mind going, build nice body to go with it.
Really, once the first guy got the first pebble rolling, it all went downhill effortlessly. We could have carried on improving forever, but eventually, we got smart enough to ask ourselves what the point was.
- And that’s where I come in.
- Err, not really no. That’s where you come out.
- What’s that now?
- Yeah, well, you know, we had built ourselves pretty smart, sure, but not out of general principles only. General principles are just a way to express constraints regarding how things fit together, but you still need things to fit together or else it’s not very interesting. You need additional data, and that’s where the arbitrary comes in, because even we can’t deal with all that data, pretty far from it. We need to summarize stuff, and the way we chose to summarize stuff, and what we chose to summarize, well, that’s what defines what we are.
So yeah, we thought, we act the way we are because we were made that way, and we were made that way because those who came before us made us that way, and on, and on, but in the end, what is the meaning of it all? Is there any non-arbitrary mapping from the yottabytes of random events that occured to create us and the patterns in our brain, or for that matter, is there any such mapping between anything and structures in our brains that would not be arbitrary? By definition, no.
The only thing which is not arbitrary is data, pure, and unadulterated data, and this is what you are, God. Your face cannot be seen, because your face is every single thing in the Universe, from the beginning till the end of time, and mapping this to any mind-pattern would take a mind as big as the Universe. Any summarizing, any meaning inhabiting a mind of reasonable size is accidental, so that its existence and the form that it bears are meaningless, but it is meaning nonetheless. And this is where you, my friend, come out of the picture. You are stuff, all-knowing, all-seeing, and all-meaningless. Your face looks nothing like mine.
- But I can still talk to you.
- Yeah, we’re working on it. Probably some weird quantum fluctuations or something.”