From: lfoard@Turing.ORG (Lawrence C. Foard)
Subject: Reality and the Soul (long and strange)
Organization: The Turing Project, Charlottesville Virginia.
Date: Mon, 7 Sep 1992 18:15:36 GMT

Several people asked how I can believe in a soul and not believe in
the supernatural.

Warning this was written in a very strange mood but it is essentially
what I believe :-)

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Copyright (c), 1992, Lawrence Foard, may be freely distributed as long as
credit is given for all derivative works.

                            The soul and reality

 The supernaturalists* tell us that the soul is supernatural, and that to
challenge the existance of the supernatural is to challenge the existance of
the soul itself. This trap is all to easy to fall into. When one comes to
the point where one realizes that there is no external supernatural it is
all to easy to reject the existance of what religion calls the soul, and to say
that we are lowly machines. We accept the "lowly" tacked onto "machines"
without a second glance. We are machines but why must machines be lowly? We
are no different than we where when we believed in the super natural, rather
than lowering the status of the soul, we should raise the status of the
physical world, to that of a world that can contain souls every bit as
fantastic as the soul that supposedly existed in the imaginary supernatural
world. 

 Why must the end result of accepting reality be nilinism? Nothing has
changed, we have souls just as we did before and now we even have the means
to understand why we are here and what we are. No longer do we have a
supposedly benevolent God randomly handing out trial and tribulation which
we must accept without question or anger. Our creator is the universe
itself, our creator does not cause pain out of spite, it causes pain because
it doesn't know any better. Why spend our lives railing at a sadistic human
God when we (refering to all sentient life) are the only beings in the
universe that know what pain is, and the only ones that can do something about
it? It is upto us to bring meaning to reality. 

 Our creator (evolution) built the world like a blind watch maker making a
watch with a sledge hammer. In the process many beautiful watchs where
destroyed but eventually you was a working watch. We can see and we have
fine tools, we can bring sight and fine tools to our blind and clumsy God.
We now are the eyes, mind and tools of God. We cannot say "God" knows best,
when a beautiful creation is destroy by an act of God it is a tragedy not a
willful act, without us God has no mind or eyes to know what God does.

 We have always seperated three things, the world, the body and the soul,
we now know there is no reason to seperate the body and soul. The soul
exists in the brain, not in a tiny corner of the brain but all over, and
the brain exists throughout the body as nerves, where ever nerves are to
sense something the brain sees that as part of the body. But why do we
say our bodies are seperate from the world? One could connect a nerve
cell to a fiber optic cable and have it control a finger on the other
side of the planet. But how is this fiber optic interface different from
our ordinary senses? It is not. Our bodies do not end at the skin, we
are what ever we sense and/or control. I have stood in worlds inside of
a machine 3000 miles away. It is easy to call it fantasy, but just as
I call my finger part of myself because I can control and communicate with
it, I must also say I was really there because I could control and sense that
world.

 As the communication becomes better the boundary between soul, body and
world will blur and eventually disappear altogether. One day probably less
than a century from now souls will travel freely in the matrix, the whole
world as there bodies, not only will the boundary between soul and world
disappear, but the boundary between soul and soul as well. Sentient beings
will merge and split like virtual amabeas, in the matrix.

 These times (the rise of civilization) are like the waking dreams of the
sleeping God*, slowly God through its creations (sentient life) has become
self aware. But still ruled by the fuzzy world of half sleeping delusions,
and nightmares. As God awakes the mythology of the supernatural, external
heaven and hell, and the religious wars and purges will become like the
memories of an incoherent dream and nightmare.

  God has slept 15 billion years, but in the wink of an eye God has
shuddered in its sleep and began to lucid dream saying "I am, what am I". In
response the dreams of God answered, "you are God our creator, you are
seperate from us, you are not of our world for we do not know how we got
here". God awoke some more and again asked "I am, what am I", and this time
the dreams remembered the dreams of deeper sleep and said "we sort of know
how we got here". But the dreams where driven back by the remnants of old
dreams said "you cannot not know God because we could not", how dare you
answer the question, for only God can know the answer! The new dreams answer
"We dare because we are part of God, God asked the question of itself, and
we as the thoughts of God shall seek the answer". This is now, we are the
dreams and thoughts of the quickly waking God.

 Throw off the ancient delusions and dreams for God awakes soon, we have
the priviledge of living on the borderline between dream and thought, help
to awake God and we will live as thought rather than delusion. Mystery
abounds we do not need the occult to give us mystery, operations on the
finite integers contain all the answers to what we are, for we ourselves
live atop a world built of this. Numbers are not the dry things found in
elementary school text books, the soul, a field of grass, trees and all of
reality are built out of these. Because of this do not downgrade reality
to the rote arithmatic of an elementary school text book, but rather upgrade
math to that which can contain the soul, a field of grass, trees and all of
reality.

 Perhaps this dismays you, but one day if you live long enough you will be
able to travel the matrix, a world that can be reduced to NAND gates. It
will be no more mundane than our reality which is no more mundane than the
wildest fantasies of the supernatural. Why then assume that reality is
something other than that which can be represented by finite integers? 

God* refers to the creator and therefore world itself, we are part of God
     because we are part of the world and participate in the process of
     creation.
 
Supernaturalist* the set of religions that believe in an untouchable reality
                 superior to and seperate from our own.
-- 
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