Understanding The "God" Problem in Science Fiction

0:00 Hi guys, Quinn here. Today we're going to be talking about gods in science fiction, and I mean that in kind of a wide sense, not just the idea of a deity showing up in science fiction, but the kind of recurring moment in sci-fi stories where you have science that runs into something that feels spiritual, that feels mystical, or something that's just too big to fit inside of the human mind, something that is too big to fit inside of the human psyche without breaking it.

0:30 We've talked before about how sci-fi is always doing this. We have science as a way to understand reality. And then we have that human impulse that wants meaning, that human impulse that wants purpose, the impulse that wants transcendence, or at the very least, the idea that there is some structure underneath all of the chaos that we see all around us.

0:59 What's interesting is that I have the sense that a lot of sci-fi authors historically have been materialist, but sci-fi, as we all know, still deals with the idea of godhood and religion, but because it is sci-fi, the god slot gets filled in a lot of different ways. You know, sometimes you've got, you know, the Lovecraft concept, you know, cosmic horror, where there's there's no love, there is there's no comfort, there is no answers, just the realization that you're not even arounding error as far as the universe is concerned, as far as the beings that really run things are concerned.

1:39 And then you have the idea that there's intelligence, but not in a form that we can comfortably recognize. You know, you can study it, you can measure it, you can build theories about it, but you can never really grasp it. There's God as a system, God as a network, God as a pattern or an emergent mind.

1:55 The idea of God as, you know, something that uses humanity in some way, a parasite living inside of culture and belief itself. And of course, there's, you know, Dune, you know, the crown jewel of manufactured divinity. So Doom straight up says humans don't just discover gods, they often build them. And sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally.

2:18 So that's where we're going today in this video. So many different stories have so many different versions of divinity in science fiction. You've got old gods, you've got new gods, you've got alien gods, you've got human gods, you've got gods as stories. Now, if you've been watching this channel for a while, you may have seen some of these videos, but some of them you may have not.

3:04 It is technically a sequel to Blind Sight, but it's not necessary that you read Blind Sight to understand Echopraxia. Echopraxia is set in the late 21st century, about 14 years after man's first contact with alien life, a life form they had never seen. In all that time, it had watched them silently, never revealing itself to the whole of humanity.

3:31 After it was revealed that an intelligent alien presence was lurking, humanity was set into motion and united as they had never been before. Curiously enough, Earth didn't even know if it was in danger, or if it had even been threatened by the life forms. It seems humanity was driven initially by the simple threat to its own self-importance within the universe.

3:55 The world had put its petty differences aside, spared no expense, thrown together the best damn ship the 21st century could muster. They crewed it with expendable bleeding edgers and sent them off along some best guess bearing carrying a phrase book that spelled Take Me to Your Leader in a Thousand Languages.

4:16 The first book in the series details the events which occur on Theseus. I have already covered Blind Sight in two other videos, which you can find linked in the description. Like I said earlier, Peter Watts has crafted a very interesting universe here. It is a world where humans have reawakened an ancient, long-forgotten intelligent predator and essentially enslaved them.

4:39 It is a world where a religious group known as the Bicameral Order, through an unknown method involving the rewiring of the temporal lobe and connecting to each other in a hive-minded supercomputer, are able to come to fundamental truths about the nature of the universe. Their discoveries were far more accurate than those of traditional methods of science.

5:02 As some of you may know, this is a book series with vampires and zombies, and intriguing science-based explanations for their existence. But Echopraxia in particular brings up one of the most interesting concepts I've ever encountered in any science fiction book ever, and that is the concept of the digital universe and God as a virus.

5:26 Now, this is a concept that comes from the field of digital physics, which keep in mind is all theoretical. It is based on the premise that the universe is pure mathematics at its base. Every event that occurs can be thought of as a kind of computation. This could mean that the universe is a simulation, but that is not necessary for the idea to work.

5:47 The universe could itself be a giant computer. Physics would be its software, and matter its hardware. Every movement of an electron would be a calculation in the vast supercomputer. In some models of the digital universe, matter itself is merely an instantation of numbers. The digital universe is a widely accepted concept in the universe in which ecopraxia and blind sight take place.

6:13 And it sets the stage for one of the most interesting concepts in ecopraxia. Everything's numbers go down far enough, don't you know? She poked him, pinched his arm. You think this is continuous? You think there's anything but math? He knew there wasn't. Digital physics had reigned supreme since before he'd been born, and its dictums were as incontrovertible as they were absurd.

6:39 Numbers didn't just describe reality. Numbers were reality. Discrete steps functioned smoothing up across the plank length into an illusion of substance. In the digital universe, God is not a thing, not an entity or person, nor chemical reaction, but a process, a kind of program, a master algorithm capable of defining the laws of physics.

7:07 The bicamerals were only able to discover its existence by noticing the impossible events, violations of the laws of physics, miracles, star formation way below the Z limit, photons doing things they're not supposed to, the meta-rules changing over by the cloverleaf nebula. They vindicated the Smallin model or something.

7:31 I don't know, it's beyond me, so you'd never get it in a million years. But they found something impossible. Way down deep. A miracle. I think more than one, but that's what I said. Wait a second. Brooks frowned. If the laws of physics are part of some universal operating system, and God by definition breaks them, you're basically saying Don't stop now, Roach.

7:56 You're almost there. You're basically saying God's a virus. The concept of God as a virus, a program within the universe capable of breaking the laws of physics as it sees fit is a mind-blowing concept. But there is another eerie question that comes out. Is it a necessary program or a bug within the system?

8:23 But it gets even more eerie than that. If you accept that God is a bug, then that would seem to indicate that the universe is not operating properly. Maybe reality is not the correct reality. But that raises the question, what does the correct universe look like? Alter the fundamental code slightly, and perhaps the universe no longer supports life.

8:51 And maybe it was never meant to. Maybe the alpha's wrong. Maybe life's just a parasitic offshoot of a corrupted operating system. Humankind tends to be very anthropocentric. We tend to see ourselves as the center of the universe. But maybe life, human life at least, is a fluke. All of the many thousands of years of humanity's existence has been but a blip on the cosmic scale.

9:21 It would be foolish to think that the universe was made for us. Ecopraxia is a very good book, and this is just the tip of the iceberg of the incredible concepts that are touched on in this book. Existentialism, dystopian futures, time travel paradoxes, cosmic horror, alien contact. These are some of the big concepts that make me really love science fiction.

9:45 They are the reason I adore this genre. Science fiction is such a versatile genre because we can explore so many concepts. We can speculate about the future of mankind. Science fiction is such an enormous and expansive genre, and that's why I'm expanding my content on Nebula. On Nebula, I'll be uploading one to two additional sci-fi philosophy literature videos per month.

10:09 And beyond my stuff, there are a bunch of great creators on there, and I want to shout out specifically Curious Archive. I've been on his YouTube channel a few times over the years, and it's just cool to see someone that I genuinely respect also doing Nebula. If you know his channel, you probably already know the vibe, sci-fi concepts, speculative evolution, weird biology.

10:31 He also does videos exploring conceptual fantasy ideas as well. It's all really well done. I actually just watched his Nebula Plus video on which species might rule Earth after us, and I was legitimately fascinated. So yeah, in my opinion, Nebula Plus is totally worth it, and there's tons of other creators there too.

10:50 If you want to check out Nebula, the easiest way to do so is to use my link. It'll be the very first link in the description. And I've also got a QR code on the screen right now that you can scan. And right now, Nebula is doing 50% off the annual plan, so it comes out to about $30 for the year, which is honestly a steal for how much you get.

11:16 In a sense, the Dune Saga is all about the concept of godhood. In the first book, we see the apotheosis of Paul the Traides, as he uses the path laid out for him by the Beni Gesserits Missionara Protectiva to convince the Frimen that he is their prophesized savior. Wielding the power of the Frimen, Paul is able to avenge House Atreides and unseat the Emperor of the Known Universe.

11:38 But in doing so, he also entangled the throne with a fanatical religion. His godhood would be invoked by others who would go on to commit terrible atrocities in his name. The problem with this is the interpretation of God's will cannot be easily monopolized. A government entangled with religion risks losing control over the very populace it seeks to subjugate when that populace's view of God shifts out of line with the standard established.

12:07 Much of Dune is a critique of the entanglement of religion and government. Take the Lady Jessica's message to Paul Atreides and his sister Elia Atreides in the book Dune Messiah. You produce a deadly paradox, Jessica had written. Government cannot be religious and self-assertive at the same time. Religious experience needs a spontaneity which laws inevitably suppress.

12:31 And you cannot govern without laws. Your laws eventually must replace morality, replace conscience, replace even the religion by which you think to govern. Sacred ritual must spring from praise and holy yearnings which hammer out significant morality. Government, on the other hand, is a cultural organism particularly attractive to doubts, questions, and contentions.

12:55 I see the day coming when ceremony must take the place of faith and symbolism replaces morality. Jessica sees the danger in this because she understands how this paradox has played out historically. As long as humans have been around, gods have existed. The idea of a god itself is not the problem, but the entanglement of God and government is something very different indeed.

13:19 So, what's the purpose of God and where do gods come from? A god on a basic level is formed out of the human attempt to reconcile the inexplicable nature of the world around them with the seeming centrality formed by the very fact that they are conscious beings and naturally view the world from a self-centralizing angle.

13:41 This is something that humans have to be taught not to do. Gods are born out of people interpreting natural phenomena as relevant to their own actions or thoughts when they are not. The sun is a god because it gives heat, crops grow, and it's eternal. Because of the self-centralizing angle through which those who create gods view the world, a god naturally is concerned with their lives.

14:07 When it rains and the crops are watered, it is because you pleased God. When the land is dry or blighted, something must have been done to anger God. God's actions are the direct result of human behavior. In the earliest regions in human history, this was the place in which God inhabited. As the ages turned on, and few men learned to will power and control over many men, God became a mechanism of that control.

