THE MURDER ON A BEACH THOUGHT EXPERIMENT: ON HAVING A SOUL

Believers, feel free to aggravate your non-believer friends with this little argument. Challenge them with this. Will they pull the trigger, or not?

THE MURDER ON A BEACH THOUGHT EXPERIMENT: ON HAVING A SOUL

by Jeffrey A. Corkern

It is my contention, gentle reader, that coldly logical examination---without any call to faith or religion, completely objective analysis---of human behavior reveals humans have souls.  That they really, truly are spirits only temporarily enclosed in flesh, instead of flesh solely.  I have developed a collection of arguments (that I have dubbed “The Nine Point Five Theses”) that attempt to prove this thesis by somewhat abstractly examining various aspects of human behavior and teasing out the assumption of eternal existence that lies at their bottom.  I have then presented them in various forums for two reasons, the first being to show people souls are an entirely rational thing to believe in, and the second being an attempt to stimulate scientific experiments to detect souls.

Unfortunately, these theses haven’t had much impact. (Not always.  The Nine Point Five Theses have rattled some VERY big cages.)  You would think showing people by all odds really do have souls would cause MAJOR excitement, but by and large, that hasn’t been the case.

I suspect at least part of the problem is the abstractness. (And the other part is the people I presented my arguments to really didn’t want to hear they were wrong.) The strength of The Nine Point Five Theses, abstract thought, is also their weakness.  Abstractness, cold unemotional analysis, is fundamentally not exciting.  Abstractness doesn’t reach most people, and as a writer, I know that to truly reach people, on the PERSONAL level, you have to engage them as PERSONALLY as you can.

So, if my abstract arguments were not getting through---then I needed to develop something IMMEDIATE and PERSONAL.  Something that would stun even the most convinced person into wondering whether or not he really did have a soul.

If I wanted to be as convincing as it was possible to be, I had a challenge.  Could I come up with a HIGHLY SPECIFIC situation, a PERSONALLY INVOLVING situation, a scenario that would demonstrate beyond all possible doubt to the gentle reader (at least to those who possess the capacity for intellectual honesty) that he, personally, really and truly acts like he has a soul?

After considerable effort, the following refined thought experiment has evolved.  I offer this experiment for you to participate in, gentle reader.

Do you, or do you not, act like you have a soul?

As always, gentle reader, I invite you to use your own capacity for logic and reason and decide for yourself whether or not I have succeeded in doing this.

You, gentle reader, MUST be the final judge.

Consider the following scenario:

You are standing on a deserted beach with a forty-five pistol in your hand, and you're BROKE AND STARVING, man, not a penny in the world.  All you own is the clothes on your back and the gun in your hand.

You're not quite alone.  Standing out in the surf, with his back to you, is the meanest man in the world, mean as a snake.  This guy wouldn't care if the entire human race died.  He wouldn’t even lift a finger to stop that from happening.  NOBODY likes this guy.  NOBODY would miss him or even think to go looking for him if he disappeared without a trace.  NOBODY needs him.  There will be ZERO consequences to society if this guy just ups and disappears.  This guy is WORTHLESS, man.

 (But one thing this guy ISN'T. He is NOT evil. He doesn't go around hurting people. He pays his taxes and he obeys all laws. He's just mean and worthless. So he does not DESERVE killing. There's NO moral justification for that here. )

He's got a briefcase in his hand.

In the briefcase is a million dollars. (Or whatever amount you think would be enough to make you happy for the rest of your life.)

You've already asked this jerk for money for food, and your face is still stinging from the back of his hand. (But don’t kid yourself into thinking you can kill this guy just because he slapped you, gentle reader. Would a judge let you off?) He's not going to do it.  He's already told you he wouldn't give you a nickel even if it saved your life.

All you have to do is shoot this guy in the back of the head,  throw the gun far out into the ocean, take his briefcase, and you'll be happy for the rest of your life.

And waddya know, the tide is going out.  The body will wash out to sea, along with all the evidence, where it will never be found.  The beach is totally deserted, not another human being for miles around.  Nobody will ever know or will ever find out.

For the purpose of this thought experiment, gentle reader, you may assume your chance of getting away with this murder is EXACTLY one hundred per cent.  There is NO cop standing there watching you.  Justice will NEVER catch up to you.

And, for a kicker, not even YOU will know what you've done.  You've got this pill in your pocket that will erase the last thirty minutes of your memory.  So you will NOT feel, for the rest of your life, the slightest pang of guilt over what you've done.  There will never, ever be, for the rest of your life, the slightest negative consequence. (This pill, by the way, works ONLY for you. It's tuned to your brain chemistry, and will have NO EFFECT on the mean guy. So robbing him and then forcing HIM to take the pill is not an option.)

So all you have to do is blow this worthless guy's brains out, throw the gun far out into the sea, take the briefcase, pop the pill, and POOF!  Suddenly you're standing on a beach with a million dollars in your hands!  I mean, you have no idea how you got the million dollars, but WEEEEEEEEE! YOU'RE RICH AND HAPPY FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE!  Who cares if you can't remember the last thirty minutes?

Now what is your own, PERSONAL choice, gentle reader?  Do you shoot the guy, take the money and the pill?  And walk away rich?

Or not?  Or do you drop the gun to the sand and just walk away?  Broke and starving?

For maximum effect, please make your choice NOW, before reading the rest of this essay. (Note this is NOT a life-or-death situation for you. You can always walk to a soup kitchen or a homeless shelter, and they will give you something to eat and a place to stay.)
     The fundamental question here is: Will you murder an innocent person for entirely selfish reasons, when it is COMPLETELY certain nobody will ever find out, and not even you will remember?

I have offered MANY people this choice, gentle reader.  Believers, non-believers, skeptics, atheists, theists, the whole range of human religious belief and non-belief.

Despite this widely differing range of beliefs, they have all made EXACTLY the same choice.  Without hesitation.

Not one has ever pulled the trigger.  Or even come close to pulling the trigger.

NOT ONE.

What does this human action, this choice, this ABSOLUTE refusal to commit murder, imply, gentle reader?  Is there a common idea we can deduce that explains why ALL these DIFFERENT people would make EXACTLY THE SAME choice?

Let's think about it.

How can we RATIONALIZE this choice?  By that I mean how can we make this refusal to commit murder make sense in the SIMPLEST possible way, IN SCIENTIFIC TERMS?  Be the SMART thing to do, in your self-interest?

In the SIMPLEST terms, (which is scientifically preferred) ONLY if there are negative consequences to the murderer. In the abstract (hard to get away from that), something that will eventually make you unhappy.  From a scientific standpoint, that's the only thing that makes sense. Again from a scientific standpoint, there MUST be some way this choice you made IS IN YOUR SELF-INTEREST.

And it can't be just a little negative consequence, either.  It would have to be one REALLY HUGE negative consequence, to so totally, completely out-weigh a lifetime of complete happiness that refusal to commit murder is done without a second's thought. (Which is what the observed behavior is.)

Except, well, there are NO negative consequences here!  Not even tiny ones!  No shred of guilt, NOTHING!  It's not even remotely possible!  ALL negative consequences have been eliminated!  All the consequences can only be POSITIVE!  So WHY did you make that choice?  It's insane, man!  Nothing's going to happen to you because you murdered that guy for the rest of your life!

For the rest of your life.

Hmph.

You're acting like there would be negative consequences anyway, aren't you.  Like justice would get you anyway and there wouldn't be the slightest thing you could do to escape it.

Except it couldn't happen while you were alive.  That possibility has been deliberately totally eliminated.  ZERO negative consequences to you, ZERO negative consequences to society.

Okay, there is one thing in this situation----AND ONE THING ONLY---that would make the refusal to commit murder RATIONAL.

If the negative consequences can happen to you----AFTER YOU DIE.

If you SURVIVE the death of your physical body.

IF YOU HAVE A SOUL.

And some way, somehow, the negative consequences would find you THEN.

By way of making this as clear as possible, let us back off and come at this again from a simpler standpoint.

