Allow me to start off with this caveat — although most of what I discuss in this post is based on empirical data and historical treatises, I haven’t provided links to outside sources confirming most of that data, simply because, well … this is only a fucking blog, for Christ-sake.
That being said, let’s move on.
Science and Religion — A Brief History
For anyone who reads this blog, it’s fairly common knowledge that, although I was raised Jewish (and yes, we do own everything), I have long been a staunch atheist. I have admittedly wandered from time to time among other belief systems — mostly Eastern — in an effort to make sense of things, as does everyone. As a partial result of that quest, I have come to the point in my life where I beleive that religion, in general, is nothing more than a means for people to stop that same endless hunger everyone owns — the search for meaning and a way to explain the universe.
In general, I try not to be too judgmental when faced with the various religions now dominating the peoples of the world, knowing, as did General George Patton, that “all glory is fleeting.” Everyone wants to beleive that theirs is the right choice, the right decision. To dictate otherwise would be an admission that they have lived in vain, chasing a “holy ghost” (pun intended) that does not otherwise exist.
However, every human culture dating back through the Turks, Visigoths, Romans, Greeks, Carthaginians, Egyptians, Macedonians, and other ancients all thought their religion was the true one; and the only one. Yet even today’s evangelicals will most likely admit that, although such ancient religions were nothing more than Pagan idolatry, they were also similarly established to explain the workings of the world and the meaning of their existence.
Yet I doubt those evangelicals would agree with the truths that 100, 1000, 2000, or maybe 5000 years from now, our progeny (if any remain) will realize that today’s psychopathic religions bear the same resemblance to logic, common sense, and absolute truth as did the long-dead religions of our forefathers — virtually none.
For just as our universe changes every time we make a new discovery — whether it be the spherical nature of the planet, the theorem of gravity, the rotation of the Earth around the Sun, the finite age of the universe, evolution, electromagnetism, sub-atomic particles, or quantum mechanics — our underlying belief structures must also, by necessity, change to encompass these new discoveries.
Such has been proven true over the millennia, time and time again.
That underlying paradigm has not been significantly altered for some time. This explains the death grip (pun intended, yet again) in which the peoples of the world have been squeezed as captives, both voluntary and involuntary, by the same organized religions for hundreds of years.
Although technology has made considerable leaps during such times, none have been vast enough to weaken the power of the current organized religions. Moreover, today’s dominant religions have managed to integrate, often through utter Machiavellian means, such new information into their underlying belief systems — by necessity. Indeed, after decades of repression and persecution, the Catholic Church (among others) was eventually forced to acknowledge these truths — the spherical nature of the planet, the Earth’s lack of singularity in the universe, evolution as science … err, let’s hold off on that last one for the sake of any Alabamians who may still be reading.
Albeit many of these truths were perverted by such dominant religions of the day so they could maintain their hegemony, such actions were taken only out of necessity, to stem the tide of dissent. Otherwise such religions would have lost completely their sway over the ignorant masses.
This same paradigm remains in place today.
However, the rate of acceleration by which the human race has developed its technology has exploded towards a critical mass, potentially beyond the grasp of current mono-theologistic religions to adapt and otherwise maintain their control of the seething masses.
Technological Trends
In an effort to move away from my love of all things history, lately I’ve been reading up on current science and technology trends. One of the most coherent sources has been from “Hthth” at inkblot earth, an Icelander computer scientist specializing in artificial intelligence. H has got some fairly advanced, yet very accessible, material floating around his site. He has also been a particularly beneficial gateway to other scientists in the field of A.I. and developing computer technologies.
For the most part, I have little to no clue as to the specifics of what he does, or the advances being made in this particular branch of the scientific community. However, I find the underlying concept fascinating, in general (I promised Hthth that I would make no “Terminator” jokes or references in the future, so feel free to add your own sophomoric A.I. joke here – but no Haley Joel Osmond, I fucking hate that kid).
In this regard, I had posted a story from inkblot last month in connection with the latest in Quantum-computer technology and the continuing development and application of “Moore’s Law” in the coming decades (if you’re unfamiliar, Moore’s Law is the empirical observation made in 1965 by Gordon E. Moore – a co-founder of Intel – that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit for minimum component cost doubles every 18 months).
Raymond Kurzweil, a leading scientist in the areas of A.I., transhumanism, and technological singularity, projects that a continuation of Moore’s Law until 2019 will result in transistor features just a few atoms in width. Although this means that the strategy of ever finer photolithography will have run its course, he speculates that this does not mean the end of Moore’s Law:
“Moore’s Law of Integrated Circuits was not the first, but the fifth paradigm to provide accelerating price-performance. Computing devices have been consistently multiplying in power (per unit of time) from the mechanical calculating devices used in the 1890 US Census, to Turing’s relay-based “Robinson” machine that cracked the German Enigma code, to the CBS vacuum tube computer that predicted the election of Eisenhower, to the transistor-based machines used in the first space launches, to the integrated-circuit-based personal.”
Thus, Kurzweil conjectures that it is likely that some new type of technology will replace current integrated-circuit technology, and that Moore’s Law will hold true long after 2020. He believes that the exponential growth of Moore’s Law will continue beyond the use of integrated circuits into technologies that will lead to the technological singularity.
In apparent furtherance of that conjecture, Hthth’s article discussed a privately held Canadian company that just unveiled and demonstrated the world’s first commercially viable quantum computer. He also included the below schematic showing that, pursuant to an adaptive reading of Moore’s Law, by 2013, technology may exist that will allow humans to perform full functional simulation of the human brain; and by 2025, we will be able to accomplish full human brain “neural simulation” sufficient for computer uploading.
