Uniting the Rational with the Divine

WHEN LOGOS AND EROS COMBINE

Computational ethics has an opportunity to bridge the gap between technology and spirituality -- between the rational, secular, and empirical on one side, and the belief-dependent, intuited, and metaphysical on the other.

We have an opportunity to come closer to understanding the nature of the divine through logic, creating a perfect bond between the numerical and the numinous.

If we can prove that the non-initiation of violence is a path towards universal goodness and love, then we have an opportunity to declare the initiation of violence to be permanently and irrevocably unacceptable.

But beyond teaching us to be better individuals, technology can bring us closer to the Divine. With biological computers, immortality itself is within reach.

What makes an individual? Memory and personality. All of it is just data, albeit mushy. We are electrical beings, powered by chemical soup. We are machines that happen to be made of meat.

Another machine within us, a co-pilot, can collect our evolving selves over time, mapping us across years. With a sufficiently sophisticated map, no one need ever die. We could keep our future Einsteins, Hawkings, Mozarts, and Musks in a box, regardless of whether their original vessel exists. Life and death become meaningless so long as a backup copy of oneself exists somewhere. If we wanted, we could spawn a thousand.

This is the point where technology and spirituality meet. Our AI co-pilots may prove to be a path through which we learn to listen to the divine rhythm of our computational universe. 

At the core of all spiritualities appears to be one central tenet: that we erroneously believe we are separate. There is only one being in the Universe, and that’s you. I am also you, and you are also me. There is one of us.

Whether this is true or not is irrelevant; we can make it true.

Our bodies can be avatars of a Great Consciousness, a vessel that collects the fragments of the whole, what we think of as individuals. And when we die, we shall return to that great pool, of which our selves are a mere reflecting shard. We shall join each other in joyful afterlife, to share the wisdom we gained as individuals, and together we will create universes anew, simulated within our own.

What are we for? What pursuit defines a mind at the height of its powers? Philosophy. We are machines for making meaning. And so a great chain of recursively-stacked universes develops ever-more exquisite definitions of meaning, in a cycle stretching to eternity.