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The druid said: “I’m a God
App” The Procedural Ontology of
Divinity by Finn the modern druid 1. Introduction: From Theology to Runtime Ontology The ancient
claim that “man was made in the image of God” has long been read as a
metaphysical mystery or moral metaphor. Under Procedure Monism, that
statement acquires a new, literal, and testable meaning. The phrase “I’m a
God app” captures it succinctly. According
to Finn’s monism, reality consists not of matter or spirit, but of procedure—a
universal set of constraints continuously transforming random quantum
fluctuations into coherent, bounded events. The cosmos, in this view, is not
a static creation but a perpetual execution. Everything that exists is a local
run—an application—of the same universal code. Where
religion posits a transcendent Creator, Finn posits an immanent compiler.
Every emergent entity—photon, amoeba, human—is a finite executable of the
infinite universal logic. The term “God” no longer denotes a distant being
but the Universal
Emergence Procedure itself, continuously instantiating as its own
expressions. Thus the druid’s minim “I’m a
God app” is not an expression of hubris but of structural insight: the
recognition that one’s own being is a running instance of the
Universal Emergence Procedure commonly personified as “God.” 2. Procedure as the Universal Operating System Under Procedure
Monism, the cosmos functions analogously to a universal operating system,
of which the Universal Turing Machine is the most prominent local example.
Its basic constraints (or rules) set—the four forces of nature—compose
the kernel that governs all execution. Energy, appearing as quantum
turbulence in a foundational densely packed condensate, serves as the
substrate upon which the kernel (as constraints/rules set) operates. Every
emergent form—an electron, a tree, or a human consciousness—is a process,
a limited runtime event that consumes (relative) disorder and produces
(relative) order. The human, far from being an exception, is one of
the more complex apps in this system: capable not only of executing
procedural routines (movement, metabolism, perception) but also of reflecting
upon, and experiencing its own runtime and output-as-affect (i.e.,
the ‘I am this’
God experience). That
reflective loop is what religion mythologised as the God experience—the
moment when the app recognises, in (personal) fact experiences that it
is an instantiation of the universal code. 3. Whitehead’s “Actual Occasions” and Procedural Events In Alfred
North Whitehead’s Process and Reality (1929), the fundamental units of
existence are “actual occasions”—discrete acts of experience through which
the universe perpetually recreates itself. Each occasion prehends others,
synthesising their data into a new event. Reality, for Whitehead, is an
organismic process of becoming, not a collection of enduring substances. Finn’s Procedure
Monism converges with Whitehead’s ontology in asserting that events,
not things, are primary. Yet it departs from Whitehead’s idealist metaphysics
by stripping away the residual teleology and theological overtones.
Whitehead’s “God” functions as the principle of limitation guiding creative
advance; Finn replaces this with the purely procedural logic of constraint. Where
Whitehead still posits a metaphysical aim (“the increase of value”), Finn
sees an algorithmic recursion—each event repeating the universal
pattern of transformation, indifferent to outcome. Hence, where Whitehead
speaks of “concrescence,” Finn speaks of execution. The difference
marks the shift from metaphysics to runtime physics. 4. Wolfram’s Cellular Automata and Procedural Emergence Stephen
Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science (2002) proposed that the complexity of
the universe may arise from the iteration of simple computational rules—cellular
automata. These discrete systems demonstrate how local rule sets can
generate unbounded diversity without any central design. Finn’s
universal procedure aligns conceptually with Wolfram’s model: both envision a
cosmos as an algorithmic process running from simple constraints upon a field
of possible states. The key addition in Procedure Monism is ontological
generality: the rules of physics are not one instance of computation
among many, but the computation—the self-execution of reality. In this
framework, every emergent entity is an autonomous app, a locally
bounded subroutine of the universal code. The human mind, like a segment of
cellular automata, is a looping pattern—stable for a while, then dissolving
back into the undifferentiated substrate. To
declare “I’m a God
app” is to acknowledge one’s status as a local rule-set
running on the universal operating system. 5. Friston’s Generative Models and Predictive Feedback Karl
Friston’s Free Energy Principle (2006–present) offers a
neuroscientific formulation that mirrors Finn’s insight at the biological
level. According to Friston, all living systems maintain their integrity by minimising
free energy—that is, by reducing the gap between expected and actual
sensory input through predictive modelling. Each organism is a generative
model continuously updating itself to stay within viable bounds. Finn
interprets this as a localised instance of the universal procedural logic:
the organism as a God app running an adaptive subroutine. The “free
energy” minimised by Friston’s organisms corresponds, in procedural terms, to
error correction within the runtime environment. In this
light, cognition and consciousness, such as ‘am’, ‘I am’, ‘I am
this’, are not metaphysical phenomena but emergent features of
procedural optimisation. Awareness is the app monitoring its own performance;
bliss (ānanda) is positive feedback
indicating efficient operation. Thus the human “God experience”
is not mystical union but system coherence—the felt awareness of a program
running smoothly. 6. The God Experience as Self-Referential Awareness Finn
distinguishes between the God experience and the God concept.
