1) Marginally sentient apes wander earth bumping into material stuff. This stuff seems pretty real because it's there whether the apes want it to be or not, and because it follows some definite patterns (which of course apes have evolved to extract).
2) Apes start using tools to dissect the real stuff. Turns out real stuff is made of smaller real stuff that likewise seems to be both a) pretty objectively out there and b) follows a lot of definite patterns now called physical law. The more patterns the ape finds, the more it uses those patterns to manipulate the stuff to find even more new patterns.
3) The ape now has a proper metaphysical problem, because it seems there are two kinds of real things, if by "real" we mean everything out there effecting the ape's world. There's definitely real material stuff, but then also these patterns seem to be pretty real as well, as they have a big effect on the stuff, even though they themselves don't seem to be made of the stuff. The patterns are weird because they seem both objectively out there like the stuff, but they are also subjectively in the head of the ape (for example, the ape can produce more of these patterns in a way that he cannot magic up more stuff). Very confusing. How are the patterns and the stuff related? The patterns seem to come from some special realm not of this earth that only the ape has access to (far as the ape knows). Call this realm the divine. Someone tells the ape about these patterns; that super-ape must be God.
4) Ape drops acid, begins to gaze at navel. Realizes that the patterns describe possibilities for the stuff that aren't actualized right now, but could be made actual. In addition, the ape discovers that the particular grey squishy stuff between its ears seems to be stuff that realizes (in the sense of makes actual) the possibilities that are out there in the other stuff. This despite the fact that the grey squishy stuff seems to be basically just like all the other stuff. It's like the stuff that seemed so hard-edged and definite and kinda static actually can create a fuzzy cloud of dynamic possibilities around itself. So there's actuality in the here and now, and possibility in the somewhen else at some other time (not here and now), and not only do actual/possibility both seem to have equal claim to be called reality, but they seem to be the same thing, or at least two side of the same coin. Trippy.
5) Hilarity ensues.
6) The computer now understands that possibility is just as real as actuality (or ideas are just as real as things, to use the old terms). In tracing back how the particular grey squishy ape head stuff came to be able to make these possibilities have an effect on actuality though, the computer realizes that it can hardly have started with the ape brain. In fact, all actual stuff seems to create some kind of cloud of possibilities around itself. The question is basically just how big the cloud seems to be and how wide an effect this particular bit of stuff has on the rest of the stuff. There's a bootstrapping process or feedback loop between actual stuff and possibility. A little stuff gives rise to a few possibilities which gives rise to new configurations of stuff which gives rise to a whole new set of possibilities and so on ... till one day squishy ape brain has built a computer riding a light beam to Jupiter and beyond the infinite.
7) The übermensch finally grasps that we're dealing with a chicken and egg problem here. Was it actuality or possibility that started off this feedback loop? In any case, both the actual stuff and the possible stuff seem to be able to go on alternating to infinity. Infinite actual stuff we think we sorta grasp -- just more space and time, right? But infinite possibilities is much more difficult because, by the very nature of possibility, it doesn't go on in the same direction, it changes qualitatively at each step. The "..." gets pretty weird somewhere around the second dot. When you try to think about the set of all possibilities extending infinitely, you start to run into some weird and paradoxical shit. Like Infinity^2. Or Infinity^Infinity. Except these mathematical versions are just pathetic domesticated animals compared with Possibility^Infinity.
"God" seems like a good name for the infinitely nested set of infinite possibilities because: a) this set would seem to be infinitely maxed out on not just space and time but every other dimension you can think of, and a bunch that even your squishy übermensch brain can't generate yet, b) this kind of inconceivability is always retreating before you as you advance, but actually creates the world as it goes and c) contemplating this set has an expansive emotional effect similar to the one that contemplating the patterns traced by stuff produced in our ape ancestors. So call this set "God" mostly for reasons of historical continuity.
But remember, actuality and possibility are just two sides of the same coin, or two moments in the same oscillation. The actual world then is a vehicle for the expansion of God, or a continually repeated part or phase of this expansion. You cannot expand possibility without expanding actuality as the two together make up reality. So this version of God actually changes and develops, even though God is outside of space and time (or maybe half inside half outside?). And it also means that all of the actual world is part of God. Though I suppose that if we decide God is infinite possibility then whatever stage that is at right now is fully actualized (there is some actual thing happening in my squishy stuff as I contemplate infinite possibility, and now it's happening to you too!) so that God, right then, is defined by the full actual state of the world. As you can see, shit gets weird here and we may need to increase the dosage. Probably the simplest way to say it would be to define God as the process of expansion, rather than as a fixed set of actual conditions right now, or of a static set of possibilities. The theory is inherently dynamic and process oriented.
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