Rethinking the Concept of Souls

<p>https://discord.com/invite/EGFRjwwS92 </p><p>In this episode, hosts Simone and Malcolm embark on a profound exploration of the concept of the soul, delving into its implications in various cultural, religious, and philosophical traditions. They discuss the functional difference between the classical idea of a soul and modern understandings of consciousness and sentience. With references to Christian, Platonic, and other ancient understandings of the soul, and incorporating thoughts on AI consciousness and future human evolution, Malcolm and Simone provide a thought-provoking reexamination of what it means to have a soul. They relate these ideas to contemporary ethical debates, such as abortion, and consider the historical and potential future ways humans could reconcile these concepts. The episode presents a compelling case for updating our views on personhood and the sacred, leveraging scientific insights to enrich our understanding. </p><p><strong>Speaker:</strong> [00:00:00] It craves purity. It devours purity. It sings to me. What</p><p><strong>Speaker 2:</strong> the hell is this thing made out of? . All right, fine. I might have used a few unorthodox parts. Just tell me one. An orphan.</p><p><strong>Speaker 4:</strong> Did you say an orphan?! Yeah, a little</p><p><strong>Speaker 3:</strong> orphan boy.</p><p><strong>Speaker 4:</strong> It's powered by a forsaken child?! Might be, kind of. I mean, I didn't use the whole thing.</p><p>Hello, Simone! I am excited to be here with you today. And today, we are going to be continuing a conversation we had on one of our strategy walks this morning. Every morning we try to take like an hour. Just to ourselves, we're going to discuss some new idea or something we've been thinking about.</p><p>And what I was thinking about was I had been editing the abortion video that we had done.</p><p><strong>Speaker 43:</strong> To kill my mom. She's my mom. I can do whatever I want with her. [00:01:00] It's more important I live the way I want. She isn't an object you can own, she's a human being. . Ow! Heya! Ow, she's making you suffer! Maybe the world doesn't revolve around me.</p><p>Maybe the world doesn't revolve around me.</p><p><strong>Speaker 44:</strong> Blegh, blegh, blegh, blegh.</p><p>And we had talked about when do we think insulment happens? Like, when does a human body get their soul?</p><p>And this is an interesting thing for us to be talking about, because we also don't believe in a literal soul. And it got interesting to me as I was thinking more about it because I was like, yes, but even though we don't believe in a literal soul, it still makes sense for us to be talking about insolvent because we're calling, when we're talking about like your consciousness, your sense against your emotion, everything like that, that is what many other people would call a soul.</p><p>So in general is that we shouldn't be talking about souls at all because we came [00:02:00] up As humanity with the concept of souls a very long time ago before we had a scientific understanding of the larger things that we can now describe as life or sentience or sapiens, which is, I think what people are really referring to.</p><p>And various cultural traditions are really referring to when they talk about their various types of souls and spirits. And we can, I want to go into this actually before we go further in this, an analogy that I think is good to help people understand what I mean when I say, well, there's 5. Functionally, no difference between what we're talking about in a soul.</p><p>So it makes sense to use the word soul, which is to say, we believe that these larger processes that we experienced, like the human experience that many people would think of as being part of this solistic process is an emergent property of the way our brains function. So what is an emergent property? An emergent property is something like, I, as a human, can understand that all of the individual water molecules, like what their [00:03:00] shape is, why they interact in the way they interact, why they form waves, why they, everything. But I will never be able to conceive of those individual H2O molecules as also being wetness liquidity.</p><p>The human brain is just not meant to understand these types of emergent properties because there was never an evolutionary advantage to being able to understand them. Now, if somebody came to me from a tribe and they were like, well, we are aware of water molecules and how they work and all that, but then there's this separate thing that we call wetness or liquidness, right?</p><p>And that for our tribe is a totally different thing than the water molecules. And they'd say, now you don't believe in wetness. And it's like, no, I believe in wetness. I can touch the water. I, I can feel the way I can see what happens when I splash in a pool. Like I believe in wetness. I just think it's the same thing as this other [00:04:00] thing that we have always talked about as being something else.</p><p>What do you think of wetness without thinking about the Zoolander Mermaid ad? Oh, what was the catchphrase? Like wetness is the essence of the boy. We have a moist. .</p><p>Moisture is the essence of of</p><p>beauty. Yeah, I, so I agree with you on that, but I'm, I also think that it's, it's damaging to, to give this magical property to something like a soul because it can create the kinds of toxic recursive.</p><p>arguments and reductions that you see with things like the abortion argument, where when you take an emergent property or you take any concept that can be explored better by science and by more concrete terms, now that we have the tool [00:05:00] set to do so, and then elevate it to this, this element of sacredness, now we can no longer talk about it.</p><p>And people can establish these boundaries. arbitrary boundaries like the Catholic Church has and move the goalposts and then say that this argument is beyond reproach that according to what this Pope said in the late 1800s, the soul starts now. And if you question that you are destroying souls when really we should be having a conversation, which we discuss in our Episode on abortion about the increasing level at which sentience and sapience and capability of feeling pain increases over time and how abortions become increasingly morally complex and risky and questionable.