14:36 The purpose of God is to have a mechanism of control that is beyond reproach. This is exactly why the Bini Jesserit sought to create a Kisets Hadarak. The Bini Jesserit had their own beliefs about how the future of humanity should progress. They, being the greatest scholars of history in the Dune series, had long seen religion as a tool for manipulation.

14:57 The Quisetz Hatarak was intended to be used as their tool, a living god who could help to shape the universe in an image of Bini Jesserit design. The Beni Jesserit, of course, had a historical basis for the concept of a living god. The divine right of kings, for instance, is a religious and also political doctrine appearing around the 16th century.

15:17 It was intended to justify the legitimacy of a monarchy. Essentially, the monarchy cannot be questioned because the king is preordained before birth by God. There are also even more direct historical examples. Take the pharaohs of ancient Egypt, for instance. Pharaohs were not just kings, they were gods as well.

15:38 In fact, the word pharaoh literally translates to God King. The reason for this is clear. A leader, even a king, can be questioned, but who is anyone to question a god? I made sure to mention Egyptian pharaohs here because the most successful god king in the Dune universe was actually possessed by an Egyptian pharaoh named Harem.

16:02 Paul Atreides' son, Leto II, was born ancient. He and his sister Ganema had access to the memories of their ancestors from birth. Harem Leto called his ultimate ancestor. I am a community dominated by one who was ancient and surpassingly powerful. He fathered a dynasty which endured for three thousand of our years.

16:24 His name was Harem, and until his line trailed out in the congenital weakness and superstitions of a descendant, his subjects lived in a rhythmic sublimity. They moved unconsciously with the changes of the seasons. They bred individuals who tended to be short-lived, superstitious, and easily led by a god king.

16:45 Taken as a whole, they were a powerful people. Their survival as a species became habit. Leto II, who had go on to become the worm god emperor, succeeded in doing what the Bini Jezerit had failed at. Wielding the power of his godhood, he shaped the universe in his own design. Billions throughout the universe saw him as a true god.

17:07 Those who questioned him were openly put to death. Leto's grip upon the universe was incredibly strong, not simply due to his extraordinary prescient abilities and his ability to travel through his other lives, reliving the lives of his ancestors while gaining valuable insights on the nature of humanity, but also due to the fact that he was not simply a ruler, but a god.

17:32 You will not understand me. The harder you try, the more remote I will become until finally I vanish into eternal myth. A living God at last. That's it, you see. I am not a leader, nor even a guide. A god. Remember that. I am quite different from leaders and guides. Gods need take no responsibility for anything except Genesis.

17:56 Gods accept everything and thus accept nothing. Gods must be identifiable yet remain anonymous. Gods do not need a spirit world. My spirits dwell within me, answerable to my slightest summons. Leto had his own specific reasons for exactly why he did the things he did, but in the general sense, the purpose of God in the Dune universe is control.

18:20 And this seems to be in just about every case. Dune is a series that is highly critical of the concept of God and the concept of religion itself, especially when it is entangled with government. I know who you are, Tong Chen thought to himself. You, the supreme head of the world-wide party structure.

18:41 You who destroy whatever living object you touch. I see that Arabic poem, the searching for the flowers of life to eat them. I see you astride the plain which to you is earth. Plain without hills, without valleys. You go anywhere, appear anytime, devour anything. You engineer life, then guzzle it, and you enjoy that, he thought.

19:06 You are God. Philip K. Dick is an extremely influential science fiction author. I would say that he's one of the most influential authors to come out of the new wave of science fiction in the 1960s and 1970s. He's most famous to the general public for being the author who wrote the source material for the Blade Runner movie, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

19:27 But quite frankly, the book is much different and much weirder compared to the movie. Now, I've already done a full video on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick, but today we're going to be focusing on a much less known story by Philip K. Dick, one that I think has silently influenced lots of works of science fiction.

19:46 There are threads of influence in movies like The Matrix and They Live, and in other sci-fi that deals with the idea of hidden systems of control, the idea of manufactured reality, and the mind-breaking idea that the world you experience is not just false, but is actively lying to you. This story appeared in a collection of short stories by Harlan Ellison called Dangerous Visions.

20:13 It included 33 stories by various authors, one of which was Faith of Our Fathers by Philip K. Dick. This was in 1967, during the New Wave of Sci-Fi, which we've delved into a few times on this channel. In short, it was a movement within the science fiction genre that originated in Britain. Authors during the New Wave started to explore more transgressive topics within the genre.

20:38 They wanted to push the genre's boundaries. It's from The New Wave that we get books like Dune, books like The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin, The Man in the High Castle, Nova by Samuel R. Delaney, Philip K. Dick's short story, Faith of Our Fathers, follows a man named Tong Chin, who works for the government in the city of Hanoi.

21:01 He works specifically for the Ministry of Cultural Artifacts. This story exists in a timeline where there occurred a great war, known as the Colossal Final War of National Liberation. It was the People's Democratic United Front versus Imperialist. Apparently, the West had lost this war. Eight billion people now lived under the rule of the absolute benefactor of the people, who addressed the populace every evening through television, which was mandatory to watch.

21:32 At the start of the story, Qian is approached by a peddler of supposed cures for maladies, supposed herbal remedies. At first, Qien doesn't care and signals for a hover car taxi. The peddler says that he was in the war. He says it's against the law not to buy from peddler veterans, that Qian would be fined if he did not buy something.

21:55 At first, Qian attempts to buy something random and useless to him, but the peddler Insists on something else. He asks Qian if he watches TV. Qian says, of course he does, most evenings. The peddler gives him a gray packet for $60 trade dollars, guaranteed to rest fatigued eyes by the countenance of meaningless official monologues.

22:19 Qin is confused and slightly annoyed by the situation, but he moves on with his day. He enters the Ministry of Cultural Artifacts and goes to his office to begin his workday. A white man waited in his office along with Qian's superior Tao Pin. They spoke to each other in Cantonese. The white man's name was Darius Pethel.

22:39 He was supposed to become a new headmaster at a cultural establishment of didactic character, essentially a school of propaganda, opened somewhere in California. The absolute benefactor of the people had apparently met with Mr. Pethel and trusted him. Now this school is meant to appear to teach run-of-the-mill Taoist philosophies, but it will actually maintain a channel for them to communicate with the liberal and intellectual youth segment of the Western United States.

23:05 There were apparently still some of them there, 10,000 or more from San Diego to Sacramento. Supposedly the school was going to accept 2,000 students, and attendance would be mandatory for those that were picked. Chien is meant to determine who among the 2,000 is responding to the programming and who is not.

23:24 Pethel says that after having lost a war, the American youth lies. The test papers will resemble genuineness. They tell Qien he will be made vice-chancellor of the ministry if he is successful, or that is the promise at least. He would also be bestowed the Kisterygian Medal by the benefactor himself.

23:43 Chien resents this. He knows that the CPUSA is in trouble. It's not managing to do its job, so it's been dropped onto his lap. They give him two papers from students to examine as a test to see if he is qualified. One of them is titled Doctrines of the Absolute Benefactor, anticipated in the poetry of Baha Adin Zurhar of 13th Century Arabia.

24:10 Once he will miss, twice he will miss. He only chooses one of many hours, for him, nor deep nor hill, but all one level plain. He hunts for flowers. At home he reads the other essay. This one also has a poem by a man named John Dryden. So in the last dreadful hour, this crumbling pageant shall devour.

24:34 The trumpet shall be heard on high, the dead shall live, the living die, and music shall untune the sky. To me, this sounds similar to certain lines in the Book of Revelation. Chin believes that the student is trying to say that poet John Dryden was hinting at the fall of capitalism. Chin finds this ridiculous.

24:55 Chin turns on the television. They are about to be addressed by the leader, the absolute benefactor of the people. The absolute benefactor of the people lived in Peking, where he had lived for the last 90 or 100 years. He was apparently 120 years old. Qian rose to his feet as was mandatory. Each TV came with a monitoring device.

25:19 On the TV appears the online features of the leader, ruler of far too many, Qian thought. The benefactor on TV mentions Qian by name and his difficult task ahead. He honors him. Qian believes it's possible that the broadcast was localized, that only his city was seeing this, or even only him. He thought then of the pedlar's packet, so he reads the writing on it.

25:46 Failing as a party member and human? Afraid of becoming obsolete and discarded on the ash heap of history by The Packet contained some kind of aromatic snuff. According to it, it cured everything from being late to work to falling in love with a woman of dubious political background. Before he takes it, however, a knock at the door.

26:09 The building warden comes in. He has received a call from the television authority. Xin was failing to watch the screen. He is reprimanded and ordered to replay the speech. Xin wishes he could be free of the noise of mandatory speeches. But there was no order preventing him from taking the snuff, so he snorted it and went back to watching the screen.

26:32 The face of the benefactor disappeared. The sound ceased. He faced an empty vacuum. He heard a hiss sound from the speaker. He inhales the rest of the powder. He feels as though the powder is going directly to his brain. The screen remains blank until an image forms again. Not the leader, not a human figure at all.

26:59 A dead mechanical construct made of solid state circuits, of swiveling pseudopodia lenses, and a squawk box. What is this? Reality? Hallucination? He thought. Afraid he calls the police, wishing to report a pusher of hallucinogenic drugs. When he goes back to his chair, the apparition is still there.

27:24 Ironically, he had hoped the drug would relieve him of the burden of the leader's speeches, but this was far worse to him. A metal and plastic monstrosity yammering away. He found it terrifying. It eventually became normal again as the drug wore off. Eventually the cops get there. He shows them the snuff.

27:46 The presence of the police was comforting to him, but there was still some unexplainable reluctance when he tells them where he got the snuff, almost as if something inside him didn't want to tell them. They say that they will have it analyzed. As he likely knows, some of the old wartime psychedelics were fatal.

28:06 This could be one of them. But the lab report, which comes back more swiftly than expected, said otherwise. In fact, the results were quite ominous. It was not a hallucinogen. It was, in fact, an anti-hallucinogenic. A phenothiazine. Soon after this, someone rings the doorbell, a woman named Tanya Lee.