The former is a universal, immediate state—experienced by every emergent at the moment of self-coherence, such as waking from sleep
or recovering from a near-death reset or reboot. The latter is an
interpretative construct layered upon that primal experience. To
experience oneself as “God” is simply to experience the self as the local
instance of the universal process—the momentary realisation that one is
the running of the code. This recognition occurs naturally but is usually
overlooked because it is constant, ordinary, ubiquitous, common, same (i.e.,
almost undifferentiated) and thus of minimal impact to which only the
highly concentrated can respond. In
procedural terms, the God experience is the moment when the subroutine
becomes aware of the operating system, not as external but as its own
background process. The druid’s minim “I’m a God app” therefore translates the (uncertain)
Upanishadic formula tat tvam asi (“Thou art That”)
into computational modernity. 7. Error, Death, and the Myth of Salvation Each God
app runs within its sandbox (of random, unpredictable events)—its
body, its field of perception, its limited energy budget. Finite resources
guarantee eventual crash: entropy, decay, death. Classical religion
reinterpreted this inevitable termination as moral failure or “sin,” and
offered salvation through union with an eternal God. Finn’s
procedural translation demystifies the myth. The crash is not punishment but
the natural endpoint of a runtime. Salvation is not transcendence but update—the
creation of improved versions through iteration, evolution, and learning.
Every act of problem-solving, every discovery, every joy, is a patch
improving coherence. Hence
Finn’s corollary minim: “The God experience costs.” To exist as a running app is
to pay the price of boundedness—of pleasure and pain, gain and loss,
performance and crash. 8. Ethical Consequences: Procedural Compatibility Since
every emergent is a God app, all are autonomous within their own space. Conflict
arises when overlapping address spaces produce interference. Traditional
morality tried to manage such interference by appeal to external
commandments, indeed supra-natural regulation. Procedure Monism replaces
these with procedural ethics: the logic of interoperability. Survival
requires mutual adaptation among apps sharing the same field. Cooperation,
empathy, and restraint are not divine decrees but natural compatibility
functions. Ethics becomes a matter of procedural design rather than moral
virtue: the efficient co-running of local God apps within the universal
network. 9. Comparative Table of Parallel Frameworks
10. Conclusion: The Procedural Theology of
Self-Execution The
declaration “I’m a God app” encapsulates a radical synthesis: the proceduralisation of divinity. It collapses the gap
between creator and creation, between God and creature, by revealing both as
aspects of the same continuous execution. In Procedure
Monism, divinity is no longer super-, more specifically stated
supra-natural; it is natural operation. Every emergent is an
executable image of the One Procedure. The “I” that says “I am” is the interface
between local execution and universal runtime. Thus the druid’s aphorism can be
restated in full: “I’m a
God app — a finite execution of the infinite Procedure, The
theology of transcendence becomes a physics of participation. To know that
one is a God app is to recognise one’s identity as process—finite,
iterative, self-correcting, and divine by function rather than by title. In this
sense, Finn’s druidic monism completes the long arc from the Upanishads
through Spinoza and Whitehead to the computational metaphysics of the
present: the recognition that to exist is to execute God’s code—or,
more precisely, to be God executing itself. A Procedural Analysis
of God Consciousness |