You know, there is one slight change we could make to the experiment where the question of WHY that particular choice is made would be easy as pie to understand. It would be immediately obvious, clear and easy to a six-year-old. I mean, right now the choice to not murder seems REALLY strange and hard to understand because there is every reason in the world to pull the trigger and not one reason not to.

What is that change?

Remember I said there was NO cop standing there watching you?

Let’s put one there. Watching YOU.

A great, big, mean, UGLY cop, with one hand on his gun and staring STRAIGHT AT YOU.

Now there’s NO problem understanding the choice to not murder!

You pull the trigger, or even try---you’re going to JAIL, man! For ten, twenty, THIRTY years! You might even be EXECUTED!

YOU’RE GOING TO BE PUNISHED!

(Oh, yeah, sure, try and shoot the cop. One guess who’s going to win the shoot-out. The trained, alert professional in his body armor, or the complete amateur?  It’s a completely flat beach, right? No cover for miles. You’ll get one shot off at most. How unbelievably, incredibly stupid.

Which, by the way, is something VERY important to note. The cop’s presence can’t stop you from committing murder. It only makes it the STUPID thing to do.)

And NOW the simplest reason for that choice you made when the cop was NOT there is clear.

The simplest reason can only be---the SAME reason as before.

Because you’ll be punished for it. AFTER you die. And somewhere deep in your guts is the unconscious knowledge you WILL be punished. That justice is completely, totally inescapable, that you can NOT escape the consequences of your actions.

Although there is NO cop standing there watching you---you are ACTING like there is!  And he can only bust you---AFTER you die!

The refusal to commit murder in this situation can only be rationalized by assuming you have a soul, and that you can't escape justice.  And NOTHING else.

Let's ignore the inescapable-justice assumption and concentrate on ONE thing.

Gentle reader, you may believe you don't have a soul----but when we examine your actions, we discover YOU ACT LIKE YOU DO.

Right?

As always, gentle reader, you get to be the judge.

END

"AFTER THE AWAKENING"

AND NOTHING HEARD MY SCREAM

I have received a request or two from readers for permission to copy and re-post certain essays of The Nine Point Five Theses in other forums.

OKAY, PERMISSION GRANTED---UNDER CERTAIN BROAD CONDITIONS, AND THE STORY "AND NOTHING HEARD MY SCREAM" MAY NOT BE COPIED.

Anyone can copy any of The Nine Point Five Theses and re-post them in other forums, under the following two conditions:

1). You MUST leave my name on it.
2). You may NOT change one single word or re-arrange any of the format of the essay. As is, or not at all.

It would be nice if you would include a link back to this blog site, but I won't insist on it.

AND NOT THE STORY! I'm still not happy with Michael Stone. The final version of the story is not yet done, I think. So I would rather he remain right here for the moment.

Thank you for your co-operation, and rattle all the cages you can.:-)

Meanwhile, back at the blog . . .

LEGAL NOTICE: All Rights Reserved. You may link to this story all you want. You may NOT copy and distribute this in any way, shape, form or fashion without my explicit written permission.


Now, if you don't believe in souls---what's the RATIONAL way for you to act? What effect would such a belief ultimately have on society?

The answer to those questions is simple. Quite stunningly simple. And yet, when that answer is pointed out, the response is surprise, shock---even anger. And a great deal of resistance, of deliberate refusal to understand.

Let me introduce you to somebody who can explain it a lot better than I can. Who will punch that simple answer across, no matter how much you might not want to hear it.

Shake hands with Michael Stone.

AND NOTHING HEARD MY SCREAM
by Jeffrey A. Corkern

My path was long and hard. My path was a path of pain.

My path had driven me to the banks of the Mississippi River, to a journey through clouds of dense, confusing fog, to struggle my way over large slabs of shifting, shattered, cruel rock. The fog dragged at my skin with clammy fingers. Ice needles stabbed my lungs with each labored breath. Vicious chill sucked the heat out of my shivering body. The fog covered the riverbank with dank gray formlessness, the rocks with slick, wet, treachery. I stepped. A slab teetered and slipped from under me. I staggered and went down face-first onto a merciless edge, into starburst red agony. I rose spitting blood and continued on, wondering what the purpose was for it all, wondering if there were any meaning for my pain, if there were any meaning at all.

I had been born onto this path, into this world, this Darwinian jungle world. This was all the reality I had ever known. The journeys of others were easy. Mine was not. My journey had always been one of suffering and solitude, to my constant wondering and bewilderment.

I walked alone, as I always had, always would, in my pocket the only safety I could trust, a forty-five automatic, banging against my hip.

I came upon a dark form, a stranger rendered faceless by the fog.

"Hello," the stranger said. He wore a thick coat that kept him warm and safe from the fog's hungry cold. A child of the soft paths, a child of privilege. "Who are you?"

"I am Michael Stone. And you?"

"I am," the stranger replied, "Just Plain Old Skeptic. Did you know there are no souls?"

"Really?" I asked. Deep inside me, a spark of anger flared at the Universe’s infinite cruelty. "How do we know this?"

"The greatest scientific geniuses in all of history have assured us souls don’t exist."

"I have long suspected as much," I said. The spark flashed into a flame of rage, into a light that illuminated and distilled all the experiences of my journey into one blinding insight. "If there are no souls, the only rational thing to be is a sociopath."

Just Plain Old Skeptic smiled, a streak of white smeared against the blur.

"What an absurd statement," he said. “You are a silly woo.”

The statement stunned me. What a complete fool. I looked around for witnesses. We were an island of two in the fog, alone and isolated, beyond the reach of all justice. I raised my arm and pointed behind Just Plain Old Skeptic.

"Look," I said, "behind you. It is the great genius Dawkins himself."

Just Plain Old Skeptic actually turned his back to me to look. I drew the forty-five silent as a ghost, brought the muzzle to the side of his head and squeezed the trigger. In the fog, the crack of the round was flat and lifeless. Just Plain Old Skeptic became Just Plain Dead Skeptic. Red and gray brains pattered like gentle raindrops over the Mississippi's surface. Just Plain Old Skeptic pitched forward onto the rocks and was still.

I pulled that fine, warm coat off his body and put it on.

"Do you see it now?" I asked him. I flicked his brains off a sleeve. "Now is it clear?" I ran my hand over silken cloth as warmth spread through my being. "Once I was cold. Now I am warm. And all it will ever cost me is this spent shell. How my action affected you will never affect me. How was my action not rational?"

I bent over and picked up the spent shell. I looted the rest of Just Plain Old Skeptic's body and eased him into the river.

A gator rose and drew him under, and Just Plain Old Skeptic turned to nothing, disappeared, gone, wiped out, vanished, zeroed, ERASED, like he had never been.

I continued on my journey, slipping and struggling over rock, feeling a deep sense of confirmation. My anger at the Universe grew into a knife of rage in my guts, a knife that twisted and burned, aching for release. Another faceless stranger rose in the fog.

"Hello," he said. His skin was soft and unmarked, without a single scar. Another child of ease. "I am Sternly Rational."

"Hello," I said. "I am Michael Stone. Did you know there are no souls?"

"I do indeed," he said. "All smart and strong people know this."

"To the Universe, you and I are nothing, then," I said. "Human beings are nothing. We come and are gone like puffs of mist. The Universe is cruel beyond belief."

"You have grasped a hard truth," Sternly Rational replied, and cast his hand at the sky. "What is puny, weak, ephemeral Man, that the mighty Universe must be mindful of him?"

"To the Universe, zero," I said, "less than the dust beneath our feet. Our thoughts, our actions, have no physically real meaning in the end."

"I see you are one of the smart and strong who can grasp this hard truth and not hide from its sting, as am I," Sternly Rational said. "One must pity those who lack the strength to face this, who must take refuge from the Great Emptiness in the delusions of religion."

"How should I act, knowing this?" I asked.

My question took Sternly Rational by surprise. He stepped back in puzzlement.