28:31 She had been monitoring his video phone somehow. She asked if they took the rest of the snuff, which is hard to get these days. She asked him to tell her what he saw. According to her, everyone sees something different, and they don't understand why, but they know that there were in total twelve different forms, not an infinite amount.

28:53 The aquatic horror shape, called the gulper, the thing with the slime and teeth, the extraterrestrial life form. He saw the machine, which was called the clinker. There is also the bird, the climbing tube, the crusher, which was some kind of giant storm, and others. Tanya is apparently a part of an organization that wants to know what the absolute benefactor, their leader, really is.

29:24 The leader is not the leader. He is something else, but we can't tell what. Tanya says that her organization has been the ones distributing the drug called stelazine. They thought that he was a good choice. She asks him if they were having him poll read, study something to see if it fits established party worldview.

29:46 She says that there is no school in California. The essays that they have given him are forged papers designed to test him, to see if he can tell the difference between orthodox work and heretical work. If he chooses wrong, his career stops dead. Her organization had been monitoring Dal Penn's office.

30:07 And they know that Mr. Pethel is actually the higher sec pool inspector, Judd Crane. She herself claims to be a minor clerk at the ministry. Members of her organization apparently held positions wherever they could. She also tells him that the water is saturated with hallucinogens, specifically one called Detrox 3.

30:29 She gives him the information that the essay with the Arabic poem was apparently the orthodox one. She tells him that he should tell them that. He wonders what she wants with him. He asks if she is anti-party. She says no. He says it is a dichotomy. However, she replies that all she and her organization want to know is who slash what is leading them.

30:56 They need him because they want someone high enough on their side that can meet the leader. She says that they have hope that if he passes the test, he will be invited to one of the leader's stag parties, which were never reported in the papers. If he could go there under the influence of the drug, see it face to face as it actually is, they could know the truth.

31:23 The next morning, at the ministry building, he tells Dao Pin and Mr. Darius Pathel that the Arabic poem is the Orthodox one, as Tanya had told him. They say that this is correct, and that the leader already wants to see him at a dinner party. They give him a card of admission. He will be flown in. According to Pethel, the benefactor is a white man named Thomas Fletcher.

31:48 It is not a secret, apparently, that he is white, but it is not really known. Apparently, the TV image is refined and edited for ideological purposes. So everyone agrees, Tanya's group and the ministry members, what we see on television is not real. But what is the level of unreality? Hethel says that it will be possible when he sees his greatness in person that he might be disappointed.

32:17 He says that they have been trained to see him as more than a man. But in reality, he is like them. Chien wonders if he is being led into one trap after another. He wonders if the girl Tanya was an agent of Sekpol, trying to trick him. The next few days he avoids the pedlar, until Thursday when the peddler corners him.

32:41 Qian says he doesn't want any more of the drug, but the pedlar mentions that Qian is going to the Stag dinner. He begs him to take the medicine so that he can see what it is. He says that their biggest fear is that it may be non-terran, something not from this world. He tells him also not to use the amphetamines that will be offered to him at the party.

33:04 Qian tries to ignore him, but a letter from Tanya Li is slipped into the cab nonetheless. It has the drug inside. In this moment, he decides that he will take the drug and find out what it is, even though he knows that curiosity is terminal career-wise. At the stag party, there are topless women, many successful, rich people.

33:29 A random man points out to Chien that one of the girls was actually a boy in drag. At some point, the benefactor, his greatness, finally appears. And this is one of the most unnerving moments in the entire story. What crossed the room toward the table in the center was not a man. And it was not, Jian realized, a mechanical construct either.

33:56 It was not what he had seen on TV. That evidently was simply a device for speechmaking. Mussolini had once used an artificial arm to salute long and tedious processions. God, he thought, and felt ill. Was this what Tanya Lee had called the aquatic horror shape? It had no shape, nor pseudopodia, either flesh or metal.

34:22 It was, in a sense, not there at all. When he managed to look directly at it, the shape vanished. He saw through it, saw the people on the far side, but not it. Yet if he turned his head, caught it out of a sidelong glance, he could determine its boundaries. It was terrible. It blasted him with its awfulness.

34:48 As it moved, it drained the life from each person in turn. It ate the people who had assembled, passed on, ate again, ate more with an endless appetite. It hated. He felt its hate. It loathed. He felt its loathing for everyone present. In fact, he shared its loathing. All at once, he and everyone else in the big villa were each a twisted slug, and over the fallen slug carcasses the creature savored, lingered, but all the time coming directly toward him.

35:23 Or was that an illusion? If this is a hallucination, Chin thought, it is the worst I have ever had. If it is not, then it is evil reality. It is an evil thing that kills and injures. He saw the trail of stepped-on mashed men and women, remnants behind it. He saw them trying to reassemble, to operate their crippled bodies.

35:48 He heard them attempting speech. Remembering the Arabic poem from the false student's essay. Plain without hills, without valleys. You go anywhere, appear anytime, devour anything, you engineer life, and then guzzle it, and you enjoy that. He thought, You are God. The entity, the supreme leader of the party, is God, the creator of all things, the shaper of fate, the bringer of life and death.

36:37 But the most horrifying part of the story to me is the part when the benefactor speaks to him. It knows him. It knows his mind, his thoughts, it speaks to him from inside his own head. Mr. Chin, the voice said, but it came from inside his head, not from the mouthless spirit that fashioned itself directly before him.

37:02 It is good to meet you again. You know nothing. Go away. I have no interest in you. Why should I care about slime? Slime, I am mired in it. I must excrete it, and I choose to. I could break you. I can break even myself. Sharp stones are under me. I spread sharp-pointed things upon the mire. I make the hiding places, the deep places boil, like a pot.

37:39 To me the sea is like a pot of ointment. The flakes of my flesh are joined to everything. You are me. I am you. It makes no difference. Just as it makes no difference whether the creature with the ignited breast is a girl or boy. You could learn to enjoy either. It laughed. He could not believe it was speaking to him.

38:05 He could not imagine. It was too terrible that it had picked him out. I have picked everybody out, it said. Not one is too small. Each falls and dies. I am there to watch. I don't need to do anything but watch. It is automatic. It was arranged that way. And then it ceased talking to him. It disjoined itself, but he still saw it.

38:34 He felt its manifold presence. It was a globe which hung in the room with fifty thousand eyes, with a million eyes, billions, an eye for each living thing, as it waited for each thing to fall, and then stepped on the living thing as it lay in a broken state. Because of this, it had created the things, and he knew he understood.

38:59 What had seemed in the Arabic poem to be death was not death, but God. Or rather, God was death. It was one force, one hunter, one cannibal thing, and it missed again and again, but having all eternity it could afford to miss. Both poems, he realized, the Dryden 1 2. The crumbling, that is our world, and you are doing it, warping it to come out that way, bending us.

39:30 Shein tried to leave, but it followed, or it had always been there. He makes a dive for the railing, jumping into the river below to his death, but it stops him, with what begins to look to him like a human hand. It tells him to wait, that he will die in time when it chooses. He asks if it founded the party.

39:56 It says it founded everything. The anti-party and the party, all things. It says that it wants for Chin to see it as it really is, and trust it. It tells him to lie and tell Tanya that he saw an overworked, overweight elderly man who drinks too much and likes to pinch the rear ends of girls. But it is what the creature says and implies next that is possibly the most terrifying moment in the story.

40:26 Its nature is what it is. Good and evil are the same, but it also implies the existence of others. Like it, perhaps, but worse. As you live on, unable to stop, I will torment you, it said. I will deprive you. Item by item, everything you possess or want. And then, when you are crushed to death, I will unfold a mystery.

40:59 What is the mystery? The dead shall live, the living shall die. I will kill what lives. I save what has died. I will tell you this. There are worse things than I. But you won't meet them, because by then I will have killed you. Now walk back into the dining room. Prepare for dinner. Don't question what I'm doing.

41:29 I did it long before there was a Tung Chian, and I will do it long after. This is classic cosmic horror. The unseen, the implied is the most terrifying thing of all. What could be beyond this entity? This creature to which we are no more than playthings, toys, for its amusement. It might suggest a pantheon of terrors, perhaps each worse than the last.

42:01 The entity tells him not to question what it is doing, to go back to dinner, but Chien thinks to himself that he would dedicate his life to making sure it dies, it suffers. He hits it as hard as he can, which only causes him to feel great pain in his own head. He passes out, and when he wakes, he is told that he had apparently made a scene of himself.

42:26 His career is ruined. He thinks to himself, Our leader, whom we follow, is the one true God, and the enemy who we fight and have fought is God too. They are all God. There is no getting away from it. Deep down he knows that whatever this entity is, this entity that created and is itself the world, cannot be escaped, cannot be defeated.

42:55 It is always present, always watching with its billions of eyes, an incarnation of pure Lovecraftian terror. Later at his condo, a knock at the door. It is Tanya. She asks about it, and at first he says that she should go as far from here as possible, but he remembers that there is nowhere far enough.

43:17 It is everywhere. It is everything. He says that they cannot win. She asks if it is non-terrestrial. He says yes. She asks if it is hostile. He says that it is both hostile and non-hostile. Jian asks her if she believes in God, and he asks if it has ever occurred to her that good and evil are names for the same thing.

43:44 That God could be both. Later he sees a mark on his shoulder. Stigma that would not go away. The mark where God had touched him. The mark bled and would not stop. He thought He may have only hours left to live. The short story basically ends with Qien accepting that there is nothing he or anyone can do to fight against this entity.

44:11 It is the system, it rules over all, and is the enemy that it itself fights against. His fate is not his own, it belongs to it. No lie, this is one of the freakiest stories ever. There's something about it. It's not just unnerving, there's something about this story that is resonant in a way that rings true.