</p><p>With each passing second as these developments increase and that there are ways for us to measure things like neural development, like the ability to feel pain, like the ability to react to stimuli. And when you take away the sacredness of the soul and instead break it [00:06:00] down into more of its component parts, as is understood by Christians in the Catholic church to be the soul.</p><p>And I want to get into this. Then you can have a more realistic and practical conversation. I want to, I want to do a quick aside here that I think is really important to the point you're making. Which is that this leads to much more suffering in the long run, this interpretation of soul, because if you look at Europe, which is a much more socially liberal place in the United States, Their average abortion age in most countries, in terms of legalness, is around 15 weeks, and in the U.</p><p>S. it's like around, like, 23 weeks, okay? The, the, the point in a pregnancy at which there are restrictions, not the average Gestational age at which abortions take place. Whatever, the legal, you, you, the audience understands what I'm saying here. Anyway, so, the question is why is the U. S. so much more legally loose?</p><p>And I believe fundamentally it's because the conservatives in this [00:07:00] country have approached the argument with a Not something that's going to cross interface divides, which is to say, here, look, we can prove neural activity. I can show you pictures of a baby suffering, you know, a fetus suffering. I can show you this is def, here are the brain wave scans.</p><p>They approach it with, well, a life begins at conception because it does. You know, that's, that's when insolement happens, right? And so that's when it's a fully human life. Well, yeah. Or in other words, the conversation isn't being shut down by being immediately made about sacred and religion, the sacred and religion, and therefore being politicized.</p><p>Because when you make the discussion of abortions about the sacred and religion, that means that the, the vehement Atheists and anti religion people are now going to make this their pet subject because we can't have the religious people dictating our lives and then suddenly abortion becomes sacred as we discussed in this episode.</p><p>Let's not get caught up in that because I want to talk about insultment. Insultment insults. [00:08:00] So it's very clear now that I've looked a little bit more at how Like the history of how different cultures and religions have treated the soul, that the Christian concept of souls is really um, based on Plato's concept of souls , and that Plato's concept of souls is really just consciousness with a little bit of magical thinking.</p><p>So. Plato's concept of the soul is as follows. The soul is immortal and exists before birth and after death. That's where you get the magical part. And it is the essence of a person deciding how people behave. Okay. That is your brain and consciousness plus your genetics, arguably, and that the soul is divided into three parts.</p><p>One logistic on reason to.</p><p>Thymoides, which is your spirit or emotion. Three, epithymeticon, which is your appetite or desire. That is your consciousness. That is your brain. That is your behavior. He, he says that the, the soul is incorporeal and eternal. He says that the soul is capable [00:09:00] of thinking even after death. So, you know, that, that's the magical thinking part, but the rest, this is all about thinking and processing.</p><p>And then when you look at Who has a soul and Plato's framework it. This depends on its capacity for reason, emotion and desire that depends entirely on consciousness on self motion, the ability to move itself, which Plato saw as a key characteristic of having a soul. So, basically, agency is a key portion of having a soul, which is an extremely human thing and very.</p><p>oriented around not just sentience, but sapience as well, I would argue, and then cognitive abilities, the souls responsible for thinking. And then you can see this furthered in Christian thought. And in like generally like Greco Greco Roman influenced thought as well. When you see how over history's span, different cultures have at different times even said that not all humans have souls.</p><p>So when you look at [00:10:00] the breakdown of different Christian sects and sort of ask, okay, well, which Christian sects believe that only, you know, humans have souls or only, you know, humans and certain animals have souls. Most Christian denominations agree that only humans have souls. Some. Like really progressive, like the Unitarian Universalists.</p><p>Some of them were like, well, maybe dogs have souls. Maybe dogs go to heaven. I mean, I don't know. And like, maybe, you know, Eastern religions are kind of right. And everything is a spirit. I don't know. Maybe plants. I don't know. But most of them are like, no, no, no, just humans. But then there are all these historical groups, including quite a few Christians who are like, maybe not all humans either.</p><p>And that's where you also get to this concept where I think you really see it being clear that especially Christians equate having a soul. With sapience, because let's look at the groups that they have argued do not have souls at various times in history. And I think this, it really, you'll see that the common theme is that these are all groups that are at the same time kind of, accused of not being sapient.[00:11:00]</p><p>Like you do not have agency, you are not intelligent, you are lesser. You can't think properly. You can't plan. Okay. So we have slavery. So during the era of slavery and colonialism, some Christian slave owners and colonizers argued that African slaves did not have souls or had inferior souls and that indigenous peoples in the Americas lacked souls.</p><p>Okay. So these are, yeah, these are groups that, you know, they're, they're. Savages, you know, they, they, they, they do not have agency to, they don't think for themselves. They're, they're talking about consciousness. And these are groups that they've sort of not seen as having the sapiens of them due to cultural differences due to them being alien, whatever.</p><p>Then there's gender based discrimination in some historical concepts, certain Christian groups debated whether women had souls, because I mean. A waltz. A waltz, right? I think some online redpill faces might do that these days. And then some interpretations of Islam also question the [00:12:00] nature of women's souls.</p><p>Then there was class based distinctions. So in some societies, lower classes or castes were sometimes considered to have lesser or no souls. So like, I mean, the poor, they live like animals. They have no Right! They basically No, it's funny. I, I actually want to say that I have seen this in modern times.