Within the context of my philosophy, I’ve begun to think of God as a more abstract omniscient agent rather than a deity; i.e., an entity with full unfettered knowledge of the universe, without any additional connotations.

There are some interesting attributes you can then ascribe to Him: for one, if the universe is truly deterministic on the subatomic level, it is only to Him that there would be any difference. The rest of us have incomplete knowledge of the world on this scale (even discounting the immense, effectively infinite, number of possibilities, there are problems such as the Uncertainty Principle to contend with) and will not be able to perceive the underlying determinism of the universe as it unfolds if the universe is in fact deterministic. (I call this effective nondeterminism). But an omniscient agent would have complete knowledge of the universe and would in fact be able to predict its course were it deterministic.

Another interesting tidbit relates to perception: as I argued in my last post, our own personal universes are colored by our perception. We may be able to reason that the objective universe is not in fact like that, but our senses will always tell us otherwise. One can think of it as performing astronomical study while there is dirt on the telescope lens.

Omniscience precludes such a filter. An omniscient agent does not rely on access to a particular “view” of the universe; the knowledge is direct, complete, and unaltered. Thus an omniscient agent can be used as a mechanism of exploring the objective side of the universe in the objective/subjective duality.

There is a technique in computer graphics, mostly in the context of gaming, known as “skyboxing”, where you simulate a sky by drawing a textured box around the player and moving it around as the player moves. The game universe is defined by the player’s perception – we see a sky and we don’t feel the need to ask questions about how that sky was rendered.

This got me thinking this morning about the “unfairness” of the universe. The objective, physical universe, of course, can care less about you or your well-being; it’s governed by intransigent laws, none of which take “is this a sentient being?” into account.

There is, however, one way the universe can be actively against you in a certain sense: if your body presents an additional struggle to overcome. Just as the skybox around the player *is* the sky in the game world, what we perceive within the real world defines our universe (despite the existence of objectivity given infinite knowledge of the world). If our perceptions are faulty, if our actions are limited, if our attention is constantly drawn away by pain or malaise, our universe has become more difficult to act within. Such a struggle is intrinsic to our own bodies, so it follows us everywhere. Like the sky, it has become a physical fact of our universe. It can thus be said that the universe is in fact working against us to the extent that our bodies are.