Gods as Iota-Relative Phenomena

Gods as Iota-Relative Phenomena

There is a deeper point about superorganisms that the inhibition coefficient $\iota$ (Part II) makes precise. The modern rationalist who says "gods don't exist" is operating at a perceptual configuration—high $\iota$—that makes god-perception impossible. This is different from gods-as-patterns not existing.

The ontological status of superorganisms is $\iota$-relative. At high $\iota$, the market is merely an emergent property of individual transactions—a useful abstraction, nothing more. At appropriate $\iota$, the market is perceptible as an agent with purposes and requirements: it "wants" growth, it "punishes" inefficiency, it "rewards" compliance. Both descriptions are true at their respective inhibition levels.

The book's ontological democracy—every scale of organization with causal closure is equally real at that scale—extends to the $\iota$ dimension: what is perceptible depends on the perceptual configuration, and the perceptual configuration is itself a variable, not a given. The gods do not appear and disappear as we modulate $\iota$. What changes is our capacity to perceive the agency they exercise—agency that operates on its substrate regardless of whether the substrate can see it.

This is not an argument for religion. It is an observation that high-$\iota$ civilization has made itself blind to the very patterns that govern it. The market god, the nation god, the algorithm god: these are most powerful precisely when the population $\iota$ is too high to perceive them as agents. A parasite benefits from being invisible to its host.

The dynamic is self-reinforcing. The market god does not merely benefit from high $\iota$—it produces high $\iota$ through its operational logic. Quantification, metrics, depersonalization, the reduction of persons to "human resources" and relationships to "transactions": these are $\iota$-raising operations applied at scale. Each turn of the cycle raises population $\iota$ further, making the god less perceptible, reducing resistance, enabling further extraction. The feedback loop—god raises $\iota$, population loses perception of god-as-agent, god operates unopposed, god raises $\iota$ further—may be the central mechanism of what Weber called rationalization. Breaking the loop requires precisely what the loop prevents: lowering $\iota$ enough to see what is acting on you.

The trajectory-selection framework (Part I) sharpens this point. At high $\iota$, the collective pattern is processed at such a factorized level that no single observer's attention encompasses it as a whole—it is just aggregate effects of individual actions, and the attention distribution samples only at the individual scale. At appropriate $\iota$, collective patterns become foregrounded: the market is attended to as an agent, because the observer's measurement distribution allocates probability mass to market-level feedback loops. The god becomes observable not because something new enters existence but because the observer's attention has expanded to sample at the scale where the pattern operates. Ritual works, in part, by synchronizing the collective's measurement distribution—coordinating where participants direct attention, what temporal markers they share, what affective states they enter together. A synchronized collective measures at the collective scale, and what it measures, it becomes correlated with. When ritual attention weakens, the god does not cease to exist; the distributed attention pattern that constituted its observability has dissolved.

This logic extends from individual perception to collective observation. Part I established that once a system integrates measurement information into its belief state, its future must remain consistent with what was observed. The principle extends to communication between observers. When observer $A$ reports an observation to observer $B$, $B$'s future trajectory becomes constrained by that report—weighted by $B$'s trust in $A$'s reliability. The effective constraint is:

where $\tau_{AB} \in [0,1]$ is $B$'s trust in $A$. At high trust, $B$'s trajectory becomes strongly correlated with $A$'s observation. At zero trust, the report has no effect.

This gives social reality formation a precise mechanism. A shared observation—one that propagates through a community with high mutual trust—constrains the collective's trajectories. The community becomes correlated with a shared branch of possibility, not because each member independently observed the same thing, but because the observation propagated through the trust network and constrained each member's future. Religious testimony, scientific consensus, news media, and rumor are all propagation mechanisms with different trust structures, producing different degrees of trajectory correlation across the collective. The superorganism's coherence depends not only on shared ritual and shared attention but on the degree to which observations propagate and are believed—which is why control of testimony (who is authorized to report, what counts as credible observation) is among the most contested functions in any social system.

The theological distinction between God's active will (God causes the storm) and God's permissive will (God allows the storm) is a conceptual technology for maintaining moderate $\iota$—preserving the meaningfulness of events (low $\iota$: the world has purposes) while creating logical space for events that resist teleological interpretation (proto-high $\iota$: some things just happen). The active/permissive distinction is an early, sophisticated technology for $\iota$ modulation—a culture-level tool for maintaining perceptual flexibility about which events are meaning-bearing and which are merely permitted.