Werner Heisenberg (a
father of QM) said, "The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences
will turn you into an atheist. But at the bottom of the glass, God is waiting
for you."
A couple years ago, a
colleague and I were both atheists. But then, because of the physics we started
working on, we came to understand that there exist higher systems of
information/intelligence beyond the human brain. One example is a flow pattern
that is computationally sentient and that runs across your "selves"
over a long period of time. By "selves" I mean that version of You at
seven years old that is so different than the You at your current age; you
might as well call them different people in some sense. Einstein blew the
scientific community's mind by showing that the future exists now, concurrent
with the present. And so does the past. This seems weird and sci-fi, but it has
been proven through various physical experiments. We also know from quantum
mechanics and countless physical experiments that reality is a tangled network
of hidden non-local connections. That means things are connected across space
and time. That's a piece of the puzzle not totally understood through a
unification theory yet because no satisfactory one exists. We just have
thousands of experiments showing that non-locality across space and time is how
reality is built.
Now imagine a flow of
information that runs across the packet of information known as You at your
current age (40 for this example), and the You at 40 and 1 day, etc -- all
moments across space and time since you were born. This idea is a fact of Einsteinian
space/time -- the eternally existing You's at age 7, etc. The theory that they
are related non-locally across spacetime is allowed by quantum mechanics. So
long story short, imagine an "uber-mind" or self that computes and
exists across this system of Yous. Now imagine one that computes within your
family, but across time. Now imagine one that computes in larger groups, such
as the human species across all of time including the deep future.
Yes, very far out stuff. But the reason
that this sort of thinking is necessary in our physics theory is because of the
problem that if reality is purely informational, a view held by a growing
number of elite scientists, then, by definition, there must be a universal
computational system to "think" it or compute it, if you will. You
can't have information without a computer or mind. So our idea of a god is not
like a humanized idea of god. It's more like a sort of Eastern type of god
that's like a flow of computation/observation/change/energy within nature. It
attains sentience, but not the sort that we're thinking of. It's more like a giant
mind that can be visualized by this: Imagine talking to 7 billion people at the
same time. Now imagine being them or experiencing them at the same time. Now,
which one is you? 'You' is now so small. Now imagine a group mind computing
across and within all of them -- this neural network described in the last few
sentences. Now, be that mind. Now compare that mind to the normal 'you'. This
is where a duality exists, where in order to have the big collective thing, we
need individual behavior to add to the picture like pieces of a mosaic -- the
free will creative neurons, so to speak. But any individual can switch-hit and
experience the higher collective levels of computational awareness as well.