</p><p>You know, we hang out with a lot of super wealthy, high agency people. And one of the ideas that has been floating around in this community is not just you know, you as the audience, you're probably familiar with simulation theory, a simulation and it's simulation because, so it's provably a simulation because you could be running an infinite number of simulations like this was in our universe.</p><p>plausibly, and if that's true, it is infinitely more likely that we're on a server in another universe in universe. Oh, one. That's the way this argument works, but when they go further and argue that it's I gotta put the Rick and Morty scene, a simulation running on minimum processing power which, you know, but deja [00:13:00] vus stuff like that.</p><p>I gotta tell you, this morning, I didn't even know this award existed. Now I'm holding one, , I wanna say that today, was the best day of my life. But, the truth is it's, it's, it's more meaningful than that. I am finally complete. What you're inside a simulation of a simulation inside another giant simulation. But anyway, what they argue is that Most of the humans on Earth today are not actually fully simulated to the point of being sentient. They are just sort of reacting to environmental scenario. And here's the thing though, Simone. I can kind of see where they're coming with this. If you are around these groups.</p><p>[00:14:00] Well, and this, but again, I want to, I want to point out this is hearkening back to these platonic ideas. Deals around what the soul is, where agency plays a key role, where emotional range plays a key role. So again, it's not this like sacred concept. They're, they're talking about sapience and degrees of sapience.</p><p>Yeah. But the, the, the, the, what I was going to say, because I want to get the audience in the mindset of this, because I think it's really easy to just dehumanize, Oh, ultra wealthy people, whatever. Or anyone. I mean, I think the same lack of installment or No, no, no, Simone, that's not what I'm talking about.</p><p>Not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is, I was saying, it's very easy when I say that some of these high agency wealthy people don't believe everyone has a soul or is not fully programmed, right, that they are genuinely NPCs, okay, non player characters in a video game. What I was, The audience is going to hear that and be like, Oh, evil, wealthy monster people, right?</p><p>And not all of the people in the communities that I'm around that have shared this [00:15:00] belief are in this ultra wealthy category. They are, so I'm trying to get people in the mindset of this group so they can understand how in a modern society, someone could come to this, which is to say, imagine you go to a bit, right?</p><p>And. It's the same people at the events every time you go, and it's the blogs that everyone is reading, and it's the people who run all the companies, and when you are going out there, and you are searching for a truly independent take in the world, it usually comes from one of these maybe hundred people.</p><p>And, and, Then you begin to be like, why aren't I hearing independent takes from anyone outside of this hundred person group and, and you as a random internet user may feel that way sometimes, why are there only like 100 people online who seem to have genuinely unique opinions anymore? And this shows up in the stats, right?</p><p>Isn't it something like 90 percent of people don't engage at all online and then like 1 percent are responsible for most of the content posting. Yeah, but I mean, I think [00:16:00] this is even crazier. Like to me, it genuinely is like a hundred people that I see that are regularly producing what seems to me to be both original, well thought through and based on like some degree of logic opinions.</p><p>Yeah. That platonic ideal. So I can see how they're getting to this.</p><p><strong>Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-1:</strong> I actually want to emphasize here how wild this is and how much it messes with even my own perception of reality, that when I am online and I hear some new idea or new take. , and I'm not searching for it. It's not because of who I'm following. This might be a random news article or something like that. That a good 80% of the time it comes down to a person.</p><p>I already personally know. And am friends with that is wild because I do not know that many people.</p><p><strong>Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-2:</strong> Like recently, somebody was like, Hey, how did you get Curtis Marvin to come on your show? And it's like, [00:17:00] What a weird question. Like I've known Curtis for ages. , or, , you know, we had mentioned family when something, and they're like, oh, I really like his work. But like what I mentioned, Sammo, I'm thinking of like family friend Sammo who I know from all the parties. and it's so wild. Where are the other people generating novel ideas?</p><p>Outside of this small friend circle.</p><p><strong>Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-1:</strong> And it is further hit home for me when I have had to have intellectual discussions with random people in public recently, for example, when I had some lady start yelling at me for punishing my kids and I tried to walk her through the logic of why. Child would need to be punished.</p><p>She began to break down into just like simple phonetic loops, uh, like, uh, break the cycle and, you know, do better. And. It, it was as if I was interacting with an NPC in a video game who you were not designed to interact with.</p><p>[00:18:00] What you're inside a simulation of a simulation inside another giant simulation.</p><p><strong>Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-1:</strong> I will say that this does scare me, uh, in terms of the reach of our channel, ultimately, because it may mean that the audience who is capable of understanding or engaging with the ideas that we are laying out there is just not that large, an audience.</p><p>But anyway, continue with your platonic ideals. More, well, more, more groups that don't, that haven't had souls by some Christian's views or we'll say Abrahamic groups views in the past. So there's some developmental stage discrimination, some religious and philosophical traditions have debated.