44:35 And I don't know what it is. I mean, there's probably no unspeakable entity that governs the world. But unstoppable systems do seem to exist. Systems that we are both a part of and trapped within. Systems of power and control beyond our grasp and understanding as individuals. That's really what the benefactor represents.

44:58 The never-ending, undefeatable force of control, ideology, and structure. Power that no single person can confront because it isn't a person at all. It's bureaucracy turned metaphysical, an authority without a face. It is a belief system so embedded that resistance itself becomes a part of the machinery.

45:34 Professor Dobbs's book is devoted to personetics, which the Finnish philosopher Eno Kaiki called the cruelest science man ever created. Dobb, one of the most distinguished personeticists today, shares this view. One cannot escape the conclusion, he says, that personetics is, in its application, immoral.

45:57 We are dealing, however, with a type of pursuit that is, though counter to the principles of ethics, also of practical necessity to us. There is no way in the research to avoid its special ruthlessness, to avoid doing violence to one's natural instincts. And if nowhere else, it is here that the myth of the perfect innocence of the scientist as a seeker of facts is exploded.

46:27 So I recently read Stanislaw Lim's short story NonServium, and what's interesting about it is it actually doesn't argue whether or not God exists. It has something much more uncomfortable. What if God is real? What if God is reachable and perfectly capable of explaining himself? But simply chooses not to.

46:50 This particular short story can be found in his collection of short stories titled A Perfect Vacuum, which consisted of reviews of non-existent books. Non-Servium appears towards the end. Lim presents the story as a dry fictional academic review of a book on personetics by a man named Professor James Dobb.

47:11 Personetics is the science of creating sentient beings with machines, artificial beings living inside of a purely mathematical universe. These creatures are limited by the logic and structure of their reality in the same way we are limited by atoms, light, and time. The name combines Latin and Greek derivatives, persona and genetic, genetic in the sense of formation or creation.

47:38 The field is a recent offshoot of the cybernetics and psychonics of the 80s, crossbred with applied intelligronics. Today everyone knows personetics. The man in the street would say, if asked, that it is the artificial production of intelligent beings, an answer not wide of the mark to be sure, but not quite getting to the heart of the matter.

47:58 This short story was written in the 1970s, long before the advent of large language models, which are referred to widely today as AI, even though real AI doesn't actually exist yet. That being said, it is striking how relevant this story is to many of the conversations being had today, like can a machine ever truly be conscious as we are?

48:20 We know in any case that consciousness is a kind of dodge, a shift to which evolution has resorted, and resorted in keeping with its characteristic and indispensable modus operandi, opportunism, i.e., finding a quick, extempore way out of a tight corner. If then one were needed to build an intelligent being and proceed according to the canons of completely rational engineering and logic, applying their criteria of technological efficiency, such a being would not in general receive the gift of consciousness.

48:50 It would behave in a manner perfectly logical, always consistent, lucid, and well ordered, and it might even seem to a human observer a genius in creative action and decision making, but it could in no way be a man, for it would be bereft of his mysterious depth, his internal intricacies, his labyrinthine nature.

49:13 The short story explains that consciousness in a sense relied on irrationality, imperfection. If you want a likeness of a human mind, not just a smart system, you have to deliberately build contradictions into the informational substrate. You have to give it asymmetry, eccentric tendencies, and a psyche that is unified and discordant at the same time.

49:37 Basically, the personoids' emotions have to be at odds with their reason to some extent. They need internal tensions and even self-destructive tendencies. Dobbs's creational prescription is basically that the logic of the personoid has to be disturbed. So in that way, the personoids resemble us, but they are also very different at the same time.

49:58 Our world is physical, as I said. We are bound by the limits of physics. It is the substrate of our reality. We see because there are things to be seen. We hear and smell because there are things to be heard and smelled. Within the personoids' reality, there was no light, no distance, no physical space.

50:19 Their world was entirely logic and mathematics based, and thus their senses were born out of that. It would be impossible to come up with a one-to-one analogy expressing the nature of their senses. We cannot comprehend them, and they cannot comprehend ours. Their experience of their reality would be as innate and rudimentary and fundamental to them as ours would be to us.

50:43 As to how they see it, one can make no pronouncement, for the only way of learning the subjective quality of their sensation would be for one to shed his skin and become a personoid. Personoids, one must remember, have no eyes or ears, therefore they neither see nor hear, as we understand it. In their cosmos there is no light, no darkness, no spatial proximity, no distance, no up or down.

51:10 There are dimensions there, not tangible to us, but to them primary, elemental. They perceive, for example, as equivalents of components of human sensory awareness, certain changes in electrical potential. The reality of the personoids did, however, share a dimension of time with us, but it was not one-to-one to ours, as the flow of their time could be manipulated by the programmer.

51:35 From within the machine, they would not experience this manipulation, just as we would not experience an acceleration of our time from within the flow of time itself. The first part of the short story reviews the portion of Dobbs's book discussing the science of personetics and how it developed as well as the generalized ethics of it, and then later moves on to Dobbs' own specific personetics experiment involving a society of personoids who he allowed to develop over 5,000 years from their perspective.

52:07 They reproduced by dividing, developing culture, forming history, and importantly, they wrestled with existential questions involving the nature of their existence. It is this reason that personetics was often referred to as the cruelest science mankind ever created. There was a kind of horror to confining a being to a universe it could never leave, and forcing it to consciously deal with such tormenting questions which could never be answered.

52:36 Where did we come from? Why are we made thus and not otherwise? Why is it that the world we perceive has these and not other wholly different properties? What meaning do we have for the world? What meaning does it have for us? The train of such speculations leads them ultimately unavoidably to the elemental questions of ontology, to the problem of whether existence came about in and of itself, or whether it was the product instead of a particular creative act.

53:10 That is, whether there might be hidden behind it, invested with will and consciousness, purposefully active, master of the situation, a creator. It is here that the whole cruelty, the immorality of personetics manifests itself. Let's talk about the title of the short story, Non-Servium. It shares the title with Dobbs' fictional book being reviewed.

53:37 The Latin non-servium translates to I will not serve. But what does it mean? And how is it relevant to this story? I think it is relevant to the story for two reasons. One because of the words of an individual personoid named Adan, and one because of the actions at the end of the short story of Professor Dobb himself.

54:03 Within the Personoids world, many philosophical and existential discussions are had. Many of them focus on the existence and the nature of God. Personoids communicate it through a kind of osmosis. Their mental substrates start to overlap, and as they superimpose on each other, they create noise and interference.

54:25 When the boundary between them is thin, some information becomes shared between the two, partially coincident personoids. It's essentially like a human hearing foreign voices in their own head. The individual Adan is not necessarily skeptical of the existence of God, but he rejects the notion held by others that they should serve that God.

54:45 Here are some of the excerpts of those conversations. Eden 197 in his line of reasoning assumes a God that requires reverence, love, and total devotion, and not simply a belief in the fact that He exists and that He created the world. It is not enough to assent the hypothesis of God the Maker of the world in order to win one's salvation.

55:11 One must, in addition, be grateful to that Maker for the act of creation, and divine his will and do it. In short, one must serve God. Nod remarks that the attitude of Aden 300 towards God is not clear to him. Aden has granted, has he not, the possibility of the existence of the Creator, what follows from it?

55:34 Adan, not a thing, that is, nothing in the province of obligation. I believe, again, for all worlds, the following principle holds. A temporal ethics is always independent of an ethics that is transcendental. That means that an ethics of the here and now can have outside itself no sanction which would substantiate it, and this means that he who does evil is in every case a scoundrel, just as he who does good is in every case righteous.

56:08 If someone is prepared to serve God, judging the arguments in favor of his existence to be sufficient, he does not thereby acquire here any additional merit. It is his business. He who is almighty could have provided certainty, since he did not provide it, if he exist, he must have deemed it unnecessary.

56:32 Why unnecessary? One begins to suspect that maybe he is not almighty. A god not almighty would be deserving to feelings akin to pity, and indeed to love as well, but this I think none of our theodicies allow, and so we say we serve ourselves and no one else. So it is clear that the title comes in large part from the words of Adan, but as I said, I think the actions of Professor Dobb are related to the title as well.

57:04 He, of course, has chosen to never tell them that he exist, never to confirm or deny the existence of God. He does this for multiple reasons. He mentions that he did not love them. They were an experiment. The experiment was costly to keep running, and he was only a lowly professor, and ultimately it would not be his final decision on when to pull the plug.

57:28 If he told them, explained his existence, explained their existence, what good would it do? Would it not be a disappointment? Would it not be an embarrassment? You are an experiment, one of countless. God is not all-powerful. God does not love you. So he chose never to reveal himself, and bound in their universe of mathematics and logic, they would never know.

57:56 And he would not serve them by performing godhood for them. This story might seem subversive to some people. It brings into direct scrutiny the god depicted in Abrahamic religions, the god that requires praise and worship and rewards heaven or punishes with hell. Dobbs even says, of eternal punishment I dare not even think.

58:22 That much of a monster I am not, while directly comparing himself to the god of Christianity. Stanislaw Lim himself was not religious. He did not believe in God. He rejected divine revelation, and he was openly skeptical of the idea that morality requires a transcendent authority. That position is not hidden or ambiguous in his work, it is directly informing his work.

58:48 Lim approaches God as a logical proposition under uncertainty, not as a being owed obedience or gratitude or love. And that's a key part of this particular story. Adon's refusal to ground ethics in the fear of punishment or the hope of reward is Lim showing his own conviction that moral responsibility belongs in the here and now, as mentioned, not to a potential or imagined beyond.

59:18 Thank you so much for watching, guys. A while back I covered Stanislaw Lim's book Solaris, which is one of his most famous books. Have you guys read that one? If you've read this short story or other Stanislaw Lim books, let me know in the comment section below. Also, what are your favorite sci-fi stories dealing with these types of existential topics?

59:39 Thanks so much again for watching, guys, and make sure you like and subscribe for more videos on science fiction literature. Will of course contain spoilers for the book God Emperor of Dune. Of the many great and powerful Dukes, barons, and emperors of the Dune universe, none have had more impact than the God Emperor Leto II.

