This post explains my "religion" beliefs deduced from the cognito ergo sum principle, using computational theory and mental experiments with some existentialist questions.
At the end of this post, you'll find out that we are not what we think. The thing I call "I" is more than a "brain", consciusness is beyond matter, and it cannot exist without the arrow in time, that's why we experience past, present and future rather than everything at the same time. Also, this thought erases the idea of individualism and therefore the individual soul that out culture thinks it exists.
Okey, what the fuck is this? I'll explain myself.
You are conscious, therefore you exist, this is what Darwin called cognito ergo sum. This means that the present experience that are you being consious of, is being percived by someone or something, this spectator is the "I". This is our axiom.
Image a person that has no brain. It cannot be conscious, right? They cannot have thoughts, vision, hearning, basic instincs... nothing! Therefore, there is no one that is perciving the present experience, the same happens with a rock, or with wather, this things are not self-conscious.
Now, remember the ship of Theseus paradox, but we'll apply it to the brain. Instead of thinking about rocks or full brains, will make a gradient from brain to rock. What happens if we remove, atom by atom, neuron by neuron, cell by cell, every part of our body?
If I remove 1 neuron over the billions that a regular human has in its brain, nothing will happen, in fact, 85K neurons will die today in your brain. But, keep removing neurons, keep removing cells out of you, the "I" will fade away as we can see with Alzaimer. Keep removing neurons, now you can't even remeber what happens, you can't focus on anything, you barely remember about who are you. Keep removing neurons. Now, you can't even hear, see or think, you just function with your most basic instics that your cerebel dicatates, your hearth beats, you brath, but you can't move. Keep removing. Now, what are you? There's no you anymore.
So, we are our brain, right? We are the neurons, the matter, the atoms that are inside of us!
Yes, but over all this years, you still being you, you are not "dead" although every atom of your body is replaced every 10 years!
A wave in the ocean is not its matter, it's the constant shape across a the medium (water) over time, this is the wave. Every instant, this wave changes the position of its atoms until it contains none of its original atoms. But the wave still is the same. It doesn't matter the medium: Air, water, light, particles... all this things are waves in a medium. Some can interact with each other and form other structures that can seem static over time but they are not, their pure existence depends on time and not the shape: like a river, where the water of its flow forms whirlpools when it finds obstacles like rocks, this whirlpool needs the time and matter to exists, since they are a flow: matter flowing throught time in a place.
So, what I want to say with this? What about you? You are not a river or an ocean. But you are a process. You can agree with me that a brain without activity is not a person, and an algorithm in a computer without electric current is just information, the same happens with time: you cannot experience or be "you" without time, since you are the process of electric currents happening inside a material called brain throught time.
Maybe if our "conciusness" was alocated in another thing, we could experience past, present and future at the same time. Maybe if it wereposible to make a human-like brain program with just light, the consciousness would also be uilt in the electro-magnetic field instead of the matter. Maybe if we could make a human brain-like program that is embeeded in the space-time curvature, we could build a conscious that IS the puse fabric of the universe.
Since every thing that can be computable can be expressed with a Turing Machine, and by definition, everything that exists, exists becase there is a nature law that allows its existence, it must be computable. So, our brain's cell's could be expressed with a Turing Machine.
The magic of the Turing Machine is that is an abstract idea that can be applied to anything: a electronic-based computer, a human brain, a phthonic matter interaction system, a minecraft redstone contraption system... And also, a piece of paper.
Remember when you were in the elementary school learning an algorithm to multiply two numbers? 123 x 456, okey, first goes 3x6=36, so I use the 6 as first digit and carry over the 3 then do 3x2 + 3 = 9... This is an algorithm made in a paper. The same happens in neural networks, you can perfectly compute by your own ChatGPT's responses applying an algorithm in a piece of paper (a very VERY big one).
Yes... but writing in a paper doesn't feel very conscious, doesn't it? Well, the same happens in a computer, it writes down numbers with electrons in transistors instead of writing it with carbon in a paper. It is the same thing. The main difference could be just that a computer erases its previous state over time and you in a paper may just use another paper when it's full, so the whole proces is existing at the same time instead of erasing the last state.
Okey, now the big question: What if we compute our brain's algorithm in paper?
