An Abstraction Called God

I've always felt that at its core all religions are attempts to realize the basic truths of existence. Doctrinal differences to me are trivial. Rules and rituals sometimes hinder rather than help the spiritual progress of the devotee. It bores me whenever people argue about the virtues of their own religion. 

When we explain technical concepts in engineering, we often use models and architecture diagrams. To represent a web server, we draw a box. To represent a client communicating with a web server, we draw another box with an arrow pointing to the web server. And when discussing it, we have these images in our heads: boxes and lines of interactions going back and forth between them.

What does that have to do with religion? Well, religion are like those box diagrams we draw on the whiteboard to explain nature and how we humans are to function within it. 

Let's go back to the web server. A web server is a piece of program running on a server hardware. If we dive deeper, all we have are just lines of code--instructions--executing based on a predetermined sequence on a processor chip made out of semiconducting material. And even that is an abstraction. There are no 'instructions' as such. That's just our human way of conceptualizing what's happening inside a computer. 

If you open up a computer and look at its printed circuit board, you don't see any activities happening at all. No one barks out 'instructions' to another. The so-called processor feels hot, but you don't see it 'doing' anything. If you tap the the probes of a voltmeter at the right points on the board, you'll be able to read voltages. Voltage is just an indication of the energy possessed by that point relative to another, allowing it to drive the flow of electrons.

All that's happening are just electronic pulses that are being triggered based on the state of the memory, processor and the disk storage. One set of pulses trigger another based on the deterministic behaviour of semiconducting transistors that make up the processor. 

Engineers again use abstract symbols to represent these digital pulses - the '1's and '0's binary language of computing. This is an abstraction to help us humans think. Bits and bytes are concepts that don't exist in nature. Nature is only an interplay of matter and energy.

Even matter and energy are concepts invented by us to again help us 'explain' nature. It's similar to 'form' and 'karma' in Buddhist terminology. Every time we talk about something with the use of concepts, we are simplifying. But it serves our immediate purpose. Concepts have instrumental value. There's nothing intrinsically 'true' about concepts. 

What is the web server? A program, a grouping of logical instructions that execute in a specific way to help us realize a desired interplay of matter and energy, realized using materials such as silicon, copper and gold and electrical energy.  The laws of thermodynamics will always be at play, energy will always be conserved and quantum mechanical laws will be obeyed. Electrons (another abstract concept) will behave like particles and waves with probabilistic certainty.

Nowadays, we like to talk about cloud computing. That's another higher level of abstraction--we have lots of computing power (inescapably engineered configurations of matter and energy) which we can tap to deliver the information processing we desire: the movies we watch on our tablet, the songs we listen to on our phones, the chat messages and videos we send back and forth with friends. We operate at this level of abstraction--exchanging information and energy with the help of engineered systems made out of matter and energy.

God is an abstraction. The rules and rituals of religion are models we build to help us interact with each other as human beings in an optimal manner. Having the concept of an authoritarian God helps. It could be a monolithic architecture but every architecture has its strengths and weaknesses. Very much like how we used to have mainframes where all computing are centrally done. Nowadays we don't even know where the processing is done because it is 'in the cloud'.

Some people are more comfortable working at the level of matter and energy--electrons, heat, light and waves. Some prefer to visualize things at higher levels - a box to represent a server, another a client. But there's no such thing as a server or a client in this artificially assembled matrix of silicon and electron. 

Some people prefer to pray or talk to God, like how a client talks to a server. This client-server model is an architecture. Some like to think of reality as being distributed--everyone is a node for karma to find its optimum path. Karma is just energy, like electrons coursing through semiconducting material in accordance with the laws of physics; like water molecules in an ocean of waves, tsunamis and whirlpools; like human beings loving, hating, desiring and killing each other.

All are just different levels of abstractions. Abstractions are just temporary formations in the human mind. The mind is another concept that does not have an independent reality of its own. We draw a boundary around a group of electro-chemical processes and call it a 'mind'.

But abstractions are how we comprehend the world and interact with each other. We are temporary abstractions build out of lower level of abstractions. Ultimately we are nothing but nature being what it is, undulating and unfolding in its natural state.

This is how I experience the universe. What is 'I'? What is 'experience'? Where are their boundaries? By asking these questions, the boundaries dissolve momentarily. Then we suddenly know, God is in everything. That is, if we choose to use that abstract concept.