This post explains my "religious" beliefs deduced from the cogito ergo sum principle, using computational theory and thought experiments with some existential questions.
By the end of this post, you'll see that we are not what we think. The thing we call "I" is more than a "brain"; consciousness is beyond matter and cannot exist without the arrow of time. That's why we experience past, present and future instead of everything at once. This line of thought also removes the idea of individualism and therefore of the individual soul that our culture assumes.
Okay, what the hell is this? Let me explain.
You are conscious, therefore you exist—what Descartes put as cogito ergo sum. So the present experience you are aware of is being perceived by someone or something. That observer is the "I". That's our axiom.
Imagine a person without a brain. They can't be conscious, right? No thoughts, sight, hearing, basic instincts—nothing. So there's no one perceiving the present experience; same for a rock or water. They are not self-aware.
Now recall the Ship of Theseus paradox, but applied to the brain. Instead of whole rocks or brains, think of a gradient from brain to rock. What if we remove, atom by atom, neuron by neuron, cell by cell, every part of our body?
If I remove one neuron out of the billions in a human brain, nothing happens. In fact, about 85,000 neurons will die in your brain today. But keep removing neurons and cells from "you"—the "I" fades, as we see with Alzheimer's. Keep going. Now you can barely remember what's happening, you can't focus, you hardly remember who you are. Keep removing. Now you can't hear, see or think; you only run on the most basic instincts from your cerebellum: your heart beats, you breathe, but you can't move. Keep removing. Now, what are you? There is no "you" left.
So we are our brain, right? We are the neurons, the matter, the atoms inside us!
Yes—but through all those years you're still you, you're not "dead," even though every atom in your body is replaced about every 10 years.
A wave in the ocean is not its matter; it's the stable pattern through a medium (water) over time. That's the wave. At each instant that wave shifts which atoms it's made of until it has none of the originals. But it's still the same wave. Same for any medium: air, water, light, particles—they're waves in a medium. Some can interact and form structures that look static in time, but they're not; their existence depends on time, not on form. Like a river: the water in the channel forms eddies around rocks. The eddy needs time and matter to exist—it's a flow, matter moving through time in a place.
So what am I saying? What are you? You're not a river or an ocean. But you are a process. You can agree that a brain with no activity is not a person, and an algorithm in a computer with no power is just information. Same with time: you can't experience or be "you" without time, because you are the process of electrical currents in a material called brain through time.
Maybe if our "consciousness" were located in something else, we could experience past, present and future at once. Maybe if we could run a brain-shaped program with light alone, consciousness would be in the electromagnetic field instead of matter. Maybe if we could embed a human-brain program in the curvature of spacetime, we could get a consciousness that is the very fabric of the universe.
Since everything computable can be expressed with a Turing machine, and by definition whatever exists does so because some natural law allows it, it must be computable. So the cells of our brain could be expressed with a Turing machine.
The magic of the Turing machine is that it's an abstract idea that can be implemented on anything: an electronic computer, a human brain, a photonic matter system, a Minecraft redstone system… and also a piece of paper.
Remember learning an algorithm to multiply two numbers in primary school? 123 × 456—okay, 3×6=18, put 8, carry 1, then 3×5 + 1 = 16… That's an algorithm on paper. Same for neural networks: you could in principle compute ChatGPT's answers with an algorithm on paper (a very large one).
Yeah, but writing on paper doesn't feel very conscious, does it? Well, same on a computer—it just writes numbers with electrons in transistors instead of carbon on paper. The main difference might be that a computer overwrites its previous state over time, while you on paper just use another sheet when one is full, so the whole process exists at once instead of erasing the last state.
Okay, so the big question: what if we run the algorithm of our brain on paper?
BOOM.
So a few questions:
You're part of the universe. A wave in the ocean that has thoughts about itself, but when it's gone it returns to where it came from: the ocean. You're a small wave in a vast ocean in an immense stretch of time and space. You came from nothing and you'll return to it. When you die, your consciousness will merge into the dark and become everything that exists and will exist at every moment, but without being aware of it.
I don't have all the answers. I can't say WHY I am me and not my neighbour, or GOD experiencing all living (and non-living) things at once—that would make more sense than having a single individual experience.
I can only say we're all small waves in an ocean, and maybe we're only conscious of ourselves, not of the ocean as such. And maybe the ocean is a super-entity we live in; when we die we merge with it, and every wave that rises from it will carry a bit of us, and that sense of "I" will dissolve into the whole universe. Hinduism has similar ideas…
As you can see, all religions are too shallow for these ideas; they're too basic. They often rest on:
In my view, none of that exists. Maybe the second, but not as an entity separate from the universe. God IS the universe and existence itself; he doesn't act on things inside his consciousness, he just is. The Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu explores this well: the Tao ("God") is a passive entity that lets everything exist without acting—just by existing. It lets good and evil coexist, high and low. It simply lets reality be and lets humanity invent its own concepts.
(I also think human concepts like "good" and "evil" exist only inside human experience, not in reality itself, so God has nothing to do with good or evil.)
So every religion we have is too simplistic to describe what I'm pointing at.
Christianity is like McDonald's in the restaurant market: the default, a bit simplistic and ultra-processed, tasty but toxic.
Islam and Judaism would be something less mainstream, like Popeyes or Taco Bell.
Buddhism and Hinduism are the closest; they explore "Universal Soul" and reincarnation, but they still assume the soul exists and becomes individual at birth. I don't believe that.
Because we are the process that runs in our brain, we experience the present and remember the past. It doesn't make sense to exist at all times at once, and a process doesn't make sense without an arrow of time—a conscious being frozen in time would have no consciousness. So consciousness can only arise with a direction called time or entropy. But that "arrow" could be anything. In a 4D universe where entropy increases along dimension "w," if it flowed along X, Y and Z we'd be one-dimensional beings with 3D timelines, but we'd only be aware of one of those timelines, as the result of a single flow at that point in spacetime.
So maybe our universe is also more than 4D. Maybe we have 7 time dimensions, but a point in that hyperspace can only be expressed in 3D space through all those arrows (the present). If time branches and we're one branch, we won't "remember" the branching, so for us there's only one line. Adding 3D space, we get 3D + 1D time. But in reality our universe might be more than 4D.
You are the process dictated by the neurons of your brain—you are NOT your brain, not its matter. You are the process happening in a medium (the brain) along the flow of time.
Yes—another brain, paper, a computer, or even a computer based on the curvature of spacetime. So maybe the whole universe is a "thought" of God. Reality might be more abstract than we think.
Time is a consequence of consciousness existing. Maybe everything exists at once, but we can't experience it that way.
Consciousness exists because we can't exist without a direction in which processes are visible. There's no process of a ball on the ground with momentum but no time. Let time run and the ball will roll to the lowest local point.
Who cares where our consciousness comes from? Just go out and live. Be yourself, enjoy the present, be human, align with your nature. We're here to experience; we're a glitch in the matrix that's aware of its own existence. Enjoy your damn ice cream, let others experience their existence—maybe you're every being in the universe, past or future, so live a good life and let others live a happy one. Make this little rock a nice place to be. Enjoy learning, kissing your mum, your suffering, being anxious, happy, terrified, in love, scared, helpless, touching grass, hungry.
There's nothing quite like a human in this brutal stretch of time and space, so do God a favour, do the universe and every human who has lived, lives and will live a favour: LIVE. It won't last forever.