Issue 27, Page 38
Transcript
1: As the serene home backdrop behind him cracks apart and reveals the fleshy, hellish landscape of the astral plane, the Smiling Man lowers his face off his head as if it were a mask and black static pours out like smoke.
The Smiling Man: Do not attempt to imagine moral superiority over me. You are as an ant to a giant; your words are a breeze hoping to move a mountain.
2: The Smiling Man reveals more of his true form: a swirling cyclone of static and distortions. It towers over the recoiling form of Julia.
The Smiling Man/Zalef-Labev: All I do, and all I allow, is born from the swallowed experiences of a hundred billion souls. My expertise outweighs all the sand in all the world’s deserts.
You and your race are but motes of dust flickering in the light, a momentary flash. I am like the sun Herself, vast and everlasting.
I am Cairo. Its buildings are my limbs and its streets my veins. I was the walled City of Elders before Cairo rose, and before that, I was the towering city of Y’thek with its obsidian spires.
I am Zalef-Labev, as I was Labev-Ra, as I was Nibabu, as I was countless other names from races that crawled upon this Earth before your kind was given its shape.
All who die with my name on their lips are drawn to me like rivers into the ocean. I hold the memories of nations, of kings and peasants, of saints and murderers, of dullards and magi.
Know your place and judge me not, for the soil is stained by your hands, not mine.
He just like me fr <3
Zalef-Labev is giving me mad envy over here. I would very much like to be a cyclone of static and dark tendrils. *sigh*
“I am like the sun Herself, vast and everlasting.”
Umh, about *that* … :-}
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun#After_core_hydrogen_exhaustion
Ouh, burned
Maybe it was a bad idea to fight (a) god on the astral plane.
You know, someone really is protesting a lot from being questioned by a “Breeze”.
Those with the most power are those with the least composure.
Yet no one calls that out in stories when you have the overpowered protagonist crushing under heel like insects expies of all the jerks, idiots, and lucky fools, the author hates in real life.
To be fair, you wouldn’t care about the character otherwise.
Hm. I’m not so sure this guy IS a ‘god’. At least, not how I define the term.
A god is a being who is capable of creating Universes, even connected Multiverses, from scratch; that is, without building it on top of another existing form of reality.
It’s not just about creating the things within the Universe, but structuring the laws of physics themselves, defining how the fundamental forces act and react to each other, and so on.
Any being with that much raw intelligence would have a MUCH better retort to Julia than one that boils down to, “Nuh uh, you’re dumb!” And they’d ESPECIALLY not make the mistake of claiming the sun is ‘everlasting’, when that is objectively false.
Of course, whether a god would actually help or not depends on what their purpose for creating (or helping to create) the Universe was to begin with. If the black mass covering the moon furthers the Universe’s purpose, then of course they will not help remove it.
But what would that purpose be? It seems like a very overcomplicated Universe for it to just be for calculations or even a farm. It can’t be for gaining worshipers or followers, because there are much better ways of maximizing THAT than having a Universe where most sentient life isn’t quite 100% sure that you exist, instead believing that something else exists instead of you.
It seems similar enough to our real Universe for me to assume its purpose is similar to ours, and my own proposal for the purpose of our Universe is for the maximization of the quantity and diversity of ‘nouns’, where a noun is defined as a person, place, thing, abstract concept, combination of other nouns, relationship between other nouns, parts of or aspects of nouns, interactions between nouns, and so on.
If the problem on the moon threatens to turn all life on Earth (and potentially also Mars? Theoretically the comic’s entire Universe?) into more of the black mass, that becomes a significant reduction in the diversity of nouns that exist. Deciding to let that happen would be Extremely Evil, and NOT something that a real god would do (assuming the Universe’s purpose is as I suspect).
TL;DR: Wanting to preserve the diversity of nouns, which is what Julia seems to want (given her desire to be her own unique individual, when she called upon Air’Asha), does in fact give her moral superiority over this complete moron.
I’m curious about your idea for the purpose of the universe. Why would “maximization of the quantity and diversity of ‘nouns’” be a goal of a god? So they (the god) would not be alone in existence?
And when you say “without building it on top of another existing form of reality”, do you mean “out of nothing”? I do not (yet, at least) possess the knowledge or ability to prove it, but in my strong opinion, it is impossible to create anything out of nothing. And by “nothing”, I mean the most absolute sense possible of that word; in that sense “nothing” might not even exist. (A vacuum is technically not nothing, as there is still spacetime within it.)
I have odd and admittedly biased perspectives on this sort of thing. The inspiration that led to the conclusion is separate from the evidence I use to back up the claim, so it’s possible I biased myself into seeing things as evidence which shouldn’t be considered evidence. That said, rationalizations or not, the logic does seem sound.
Basically, consider the possibility that the Universe has a purpose to begin with. Supposedly it would be possible to deduce that purpose by looking at how the Universe is structured, how it works, and so on.. In other words, by studying the laws of physics and the boundaries of what is and is not possible, we might be able to gain insight on what it was designed to do.
I was raised very religious, so it was easy for me to start out with that assumption.. And I started trying to think of possible purposes for our Universe. One of the things the Bible says on more than one occasion, is that God is love.. And that led me down a rabbit hole of trying to define ‘love’ quantitatively.