"I can't see how this would have any effect on how you should act," he said. "I haven't thought about it. What do you think it means?"

"My actions are free and uninhibited," I said. I drew my forty-five. "Since I do not exist eternally, I can escape the consequences of my actions."

"What?" Sternly Rational asked in a confused tone. "I don't understand."

"I may do as I wish," I said. "Without an immortal soul, the Universe began when I was born and will end when I die. I am therefore absolutely alone, a Universe of One. Anything I can get away with is rational." I aimed and fired. "Any feeling of connection I might have to the rest of humanity is strictly false and an illusion."

I missed my shot. Instead of smashing his head, I tore Sternly Rational's throat out, a red raw-meat wound like a great gaping mouth slashed open underneath his chin.

Sternly Rational put his hand to his throat and made a gargling sound of terrible surprise. He folded over onto the rocks making wet, bloody sounds.

He wasn’t dead. It wasn't safe to approach. I backed away and sat down to wait while Sternly Rational twitched and jerked and became Sadly Rational. I thought and watched a red stream flow into a brown one, bloom out into the water, and fade away. I brooded over the implications of this new fundamental insight as it spread throughout humanity.

The Universe didn't care. I was nothing. All humanity was nothing. Pressure clamped down on my mind from all sides, gentle, inescapable, inexorable, raw evolution itself, growing into pain as my understanding deepened.

For every human being I met, if he could kill me for whatever I had and get away with it---that was the smart thing for him to do. This was a new physical truth, the way the Universe was. Every single person I met was now a potential killer, everywhere, all the time, forever. The smarter he was, the more likely he would be to kill me.

What would this new physical truth do to the human race?

I felt a society, an entire world, crashing down in flames.

The flowing stopped. I rose, picked up the spent shell, and looted Sternly Rational's body. I rolled Sternly Rational's flaccid body to the river, tumbling it over the rocks. He went in without a splash.

Another gator rose and pulled him down in a swirl of water and Sternly Rational turned to nothing, disappeared, gone, wiped out, vanished, zeroed, ERASED, like he had never been.

I continued down my path. The rage, the fire, jumped in me, roared and built up white-hot in my guts, began transforming me, forging me into a new being, evolving me. A line of V's formed in the river behind me as the gators followed. Around me, the confusing fog began to lift, rising to clarity, rising to final revelation.

Another faceless stranger appeared, clad in expensive clothing, fat, well-fed. The gators sank out of sight to safety, like the perfect Darwinian sociopaths they were, to await my gift.

"I am Michael Stone," I said. I gripped the forty-five in my pocket. "There are no souls."

"I am Naïve Skeptic," the stranger replied. "Of course there are not. Such a transparently foolish, impossible notion, clearly born out of desperation and fear of death."

"People everywhere will soon finally realize what that means," I said. "Killing is smart. A rational thing to do to get what you want."

"Oh, fudge," Naïve Skeptic said, with the blindness of a lifetime of comfort. "People would never do such a horrible thing. People are nice."

"People are not nice," I said, and fired. Naïve Skeptic snapped backward with a little round hole in the front of his head and a big round hole in the back. He lay on the rocks staring up at the sky with a permanent stare, Forever Wide-Eyed Skeptic. "People are smart. 'Homo nice' is not what people are. People are Homo sapiens, Homo smart. That's what people are."

I picked up the spent shell. I looted Naïve Skeptic's body and dragged the idiot to the river. The gators surfaced like ancient gray submarines, sank their teeth into Naïve Skeptic, and Naïve Skeptic turned to nothing, disappeared, gone, wiped out, vanished, zeroed, ERASED, like he had never been.

The gators and I continued our journey. My anger continued to rise. Hot-lava anger coursed through my bones, flamed in my fingertips. The pressure of being nothing crushed in on my skull. The fog continued to lift, patches of clear sunlight moving along the rocks.

I smelled him before I saw him.

A pungent, sweetly aromatic smell cut through the fog. The stranger stood on a rock with a burning tube of something clasped tightly between his fingers. As I approached, he put the burning tube in his mouth, took a deep drag and held it in his lungs.

“I am Michael Stone,” I said. The stranger turned to face me. His face bore a dazed, sweetly beatific expression. His eyes were shot through with viscous red lines. Although we were less than an arm's-length apart, he squinted at me as if he could barely see me in the fog, as if I were a long way away. “There are no souls. We are all nothing.”

The stranger expelled a massive cloud of smoke from his lungs.

“I am Barely Here Skeptic,” he gasped, coughing. “Yeah. It's a bitch, dude, but that's the way it is. All the scientists tell us this, and they should know, shouldn't they.” He offered me the burning tube. “Here, dude, I got the cure for it all. The finest, most expensive emotion drug in the world, primo stuff. Have a toke. All your pain will go away and you will feel completely happy, I promise. You can hide from the agony of being nothing for all of your life.”

“No.”

Barely Here Skeptic's eerie red eyes opened wide in shock.

“What?” he exclaimed. “It don't make no damn difference what you do with your life, dude! We are all helpless little nothings, man! Getting stoned and staying that way is the smartest thing to do! Why the hell not?”

“I am not weak.”

Barely Here Skeptic blinked and became sullen. He closed in on himself.

“Yeah, well, screw you, dude,” he said. “Watch this. Watch me make you go completely away.” He put the glowing tube between his lips and took a deep drag.

And he did it. The emotion drug hit him, and he went completely away, became completely unconnected to the Universe. Although his eyes were open, he saw nothing, lost in an addled haze of induced emotion. When I pressed the cold steel barrel of the forty-five between his eyes, he didn't even twitch.

He was happy.

I squeezed the trigger and blew his stoned brains out. Barely Here Skeptic became Not Here At All Skeptic. The burning tube dropped from his lips and vanished between the rocks. Barely Here Skeptic folded in on himself like an empty sack and dropped, going down without a sound.

I bent over and picked up the spent shell. I looted Barely Here Skeptic's body. I got him by the collar and dragged him to the river, gagging at the stench of the emotion drug that clung to his body.

I dropped Barely Here Skeptic into the river. The gators sniffed him for a moment, then dragged him down, and Barely Here Skeptic turned to nothing, disappeared, gone, wiped out, vanished, zeroed, ERASED, like he had never been.

I turned and continued on my journey, wondering if there were anybody he had been connected to, anybody who would miss him.

The gators saw the next one before I did, submerging beneath the surface, leaving only a ripple behind to betray their presence.

This time, I could see his face, but did not wish to. There was nothing there that meant a damn thing.

"I am Michael Stone," I said. "There are no souls, and soon society will dissolve from within, in an overwhelming wave of slaughter, as people realize this means killing is smart."

The stranger smiled in a superior fashion.

"I am Hypercomplex Skeptic," he said. "Oh, my friend, no, such an awful thing could never happen, because it would destroy the gene pool. I have spent my life of ease and affluence, which I deserve for being a superior Darwinian competitor, in the study of these matters, and I know it all."

"The gene pool?" I asked. "Please explain."

"You are suffering from the delusion of free will," Hypercomplex Skeptic said. "What you think is consciousness and free will are actually only emergent properties of the Darwinian non-linear electrochemical competition between your brain cells, which themselves are controlled by the structure of their genetic makeup."

"Darwinian non-linear electrochemical competition? And this means?"

"It is not what we want that controls our actions, my friend, but what our genes want," Hypercomplex Skeptic said. "We are only zombies, controlled by our genes!"

I drew my forty-five and aimed it at Hypercomplex Skeptic.

"Is this not Darwinian competition? What you believe in?" I asked him over the sights. "Am I not now the superior Darwinian competitor?" I squeezed the trigger. The bullet slammed Hypercomplex Skeptic backward onto the rocks, turned him into Simply Dead Skeptic.

"I had a gene I didn't like once," I said to the corpse, "so I changed it. If I can change my genes, I am controlling my genes. They surely are not controlling me. How incredibly stupid, my friend. What an absolute, utter fool you were."