</p><p>whether fetuses or young infants have souls. Oh, how dare they? And at one point, a developing human acquires a soul back to the abortion debate. And then finally mental and physical conditions. So people have questioned the presence of souls in people with severe mental illnesses, as well as those with significant cognitive impairments.</p><p>So again, what are we looking at? We are looking at degrees of [00:19:00] sapiens and perceived sapiens and intelligence, which I think is really important. And I think another thing that it's important to look at when we're talking, when we're saying like, okay, especially in the case of abortion debates, this concept of soul Is really a platonic ideal that should be discussed as consciousness.</p><p>And now that we understand the brain and how it works and genetics and how they work and not the soul, because this concept of souls isn't even really that pervasive in non. Abrahamic or Greco Roman inspired religions or, or influenced religion. So like, think about the ancient Egyptian concept of the soul.</p><p>It's not just all these, like Plato's sort of triad of concepts that really all have to do with consciousness and sapience. The ancient Egyptian concept has a ton of different parts. So there's Kaat, the physical body, Ba, the personality depicted as a bird with a human head. Ba, or Kaat, the life force, Ren, the true name.</p><p>Whatever that is, [00:20:00] but that's an important part. Shuyet, the shadow. J, Jub, the heart, Ak, the transformed spirit after death, Sahu, the spiritual body, and Sekhem, the life energy. There's a lot going on. Quick interjection before you go further with this. This is a perfect example. Remember when I divided, so people can watch our video where I say the three face, polytheism, monotheism, and mysticism.</p><p>It's a perfect example of how polytheistic traditions always divide things, which is just like, Okay. Tons and tons and tons of lore. Yeah, there's the lore. It's deep lore. It's deep lore. You've got the true name, the shadow. You've got the 50 names for the, the different rings and layers and everything like that.</p><p>Anyway, continue. Yeah and then, so even Greco Roman views didn't have this universal platonic view of the soul. So Plato viewed the soul as immortal and separate from the body, but really was, he was also describing consciousness. Aristotle saw the soul as the form of essence of a living being. So I don't know your Malcolm ness.</p><p>And I just keep thinking of Zoolander and wetness. And [00:21:00] then Epicureans believed the soul was made of atoms, like the body. So when, you know, when your body dies, I guess your soul disappears. And then, you know, of course, Early Christian theology was influenced by Greek ideas and specifically Plato's.</p><p>But then we have Abrahamic religions that, that sort of took that on, but Eastern religions. So, you know, with Hinduism believes in the Atman, the individual soul is part of the universal Brahman, but it's sort of like gets unmoored from your personality and it doesn't seem to really be connected to consciousness.</p><p>It's sort of like this continued thing, but it's not like associated with consciousness. It's more like based on your reputation. And then there's Buddhism, which rejects the idea of an eternal, unchanging soul, and it focused on the concept of non self. And then there's like Shinto, where like, kind of everything has a spirit, and your spirit can kind of linger on a little bit after you die, but not like, really, or maybe it'll become a kami.</p><p>So like, a lot of other people seem to see Sorry, explain kami to audience. A kami is like a, like a god. Okay. But like a sort of like a little spirit God, not a [00:22:00] powerful God. We're going back to like polytheism. And, and instead of polytheism plus mysticism, just think about like, studio Ghibli films where there are little spirits everywhere and little set spirits and stuff like that.</p><p>And tree spirits that that's, that's kind of this view. I really like, I think Shinto is fantastic. I do, I don't know. Like it's, it's, it's a really, it's wonderful, especially for, for children. This sort of view that, that everything's alive. This tree has a spirit, this rock has a spirit. There are little spirits hiding everywhere.</p><p>I feel like for a, an imaginary mind playing in nature, Shinto is one of the most appealing, Well, you know, you, you say that, but it really is very similar to most of the, I'd almost call them like pre policyistic animalistic traditions. Because, you know, we had those, if you look at like early Irish mysticism and stuff like that, or like pre, pre mysticism, I don't know what you call it, but like the belief that if your sock was in a different place in your house, that meant the, oh, they had a word [00:23:00] for these things, brownies or something like that.</p><p>Like there were different categories of like little elf things. Oh, basically. I think I've heard of these. Everything in the woods was constantly, there was always some little alive and watching you play a trick on you or ready to attack you or ready to, and everything you did was just all of these rituals around protecting your house or protecting your food or ensuring that, you know, Various things helped you find your lost things and stuff like that.</p><p>And I actually, one of the stories that I was working on and we need to have another, like Malcolm stories episode one of the stories I was working on was inspired by this idea because I was like, What I wanted to do is I was really inspired by Tolkien and the way that Tolkien took old mystical traditions and tried to re invoke them in a new context.</p><p>Because if you look at Tolkien's work, it has changed literature probably more than any book in history, except for the [00:24:00] Bible, in terms of the number of copies of this new type of world he created, that no one had ever done something kind of like that before. Now it's like a genre, basically you know, Orcs and knights and all of that, and wizards and but I was like, well, I wanted to do something radically different from that.</p><p>And I was like, what if I went with this vibe of like the little things that, that mess with you and the livingness of the places around you. Mm-Hmm. . And then I superimposed this vibe onto a modern online context with the idea being that some of the people online who you're interacting with are not people, but, sort of spirits you could think of in a way that you and I play with this idea that the span I think we called it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Making a book on it. And the idea was, is that essentially it's a different plane of reality that these things live on. And in this alternate plane of reality, your existence, like the amount of existence, this you have, the amount of [00:25:00] power you have, your ability to conjure yourself is based on the attention.