Even gods might be temporary
Bob Sinclair
A flock of birds can disappear without a single bird dying. They scatter, settle in different trees, or fly off in separate directions. The birds are still there. The flock is gone.
We use emergence to describe capacities or patterns that arise from the organised activity of parts. The coordination of a flock belongs to the birds acting together. Once they disperse, that collective pattern ceases to exist.
I call this Emergent Impermanence: an emergent capacity or being can disappear when the relationships that sustain it break down, even though its components survive.
The useful distinction is between losing the parts and losing their organisation. You could count every bird and still miss what had disappeared. Knowing that all the ingredients remain does not tell you whether the thing they produced still exists.
A flock can turn and change shape without ceasing to be a flock. Its organisation can persist even as the birds change position. Other forms of organisation may even survive the replacement of their parts. A community might maintain its ways of sharing information as one generation gives way to the next. What matters is whether the relationships that support their capacities endure. Impermanence names a vulnerability, without telling us how long anything will last.
Biogenics views life as a continuing process of self-production, self-organisation and self-correction. A living system must keep doing the work that sustains it. Its existence is an ongoing achievement.
Even gods
In the previous essay, I asked whether biological organisation could produce beings that humans might mistake for supernatural powers. Suppose some arrangement of living things could support a consciousness of its own. That is the speculative step. A flock gives us an example of collective organisation without establishing a collective mind.
But grant that possibility for a moment. Why would such a being be exempt from dependence on the relationships that sustain it?
Immortality would be quite an additional assumption.
Imagine a being sustained by relationships among people and their environment. Changes in how those people lived, communicated or responded to one another might disrupt the organisation on which it depended. The people could survive while the larger being ceased to exist.
Such a being need not be brief or fragile. The conditions might sustain it for centuries, then shift in ways its participants barely noticed.
Some stories about gods who were once present and later absent might raise an interesting biological question. Could the conditions sustaining their presence have changed? Linking that possibility to any particular religious account would require evidence of its own.
What returns
An apparent disappearance would still leave several possibilities. The being might have ceased to exist, become inactive, or stopped communicating in ways its participants recognised. Silence alone would not tell us which.
If the necessary relationships were re-established, something similar might emerge. But recurrence would not automatically mean the same individual had returned. A flock gathering tomorrow does not settle the identity of the flock that dispersed today. With a conscious being, the question would be even harder.
A god might disappear without a single person dying.