At this point, you’re saying: “well, this is all quite fascinating, but what the fuck does it have to do with religion?”
Well…
New Paradigms
Andrew Sullivan recently included on his site a letter from one of his readers discussing the latest scientific theories on supra-normal human experience, for an article in a future issue of Discover. Taking directly from that post:
[The author researched] Near Death Experiences (NDEs), out-of-body experiences (OBEs), reincarnation – nothing [was] off-limits as long as there’s been some kind of serious scientific inquiry into the phenomenon. The most fascinating stuff I’ve come across in my research, by a long shot, is in the area of quantum mechanics, as presented in the work of the Oxford mathematician/physicist Roger Penrose and his colleague Stuart Hameroff, an anesthesiologist and professor at the University of Arizona.
Together, Penrose and Hameroff have developed a theory of consciousness called ORCH OR (Orchestrated Objective Eduction of Quantum Coherence in Brain Microtubules) which posits that consciousness "occurs" not at the neuronal level in the brain, and not in algorithmic processes mimicking on a grand scale the way computers work, but at the sub-neuronal level, in the microtubles (crystal-like lattice structures that help organize cell structures and enable information processing) in which quantum processing interacts with classical physics. It’s that intersect, between classical and quantum physics, to drastically over-simplify the Penrose/Hameroff model, that “provides the global binding necessary to consciousness.”
Why is this interesting? Two reasons: because it suggests that the brain functions not like a computer but in a non-computable (i.e. non-reproducible by artificial means) way, and because Penrose goes further, and theorizes a stable set of Platonic ideal structures residing at the very lowest energy level of the Planck scale (where quantum gravity, whatever that is, would be strongest), which inform and influence at least our unconscious minds. Because quantum mechanics allows for non-local patterns, and because these non-local patterns repeat everywhere, the implication is that the universe is in some way conscious, and that we are part of that consciousness.
The Italian physicist Paola Zizzi, taking the Penrose/Hameroff model a logical step forward, has developed the theory that in the moment of the Big Bang, the universe also acquired consciousness (in the sense of these Platonic ideal structures), which she calls the Big Wow. The immediate implications of this theory are profound, and echo some of the basic tenets (though certainly not much in the way of dogma) of our major religions: that we are all connected; that consciousness exists apart from the purely mechanistic or biological workings of our temporal bodies; that consciousness exists outside of classical space/time; and that when we die, or when our brain activity ceases, to be precise, the quantum information that has accreted through a lifetime of experience does not disappear. It may decohere, in the sense that the individual information is no longer organized the way your brain organized it, or it may remain semi-coherent in what Hameroff suggests as some kind "hologram," (he is after all still a scientist); it may even float around and reconstitute itself in some other form, that’s to say as some other person. No one knows.
What Penrose/Hameroff do claim to know, or at least strongly suggest, is that individual consciousness does remain, after death, in some form (perhaps outside the ken of current science, or even philosophy, though certainly not religion). I’m probably doing grave injustice to Penrose and Hameroff by summarizing their theory with such radical simplicity. Penrose’s two books: “The Emperor’s New Mind" (written before he’d come into contact with Hameroff’s research into microtubules) and especially “Shadows Of The Mind: A Search For The Missing Science Of Consciousness,” are undoubtedly better resources if you’re interested.
I am with Sullivan to the extent that we both have no expertise in this area, and pass on this information in good faith (pun intended, yet again). Wiki’s entry on Penrose argues that no one doubts his brilliance, but that some of his theories are not accepted by many in the scientific community.
Conclusions
If the aforementioned quantum theories can be in any way substantiated, they would clearly throw a huge monkey-wrench into the underlying belief structures of many of the world’s currently dominant religions (mostly western). It would also throw a curve ball (and potentially, a rational basis for showing “faith”) to those of us the atheistic camps, as well.
However, there is obviously also sufficient wiggle room to allow such religions — most notably, Buddhism and Shintoism — to “amend” their faiths to incorporate this new information while still maintaining a lions share of the faithful to fill the coffers (and the courtrooms).
More importantly, if it could indeed be scientifically proven that “consciousness exists apart from the purely mechanistic or biological workings of our temporal bodies,” what kind of ramifications, if any, would such a revelation have in the area of Artificial Intelligence? Or, for that matter, cybernetics. Especially given the recent advances in quantum computing which may theoretically allow humans to “upload” themselves into computers within the next 50 years.
Indeed, based on this new “quantum consciousness” theory, if we may someday have the technology to upload a complete human brain neural simulation, would we still be limited to retaining only data, with no way of retaining a person’s underlying “consciousness?” Would the person remain, or just the memories? And what does that even mean?
Is there indeed scientific and empirical proof of something at leastresembling a soul?
Interesting questions — to all of which I absolutely no answers, and little clue if I’m even presenting valid questions. All I can say is that a scientifically quantified, quantum based, universal consciousness sure sounds like a drastically different paradigm than what is currently in place.
UPDATE: After reading Hthth’s insightful comment to this post, I realized that I inadvertently forgot to state something that had been implied throughout, but not expressly stated:
This new paradigm to which I was referring, in large part, is that science would thereby become a source of religious faith / proof in and of itself (i.e., science as religion). In this regard, science and religion may appear to be reaching an intersection.
In other words, whereas religion has historically struggled to reinvent itself to fit within the confines of new sciences as they are learned, it appears the pendulum has swung to the point where science has become so revered (especially among those of my atheistic ilk) that it may soon take the place of religious “faiths” — thus becoming a religion unto itself (and no, I don’t mean Xenu).
By doing so, we would be shifting from the underlying tenant of all religions — “faith in sights unseen” — to the equally disturbing belief that humans will eventually have the capacity to explain everything through the use of scientific methods.