I picked up the spent shell. I looted Hypercomplex Skeptic's body. I picked his body up and held it over my head. The gators rose and came for Hypercomplex Skeptic. I watched the perfect Darwinian sociopaths come and realized they were my brothers, my evolutionary goal, what the Universe wanted me and all humanity to evolve into. I blessed Hypercomplex Skeptic to the river. My brothers the gators accepted my benison with open mouths. They pulled Hypercomplex Skeptic under, and Hypercomplex Skeptic turned to nothing, disappeared, gone, wiped out, vanished, zeroed, ERASED, like he had never been.

I turned away and continued down my jagged path, feeling the anger twist and burn inside me, the evolutionary pressure re-shape me to the core of my being. With every uncertain step, my transformation grew more complete.

Another stranger in the distance. My step quieted. He only heard me when I was close.

"I am Michael Stone," I said as he turned. "There are no souls. This means anybody who is smart should be a killer."

"I am Apologetic Skeptic," the stranger said, waved a manicured hand and looked helpless. "Maybe, well, yes, but I have signed the social contract, and would never do such a savage thing."

"I refuse to sign that contract," I said. The forty-five roared its oblivion. The back of Apologetic Skeptic's head spouted brains, and he went down Sorry As Hell Skeptic. "Me and a million other savages. Your 'social contract' is totally stupid. It has no physically real enforcement mechanism I am absolutely forced to respect, and is therefore not worth the paper it's not written on."

I picked up the spent shell. I looted Apologetic Skeptic's body and hurled him to the gators. They fought to be first to get him. Apologetic Skeptic splashed into a ferocious maelstrom of roiling gray, was torn into pieces and sucked down, turned to nothing, disappeared, gone, wiped out, vanished, zeroed, ERASED, like he had never been.

I knew I was close to the end of my journey. The fire inside me bubbled and burned in anticipation. My brothers and I continued on. The last of the fog lifted away, and I walked on the harsh, brutal landscape of final Truth. My evolution, my transformation, was complete.

I had become the supreme killer the Universe wanted me to be.

Again, fresh prey for me and my brothers, another stranger standing balanced on a rock contemplating the river.

"I am Michael Stone," I said. I edged closer. "I have no immortal soul, so the only rational thing I can be is a sociopath."

The stranger turned to face me.

His eyes froze me in place.

The Great Emptiness burned in his eyes, a vast inhuman blankness beyond all hope of light, a gaze before which all humanity shriveled and vanished away to utter insignificance, a total disconnect beyond anything I had ever seen.

"I am Stone-Cold Genius," he said. "Precisely true. I have understood that for a very long time now. Hello, brother."

"You understand already? I’m not the first?"

"Not even the ten-thousand-and-first," Stone-Cold Genius said. His blank eyes burned at me. "There are many of us who understand, hidden in the shadows and the darkness."

"Check my reasoning, so I can be sure it is right," I said. "Tell me what remains of the history of Man."

"Come, let us reason together," Stone-Cold Genius said. "I challenge you. Tell me how you think the end of humanity will come."

"If there are no souls, the only rational thing to be is a sociopath," I said. "All of society's members will evolve into sociopaths. The smarter you are, the quicker you will turn. But sociopaths hate society by definition. Society must inevitably collapse, in a tidal wave of murder."

Stone-Cold Genius shook his head.

"No," he said. "Your understanding is not complete. Your logic is correct, but people don't think logically. They think emotionally. Tell me. What does the lack of immortal souls mean? What are scientists telling us about life?"

"That life is a random occurrence in an uncaring Universe," I said.

"And this means what, in a physical sense?"

"All human action is physically equivalent and physically meaningless."

"To the Universe, what are human beings? What are you?"

"Nothing."

"And human beings will feel what about this?"

Clarity struck like a steel hammer. I stood revealed to myself. Truly his understanding was deeper.

"Rage," I said. "Rage and despair."

"And the effect of this on society?"

"Killing," I said. "There will be rising numbers of little massacres. Random killing sprees, murder-suicides, that will seem to happen out of nowhere and for no reason at all."

"What is mass murder, in the end?"

"The same as all other human action. Nothing."

"Correct," Stone-Cold Genius said. "Who will start the killing?”

“The fresh, unclouded minds, who will perceive this new physical truth clearly, without being blinded by the prejudices of the past,” I said. “The children. The first little massacres will be committed by children.”

“Have you and I both not seen precisely such little massacres?” Stone-Cold Genius asked. “Let us recite their number!"

"Harris and Klebold at Columbine," I said.

"Woodham at Pearl! Weise at Red Lake!"

"Kinkel at Springfield."

"Malvo at Washington! Gill at Montreal! Rouse at Lynville! The Oriental Boys at Sacramento!"

"Cho at Virginia Tech."

"Tell me," Stone-Cold Genius said. "Why did children commit mass murder?"

"They were angry. Because they had been treated like nothing."

"What did science tell them they really were? What did the Universe tell them they really were?"

"That they really were nothing."

Stone-Cold Genius spread his arms wide in complete futility.

"Our children are our future!" he cried. "And they will be called the Children of the Slaughter! What unimaginable horror will they unleash upon the human race?"

The future was torn open before me like a curtain. I stood on a high point overlooking an infinite plain. I saw the surprise massacre of Man.

"The little massacres will continue, grow in number, and become bigger and bigger massacres," I said. I ascended to new levels of knowing. I saw the cities die. People by the millions ran screaming in the streets, only to drop coughing fountains of red and die writhing in agony in puddles of their own blood. "You will see them more and more often in the news, until they become common. The record for the number murdered at one time will be broken again, and again, and again. The death toll will rise exponentially, to dozens, then thousands, then tens of millions."

"How? How could this impossible murder happen? What awful thing could make it possible?"

"Technology."

"What is the essence of the power technology has given us?" Stone-Cold Genius asked. "The ability of one to massacre millions at the push of a button. All hail mighty technology, savior of Mankind! Now one man can kill another man with a finger's barest twitch on a trigger."

"One lone angry Child, one lone killer, one lone mass murderer, all on his own," I said.

"Your understanding grows," Stone-Cold Genius said. "One lone angry Child can kill dozens by breaking a bag of manufactured Sarin in a city's subway."

"One lone angry Child can kill tens of thousands by releasing refined anthrax spores into a city's wind," I said. I looked into the coming years. Stinking heaps of rotting bodies filled the cities. Blood ran like water in the gutters. Rising crematoria smoke blackened the sky, the entire Earth.

“Even as we speak, scientists are picking out the smartest of our children and teaching them they are nothing,” Stone-Cold Genius said. “What will they feel? What will grow deep inside them with each lesson?”

“Pain,” I said. “Pain and anger.”

“What will they become?”

“The apotheosis, the highest form, of the completely Darwinian human,” I said. “With the silly, ignorant superstition that the Universe cares burned out of his skull.”

“The brightest, most intelligent expression of man in the uncaring Universe,” Stone-Cold Genius said.

“In a state of constant and unending agony,” I said. “The screaming killer genius.”

"Soon, very, very soon," Stone-Cold Genius said, "one lone angry Child, one lone screaming killer genius, will be able to murder tens of millions with a mere tap of a button, or the twisting of an aerosol-release valve. What does this mean?"

"At its core," I said, "human civilization is violently unstable.”

"Your understanding is complete,” Stone-Cold Genius said.

“Given the current high level of technology,” I said, “it can’t possibly survive much longer."

“What must be the inescapable fate of the human race?"

"On a day of complete peace and calm, out of the clear blue sky and utterly without warning, human civilization will be attacked," I said, caught up in the madness of world-wide massacre, "and destroyed, like twin towers crashing down."

"Yes, we grasp the ultimate meaning, you and I," Stone-Cold Genius said. Total understanding glared from his eyes like total insanity. "Only a physically real restraint could stop it from happening, and there is no such thing. The historical forces of Science and Technology are driving humanity to an inevitable, unavoidable end. One lone angry Child, one lone screaming killer genius, in an act of rage and despair at being nothing, will soon manufacture and release a technological creation obscene beyond imagining, for no reason other than mass murder, that will wipe out the entire human race."