BOOM
Okey, here we have several questions:
The answers I can give
You are part of the universe. A wave in the ocean that has thoughts of self, but when it dissapears returns where it came from: the ocean. You are a little wave in the vast ocean in a vast abyss of time and space. You came from the nothingness and will return to it. Your consciousness will fuse with the dark when you die and will become all the things that exists and will exists in all the moments but without any consciousness of it.
I don't have all the answers, I can't respond WHY I am who I am and not my neighbour, or GOD experiencing all the living (an non living) things at the same time, it would make more sense that that rather have an experience of an individual.
I just can say that we are all little waves in a ocean, and maybe, we just have consciousness of our-selves, but not the ocean itself, and maybe the ocean is a super-entity where we live on and when we die we fuse with it and every wave that emerges from it will have a little bit of ourselves, and this sence of "I" will dissolve over everything in the universe. Induism have similar ideas...
As you can see, every religion is too superficial for this ideas, they are too basic. They often fall into this axioms:
Individualism of the soul
Existence of bigger authorithy (GOD)
Afterlife
In my opinion, none of they exists. Maybe the second, but not as a separate entity of the universe. God IS the universe and the existence itself, it doesn't do nothing over the things in its consciousness, it just exists. Tao the Ching, Lao Tse, explores this idea very well: The Tao ("God") is a passive entity that permits that everyting exists without acting, just existing: Allows the good and the evil coexist, allows the tall and the short coexist. It just lets go the reality to be, and the human kind to make their own concepts.
(Also I believe that every human-like concept such as "evil" "good", etc there exist just inside the human experience and not the reality itself, so God has nothing to do with good or evil)
So, every religon that exists are too simplistic to describe the ideas I am explaining.
Cristianism is the same as the McDonalds in the restauration market: Is the default standard, simplistic and ultra-procesessed thing that tates very good but is toxic.
Isam and Judaism would be something les popular like Popeye's or Taco Bell.
Buddism and Induism are the more acurate ones, they explore ideas of the "Universal Soul" and reincarnation, but fall into the idea that the soul exists and it becomes individual when it comes to life. I do not believe that.
Since we are the process that occurs in our brain, this is the reason why we experience present and remember the past, because makes no sense of existing at the same time, neither makes sense that a process ocurrs if an arrow of time doesn't exist, since a pure state of a conscious being (freezed in time) would have no consciousness, so a consciousness only can emerge with a direction called time or entropy. But this "arrow" could be anything. Instead of the 4-dimensional universe where the entropy thends to increaw towards the "w" dimetion, it flowed thowards X,Y and Z dimension, we would be a 1-dimensional beings with 3 dimensional timelines, but we would be only consciouss of 1 dimensional timeline since we would be the result of one flow in that point in space-time.
So, maybe also our universe is more than 4-dimensional. Maybe we have 7 time dimensions, but a point inside that hyper-space can only be expressed in a 3-dimensional space accross all this arrows (the present). If in time there are bifurcations, and we are one of them, we won't "remember" the bifurcation, so, for us, there exist only one line instead of several ones, sum up the 3d space and we experience a 3d + 1d time reality. But in fact, out universe could be more than 4d.
You are the process that the neurons of your brain dictates, you are NOT your brain, you are not its matter. You are THE process that occurs in a medium (brain) over the flow of time.
Yes, we can be computed in a medium such as another brain, a paper, a computer, or even a space-time curvature-based computer. So, maybe, all the universe is a "thought" of God itself. The reality may be more abstract that we thought.
Time is a consequence of the existence of consciousness. Maybe everyting exists at the same time but we cannot experience it.
Consiousness occurs because we can't exist without a direction where the processes are visible. There is no process of a ball in the ground with momentum but no time. Let the time run and the ball will roll over the surfice towards the lower local point.
Who cares what our consciousness comes from? Just go there and live, be yourself, enjoy the present experience, be human, merge with your nature, we've been born to experience, we are an error in the matrix that has consciousness over their own existence. Enjoy your fucking ice cream, let others experience their existence, maybe you are every being in the universe, past or future, so let yourself living a good life by letting others live a happy life. Make this fucking little rock a nice place to live. Enjoy learning, enjoy kissing you mother, enjoy your suffering, enjoy being axious, happy, terrified, loving, afraid, helpless, touching grass, hugry.
There is nothing like a human in this brutal abyss of time and space so make God's a favor, make the universe and every human that has lived, lives and will live a favor: LIVE. It wou't last forever.