Software is kind of magic, if you think about it. It’s a causal pattern written in a language that is not the same language that we use to describe what happens in the transistors of your computer. Software does not break physics, but it’s able to control physics. Once you establish software, it’s a causal pattern that is determining what happens in reality to some point.
My mind very much has the properties of what people call a spirit. It’s agentic, it’s capable of experience, right? And it’s a software that runs on the brain. My brain is probably not agentic and capable of experience. It’s my mind—that is, it’s me. It’s this representational pattern existing on it.
The organism is not a physical thing. It’s not an object like an electron, or something. It’s something that is a function that describes the organization between the cells. What you’re actually looking at when you look at an organism is a few trillion cells that behave as if they were one thing. And this behavior as if they’re one thing, this coherent behavior, is the result of a causal communication pattern between these cells—and this is a software.
At which point does the spirit of an organism start? You can ask yourself: at which point does the spirit of a society start? And a society is ultimately composed of human individuals that talk to each other, and have beliefs about each other, and establish norms about how to interact in the future, and expectations, and so on. And it’s a gradual process, but there are some principles that turn a group of people into a society. For instance governance, where you basically establish institutional structures that make sure that the society gets a degree of stability and regulation. And this government is itself software, right? It’s a set of rules that society gives itself.
The concepts that you’re talking about are concepts in some kind of representational language in our minds. So they’re not the physics outside of us, because we cannot experience the world outside of us directly, or get a grasp on it directly. All we get is patterns that your perceptual system is extracting from reality through the learning in your mind, and the generalization in your mind. And some of these patterns are about language that other people speak, and this allows us to share these concepts that we have, and to converge on shared conceptualizations of reality. But this makes us a collective mind, to some degree, where humanity is a collective modeling system of reality. But the objects that we’re talking about are not objectively there, they are there from the perspective of this modeling observer. And when you find better concepts to model reality, then your perception of reality changes.
Is it possible for the organization of your mind to persist when the organization of your cells is disappearing? Right? Similar question, maybe: what happens to the social structure of a society when the society crashes? Right? So when the Roman civilization died, what happened to the Roman civilization? Well, it didn’t completely disappear. There is a ghost of the Roman civilization in the environment that is informing things that we do today. Many of the words that the Romans invented made it into the future, and turned into concepts in the English language, and too in the Anglo-Saxon culture, for instance. And when the U.S. was designed, it was designed largely based on influences that people had when they read books that describe Roman society. And so you could say that the ghost of Roman society is still alive and still around. But of course it doesn’t run on people anymore, in the sense that it can control the region of physical reality. So it’s only here in this disembodied way.
The purpose of this exercise is to negotiate the interaction between an agent and its environment. And so it makes the model of this agent, of you as a person, and puts this model of what this person would be like—the model of what a few trillion cells would be if there were one single thing—into this world, and then consciousness binds to this perspective of this being, and looks at the simulated world and your mind from the perspective of that being.
It’s how the tribe feels about you, or how the larger spirit of things feels about you. Right? So you basically replaced this outer mind of the individual organism with an outer mind of an entire tribe.
Most of the agents that you observe in nature are collective agents, which means just made out of smaller agents that decide to serve the larger agent. And to the degree that the individual agents explicitly or implicitly serve other agents, and the degree to which they become coherent in their interaction, this is the degree to which the transcendent agent—the agent on the next layer—becomes real.
If you have a bunch of people in your family or in your group house who decide that they want to act in a coherent way, then suddenly your family or your group house becomes an agent. It becomes something that makes decisions collectively, that decides what’s good for the whole of us. And the whole of us is more than the sum of its parts. It’s something else, right? It’s an entity that exists at the next level of organization.
The world that the Christians want is one that is transcending this one. It’s a different organization in which we are much more tightly aligned with each other and basically become a single mind. This is, I think the idea of heaven; is that merging of all the minds into one that basically have shared interests. It’s radical nonduality.
Society is itself the organism that you need to serve. And so when Japanese people bow to each other, they acknowledge the spirits and status that they have with respect to each other in the society. Right? It’s similar to the muscle cells bowing to the neurons that tell them what to do.
Everything that is, is nature. So the notion of “supernatural” doesn’t make a lot of sense, except by hobbling your own mind.