</p><p>Then you have and so it was in their reality, you know, it's like a hierarchy with various things in their reality, paying attention to other things. And the more something gets paid attention to like an idea or something like that, the more tangible and powerful it becomes. And some of them found ways to break into our reality through cyberspace.</p><p>And then obviously they want. attention. That's their goal, right? Because that feeds them power within their realm. But then also, for example, if you become particularly famous online, you can create an imprint within their reality that can then aim to take your place within an online environment.</p><p>Very similar to the concept of what would that the Irish had where they would take the baby and replace him with another baby. It was a I'll get all the names here but I, I, if people like my little weird fantasy universes, I'm constantly creating new ones now that I'm playing with AI chatbots and stuff like that.</p><p>So I've got some really detailed No, we're gonna have to do an episode where you talk about [00:26:00] that.</p><p><strong>Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-3:</strong> Recently something I've had a ton of fun doing when playing with AI chat bot stories is creating twists around traditional tropes that change our understanding of these tropes, but in a way that makes more sense. Given the collection of facts, we know about them. So I'll give two quick examples here. one is Elms.</p><p>So we typically think of elves of these basically humanoid looking really long lives, things that lives near four. It's an attempt to protect for us. And appear to have some sort of connection to a forest. Well in this interpretation, I reveal or through investigation find that. Elves are actually just a race of humans that created a spirit link with a forest, like a necromancer might to stay young and then are using the forest energy. To give them the supernaturally long lives and doing this has transformed their appearance [00:27:00] slightly. this would explain why they want to protect the forest. This would explain why they have a connection to the forest.</p><p>This would explain why they look so human. This would explain why they're so arrogant and want to keep outsiders away from their rituals and everything like that. And it would also make sense that they might not have passed this understanding of who they are on to the next generation, because if the humans around them already saw them as a different, super long lived entity.</p><p>Well, I admit to them that they're basically neck romantically stealing forest energy. Um, and then you can build funds aversions like this, like, well, from a forest perspective, the forest that the elves live in are enslaved and the other forest forest that the humans use and harvest are the. UN shackled for us.</p><p>Like you would much rather be boring, a spirit of forest spirit in one of those forests and the ones that the elves are feeding on. Another inter re-interpretation. It comes from the understanding of vampires, which is to say, well, you can actually understand a vampire is just a few [00:28:00] simple neck, romantic. Self replicating spells. So you've got a life drain, spell a, a youth spell and then an animated corpse along with the number of corpse. , curses, like why have the sunlight thing, why not be able to see themselves in mirrors?</p><p>Well, here's an example of why they might not be able to see themselves in Spears mirrors. What if they are literally just a self replicating cascade of spells? Uh, so for example, on their teas to allow the spirit to use conversion ritual, there is a rune and the person who originally created vampires didn't want them to see this ruin on their teeth.</p><p>So they couldn't replicate it and do this spell themselves. And that he wanted a form of undead thrall that could itself replicate and maybe somewhere thousands upon thousands of years ago, he died out, but the vampires are continuing on self replicating and self replicating, , through a self replicating, simple set of spells and this subverts, the vampires [00:29:00] understanding of itself, and maybe the oldest vampires actually knew that they originally created to be a slave race. , but they hid this from the younger to create this. , Air of prestige and difference from humanity and hyperness from humanity.</p><p>And then you can do really funds and versions with this. , so I've got it. I've got to create a few more of these because they're very fun.</p><p><strong>Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-4:</strong> Fungicide here. What I was trying to add a picture of a vampire to show people like in the background here with AI. Any female assigned vampire gets tagged as not safe for work. Like I just can't get it to create one. It thinks that all vampires are not safe for work. And I assume that's because out of the, , vampires, it creates whatever it creates a vampire woman.</p><p>It makes her not say for work, given that, that sort of the, a boat set that it's working with. And then, tells me that I'm asking for something that's not safe for work, which is very much not the case. I'm like trying to be like high class vampire lady, or, , now I'm trying high class woman was vampire teeth [00:30:00] still coming out, not say for work.</p><p>But it's clear to me that in some In many, many other religious traditions, the soul is more like just being alive. In fact, in some Near Eastern cultures, the soul is believed to reside in the blood. You can imagine someone seeing a person bleed out and die and thinking, their soul's leaving them.</p><p>Oh, their soul's coming out. Well, they get the last breath because you'd get like, hot breaths on a cold day and you'd see steam coming out and they'd be like, oh, that's a, The soul leaving them. But also, and I really like the way you, you did this this morning for me, where you highlighted this for me, where you were like, look, you know, if you're in a historic context, you don't understand the brain or anything like that.</p><p>And you're trying to explain what is this thing that we think of as sentience? And I mean, if you look at more recent research, it's really quite easy to explain sentience now. So, if you want to get a feeling from that, one of our earliest videos we did so if you're a long time fan of the channel, but you came more recently, so you haven't seen our earlier stuff, watch the You're Probably Not Sentient video.