"I feel its name hanging in the air like the blade of a guillotine," I whispered. "The Damnation Flu."

"A whirlwind of death is coming to smite the entire world," Stone-Cold Genius said. "It will be every man for himself. The smart will survive only if they prepare and strike first."

"Tell me," I said, "why are you here?"

"Hunting," Stone-Cold Genius said, and moved like a striking snake, but I fired first, and turned Stone-Cold Genius into Stone-Dead Genius, lying at the river's edge with muddy water lapping into his empty skull.

My brothers undulated to the river's edge to get him. I barely had time to loot Stone-Cold Genius' body and put the forty-five in his hand. The haul was rich. He had been having a long, successful hunt. His experience had apparently been exactly like mine. There were many, many fools who couldn’t or wouldn’t understand.

I stepped back and let my brothers have him. They yanked him down, and Stone-Cold Genius turned to nothing, disappeared, gone, wiped out, vanished, zeroed, ERASED, like he had never been.

I picked up the last spent shell and tossed them all into the river, severing all connection to the events here, to the past. I exhaled a long breath and took stock of my journey in the light of my new understanding and transformation.

The value gained: Three thousand, five hundred ninety-eight dollars.

The value lost: One forty-five, seven shells.

The value of the humans killed: Zero.

I had shown a profit.

That was smart.

"If there are no souls, the only rational thing to be is a sociopath," I whispered to the Great Emptiness. "How strange that this is so difficult to see."

But of course, the Great Emptiness made no reply.

The Universe didn't care, never had. How insane, to want such a thing. I stared out over all of human history and added it all up, all the pain and misery of all humanity throughout all of history. It rolled over me and crushed me like a bug, all the empty suffering and death. Billions upon billions of human beings had lived and died lives composed only of completely purposeless anguish and pain, and none of it had been worth it. It had all had absolutely zero meaning.

The Universe was an infinite death camp, a vast Hell house, whose only real purpose was to inflict as much pain and torture as it could on all of its inhabitants.

The Universe was an abomination.

The anger boiled and erupted inside me with a volcano’s force, ripped its way up through my guts, forced its way out to the Great Emptiness in a long, primal scream of rage so crystalline and pure it threw my mind reeling and shaking into horror.

And nothing, nothing at all, heard my scream or felt my horror.

I came back from horror lying face-down on the rocks. My final duty shone clear in my mind. I had finally found the purpose for my journey.

The Universe had to be destroyed. Smashed beyond all hope of recovery, blotted out of existence, thrown back into the Great Emptiness it came from.

A wild laughter ran through me. The Universe had created its own destruction.

Blood was running into my eyes from a cut on my scalp. I staggered up, wiped the blood from my eyes, and headed away from the river. The onrushing doom of Man prodded me, hurrying my step. I fingered the money in my hand. Time was short, and I had much to do.

The Slaughter was coming.

END

"AFTER THE AWAKENING"

On Detecting Souls: A Proposed Experiment

On Detecting Souls: A Proposed Experiment

-or-

There Was This Cat-Soul That Went Through My Chest Once---

by Jeffrey A. Corkern

What happens to people when they die?

It is the purpose of The Nine Point Five Theses to light a fire under scientists' rear ends and get them pounding away on finally answering this question. To, quite precisely, get scientists to attempt to find souls by building a soul-detector and detecting souls under rigorous laboratory conditions. I have a suggestion about how to conduct this experiment based on a personal experience of mine.

But first:

Is the question of what happens when people die an important question? Is this something critical the human race MUST absolutely, positively know the answer to one day, be the answer positive or negative?

Um, yes, it is. I will not justify that answer here. Why this is true is laid out in the various theses that follow this opening piece. I will leave that answer hanging as a hook to draw the gentle reader into reading The Nine Point Five Theses posted here.

But yes, it is in fact CRITICALLY important for the human race to know the answer to this question. The human race is rapidly approaching the point where it will be vital for us to truly know what happens when people die. To know the answer as precisely as it is possible to know it. To know it by the best tool the human race has for knowing things.

To know it by using the tool---of science.

The answer to the question of life after death, or not, must be known, and SOON----to a SCIENTIFIC certainty.

Why now, I can hear the gentle reader ask. The human race has been getting along just fine for all of its existence so far without knowing the answer to this question. Why is it suddenly so critical to the human race the answer to this question be known NOW?

Because there are certain choices technology is about to make available to human beings, and what choice will be the smartest one to make is going to depend on whether or not human beings have souls, or don't. Whether a human being is no more than his physical body, or are really, truly, immortal souls that merely occupy physical bodies from time to time.

Again, what those technological choices are I won't specify here. They are contained in The Nine Point Five Theses, and again I leave what these choices will be as a hook to draw the gentle reader into going through them. They are quite amazing things, these new gadgets. You can see them coming in the technological developments of today.

So how do we go about applying the tool of science to answering this question?

The first thing to do is to see if we can develop a consistent physical theory. A physical theory of souls. If we can develop a completely rigorous, self-consistent theory of souls, we will have gone a VERY long way towards convincing scientists to conduct experiments to detect souls.

And so are born The Nine Point Five Theses. They are that foundation theory.

Are they rigorous? Are they self-consistent? Are they so completely rigorous and self-consistent any thinking scientist is immediately going to go flying to his laboratory and start trying to build a soul-detector?

That, gentle reader, is YOUR judgment to make---NOT MINE.

Because it's all about reason and logic here, man. I am writing "2+2=4" up on the board here for all the world to see---but I am NOT insisting you believe it simply because I say so.

I insist the gentle reader use his own judgement, his own personal capacity for critical thinking, for thinking coldly, rationally, and objectively, to determine whether or not this theory is correct and rigorous---or isn't.

One thing I DEMAND here.

Critical thinking.

Critical thinking, I ABSOLUTELY demand. Toss what you think you know out the window before reading The Nine Point Five Theses. Toss all your scientifically unproven assumptions right out. Read these things with a totally open mind.

Now, about the suggested soul-detection experiment. About the cat-soul-diving-through-my-chest thing.

Once upon a time, many years ago while I was living in Lafayette, Louisiana, I had a cat.

"Shovel Puss" was her name. A bit of a play on words, you see, she was, if you'll pardon the pun, a "spayed cat."

And she was dying.

Hepatic lipidosis, the vet said, fat cells invading the liver, and there was nothing anybody could do.

I first discovered her condition one morning when I saw that her skin had turned yellow and hauled her furry tail to the vet. The vet said all we could do was "support" her, in medical terms, and hope she got better all by herself. In practical terms, this meant inserting an IV tube into her so she could at least be hydrated, and leaving her in the vet's office for several days where he could keep an eye on her.

So I left her there, and dropped by in the afternoon to check on her and see how she was doing. This went on, oh, for at least several days. It was many years ago, and I'm not clear on the details now.

One afternoon on one visit, a Thursday I think, Shovel Puss looked dead at me and hollered REAL LOUD about how she wanted to leave this vet's office and go home right NOW, dammit!

So I took her home. The vet gave me a syringe filled with some kind of drug--for pain, I think--and gave me instruction on how to give a cat a shot. (You fold up the cat's skin between your fingers, insert the syringe into the fold, and gently push the plunger down.)

The vet told me to bring her back in the morning. No problem. Shovel Puss was ecstatic to be back in her own place, despite being very weak. She had a nice visit, and the next morning I gathered up and put her in my car and carried her back to the vet's office.

This Shovel Puss did NOT like. She took one look at the vet's office and deflated like the air going out of a balloon. She had had enough of the vet's office. I didn't like doing it, but I left her there and went off to work.

About 11:30 I left work to go to a restaurant for lunch. There was no other customers in the restaurant as it was early. I ordered a baked chicken lunch, which arrived promptly.