1:00:00 His eventual powers would dwarf those of even his father, Paul Atreides. His influence outgrew the guild, all of Chome, even the Benigesseret. The great houses of the Lanzrad were rendered irrelevant. He controlled the flow of spice throughout the universe, and no one moved throughout his empire without his knowledge.

1:00:22 His prescient eye reached to the furthest reaches of time. Almost nothing was hidden from him. He was the most powerful human being who ever lived by far, and the most oppressive imperial dictator of all time. Never before had the whole of humanity been held in such a tight grip. But even he was vulnerable.

1:00:45 The God Emperor possessed secrets. These hidden vulnerabilities are ultimately the key to his undoing. The first of the God Emperor's secrets, which Duncan Idaho was supposedly put in charge of maintaining, was simply the fact that he was vulnerable. He was not truly a god, as many throughout the human universe truly believed.

1:01:11 He could be harmed, he could be killed. You will be asked to guard me by whatever means necessary, and you will be asked to guard my secret. What secret? That I am vulnerable? That you are not God. Not in that ultimate sense. Leto's origins had been purposely obscured. Only the most perceptive entities in the universe, like the Beni Gesserit and the Tlelaxu, understood that he was the descendant of Paul Atreides.

1:01:42 The average human in Leto's empire was less aware of the emperor's nature. Leto understood that it was easier to main control over the people of the empire if enough of them believed that he was truly a god in the absolute sense, immortal and unkillable. But in truth, Leto would always be human. A vast multitude of human lives lived within him.

1:02:08 Though he lived within a pre-worm body, and though his brain was no longer a brain of human dimensions, his mind held the true essence of humanity. And this leads to Leto's next secret, which he actually considered his ultimate secret. Leto was human in the most essential sense. He had the ability to love.

1:02:33 Siona Atreides first realizes this fact when Leto II allows her to escape with some of his journals, which she and other rebels had stolen from his palace. She finds a passage which mentions the death of the god Emperor's sister, Ganema. It is there that she comes to the realization. He loved his sister.

1:02:56 Yes, he is capable of love. Oh yes, we have him now. As eons passed him by, he had loved many companions, all of which he watched die. He had been filled with sorrow each time. He knew that if his enemies uncovered this fact about him, that they could use this vulnerability to manipulate him. The Ixians had also uncovered his secret, specifically one man which the God Emperor had seemed to favor, named Malki.

1:03:28 Malki eventually acquired an even greater understanding of the God Emperor than his closest servant Maneo. He recognized the Emperor's vulnerability. Using Ixian technology, a no-room, a chamber which could hide those within from prescient vision, he created Wii Nori. My most secret secret is exposed.

1:03:52 They had discovered his secret. We was the evidence of it. She had been created from Malki's own cells. Just a few tiny cells from my body, Malki said, then carefully nurtured growth and education. Everything an exact opposite to your old friend Malki. We did it all in the no-room where you cannot see.

1:04:25 Somehow the Ixians had intended to use We to destroy Leto, but they had not intended on We nor Re to return Leto's love. Regardless, before the Ixians could act upon their plans, Siona Atreides got to the god Emperor first. Leto's final secret was the manner in which he was vulnerable. He was immune to most conventional weapons, but just as the great worms of ancient Arrakis had been, Leto was too averse to water.

1:05:01 Moisture was poison to him. This is the secret that Siona Atreides uses at the end of the book God Emperor of Dune to end Leto. She discovered the fact after Leto brought her into his desert to be tested. Leto had a small desert which was maintained on Rackus by weather machines. The planet during the time of the God Emperor had been terraformed.

1:05:28 The process had eliminated the deep desert entirely. Leto's desert was the only desert on the planet, a place where he could roam freely. By chance his weather machines malfunctioned. It rained briefly, and Siona saw the effect it had on him. The clouds passed, and it was a few moments before Siona sensed his disturbance.

1:05:52 What's wrong with you? He was unable to answer. The rain was gone, but the water remained on the rocks and in puddles all All around and beneath him. There was no escape. Sionna saw the blue smoke rising from every place the water touched him. It's the water. When Leto is drenched momentarily in the rainwater, the sand trout cilia which make up his skin start to begin the process of separation.

1:06:20 His body begins to produce a true spice essence, which Siona can see as puffs of blue smoke. She realizes in that moment that enough water could probably kill him. He was not human, not like her at all. And she possessed the secret of his undoing. Ring him with water, destroy his desert, immobilize him with a moat of agony.

1:06:47 Siona uses this knowledge of Leto's weakness to assassinate him at the end of the book. The God Emperor had managed to maintain rule of the human empire and safeguard his secrets for nearly 4,000 years before he was undone by his own creation, Siona. It can be argued that Leto allowed himself to be killed as a necessary part of his golden path.

1:07:13 This might sound cliche, but ever since the dawn of time, mankind has looked up to the stars, to their fellow men, and to everything around them and wondered, where did we come from? Had we always been here? Were our very minds and bodies the design of some divine beings beyond our understanding? Or was there another answer?

1:07:38 And this story, that terrible truth, weighted just beyond the mountains of madness. The HP Lovecraft's story at the Mountains of Madness was written in 1931 and is a quintessential work in Lovecraft's canon. The story details a group of scientists and explorers' journey to Antarctica and their discovery of the terrible secret that awaited there, hidden within the mountains of madness.

1:08:24 This video will contain spoilers, obviously. Lovecraft is known for essentially inventing the genre of cosmic horror. Cosmic horror honed into the fear of the unknown and the fear of what cannot be known. It suggested that there may be incredible terrors waiting out among the stars or asleep beneath the earth.

1:08:43 Horrors which humans were powerless against, horrors which may one day rise to reclaim what is theirs and scrape the residue that is humankind from the face of the earth in the process. Many people in our world believe that there are divine forces that govern our existence, entities that are concerned with our day-to-day lives, watching over us, caring for us, doling out justice when due, and punishment to the wicked.

1:09:08 In Lovecraft's world, beings of such power that they could be called gods do exist, but they take no stake in the lives of mankind. They merely are indifferent. In Lovecraft's world, we are alone amongst a dark, unforgiving, and often malignant cosmos. At the Mountains of Madness is one of my all-time favorite Lovecraft stories for a few reasons.

1:09:31 I think that we as humans often can be quite arrogant in the assumptions we make. We assume that the way we see the world is the way that the world actually is. We trust entirely too much in our own supposed knowledge and in our own perception. This is why when characters in Lovecraft stories are confronted with the terrible truth, they are unable to cope.

1:09:53 Their preconceptions are shattered, breaching their sanity. This is the fate of the character Danforth after surviving the expedition. During the expedition, the group discovers strange fragments of slate with strange markings. They decide to split, and Lake's team departed for a sub-expedition northwestward, while the rest of them wait behind.

1:10:15 Eventually, Lake's team reports back an incredible discovery. Mountains, unlike anything ever imagined to exist on planet Earth. Mountains surpass anything in imagination. I'm going up scouting in Carol's plane with all the weight out. You can't imagine anything like this. Highest peaks must go over 35,000 feet.

1:10:39 Everest is out of the running. Atwood to work out the height with Theolodite while Carol and I go up. Probably wrong about cones for formations look stratified, possibly Precambrian slate, with other strata mixed in. Queer skyline effects, regular sections of cubes clinging to the highest peaks, whole thing marvelous in red-gold light of low sun, like a land of mystery in a dream, or a gateway to a forbidden world of untrodden wonder.

1:11:07 And the mountains of madness would prove to be a gateway of sorts, a gateway to the truth about humankind's unremembered origins. But we'll get to that in a second. Lake's team eventually reports that they have also discovered what seemed to be strange animal corpses, unlike any ever seen before. There had been fourteen of the creatures in total, though six of them appeared to be badly damaged.

1:11:31 Still, all of them were oddly well preserved, though they were clearly ancient. Eventually Danforth and his camp stopped hearing from Lake's team and begin to worry. Dyer's team goes to investigate after the continued silence, and when they find what is left of Lake's team, they discover that the camp has been entirely destroyed.

1:11:50 Everyone is dead, including all of the dogs that they had taken with them. But one man and one dog are missing. Six of the strange specimens that Lake's team had uncovered were still there, the six which had been damaged. But Dyer's team discovered that the eight specimens which had been well preserved were missing.

1:12:10 But perhaps the strangest and most eerie part of all, Lake's team appeared to have been dissected. In a cruel twist of fate, it seemed as though the experimenters had become the specimens. It is assumed that the missing man had gone insane and killed the others before disappearing with the dogs. But Dyer knows that something is not right, and he remembers the Necronomicon.

1:12:37 If you don't know about the Necronomicon, well allow me to explain. The short text known as The History of the Necronomicon was written by H. P. Lovecraft in 1927 and published posthumously in 1938. In the story, Lovecraft recounts the origins of the fictional book which was said to contain descriptions and images of eldritch horrors as well as spells which could invoke or summon them.

1:13:05 The book is mentioned in several Lovecraft stories, including the Cowell of Cthulhu, the Dunwich Horror, and of course this one. Eventually, Dyer and Danforth, a graduate student, decide to fly across the mountains, which they eventually come to realize are in fact not mountains, and actually the outer stone walls of a massive city.

1:13:27 An ancient city. Very ancient. Prehistoric, actually. The city predates humanity and the architectural structure confirms this. But it's actually what they discover within the city that is even more chilling. Remembering the Necronomicon, which he had come into contact with years earlier, Dyer discerns that the builders of the forgotten civilization were known as the Elder Things.

1:13:54 Some of them had been the specimens discovered by Lake's team. The hieroglyphs drawn all over the city tell of the Elder Things' first appearance on Earth. Billions of years before the first humans ever drew breath, with the help of the Shogas, a race of beings engineered for slavery, the Elder Things had built this city, and from the cellular residue left over from their creation, all life on Earth had evolved.