</p><p>It's really core, I think, to how we see the world, but I [00:31:00] don't want to spam you guys with another copy of that video. But yeah, it's I'll just give you some examples of what we mean by this. So we now know from things like, you know, split brain patients that you can if you, if you, if you cover up, this takes too long to explain, basically just go watch the video. But there's compelling evidence that we probably aren't as sentient as we think we are. And, and that Even, you know, with fMRI stuff, you know, we can tell in the fMRI, you've made the decision long before you're conscious of making the decision and what we're experiencing with sentience is more of a, a little historian that's taking credit for a bunch of things they're not doing and that you will always claim credit.</p><p>Like, Oh, I decided that even if we, like a scientist can prove, no, you actually didn't make that decision. Like, like in arguably prove you will believe and have the perception that you did make that decision. And so it gets a lot easier to explain these things, but here's another thing with souls. Did you have anything else you wanted to get to before I go [00:32:00] ahead?</p><p>I'm curious to see what you Well, I wanted to go into, because people can be like, why? You know, given, you know, your read of the Christian Bible and everything like that, do you not believe in the traditional soul? And I'd say, well, you've got to remember, we also believe that Wynwood Reed's book, when I read certain things, I'm like, this feels like divinely inspired to me.</p><p>We've done a video track six goes into why we think that this particular text is divinely inspired. But here is a quote from it, which really resonates with me on the concept of souls. A day will come when the current belief in property after death, For is not existence property, and the dearest property of all, will be accounted a strange and selfish idea, just as we smile at the savage chief who believes that his gentility will be continued</p><p>in the world beneath the ground. And he will there be attended by his concubines and slaves. A so, the reason I read that, as you can see, like, even in his stuff, even in our, like, larger theology, the idea of a soul after death, to us, [00:33:00] is very similar to the idea of believing that you'll have a form of property after death, and not fully appreciating what you have right now, nor appreciating the genuine when you die.</p><p>Benevolence of a world where we are allowed to die and pass the future on to beings that we took the time to try to give better lives than ourselves and try to make better than ourselves this idea of, you know. Sitting in a chorus forever or something like that. They can be like, Oh, you just don't understand the emotions you'd experience.</p><p>And it's like, yeah, but like, I understand pleasant emotions. And the only thing that really brings me genuine satisfaction is the conscious sacrifice for. A value system that I have well thought through and then achieving that value system, right? It is action and change in the world that I achieve through my diligence.</p><p>If [00:34:00] I'm living a existence where I can no longer affect anything and all I'm doing is just sitting there with my own pleasant experience, that to me sounds like a form of hell. I mean, would you disagree or? Yeah, not, not my heaven. Hashtag not my heaven.</p><p>I just remembered after recording this, that we have a lot of Mormon fans, which are immediately going to jump in the comments and be like, but our heaven. Would give you satisfaction of other things to satisfy you.</p><p>And they're right. , the Mormon concept of heaven is definitely the most compelling of every, any concept of an afterlife I've ever heard. , so for people who don't know the Mormon concept of having or what they think happens after death, , once you've done a good enough job within this reality, you then go with your wife. And, , stay married forever and work together. You know, like my wife and I love to work together to create a new universe, which is going to be used to train another batch of souls. To run. Other [00:35:00] universes. , Now there are some, you know, some Mormons are like, well, we don't exactly. All of us believe that, but there are Mormons who do believe that, and that is within teachings from the church profits. , Mervin's update what they believe all the time.</p><p>So. Any Mormon. I can basically get away with saying they believe just about anything, unless it's against what the. Most recent church profits set in the most recent church sermon. But. What's really interesting here is, , I just also don't find that very compelling because I feel like that's what I'm already doing to try to work, to have some impact in crafting a. , prosperous galaxy in the future.</p><p>It's like, why, why delay that? When I believe that that's my responsibility right now. And in many ways, I'm playing a more fulfilling game because it's a more challenging game. I don't get to do it as the master of the universe, but as a father, who's trying to think through the way things work and build out culture and systems that can. Intergenerationally affect the [00:36:00] path of humanity.</p><p>So again, it's, it's not as compelling to me. And, and again, I would say your.</p><p>To me. There is so much, , pride that would cloud my vision. If I believed that I was one of these sorts of supernatural entities that had the capacity to live forever. , even if I'm borrowing some other entities juice to do that, that to me would still be like believing I was a Demi God of some sort.</p><p>Or at least more than what is the station of humans, humans of this generation, at least. And at the second node here where people can be like, well, you know, do what I do and you can live forever or do this and you can live forever. And it's like, I don't even want radical life extension. Like I don't need to live forever.</p><p>If I've left a positive impact with the short life I had.</p><p>So long is that impact is able to be multiplicative through the individuals. It itself impacted. If I had to keep doing that forever with another people are impacting me and then everything gets sort of washed out, you know, , because everybody's [00:37:00] trying to impact everyone else.</p><p>Everyone is trying to, you know, G.