On Omniscience

[sdi]

Let's take Sallustius' words as given and assume that the Gods are those beings that Cause but are not Caused. Therefore each God is an eternal fixed point, dependent only upon themselves.

Let's also consider omniscience. A Mind, to understand something, must encode that information somehow. This can either be done directly (for example, our brains can be said to perfectly encode their own electrical signals, since that's what they are), or indirectly (those electrical signals may encode sensory signals of external things). But this indirect form is a lossy process ("the map is not the territory"), which implies that the only way to be omniscient of something is to contain its original, since the alternative is to only have a lossy view of it (and a lossy comprehension cannot be considered complete).

But the Gods are not contained within each other—this would violate our original axiom. Thus the Gods cannot be omniscient—except, of course, in the aggregate, since they collectively give rise to the Cosmos. But there is no way to recover this collective information, as it is broken into disjoint spheres.

In a smaller sense, though, the Gods—even secondary or tertiary ones—can presumably be omniscient of something, if that something is within their causal sphere. Insofar as Apollo gives rise to Asclepius, Apollo is omniscient of Asclepius. Insofar as Asclepius gives rise to Hygeia, Asclepius is omniscient of Hygeia.

I think this lack of omniscience is an interesting consequence of polytheism, and helps make sense of both myth and everyday experience, where it appears that the Gods are "warring" with each other. The apparent conflict is a necessary consequence of the Gods being limited in their domains, but also collectively composing the definition of the cosmos.

Comments

[boccaderlupo]

This is an interesting conjecture, and I like how you tie in the concept of loss comprehension, etc. There is a lot to think about here.

I'm not sure I entirely agree, however, as it seems the areas where we try to intellectually comprehend the functions of the gods break down the higher "up the chain" we go. For example, if we imagine a spectrum of spiritual beings (The One --> henads (gods) --> angels --> daimons --> ... mortals), my suspicion is that, the closer one gets to The One, the less any sort of axioms hold. This might even hold within the gods themselves: The Zeus we are familiar with from the myths, which fixes certain attributes in our rather simple minds about the god, is not Zeus at the summit of his powers, in his full majesty (cue what happens to Semele when she beholds the unveiled Deity).

That's not a great answer, I know, but that's just my own personal view. Shades into mysticism, I guess.

On the other hand, I think there is real value in these kind of meditations, as they tend to lead to insights.

Side note and somewhat related: I came across a good summary of Iamblichus's views in De Mysteriis, in case you (or anyone else) wants an overview. It's contained in Lynn Thorndike's History of Magic and Experimental Science Volume 1, in Chapter 11, "Neo-Platonism and Its Relations to Astrology and Theurgy" (found online, gratis!)

[sdi]

You're completely correct, of course: given that our logic works here, but is certainly broken by the time we get to the One, there must therefore be some level between them at which it breaks. The Gods we're talking about are pretty high up the chain, and therefore our a priori belief about whether our logic applies to them must be correspondingly low! Thomas Taylor says somewhere (I can't now find the reference—he wrote a lot of footnotes!) that the Gods exist in some kind of mystic union through their connection to the One. If so, then the belief that the Gods are not Caused is itself a paradox.

For my own part, even if it doesn't apply to the highest levels of Gods, it certainly applies at the more proximate level of beings that give rise to our own world and the conflicts we see within it! (Apuleius, for example, would treat the Zeus we can comprehend as a dæmon, separate from—though in service of!—the true Zeus. Maybe this logic doesn't apply to the true Zeus, but does it matter? We can't even comprehend Him anyway! We might as well deal with the beings we can experience.)

So in order to align our experiences, I'll need to use a more nuanced argument applying recursively to individual "levels" of the cosmos. I'll consider putting it together, it'd be instructive for me...

[sdi]

In thinking about this today, I think I am positing one axiom that I have not yet seen in the classics yet.

Let me define the generation of a being to be the shortest path up the chain of existence to the One. For example, if we work from Hesiod, Chaos, Gaia, etc. are the first generation; Nyx, Ouranos, etc. are the second generation; etc. There's some complexities here: the Titan(esse)s are also the second generation, as they are born from a first generation mother even though their father is of the same generation they are. The Olympians are therefore the third generation (being descended from Titan(esse)s); Aphrodite is also of the third generation, being generated directly from Ouranos. And on and on.

I make the point of the shortest path because of oddball examples like Heracles, who is divine despite having a mortal mother. Being divine, he cannot be of a mortal level! So he must take his heritage from his father.

The assumption I am making is that each generation defines the world in which the generations below them exist. In Hesiod, the primordials are the world in which the Titans and Olympians live. The Titans and Olympians are the world in which the demigods, nymphs, oceanids, etc. live, and so on and so on. I don't think I've seen this assumption anywhere that I've read, and I probably just conjured it out of nowhere.

However, if you allow this assumption, then the original point I was making above is straightforward enough to make here, too: each being of a given generation is causally independent of other beings of the same generation, since they have their being from the generation immediately above. Since the beings at any given generation are causally independent, they cannot be omniscient at that level of causality (though they may be omniscient of causal levels below them, etc).

Your criticisms still seem to apparently stand, of course: I used Hesiod as an example because it is fairly straightforward (but with some nice edge cases to make sure I'm not running off the rails), but things get awfully weird when gets to the higher levels of being in Neoplatonism, so who knows.

Of course, these are all merely models, and any relationship to reality proper is merely incidental!

[sdi]

Regarding lossy comprehension, the argument for that one is straightforward: if you want to be omniscient of something, you need to encode that information somehow (as astral matter, as neurons in a brain, as magnetic charges on a hard disk, as marks on a piece of paper, etc. etc.). But now you have more information about that thing... so you need to encode the encoding somewhere, or you can't be said to be omniscient of the original thing. But if you do that, you have to encode the encoding of the encoding somewhere, etc. etc. etc., leading to an infinite regress, which makes no sense.

[sdi]

Thank you for the link to Thorndike! I will greedily gobble that up, I imagine it'll help a lot with Sallustius—Iamblichus is a very difficult read, and there was no way I was going to be able to manage it simultaneously!