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

[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!