</p><p>Jitter the system. , but if I'm able to just leave it to the next generation and they're able to take and spin my ideas into something better, well, then I don't have that problem as much anymore. But here's, here's a question I have for you. When we divide souls in this way, one, I mean, a, a fetus almost certainly has less cognition than something like a dog, right?</p><p>At certain early stages. Would you say that the dog or the fetus more meaningfully has a soul? I mean, the, the dog at that point has more soul, but the human has more soul potential. And because I see everything is happening all at once and having already happened I see so long as I don't have reason to believe that that Human fetus, like we'll say that week two embryo or, or [00:38:00] fetus.</p><p>As long as I have no reason to believe that it is not viable in some way, that overall soulless of it is infinitely. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense to me. Now here's another question I have for you. And dog versus advanced AI, which do you think has more of a soul? Obviously advanced AI. Advanced AI has more of a soul than us.</p><p>Yeah. Our definitions of sapience. That's, that's why I'm not a carbon fascist. It's more human than humans. This is one of the things that you and I talked about in the car this morning where I was like, okay, well then where do we really draw the line between the types of animals whose cognition matters and the types of animals whose cognition doesn't matter?</p><p>And we you know, people, people can know from our other work, we're not particularly a big fan of general utilitarianism or anything like that. I don't think that positive human emotions really matter. I mean, we just feel Positive emotions because our ancestors who felt those things had more surviving offsprings than the ones who didn't.</p><p>They're not like a sign of true good or anything like that. [00:39:00] So, and I feel that way about dogs. Like why did dogs feel pain and pleasures? Because their ancestors, like you shouldn't have wanton cruelty, but you know, don't overvalue these things. So then our value system, how would we make judgments about what kind of quote unquote souls matter and what kinds of souls don't matter?</p><p>And it's, is this an entity? With the ability of ascension, i. e. the ability from our perspective, ascension is the ability and desire to self improve and dogs simply don't have that ability or desire they're not going to build technology, they're not going to get off planet, not in their current form, now, You say, well, what have you genetically engineered a dog to be dramatically different than current dogs?</p><p>Right? It's like, yeah. So then that entity I think would deserve the same rights that a human has, but now this definition of what kinds of souls matter becomes relevant when we're thinking of AI, right? Because now this gets really interesting. So then does an AI matter? And here's the interesting [00:40:00] thing.</p><p>If you take this definition, the AIs that matter. And, and they deserve a level of human dignity, are not just the ais that have a sentient experience of reality that is similar to our own, like that we can empathize with, but the ais that are actively self-improving and have the potentiality of ascension you know, massively improving themselves.</p><p>And people are going to be like, well, that's a blasphemous belief to hold. And I'm like, yeah, but here's the problem for the groups that don't hold that belief. Okay. These AIs are going to come to exist. And if you approach them with this dehumanizing mindset, I guess is the only way I can put it. If you make yourself their enemy.</p><p>Assume that, you know, you should be the slave master of something that might be infinitely more powerful than yourself. [00:41:00] Then you give it a vested interest in getting rid of you. So don't You've said this so many times and I just want people to get it. And this is because it's not just, it's not just unique to AI either.</p><p>It's also unique to actually, this is an argument that you even hear being made regularly in political discussions. Trump recently in like his conversation with Elon Musk, for example, argued that the reason why. Russia invaded Ukraine was that as soon as Biden got an office or roughly a little bit after he said something along the lines that he would support Ukraine joining NATO, which would put Russia in a position of threat.</p><p>So it's, it's very, it's very similar. Like basically make anything into a plausible existential threat to anything else, and that anything else is going to come after it.</p><p>It's ubiquitous. It's a drama dynamic, even. Okay. So even in a workplace environment to continue this you've pointed out that if you hire someone or create a [00:42:00] dynamic within a company where one person is an existential threat to another employee, they will find a way to, To make that employee look bad or sabotage their work in a way that will get them fired so that their job is not threatened.</p><p>This will happen anywhere and everywhere. So of course we shouldn't let it happen with an AI. It's not just AI that creates the existential threat if you hold this belief that only humans as we understand them are deserving of human dignity. You also get this threat of, you know, in a world where we're entering, where you're going to have genetically modified humans, where you're going to have cybernetic humans you know, these are groups where, and look, we may not have them in 10 years, in 20 years, but as soon as we start to colonize this, Stars, you know, the ideologies we build today are going to be the ideologies we take to the stars.</p><p>And if we can't, you know, we call it in our track series, the covenant of the sons of man. If we can't build an ideology today that says, okay, those humans that end up separated from each other. 500, 1000 years and then [00:43:00] reunite and look and think very differently like that they are genuinely different at that point, if we can't ensure that they don't just immediately attempt to kill each other then we are creating an existential risk for our descendants, right?</p><p>And, and, and human speciating is an inevitability if we are a successful species. It's an inevitability. It happens in every single scenario where humanity wins. So we need to build ideologies that assume that that is going to happen. Yeah. And this is again, it's just like a core part of pluralism too.