♾️ Hierarchical Consciousness vs No Ultimate God
A Foundational Page of Similarity Theory
By Simon Raphael
🧭 Guiding Principle
In Similarity Theory, realities rhyme across scales. A higher order can organise, constrain, and meaningfully influence lower orders — yet no order occupies a final, all-controlling vantage.
Infinity serves as a conceptual tool, not an instantiated being. Therefore, there is no ultimate God to which true similarity can be drawn.
🔎 Working Definitions
“God” (Abrahamic sense): An unbounded, all-knowing, all-powerful being — rejected by Similarity Theory as a realised entity. It remains a concept only.
God-like (relative): Any order whose power appears overwhelming compared to a lower one. God-likeness is comparative, provisional, and bounded.
Higher-order mind: Collective integrations — e.g. civilisation-scale intelligence, planetary mind, or dimensional mind — that exhibit emergent capacities not found in parts alone.
⚖️ Note: A substrate or host (carbon, silicon, canvas, road) does not automatically possess more consciousness than what emerges upon it. Consciousness flows relationally: a higher-order system may support, enable, or constrain, but not always outshine the consciousnesses within it.
🪜 Core Claims
♾️ Infinity is conceptual, not instantiated. Mathematics uses infinity to guide thought, but there is no “all-powerful” entity embodying it.
🌍 All higher minds are system-internal. Planetary, universal, or dimensional minds arise from organisation within the system, not from external creators.
✨ Note: What appears today as a mere substrate (a planet, a lattice, a computational base) may later integrate into a higher-order consciousness. Hosts can become minds when organisation and resonance cross a threshold.⚖️ God-likeness is always relative. A higher order may seem divine from below, but this power dissolves under closer analysis.
🚪 No terminus. The hierarchy is open-ended: for every higher order, there are further horizons. No final rung closes the ladder.
🧪 Analogies
🧑🌾 Humans to plants and animals → We breed, feed, mow, and cull. To the plant, this looks like control, yet we cannot dictate each blossom or chew.
🚰 The draining sink → You can pull the plug and drain the basin, but you cannot decide which molecule leaves first. Control is coarse, not absolute.
🗿 Rocks to atoms → A rock stabilises its atoms, appearing god-like to them, but it does not command each electron’s path.
🧍♂️ Higher-dimensional beings to humans → Their power may feel divine, yet their agency remains bounded by context and structure.
🧩 Vocabulary Note
When Similarity Theory uses “god-like”, it is a linguistic concession. It signals relative asymmetry of power — not an ultimate deity.
🧠 Implications
🌱 Ethics scales with vantage. Greater power demands stewardship, but never confers omniscience.
🔬 Method over metaphysics. Investigate how integration yields new capacities, rather than postulating final causes.
📝 Language discipline. Use “God” comparatively, always specifying the frame (e.g. “god-like relative to X”).
🔗 See Also
🌀 [Transcendence without a Final Ceiling]
🔦 [Light Behind the Frames (Consciousness and Time)]
🧭 [Freedom and Will in an Open Hierarchy]
🧬 [Panpsychist Resonance across Scales]
♾️ One-Sentence Takeaway
Similarity Theory replaces the idea of an ultimate God with a scale-relative map of powers, where each rung may look divine from below — and none is final from above.
📚 References and Notes
[1] “Alpha and Omega” as ultimacy markers: Revelation 1:8, 22:13.
[2] Aristotle on potential vs actual infinity; Cantor’s developments.
[3] Hilbert’s Hotel: why completed infinities defy physical instantiation.
[4] P. W. Anderson, More is Different: higher-level laws emerge.
[5] M. A. Bedau on weak emergence: macro-patterns without absolute top-down control.
[6] Surveys of emergence and downward causation.
[7] Standard overviews of panpsychism.