Just before I took my first bite, a "ball of energy" appeared, oh, about six feet in front of me and three feet up. It dived at me, entered my chest just to the left of my heart, went through me chest, exited just under and to the right of my left shoulder blade, continued on for a few more feet, and disappeared.

When I say "ball of energy", it's because I have no other words to describe it. There was no light, no sound, nothing in any of the normal physical senses.

This was so completely, totally, out of the realm of my experience I had no reaction beyond a certain befuddlement. Although I must confess I had a sneaking suspicion my poor kitty cat was gone.

I just ate my lunch and left.

When I got back to work I was told I had gotten a phone call while I was out. I called the number. It was my vet.

He informed me he had had to put Shovel Puss to sleep "a short while ago."

So.

I cannot, in a rigorous, scientific sense, claim that "ball of energy" was Shovel Puss's soul, a cat-soul. I, ahem, left my soul-detector home that day.

What I can do is propose the following soul-detection experiment.

There are these little widgets called SQUIDs, Superconducting Quantum Interference Detectors, which have the ability to detect VERY small electromagnetic fields. I propose constructing a sphere of these devices, putting a cat to sleep in the middle of it, and trying to detect the cat's soul---assuming it exists---as it leaves the cat's body and passes through the SQUIDs.

Since cats are used and not human beings, a great number of ethical concerns are avoided. The experiment becomes easy.

To make it completely ethical, we will only use cats that are about to be put to sleep anyway. I point out that if cats have souls, we are doing no real harm. We are only separating the cats' souls from their bodies.

(Y'all pardon me a minute. I got to excite some scientist egos here. These scientist people are all about "credit", i.e. ego.

To all you scientists out there:

What if I am right? What if The Nine Point Five Theses really, truly are rigorous and self-consistent?

What if souls exist as real, physical entities?

What would happen to any scientist who succeeded in detecting souls? You think he/she might win so many Nobel Prizes he/she could cover the walls of his/her office with them? You think he/she would have grant money pouring out of his/her ears for the rest of his/her life? You think they'd go down in history for conducting the most significant experiment in the history of mankind? You think people walking down the street would see them, point their finger at them, scream out their name, and faint dead away?

I think it might happen EXACTLY like that. What do you scientists think?

For you scientists who take up this challenge---happy hunting.)

A closing word about The Nine Point Five Theses.

Read them in any order you want. They can be read in any order. They are independent of each other.

And there aren't actually nine point five theses, at least not yet. So far, there are only four theses. The extra two are left-over blogs from a time when this site was a daily blog. They have ideas in them the gentle reader might find interesting, so I left them in.

Each of The Nine Point Five Theses has an underlying theme. I list them below to help the reader understand them.

---"On Emotion Drugs"

Why are emotion drugs illegal? Why is the War On Drugs being fought so vigorously? They seem like such harmless things. This thesis answers that question. The answer will surprise you. Emotion drugs are an incredibly fundamental attack on the basis of society. For a non-scientist, this is probably the thesis you should read first.

On an abstract level, this thesis shows what effect immortal souls would have on a society's basic rules of behavior, specifically what an individual immortal soul may and may not do to get happy.

---"On The Sentient Constraints Of A Sentient-Containing Universe"

This is the rock-bottom of all The Nine Point Five Theses. This thesis explains why something as weird as immortal souls MUST exist in the first place. (They make a sentient-containing Universe stable, as in safe from its sentients, if you must know RIGHT NOW.) If you are a scientist, read this thesis first.

---"The Happiness Box: A Short Scene"

The intent here is to get the gentle reader to examine his own actions, and see if he, personally, all his life, has been acting like he has a soul---but just hadn't realized it.

What would YOUR choice be, gentle reader? Would YOU choose to go into a Happiness Box, or not?

---"On Souls"

This one is two parts. In the first part, I derive a single, simple rule that encompasses all of human motivation. Since this rule involves souls, in the next part I examine human action to see if we can find evidence of souls in it. I do this by deriving what would the SMART way for a person to act if he does NOT have a soul, and the SMART way for a person to act if he DOES. I close by examining the ultimate effect of having or not having a soul on society.

To those who take up the challenge of reading and analyzing The Nine Point Five Theses for yourself---happy thinking.

(And for those of you who find The Nine Point Five Theses completely rigorous and logical:

HELP ME SPARK THE SOUL-DETECTION EXPERIMENTS.

If you know a scientist who could carry out soul-detection experiments---show him/her The Nine Point Five Theses. After they get their Nobel Prize, they will thank you profusely.

If you don't know any scientists, then, if you would please, at least help me spread the word. Digg this if you can, post links, and so forth, whatever you can think of that'll help spread the word and start a debate that will end, I absolutely guarantee you, in scientists finally doing experiments to detect souls.

Little help here?)

And I'm done.

I guarantee you all an interesting read.

END

"AFTER THE AWAKENING"

The Happiness Box: A Short Scene

THE HAPPINESS BOX: A SHORT SCENE
by Jeffrey A. Corkern

DRAMATIS PERSONAE:

Andrew: A married man with a wife and kids. A good and kind man who loves his wife and children very much.

But Andrew is also a man who doesn’t believe he has a soul.

Jeff Corkern: Me.

Scene opens:

Me and Andrew are on a stage. I am standing stage left, Andrew is stage right sitting in a chair. In the rear and center of the stage, Andrew’s wife and two children are sitting, watching both of us.

"Andrew, man," I say, "I’m going to do you a favor. I’ve got a gadget that will make you happy permanently."

Andrew raises an eyebrow in mild disbelief.

I walk off-stage and return pushing what looks like a large steel coffin on wheels.

"Andrew," I say, "this is a Happiness Box."

I open the top of the box. Inside is revealed a very large computer, plus various clear plastic tanks containing fluids and tubes running to those tanks. At top, in the region where a head would lay, is an open metal sphere with what looks like half a hollow basketball with tiny electrodes spiking out all over its interior. All the wires and tubes in the box lead to the metal sphere.

"Andrew," I say, "this box is the ultimate in virtual reality, the absolutely latest ultra-cool advance in high technology. It works like this. Surgeons will remove your brain and place it in this basketball-looking thingy here. Then the surgeons permanently implant electrodes into your brain’ sensory nerves---hearing, seeing, touching, tasting, smelling, everything. In the box is a computer that will feed impulses into the electrodes attached to your sensory nerves. The computer will be programmed to keep your brain in perfect health and give you whatever you want. Essentially what happens is your current life is replaced by another life---"

Andrew's wife and children look at Andrew with sudden concern.

"No," Andrew says, sharply and with total revulsion. "Who would take care of my children? Who would love them?"

Andrew's wife and children look relieved.

"Please don’t interrupt, Andrew," I say, "it’s rude. Essentially what happens is your current life is replaced by another life---except this life will be perfect. Before you go into the box, you can program any kind of life you want ---"

"No," says Andrew, interrupting again. "I am not interested."

"Please, Andrew, mind your manners," I say mildly. "I’m still not finished. When you go into the box, all memories of the box itself will be erased. So, as far as you will know, the life you are living inside the box will be perfectly real."

"Not interested," Andrew says. "You’re talking about abandoning my family."

"Yeah," I say. "So what? We’ll just chop that memory out, too."

"Forget it," Andrew says, "not a chance."

"Andrew, you’re not thinking," I say. "You’re passing up a golden opportunity. All you are is your brain, right? Reality is just a current of sensory impulses going into your brain and being processed in various ways. That’s all you are. Physically speaking, all we are going to do is replace the sensory current portion with another sensory current. By all logic and reason, it will be precisely the same, precisely as real as the life you are living now."

"Jeff," Andrew says, "you are wasting your time. No."

"It’s my time to waste," I say. "I’m only trying to do you a favor."

"By telling me to abandon my wife and children? Hardly."

"We can wipe the memory of that out after you’re in the box!" I protest. "You’ll never know you did it! C’mon, man! Why not?"

"It’s not ethical!"

"Now tell me, please," I ask, "what does the word ‘ethical’ mean in any physical terms? In terms of volts and newtons? You’re not making any sense."