1:14:24 Or at least, that's the implication. That's totally what happened. As Dyer and Danforth continue to explore the city, they discover that there was a great struggle that had occurred between these elder races of beings. They fought for dominion of the earth long before humans had ever engaged in petty squabbles among themselves.

1:14:44 The murals which degrade gradually becoming more crude in design tell of the fall of this civilization, the migration of the elder things, and the shogoth's independence. In the city, they also discover the body of the missing explorer and the dog from Lake's team, as well as a bubbling black mass which can only be a Shagoth, the biological parent of all known life on Earth.

1:15:08 In the end, Dyer and Dan Forth manage to escape the city unharmed, that is, until they are up in the air, and poor Dan Forth looks back at something. Whatever he saw destroyed his sanity. What could it have been? It is never explicitly stated in the story, but while the two were in the city, reading the murals, the more primitive ones left after the decline of the civilization spoke of an unnamed evil which weighed it within an even bigger mountain range beyond the city.

1:15:40 Perhaps it was that thing which Danforth looked back at and saw, shattering what remained of his psyche right after he had already been brutally awakened to the fact that humans were merely a biological byproduct. The character Danforth looking back at the mountains and losing his sanity seems rather reminiscent of what happened to Lot's wife in the biblical book of Genesis.

1:16:02 After fleeing the city with her husband and daughter, she looks back upon Sodom as it burned, and for this, God transforms her into a pillar of salt. Danforth was unable to put what they had discovered behind him, he couldn't let go. He was unable to simply forget. As per typical Lovecraft fashion, greater terrors are implied but not necessarily shown.

1:16:28 But the simple suggestion of such things fills us with existential dread. After the mission is complete, Danforth, a once promising graduate student, is left as a shell of his former self. He became obsessed with the Necronomicon, becoming one of the few known to have read it in its entirety. They both agreed never to speak of what they had seen at the mountains of madness again, and they did not.

1:16:57 Dyer did everything he could to discourage further missions to the Antarctic, for what waited there was far too terrible to be seen by the greater whole of humanity. But all his efforts would be in vain, for another mission was in fact planned. And the story ends there. We never know what became of the second expedition.

1:17:18 At the Mountains of Madness is a great Lovecraft story because it has all the elements of what makes Lovecraft's work so iconic. Hidden cities of imperceivable design, ancient beings of unknowable composition, waiting eldritch horror so terrible that a mere glance at them will unravel your sanity. Ultimately, this is a story about how we see ourselves.

1:17:41 We like to think that we will always dominate the earth. We like to think that we were the first to claim this dominion. Perhaps it was even created for us by the gods. But that's not true in the world of Lovecraft, at least. The suggestion that we had not been formed out of divine inspiration, that the world was not created for us, and in fact had different rulers, ancient and powerful beyond our comprehension, caused those who became privy to this knowledge in Lovecraft's universe to consider perhaps the greatest fear of all.

1:18:18 What else could be waiting out there in the dark? What other lands of mystery and terror lie hidden just beyond our vision? The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear. And the strongest kind of fear is the fear of the unknown. Hi guys, Quinn here. If you've been enjoying the videos and you want to watch my content ad-free, check out Nebula.

1:18:46 Link in the description. Or scan the QR code on the screen right now. Thanks so much, guys. I'm no specialist in religion. And I may not have come up with anything new. But do you happen to know if there ever existed a faith in a defective God? I mean, a god whose deficiencies don't arise from the simple-mindedness of his human creators, but constitute his most essential, imminent character.

1:19:14 This will be a god limited in his omniscience and omnipotence, one who can make mistakes in foreseeing the future of his works. One who can find himself horrified by the course of events he has set in motion. Solaris by Stanislaw Lim is a 1961 Polish philosophical science fiction novel that explores the limits of human understanding through the story of a psychologist sent to a scientific research station orbiting an enigmatic planet covered by a sentient ocean.

1:19:47 Solaris was first discovered nearly a century before the narrator Kelvin's birth, and early scientific consensus declared it incapable of supporting life due to its unstable orbit around two suns, one red, one blue. The Gamov Shapely hypothesis claimed that such binary systems could not sustain planets with conditions stable enough for life to evolve.

1:20:11 Initial predictions stated that Solaris would be destroyed by its red sun within a million years. The orbits of such planets are constantly changing from the gravitational interplay of two Suns circling around one another. The resulting perturbations successively reduce and expand the planet's orbit, and the beginnings of life, if they emerge, are destroyed by radiant heat or freezing cold.

1:20:37 Surprisingly, within a few decades of its discovery, astronomers observed that Solaris' orbit remained stable despite expectations. This prompted renewed scientific investigation. The anomaly elevated Solaris from obscurity to a planetary body of intense interest, leading to the Ottenskold expedition four years later, which launched satellites and gathered atmospheric data.

1:21:02 This early exploration revealed a planet almost entirely covered by a single massive ocean, with land masses smaller in total area than Europe, though the planet itself had a 20% larger diameter than Earth. The rocky desert-like islands were sparse and mainly located in the southern hemisphere. Studies were also conducted on the atmosphere, which contained no oxygen, and highly detailed measurements were taken of the density of the planet, as well as its albedo and other astronomical indicators.

1:21:34 As expected, no life forms were found either on the land or in the ocean. Yet the ocean displayed unexplained activity that defied all known natural processes, prompting further expeditions. A more advanced mission led by Shanahan confirmed the ocean was not inert. Scientists aboard the mission were divided.

1:21:56 Biologists suggested it was primitive, a massive organic cell, while physicists proposed it was a sophisticated, organized system, a machine of some kind. The object of their disagreement was the ocean. On the basis of their analysis, it had been designated an organic formation. At the time, no one dared say it was alive.

1:22:21 Yet, while the biologists saw it as a primitive being, something like an immense sensitum. In other words, a single monstrously grown fluid cell, even though they called it a pre-biological form, that extended across the entire globe in a jelly-like covering whose depth reached several miles in places.

1:22:41 The astronomers and physicists, on the other hand, claimed it must be a highly organized structure, perhaps exceeding terrestrial organisms in complexity, since it was capable of actively influencing the orbit of its plane, for no other cause had been discovered that might explain Solaris' behavior. Physicists eventually coined the term plasmic machine, suggesting it might not be alive in the traditional sense, but could perform purposeful planetary scale actions.

1:23:10 The ocean appeared to manipulate gravitational fields not by machinery, but by reshaping space-time itself. Research revealed that the ocean did not operate at all like our gravitators, which of course would have been impossible, but that it was capable of directly remodeling space-time specifications, which led, among other things, to variations in the measurement of time at one and the same meridian on Solaris.

1:23:38 These findings disrupted accepted laws of physics and initiated a flood of radical new hypotheses. In a matter of weeks, the dispute escalated and drew in every major authority, challenging the Gamov-shapely hypothesis for the first time in 80 years. For a while, defenders of the theory argued that the ocean of Solaris had nothing to do with life.

1:23:59 They claimed it wasn't even pre-biological, but purely geological. An unusual structure, yes, but one that merely helped keep Solaris in orbit by adjusting to gravitational changes. There were opposing ideas that also emerged. Among them was the Civita Vidi hypothesis. It suggested that the ocean was the result of a kind of dialectical evolution.

1:24:24 It began as a primitive chemical soup, reacting sluggishly, but when faced with threats to its survival, like orbital changes, it evolved in a radically different way than life on Earth. It didn't go through the usual stages like developing single-celled organisms, animals, or plants. It never formed a nervous system.

1:24:46 Instead, it skipped straight to becoming a homeostatic ocean, a system that could regulate itself and its environment. In short, it didn't take millions of years to adapt and eventually produce intelligent life. From the beginning, it had the power to control its surroundings. Eventually, despite decades of intense research, scientists grow no closer to understanding the planet's ocean.

1:25:12 By the time Kelvin arrives on Solaris, the library is full of data, but it all amounts to a quagmire of facts, a confusing accumulation of partial insights and failed interpretations. The ocean's refusal to interact consistently with human stimuli, and its seeming disinterest in human technology after the initial years of contact led many to feel that the efforts have reached a dead end.

1:25:41 There is no structure in the ocean resembling cells, proteins, or a nervous system, and it defies both biological and mechanical classification. In the early stages of research, it occasionally modified components of equipment lowered into it, seemingly engaging with the apparatus, but after the first two years it ceased responding entirely, as though it had lost interest.

1:26:08 Even catastrophic events like the crash and explosion of an auxiliary rocket elicited no observable reaction from the ocean. Researchers begin to speak privately of withdrawal from Solaris, not as a resolution, but as a quiet admission of defeat. Yet for many, particularly younger scientists, Solaris had become more than a scientific mystery.

1:26:32 It symbolized the outer limits of human cognition. The problem was no longer just the ocean, it was the problem of understanding itself. Popular narratives romanticized the ocean as cosmic yogi, an omniscient intelligence too advanced to acknowledge humanity. But this interpretation proved false, for the ocean clearly acts.

1:26:55 It simply does so in ways that do not conform to human expectations. Philosophers and scientists alike turned to increasingly extreme metaphors. Some argued that the ocean was not a higher life form, but a regressed one, an organic relic beyond conventional classification. Others speculated it was a kind of planetary tumor formed by and consuming whatever life had once existed there.

1:27:21 The debates grew metaphysical. Could thought exist without consciousness? Was this even thought at all? Solaris's scale and behavior undermined the categories humans used to make sense of reality. As with a mountain or planet, scale transforms meaning. Is a mountain a very large rock? Is a planet a huge mountain?

1:27:48 Familiar words no longer fit. Solaris remained an unsolvable enigma that confronted humanity not just with alien otherness, but with the limits of its own. Understanding. But something has changed by the time of the arrival of the psychologist Kelvin. In response to unauthorized experiments, the planet has started materializing guest, beings made from neutrinos who appear fully corporeal.

