ON GODS
from the desk of Doctor Nemesis:
Deity: Fundamentally unscientific piffle. Yet one must painfully acknowledge that, according to some quirk of our reality, narrative abstractions have an annoying tendency to achieve form. Reduced to a processor system, this class of entity might be expressed as follows:
OBSERVATIONS:
• Patronage outputs have a constant upper limit, i.e., the personal benefits a user may expect are fixed, irrespective of the number of other users.
• Total system output is a product of total input. This would appear to limit a deity's
capacity for manifestation and agen cy. I speculate:
• 1-100 Worshippers: The processor cannot manifest far from its cultic input. It is tightly bound to its users.
• 100-100,000 Worshippers: The processor achieves a level of independence. It begins to act according to system objectives.
• 100,000+ Worshippers: the processor is essentially autonomous. Oddly, deities at this level almost never manifest. (Some manner of output->input loop? This would merit further study if literally Everything Else weren't a better use of my time.)
• Secondary Input: There seems to be a threshold of mass consciousness beyond which processors cease to require primary input. (I doubt there are any active cults slitting chicken-throats to Loki, Hercules, etc., yet they refuse to @#& 0/o off.) I speculate they have transitioned from the merely Metaphysical into Enduring Literary Devices -exchanging a high-value/small-dose input for an unexotic but endless supply of human awareness. Which begs the question: If we could delete all memory of, e.g., Thor, from the minds of mankind, would he cease to exist?
Hm. Fun idea. We should try.