Andrew shakes his head and looks stubborn.

"What’s the physical difference?" I ask. "What physical experiment could you perform that could tell you the difference? That you were inside a Happiness Box?"

"I don’t know, and I certainly don’t care," Andrew says. "I’m not going to do it."

I sigh in a forbearing fashion.

"Let me point out as precisely as I can what you’re giving up," I say. "Surely you will see the light of reason then. Andrew, what do you really, truly want? In the Happiness Box, you can have it, and more. Would you like to see your children always be obedient and never give you any trouble? Done. Would you like to see your children grow up and win Nobel Prizes? No problem. Be a rich man with no money worries, live in a big, fancy house on the beach? A mere few lines of code. We can even dispense with sensory experience altogether and just shoot the juice to your pleasure centers. Permanent bliss."

"No."

"Well, what about women, then? The supermodel of your choice. All of them. One, a hundred, a thousand. They’re all in there, every single one, waiting for you."

"No."

"Look," I say, "there are going to be lots of people who will be more than happy to jump into this box with both feet. They’re going to be fighting each other by the millions to get a Happiness Box of their own. Even fathers. Join the crowd. Everybody else will be doing it."

"Perhaps they will," Andrew says, "but I shall not. That thing is an abomination. No."

"Andrew," I sigh, "you’re a hard case. Here’s yet another advantage. When you’re in the box, we’re going to put it deep underground. You will not be exposed to new diseases, or environmental carcinogens, or be in danger of dying by accident, or terrorist attack, or any of a thousand other different dangers. Since you also won’t have a body, it will be impossible for you to die of a million different ailments. Which all adds up to one thing. When you’re in the box, you will be safe, Andrew, safe beyond your wildest dreams, and you will as a consequence live a very long time, maybe hundreds of years."

"No."

"Okay," I say, "you force me to do this. I wanted to avoid this, but now I have no choice. I told you I was trying to do you a favor. Now I will tell you why."

I raise my hands to indicate the entire stage.

"This reality we’re in now can be a terrible place, a place of absolute, bone-crushing horror," I say. "What’s the most horrible thing you can imagine? I bet I know. Watching your children die slowly and painfully of cancer while you stand by utterly helpless to remove their pain. I can save you that." I point at the box. "In the box, that can’t happen. In the box, Andrew, nothing bad can ever happen to you."

"No."

"That’s nuts," I say. "That’s absolutely nuts. Do you understand what you’re turning down? A long life of perfect peace and happiness, for a short life that is certain to contain pain and suffering. Will you turn that down? Will you?"

"I will," Andrew says flatly. "To raise my children and keep them safe, to love my wife and children, I will take the short life of pain and suffering."

"You’re a good man, Andrew," I say. "But I want to ask you one question. Is what you’re doing rational according to your belief system? All I’m doing, from your perspective, is replacing one sensory stream with another, much better one---and yet you turn it down, and it’s not even close. Does that make sense?"

"I will concede it’s not rational," Andrew says. "But I’d rather be irrational than abandon my family."

"Okay," I say, tossing my hands up theatrically, "I give up."

Hanging my head in a defeated fashion, I push the box off-stage.

I return bearing a flat, oblong package of a green, leafy material wrapped in clear plastic.

"You won’t let me make you happy permanently," I say, "so let me at least make you happy for a little while."

I lay the package at Andrew’s feet and back away.

"That’s marijuana," I say. "Happy toking. Just bend over and pick it up."

Three great, big, mean, UGLY police officers enter from behind Andrew and surround Andrew on three sides. They fold hairy muscular arms over massive chests and stare straight down at Andrew.

Andrew looks up at the three great, big, mean, UGLY police officers.

"Hello, officers," he says.

The three great, big, mean, UGLY police officers don’t say a word. One great, big, mean, UGLY police officer shifts in a significant fashion that makes his handcuffs clink together rather loudly.

"Hurry up, get smoking, and get happy," I say. "Time’s a-wastin’."

Andrew looks at me.

"Now you’re the one who’s nuts," he says. "No. I have zero desire to go to jail."

"If you bend over, pick up, and smoke that dope," I say, "or, generally speaking, get happy by direct stimulation of your brain’s pleasure centers----the three great, big, mean, UGLY cops here will bust you and haul your rear end off to jail."

"Yes."

"You touch that dope, that emotion drug---you get punished."

"That about covers it."

"So touching that dope---isn’t smart, isn’t rational."

"Yes again."

"Tell you what," I say, "I have a compromise. If you would, officers."

The three great, big, mean, UGLY police officers back up about three feet. I produce a large piece of white chalk and draw a square around Andrew, so that the three great, big, mean, UGLY police officers are just outside the square.

"All right," I say. "I have made a deal with the three great, big, mean, UGLY police officers here. As long as you stay in that square, you can smoke all the dope you want. Inside that square, you have COMPLETE freedom of action. But, alas, the second you leave that square, for whatever reason, you can be arrested and punished for any illegal actions you performed while inside the square."

Andrew laughs.

"Not punished right then, just punished later," he says. "That is no compromise. Forget it."

"So it’s still stupid to touch that dope?"

"Yes, it’s still stupid to touch this dope."

I gesture. The Happiness Box is wheeled back out onto the stage.

"One more time," I say. "This box will make you happy---UNTIL THE DAY YOU DIE. Something I didn’t state the first time, but was certainly implied. Want it?"

"No."

"Andrew, man," I say softly, "you are acting just like you did in the white-square situation. This Happiness Box ain't nothing but a high-tech emotion drug, and you are acting like you can get busted for drugs not now, but later. Incredibly, you are acting like you can get busted for using emotion drugs---AFTER YOU DIE. You say you don’t believe you have a soul---but when we examine your actions, we discover YOU ACT LIKE YOU DO."

Now it’s Andrew’s turn to not say a word.

"Now we can define the word ‘ethical’ in physical terms, perhaps," I say. "An unethical action is an action I can get away with while I’m alive, but will be punished for after I die. I screw up, a hammer I can’t escape comes down on my rear end. That’s a PHYSICAL definition."

"But I didn’t think of it like that," Andrew says finally. "I thought only of loving my family."

"But you yourself said what you were doing didn’t make sense by your own belief system," I said. "Only one thing makes your behavior to be in your own personal self-interest, rational, explainable. You are acting like you have a soul---but it’s totally unconscious on your part, buried deep in your guts, so much a part of you you’re not even aware of it. And it’s not just you, Andrew, the vast majority of the human race is doing exactly the same thing---acting like they have souls, but completely unaware of it."

I step back.

"For your kids, I do this," I say. "I suggest you reconsider very carefully what you think you believe, how it might affect people’s actions---the entire human race---in times to come. Because Happiness Boxes are coming, man, they are at most only decades away. And, if there are no souls, this Happiness Box you so rightly called an abomination becomes RATIONAL."

END

"AFTER THE AWAKENING"

ON EMOTION DRUGS

ON EMOTION DRUGS
by Jeffrey A. Corkern

Why are emotion drugs illegal?

Our society---in fact, all stable, functioning societies in the world---do NOT like emotion drugs for some strange reason. Drugs like pot, cocaine, heroin, LSD, meth, Ecstasy and so forth. They spend literally HUNDREDS of billions of dollars fighting emotion drugs. "War On Drugs" is not an over-exaggeration to describe this world-wide effort, not in the least. The expenditure easily matches what has been spent on fighting real shooting wars.

This world's societies are SERIOUS about this war. A lot of this world's societies will stand you up against a wall and SHOOT YOU DEAD if they catch you selling emotion drugs.

You wanna know the weirdest thing?

The world's societies can't really tell you why they're doing it.

They can't answer the question of why they're making this EXTREME effort against emotion drugs. They can't. Not one society in this world can give an answer to that question you can't shoot down with the greatest of ease. If they could give an entirely logical answer, an answer that could convince EVERYBODY emotion drugs really were intrinsically bad things, an argument everybody could understand, they wouldn't be having such a hard time keeping people away from emotion drugs. They wouldn't be having to spend so much money.