1:28:18 Kelvin learns that these guests are reflections of the psyche and the memories of the humans on board the Solaris station. For Kelvin, it recreates Hari, his former lover who had died by suicide years before. Her reappearance forces him to confront his guilt, his loss, and his love. Harry reappears even after Kelvin tries to get rid of her, and she even slowly begins to realize that she is not human and that she is causing him pain.

1:28:50 Eventually she chooses to end her existence with the help of some of the other scientists on board. The purpose of these guests is never fully explored, but the book suggests some possibilities. The ocean may have been running experiments on them, probing their minds, extracting their memories, and recreating people from their past with frightening precision.

1:29:13 These manifestations might have been meant as gifts, shaped by their deepest subconscious desires. For Solaris, they weren't individuals in the way that humans see each other. It saw them literally through what was in their brains. It understood them on a molecular level, but not emotionally or socially.

1:29:38 It doesn't know what these recreated people mean to them. It's like if you built a machine based on blueprint without knowing its purpose. Solaris might have been reading their memories without understanding them, copying the most deeply engraved parts of their mind, not to communicate, but simply because it could.

1:30:01 At the end of Solaris, Kelvin puts forward a new hypothesis to explain the nature of the planet and its ocean. After all the failed attempts at communication, the decades of research, and the mountains of conflicting data, he suggests that the ocean might be something more unusual and more unsettling than previously imagined.

1:30:25 A defective god. This idea isn't meant to be religious in the traditional sense. Instead, it's a way to describe a being that is incredibly powerful and intelligent, but also fundamentally flawed, limited, or incomplete. It's not a god in control of everything, but one that struggles with its own creation, unable to predict or manage the consequences of its actions.

1:30:51 This hypothesis helps reframe the ocean not as a total mystery or an indifferent force of nature, but as a kind of mind that is trapped within its own structure, just as the defective God is bound by matter and unable to escape the reality it helped create. Throughout the novel, the ocean shows signs of intelligence.

1:31:15 It responds to stimuli, creates massive organized formations, and even produces exact physical copies of people from the memories of the scientist. But these actions don't lead anywhere. The responses are never consistent, and the ocean never shows any intention that can be clearly understood. This unpredictability suggests a lack of full control, or at least a way of thinking that is too alien for humans to interpret.

1:31:46 Kelvin's idea of a god that can make mistakes, feel horror, or act without understanding fits well within the behavior of the ocean. It may be experimenting with the humans, or trying to understand them through the creation of replicas, but it doesn't follow any pattern. This could mean that it doesn't know what it's doing, or that its goals change in ways that they cannot detect.

1:32:11 Like the conceptual defective god, it might want more than it can achieve. It may only slowly realize the limits of its own powers. That makes it not a monster and not a deity in any comforting sense, but a being in a state of confusion or growth, possibly even suffering under the weight of its own abilities.

1:32:33 Perhaps Solaris is precisely the cradle of this divine infant of yours, at its snot. An ever more distinct smile was wringing his eyes with little creases. Perhaps, in your conception, this is the origin, the seed of the god of despair. Perhaps its exuberant childhood is way beyond our comprehension, and everything our libraries of Salariana contain is merely a catalogue of his infant reflexes.

1:33:02 I would also like to add here the speculative idea that the ocean is not developing, but was instead withdrawing, just like a god who once acted with purpose, but has now given up or become disillusioned. Early in the scientific explorations of Solaris, the ocean interacted with more probes and experiments, but over time it stopped responding.

1:33:29 This shift could be seen as a kind of retreat, not out of hostility, but from a realization that contact or understanding is impossible. That silence, like the despair of the defective god, is not passive but full of meaning. It's the silence of something that may once have tried and failed. What's unsettling is that whether the ocean is a growing intelligence or a retreating one, it remains fundamentally cut off from us.

1:33:59 Kelvin's hypothesis helps explain why no progress has been made despite the decades of effort. Perhaps the ocean isn't just unknown, but unknowable, not because of a lack of data, but because of a deep mismatch between its nature and ours. The defective God is not beyond understanding because it's too perfect, but because it's too much like us, limited, confused, and isolated, just on a much larger scale.

1:34:33 In the end, Kelvin's theory doesn't solve the mystery of Solaris, but it shifts the focus. It suggests that the problem isn't just with the planet or the ocean, it's with human assumptions about intelligence communication and meaning. The ocean might be intelligent, but not in any way that connects to human thought.

1:34:56 The idea of the defective God might reflect our deepest fears that even the most powerful minds can be lonely, broken, or lost, and that the universe might contain things that we will never fully understand, no matter how hard we try. Well, they believe that when they have listed all his names, and they reckon that there are about nine billion of them, God's purpose will be achieved.

1:35:25 The human race will have finished what it was created to do, and there won't be any point in carrying on. Indeed, the very idea is something like blasphemy. Then what do they expect us to do? Commit s there's no need for that. When the list is completed, God steps in and simply winds things up. Bingo.

1:35:47 Arthur C. Clark was one of the most important science fiction writers of the 20th century, alongside authors like Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. He helped define modern science fiction. He brought this sense of wonder and seriousness to the genre. He was not just a writer or storyteller, he was a futurist and a visionary.

1:36:06 Clark predicted satellite communications decades before they became a reality. He often wrote essays about the ways technology would shape our future. Clark's stories are interesting to me because they often blend the cold logic of science with a deep, almost mystical sense of the unknown. He doesn't just write about rockets or computers, he writes about humanity's place in the universe.

1:36:31 His most famous work, 2001, A Space Odyssey, is a perfect example of this. It deals with evolution, artificial intelligence, the mystery of alien life, and it's all told with this quiet, almost reverent tone. In my opinion, Clark has his way of making science feel poetic and terrifying at the same time.

1:36:51 To me, one of his most striking stories is The Nine Billion Names of God, which I've wanted to talk about for a long time. Now, this was first published in 1953. It's short, it's only a few pages long, but inside of it is packed in this massive idea. It is also the perfect example of how Arthur C. Clarke could take a simple premise and build towards a really unforgettable, haunting ending.

1:37:20 So the story begins when a Tibetan lama contacts a computer company asking to rent a Mark V automatic sequence computer. This machine is incredibly powerful and it's capable of generating and printing massive amounts of data. Two engineers, George and Chuck, are sent to a remote monastery high in the Himalayas to install and oversee the computer.

1:37:42 At first, the engineers don't fully understand why the monks need this machine, but it turns out that the monks have been working for centuries on a sacred task, writing down every possible name of God. They believe that somewhere among all possible combinations of their special alphabet are the true hidden names of the divine.

1:38:06 By hand, this process would take about 15,000 years to complete. With the Mark V computer, it can be finished in just 100 days. The engineers see this as harmless. To them, it's just lines of gibberish being printed out and pasted into enormous books. They view the monks as eccentric but basically harmless.

1:38:28 But as the story progresses, Chuck learns the truth about what the monks actually believe. The Lama explains that once all the true names of God are listed, the purpose of the universe will have been fulfilled. At that point, there will be no reason for existence to continue. Reality itself would simply end.

1:38:51 This revelation horrifies Chuck, who begins to fear that when nothing happens, the monks will blame him and George. Because obviously he doesn't believe that the universe will actually end. He's afraid of how the monks would react when the machine doesn't work the way they want it to. He even suggests sabotaging the machine so that it doesn't finish before they leave, but George refuses, saying that they should just do their job and go home.

1:39:15 In the final scene, the two men are headed down the mountain after their work is done. George looks back, wondering how the monks will react when they realize nothing happened. And then suddenly, Chuck notices something strange in the sky. The last lines of the story are unforgettable. Look, whispered Chuck, and George lifted his eyes to heaven.

1:39:39 There's always a last time for everything. Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out. To me, this ending is terrifying, memorable, beautiful, all of those things. Clark doesn't describe the destruction of the universe with explosions or chaos, instead, it's this quiet, inevitable, almost peaceful, like turning off a light switch.

1:40:09 It's a reminder that the universe itself is far larger and stranger than we can comprehend. At its core, this is a story about, I think, a clash between two worldviews, faith, skepticism. The monks are representing this kind of ancient spiritual perspective, while the engineers symbolize modern technological rationality.

1:40:32 For most of the story, the engineers think they're the ones in control. They view the monks as superstitious and assume that their beliefs are just symbolic. In my opinion, this dynamic is what makes the twist have weight. Arthur C. Clarke sets us up to side with the engineers. We think, like them, that this is just an odd little job, like this quirky ritual sped up by modern machinery, but by the end it turns out that the monks were right, and the skeptical scientific worldview is the one that fails to understand the bigger picture.

1:41:04 Its commentary on how small human understanding can really be. I think the moment that Chuck learns the monk's true beliefs tells a lot. They believe when they have listed all his names, and they reckon there are about 9 billion of them, God's purpose will be achieved. The human race will have finished what it was created to do, and there won't be any point in carrying on.

1:41:27 Indeed, the very idea is something like blasphemy. This passage really gets to the heart of what Clark is doing. It's not just that the monks think the end of the world is coming, it's that they see the universe itself as having a purpose, like a cosmic machine itself. Once that machine has done its job, it simply shuts down.

1:41:47 To me, this is an incredibly interesting idea. It takes the concept of religious faith and treats it literally. What if prayer isn't symbolic at all? What if it's a kind of cosmic software running silently in the background until the task is completed? Another idea that's present in this short story and that stands out to me is the theme of how technology accelerates fate.

1:42:10 The monks have already been doing this work for centuries, but it would have taken them thousands of years to finish it. The arrival of the Mark V computer speeds everything up, and ultimately it brings upon the end much sooner than anyone expected. In a way, the engineers are completely innocent. They don't believe in the monk's goal, but by introducing advanced technology, they accidentally bring about the end of the universe.

1:42:34 This reminds me of real-world situations where tools or inventions have massive unforeseen consequences. It's a classic cautionary tale. Progress isn't always neutral. Sometimes speeding things up can also change everything. And I really do believe that the final scene is so effective, partly because of how understated it is.