I know some languages have multiple words for different ‘types of love’, but I dunno… Something about a single word being so diversely used seemed more.. Universal, to me. So, I started trying to figure out a single definition of ‘love’ that covers literally every single way that the word can be used in.. From, “Oh, I love that band!” when casually talking about music preferences, to deeply emotionally telling your partner, “I love you so much…”, to even just things like, “I love the color blue.”
What I eventually settled on was, “The desire and/or act of creating or protecting a noun,” with ‘noun’ having basically the same definition as I gave in my last post. It’s kinda morphed over time, but only in that sometimes I include some things and forget to include other things.. I remember after typing that post that I thought of several things I usually include and forgot to this time, and now that I’m typing about it again… I’ve forgotten them again. If I remember before I send this, I’ll edit this part to include them instead of rambling about not remembering (Edit: Patterns! That was it. The main way one could generalize all of it is to say that a noun is any pattern within reality that behaves uniquely to another pattern, compared to other patterns. Which is.. Hard to explain really, and I’m rather sleepy right now, so maybe not wording it well). Point is, the ‘spirit’ of the definition is the same, though I sometimes word it differently and emphasize different things.
Aanyway, when I was contemplating possible purposes for the Universe, one of the thoughts I had was, “What if it’s literally just to maximize love, as I’ve defined it? The Universe, especially with regards to humans, has created a lot of weird and crazy things that are unlikely to exist, like porn of rubber people and electric cars being launched into space and flying by Mars. Is there anything in the laws of physics that would go against that idea, that producing as much random stuff as possible with as much complexity as possible, is the actual point of it all?”
Aand at first it looked like a dead end, because obviously there’s the whole Entropy thing that dilutes energy and makes it harder to reuse for anything useful…
… Until I stumbled upon some videos explaining what entropy actually is, and how it helped make complex forms of matter possible to begin with. And then a few days ago I happened to find a more mathematically rigorous video on that topic, which convinces me further of my hypothesis (though bear in mind I am heavily biased toward my own conclusion, so.. It doesn’t mean much that I would think something supports what I already believe).
At the end of the day though, entropy is what let the Universe cool down enough to not just be a near-uniform cloud of superheated plasma. As the Universe cooled down, it condensed, and started to cluster stuff together into more complicated stuff, and so on, so…
… Entropy is a key ingredient in making sure that as many possible nouns, with as much variation as possible, come into being.
It all fits. Everything I know about physics fits this purpose. AND it fits with religious themes about God being Love, AND it fits almost all of human morality (and I’ve found there are serious and legitimate reasons to NOT go with any moral code that Does go against it anyway).
So… Yeah. It just all fits so well. Most people I know who aren’t fans of this idea, are deeply religious to the point of being attached to moral codes that go against it. The sorts of people who think pornography is evil and should be destroyed. The sorts of people who ban entire genres of fictional artwork, despite how such art helps trauma survivors process the horrors they’ve been through…
It’s the only system of morality I’ve seen that not just explains the connections between everything, but can be (though admittedly was not originally) derived from just studying how the Universe works on a physical level… And also reinforces most of the morals I’ve come to have through life experience over time.
Most, not all. I’ve in the past considered things like online advertisements to be evil invasions of privacy, but… They’ve also helped fund a lot of websites that are hosted by hobbyists and the like. I still think that the privacy invasions are evil, but mostly because that much data being kept around is BOUND to be massively abused eventually (and probably already is).
But the idea behind online ads? I’m more okay with it now. It actually made me smile a bit to see ‘YOUR AD HERE $0.03’ at the top of this comic’s pages; it shows that the ads are targeted not by an algorithm with tons of privacy-invading tracking techniques, but instead by how people who like this comic might have a product for other people who like this comic. Using the website itself as a demographic. THAT is a more than acceptable way to host ads, and helps fund the comic!
So, while it’s surprising µBlock Origin doesn’t already have a filter for that ‘comicad’ website/service, I’m not adding a filter for it manually. I Appreciate it instead, while in the past I would have been annoyed by seeing yet more ads.
___________________________________
So.. Yeah. It’s inspired by religion, goes against how oppressive most religious people have become, and could theoretically be derived from scratch by just studying the laws of physics. Maybe. I admit that’s a stretch, and my own biases probably played a large role in how I came up with it.
If anything in the universe is divine, it is love. Almost all, if not all, major religions have, at their core, kindness and compassion as key virtues.
I realized I didn’t directly answer your question.
My answer to that is that it’s impossible to know. If you look into the ‘incompleteness theorems’, you’ll find proofs that a mathematical system can’t even prove its own consistency, proving that a fully consistent system of mathematics cannot also be a Complete system of mathematics.
The Universe is, in a way, a system of mathematics. It can’t, by the laws of logic, know everything about itself… So by extension, it cannot know everything about anything Outside of itself.
I don’t know if there is one God, or many gods. I have other things I can say about Christianity in particular and why I think some of its stuff might be closer than most other religions, but at the same time, that might be me being biased toward how I was raised, so I cannot say it with much certainty (and pretending to would be intellectually dishonest, even though that is how I actually feel about it. Hence, it’s not personally dishonest, but it is definitely intellectually dishonest).
In my other answer, I already go into uh… A lot more detail than I thought I was going into, about how I came up with all of it. I think that’s as good as I can get to answering ‘but why’.