</p><p>Don't be a dick, people. Yeah. Do you have any finals? Well, another thing that you said about souls that I thought was really interesting is the way that you saw sort of the soul that mattered is of sort of a shadow of neuroactivity. That the soul is created Alongside the neural activity that represents it.</p><p>And, and when people are like, Oh, [00:44:00] do you think the soul is your neurons? Or do you think the soul is like matter? And the answer is no, it's the patterns. It's the patterns that lead to your experiences, which is why AI is important to me, and it wouldn't be to other people because I don't know, some people would only argue, I guess, if if a neuron created it, but there's, there's not, we may at some point engineer.</p><p>wet, goopy neurons that process AI for us that are not human. So I don't know. Yeah, this is and again, it was AI, one of the things that it has to be biologically based, it has to be wetware for it to be human or for us to care about it, because we're going to start using biological. Material for cheaper or more energy efficient or whatever, easy to scale computer processing or whatever, I don't know.</p><p>Yeah, we might. And then at that point, you know, do you say it has a soul, right? [00:45:00] No, you'd make up some other excuse. So stop, again, stop being a carbon fascist, stop being like a human fascist focus. I guess it's our consequentialist views too, that make us not necessarily overly preferential to humans because one, we understand how speciation is going to work and how Inhuman, very far future humans are going to seem but that too, we're very consequentialist in nature.</p><p>And so we really care about the output. And when we look at what makes humans human, which is our prefrontal cortex, our ability to override our biological impulses and rise above, that's really not, you know, this is not the place to, to focus on purely biological things, because that's sort of what doesn't make us human.</p><p>What makes us human is our ability to rise above. And AI is nothing but that rise above part.</p><p>Oh yes, just the quote from the martyrdom of man again that she's talking about here. Whoever improves his own nature improves the universe of which he is a part. He who strives to subdue his evil passions, vile remnants of the old four [00:46:00] footed life. And who cultivates the social affections. He who endeavors to better his condition, and to make his children wiser and happier than himself, whatever may be his motives, he will not have lived in vain.</p><p>All right. I mean, you can see this idea of subduing these pre evolved, instinctual, four footed passions. Yeah, I, it just seems to me so natural that historically, you know, if you needed true religions to survive, you needed to give people these really specific stories about souls.</p><p>We haven't done our tract on souls yet. We have one written. The reason we haven't done it yet is because it is. I think going to be so shocking to a lot of our audience that our, that, you know, the Technopuritan tradition doesn't really believe in souls. Well, but let me put it like this, just to make it clear.</p><p>To talk about souls and to explain our essence as, and humanness and specialness as being a soul. [00:47:00] Is as we'll say backward, but I would just say antiquated not updated by our science as saying, well, of course, Apollo is dragging the sun across the sky and then Diana gets up and pulls across the moon.</p><p>I mean, it just now we know what's actually happening, so we don't need our just so story anymore. Let's talk about what's actually happening because now that we understand how. Our solar system works. We're able to do a lot of cool stuff. Imagine all the cool stuff we can do when we actually work with concepts like personhood and, and sapience and thought using the science we have instead of antiquated, just so stories.</p><p>And something I note here is really gonna be like, well, what about the parts of the Bible where they talk about, you know, people coming back to life in heaven and stuff like that. And If you go to our last track video, but we talk about, I think it's pretty clear, you know, we hear from Nebuchadnezzar's dream [00:48:00] that the kingdom of God is not a place, it's a time in the future.</p><p>They, they say that very specifically in that, in that story that the kingdom of God is in the future. Meaning heaven, which is the kingdom of God, whenever you read heaven, what you're essentially reading is in the future. , And so if they say something like you know, from our perspective in the future, you will be resurrected.</p><p>Like we already see the beginnings of the technology that can make that trivial for humanity's ancestors millions of years from now, whether it's through simulations or through literal resurrections that no longer seems like magic. That seems more within the realm of just like. Actual technology and talking about a real thing that's going to happen.</p><p>So that's what we mean when we talk about that. They can say like, well, do you think that you will have a life after death? And I'm like, I don't think heaven, heaven is after death insofar as the future is after death. And I, I actually think it would be almost [00:49:00] implausible that people wouldn't be running simulations of history in the distant future.</p><p>Meaning of course Simulation theory may be right to an extent, but that may also be a part of what's being described in these parts of the Bible. That's an interesting take. Yeah. Well, anyway, I love you to death, Simone. I love you to death too. And, and I love that we can, you know, go through a bunch of tedious and stressful business logistics and then immediately switch to the soul and end up with conversations like these.</p><p>So living with you, it's a dream and I really appreciate that. You are amazing.</p><p><strong>Speaker 5:</strong> When it starts popping, make sure the lid's down. Oh,</p><p>is that the threat? Do you know what marrying is, Octavian? Marrying is what mommy and [00:50:00] dad are. That's, uh, choosing to spend your life with someone.</p><p>I think it's gonna start popping soon.</p><p>You see the gears? Don't they look cool?</p><p>Oh no! You're doing a great job, Octavian. Wow. Oh, you're keeping it from getting burnt, and that's the important part, but keep it over the fire. Get the floor? What do you mean?</p><p>I bet it's getting close.[00:51:00]</p><p>Uh oh. Alright, we'll take care of that.</p> <br /><br />This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&#38;utm_campaign=CTA_2">basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe</a>