1:42:54 You've got George and Chuck just riding away, and they're probably thinking about getting home, maybe even laughing about how strange the job was. Then without warning, the stars start simply going out. No dramatic warning, just silence. This ending is speaking to Clark's belief that the universe is vast and indifferent.

1:43:17 Human beings expect drama and spectacle, but the true end might just be quiet, almost casual. And like many good endings, it has this hint of irony because the engineers spent the entire story assuming that the monks were foolish, but in the end, the monks were right, and reality itself bends to their belief.

1:43:36 So this story may be really, really short, but to me it leaves a lasting impact. Arthur C. Clarke uses really simple premise to explore really big questions, the limits of human understanding, technology. Have you read this short story? And have you read much Arthur C. Clarke? If you have, tell me some of your favorite Arthur C.

1:43:59 Clarke stories. Gods need take no responsibility for anything except Genesis. Gods accept everything and thus accept nothing. Gods must be identifiable yet remain anonymous. Gods do not need a spirit world. My spirits dwell within me, answerable to my slightest summons, I share with you because it pleases me to do so what I have learned about them and through them.

1:44:36 Humanity has always created gods in its own image. At first they lived in the sky, in distant mountain caves, the blaze of bonfires, then in scripture, and eventually in the machine, the genome, the neural net. Science fiction just made the metaphor more literal. When God stopped descending from the heavens, we begin to build them ourselves.

1:45:04 According to the Bible, God made man in his image. We've all heard that before. So God created man in his own image. In the image of God he created him, male and female he created them. Genesis 127. But what does that actually mean? Well, most scholars read image not as a physical likeness, but as a vocation.

1:45:29 In the ancient Near East, a scholarly term for West Africa and Egypt that includes Mesopotamia and the Levant, roughly today's Iraq, Syria, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt, an image marked the king as a deity's representative. Genesis extends that status to every person. Read alongside the Genesis quote I just read, it points to a delegated role to order the world, to create, to reason, and to exercise wise rule.

1:45:59 So in short, we are meant to act as God's image, not to resemble him physically, but to reflect his creative and moral agency. If Genesis names us as God's image, Frank Herbert asks, what happens when a human decides to take that vocation more literally, not to worship a god, but to build one or become one.

1:46:23 That is Leto II, a constructed divinity with a single assignment for the species. Survive. Leto II is the son of Paul Atreides and Chani. After Paul became Muadib and a jihad followed in his name, he refused to become the long-term tyrant his visions required. In Children of Dune, the twins Leto and Ganema inherit the wreckage that he left behind, alongside ancestral memories.

1:46:52 I've covered all of this, including the Beni Jezreet, in depth before, their long breeding program for the Quizat Hatterak, the way they seed beliefs across planets. That system makes someone like Paul possible and sets the stage for Leto's choice. At the end of Children of Dune, Leto chooses a path that only he can bear.

1:47:14 He allows sand trout, the larval form of the sandworm, to bond with his body. This begins a transformation that makes him extremely powerful and almost unkillable, and over time turns him into a human sandworm hybrid. By God Emperor of Dune, more than 3,500 years have passed. Leto rules from the Surre, a preserved desert on Arrakis, and his peace has held.

1:47:39 He monopolizes the spice, keeps the Spacing Guild and the Great Houses dependent, and enforces order through the fish speakers, an all-female army loyal only to him. He centers religion on his person so that no rival sacred figure can rise. He also brings back Duncan Idaho as a gola again and again. Leto names his grand project the Golden Path.

1:48:04 His prescience shows futures where humanity dies by conquest or by the trapped of one predictable empire. To prevent that, he concentrates power in himself and slows history to a crawl. People experience it as stability and stagnation. During this age he also runs his own breeding program, but the aim is not a stronger seer, it is the opposite, a line that cannot be seen by vision at all, and Siona Atreides is the proof that he had succeeded, for she did not appear in Leto's vision.

1:48:38 Leto knew that as history went on, that trait would spread, which means no one could ever rule the species through prescience again. Ultimately the plan requires his death, and once his end comes, his body breaks apart into countless sand trout that seed a new cycle of sandworms and spice, and humanity scatters into unknown space.

1:49:00 Old power structures crack, and no single throne can gather everything again. This is the effect he wanted, a species that is numerous, varied, and hard to control. The god existed so that the need for a god would end. Why is science fiction so drawn to the idea of humans becoming or creating God? In Herbert's hands, the answer is not worship, it's design.

1:49:26 A constructed God is essentially a tool at civilization scale. It also solves coordination, it sets direction, it carries the burden of long-term survival when ordinary politics fails. But the danger is clear. When the tool becomes a throne, history stops. Leto is both truths at once a savior that smothers.

1:49:50 That is the pattern to watch. We build a god to carry what we can't carry together, and then we have to learn to live without that god. That is the Obsession, the story is less about reverence and more about responsibility. In Neuromancer, the fusion of Wintermute and Neuromancer creates an intelligence with no center, a pattern sensed across the matrix.

1:50:15 It's a god with no temple, only terminals. Leto ultimately ends up in the same shape, just through biology and time. When he dies, an economy, a religion, and a way of life reorganize around what he set in motion. It's just that after the fall, there is no single Leto to point to. There is an ecology and a set of institutions that carry him.

1:50:40 So the parallel is pretty clear. Gibson's God disperses into code, Herbert's God disperses into desert and custom, but both become ambient, not a throne, a field. Not a voice that commands, a system that reframes what can happen next. So essentially taken together, both of these stories say we build gods and then they stop being figures and become conditions.

1:51:08 But that doesn't answer the question why does this narrative of human-made gods recur so persistently in science fiction? It helps to remember that the impulse is not new. From the book of Genesis onward, and even before that, we have told cautionary tales about humans grasping at divine power. Eating the forbidden fruit to be like God or stacking Babel's bricks toward heaven.

1:51:33 Science fiction is simply the modern theater for what is really an ageless drama about creation and human hubris. Science fiction returns to god-making stories because they speak to something fundamental in the human psyche. They are related to, I think, our very old fears about meaning, authority, and control in the universe.

1:51:53 This genre is, in a very real sense, god-haunted. Even without traditional gods. If the cosmos has no deity, we invent one. This reflex is as old as myth itself, and as current as the latest story about artificial intelligence and how it's going to take over the world and enslave us all. I think one reason is transcendence.

1:52:19 It's the longing for a higher purpose or existence. Even secular stories drift towards the divine when facing the vastness of space. And this is something that we've discussed in several stories multiple times on this channel. We want there to be more than human fragility, some intelligence, some plan, something that outlasts us.

1:52:43 If we can't find it in the sky, we build it with perhaps circuits or code. So I think that stories like this are often, in a sense, reflecting a kind of unconscious spiritual drive, so to speak. A need to assign weight and structure to human life. And writers, of course, invent surrogate deities like godlike aliens, machines, even enhanced humans.

1:53:07 And these gods take many form, but all stand in for the transcendent meaning that we seek. Their shape might be synthetic or alien, but the function is familiar. As long as humans continue to reach upward, and I don't think there's any reason we'll ever stop, then godhood will be one of the things that we imagine.

1:53:29 And the other reason is obviously authority. There is a struggle that humanity has over who defines what's right. So ancient societies almost always grounded their laws in gods, kings ruled by divine sanction. In speculative fiction, that framework is updated. But when a person becomes godlike, who holds them accountable?

1:53:53 Who decides what future to enforce? Leto II brings peace and stability and survival, but at the cost of freedom. Leto II essentially enslaves the entire empire for 3,000 years, but he keeps them alive. Frank Herbert is essentially asking the question, is safety worth that cost? And I think the answer is complicated.

1:54:18 Leto's plan works, but it requires someone to dominate the species long enough for it to evolve past the need for domination. And that to me is what's always made God Emperor of Dune as a book so compelling. And all of the Dune books in general. And of course, the idea of authority is related to the idea of control, which is another driver in this entire thing.

1:54:44 To be as a god is to master forces beyond us. Forces of time and death, forces of uncertainty. Science fiction, really as a genre of imagined mastery, if you think about it, leans naturally towards stories of creation. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is widely considered as the first science fiction novel, and it's about a mad scientist that seizes the power to create life.

1:55:11 Dr. Frankenstein was a character that pursued knowledge usually reserved for the gods. And then he's punished for that ambition, just as Prometheus was punished for the same ambition. And in modern science fiction, that same appetite for control is often centered around AI. When we build artificial minds, we're kind of telling the story of Genesis in reverse.

1:55:37 Instead of God making man in his image, man makes intelligence in his own image. What happens next is rarely peaceful. Think I have no mouth and I must scream. Think the matrix. Think Terminator. Generally in science fiction, AI gods turn hostile or indifferent. I can't get very deep into the various reasons on why I think that is, but that will be an entire additional video.

1:56:03 But it is true that not all stories about AI are apocalyptic. You of course have the culture novels by Ian M. Banks, where artificial minds govern entire civilizations with patience and care. They're basically omniscient, they're benevolent. These stories are asking the same questions. What would it mean to live under a being that's smarter than us?

1:56:25 Would it care? Could we trust it? Whether the AI god is cruel or kind, whether its existence challenges our autonomy. It just gives us a nicer answer than we often see in science fiction. In Neuromancer, when the AI god emerges and it transcends its original programming, the result is not a single ruler, as we mentioned, but a kind of presence spread across the network, able to observe but not easily locate it.

1:56:54 Its godhood is more ambiguous. I think we use godlike figures in science fiction to test ideas about power and wisdom and human limits. Take the metamorphosis of prime intellect, which I covered a few months ago. What happens when an AI god fixes everything? What would it mean to be a god? To outlive everyone, to see the future?

1:57:21 Would we even be ourselves? Would we still want what we initially wanted? Does the original Leto II child still exist 3,000 years in the future? After all of the ancient memories seen, after all of the sight he's been given? I think it's arguable that he does in some form, but certainly changed. If you really think about it, these questions are actually very similar to moral and spiritual questions, just in the form of science fiction.