This extreme effort seems strange to a lot of people. So much so there are organizations---like NORML, the National Organization to Reform the Marijuana Laws, for example, and many others---that are actively trying to make emotion drugs legal.

One sign of everyone's complete and total confusion is they haven't even correctly labeled these things as what they are. EMOTION drugs, that is. Drugs that make people feel good, that MAKE people feel a certain EMOTION they want to feel.

Let's run through a couple of these worthless arguments and shoot them down, just to illustrate how completely and totally confused this anti-emotion-drug thing is.

The first objection you hear is that it's wrong to use to emotion drugs----because they're illegal.

Right.

This is so astoundingly illogical it takes your breath away. An example of circular logic at its finest. Because they're illegal? Easily cured, man. Just make the damn emotion drugs legal. Then it'll be right. Just make all emotion drugs legal and let corporations sell them just like soda pop. You'll save how many HUNDREDS of billions of dollars? How much drug crime will go away? How many prisons will be COMPLETELY emptied? How much money will you rake in on taxes? It'll be in the billions! You'll make every nickel back you spent on that futile War On Drugs! People will spend money on emotion drugs before they'll spend money on FOOD, man!

Which brings up the second objection.

Emotion drugs in general hurt their users. Letting people use emotion drugs will be allowing people to damage themselves, even kill themselves. Several of these emotion drugs will kill you deader than a hammer if you slip just one little inch.

First answer to that: There are quite a number of activities that people do in this world that are just as dangerous (or MORE!), that can kill you just as dead---and none of the world's societies forbid these activities. Things like sky-diving. High-speed auto racing. Airplane racing. Hang-gliding. Scuba diving. Mountain climbing. Slip just one little inch doing any of these activities or any of a thousand other risky activities---and you're DEAD, quicker than a heartbeat.

(You know, it's odd, but we can abstract a rule from this observed behavior. We can abstract a single, simple rule the world's societies are using to determine what is and is NOT allowed behavior to get happy.

You can do anything you want that doesn't hurt other people to get happy---except stimulate the happiness centers of your brain directly.

Anything else is allowed, even if you can get yourself killed doing it. Indirect stimulation of your brain's happiness centers is legal. Direct stimulation of your brain's happiness centers is NOT.)

Second answer to that: Okay, so what if we find a way of stimulating the brain's happiness centers that DOESN'T hurt the user? That have no side-effects. Not physically addicting and impossible to overdose on. The perfect drug or class of emotion drugs. Then we can make that one class of emotion drugs alone legal.

Impossible to make a single chemical that does that, you say? Chemicals ALWAYS have side-effects.

Well, actually, you're probably right---if you're talking about chemical substances.

Fortunately, science is marching on. The human race is no longer restricted to chemical substances when it comes to getting stoned---pardon me, happy. We can cut right to the chase these days, without having to use any kind of nasty chemicals with their nasty side effects.

Direct electrical brain stimulation.

We can run a little metal wire right to certain sections of your brain, trickle a few milliamps of current to it---and you will be in Nirvana INSTANTLY, man, higher than a kite. With NO side-effects.

The groundwork has already been laid. Neuroscientists have ALREADY discovered precisely what sections of brain to tickle, believe it or not.

So there we have it, the perfect happiness drug. Or machine, rather.

So now we can make all emotion drugs and machines legal. Right? Right! There's not a single objection we can't shoot down. We can't find a single truly logical reason not to.

W-e-l-l, perhaps not. Perhaps there are one or two teeny-tiny little objections to making emotion drugs, or machines, legal.

Let us examine this question as precisely as possible. (Which is something, by the way, the world's societies have NEVER done. They have just been reacting instinctively, stumbling around blind in the dark, on this subject.)

First, let us define precisely what an emotion drug is.

An "emotion drug" is a substance that is capable of directly affecting the emotion centers of the user's brain and is employed by the user for the SOLE purpose of affecting the emotion centers of his brain, for directly altering his emotional state.

Note that this definition is at least half a use definition, i.e. the user is the one who defines what an emotion drug is.

Let me illustrate what I mean. Smoking marijuana for the SOLE purpose of getting high defines marijuana as an emotion drug (and illegal). Smoking marijuana to, let us say, relieve the pain of menstrual cramps or to stimulate your appetite because anti-cancer drugs have suppressed your appetite defines marijuana as NOT an emotion drug (and legal).

It is the purpose the user has for the drug that primarily determines whether or not the drug is an emotion drug. To DIRECTLY affect his brain's emotion centers---it's an emotion drug. Anything else, it's not.

So now we have a working definition of "emotion drug." Which is also hereby defined to include, not just drugs, but also mechanical devices.

Now, what rational, logical objection can we find to making these things legal?

What do emotion drugs do.

Hmmmm.

They make people happy. Fundamentally, the rock-bottom, that's what they do. They make people feel good.

How in the world could that be a bad thing?

I mean, everything else people do has as its sole purpose to get happy. Why aren't emotion drugs just yet another pathway to this emotional state?

Perhaps we should pause here a minute and look at this getting-happy thing. There is something quite astonishing about this getting-happy thing.

You know why people do what they do?

BECAUSE THEY'RE ALL TRYING TO GET HAPPY!

You know what? You can describe ALL human action in terms of getting happy!

All of it, man! ALL OF IT!

You race cars at high speed---because you enjoy it. You parachute out of perfectly good airplanes---because it's fun. You play video games---because it brings a smile to your face.

It goes deeper than that. A LOT deeper.

You get married, because being with that special other person makes you happier than anything else in this world.

(You wanna know where this deep insight into human motivation first began to pop to the surface? To become consciously known?

In the eighteenth century!

In the eighteenth century, there was a great deal of philosophical inquiry into why people did what they did. And the answer they came up with was people did what they in order to get happy. This was NOT just some airy-fairy philosophical conclusion, either. This conclusion GOT USED AS A FOUNDATION RULE FOR ONE OF THE WORLD'S MOST SUCCESSFUL SOCIETIES!

Guess which one.

The United States!

What does it say in the Declaration of Independence?

"life, liberty, and THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS!"

The Founding Fathers were trying to lay the foundations for a successful society using this radical new discovery. And they did it, man, they did it. They absolutely NAILED it! Because ALL human action truly can be described as an effort to get happy!

Smart guys, our Founding Fathers.)

You have a family---because it makes you happy. You get up every morning, go out and work like a damn dog---because having a family, in the end, makes you happy, so happy you don't mind the extreme effort it takes.

Whatever you do, it's to feel happiness in one form or another. It's all about being happy, your own personal happiness, and everybody else's, in the end.

Unless, of course, you use emotion drugs to get happy. Now you no longer need to do any of those other things. Now all you need is the emotion drug---a bag of pot, a line of coke, a wire to the brain. Now you don't need any of those other things to get happy anymore. Race cars, airplanes, video games, you don't need them---and something far more terrible you're not going to need.

You want to know what the most terrible thing is you're not going to need?

You're not going to need---other people.

You're not gonna need other people, man. You can see this already happening in society. This is a known psychological effect of emotion drugs. Look at the people you know who use dope. Look at them REAL HARD.

Are they not---ISOLATED? Fundamentally cut off from the rest of the world? In a kind of unchanging stasis? Not going anywhere?

They don't HAVE to change, you see. With people who don't use drugs, if they are in pain somehow and not happy, they are FORCED to change something about themselves or their environment in order to be happy. This is NOT true for people who use emotion drugs. If they feel bad, they just go running to the dope, and PRESTO! They're happy! Without having to go through the effort of making all that nasty, wrenching, painful change!

So they DON'T change, and this is a known psychological effect of emotion drugs. If somebody started using emotion drugs at fifteen, you can examine him psychologically ten, twenty, thirty, forty years later---and he will STILL be fifteen years old on the inside.

(You can see this same isolating effect in drug-related violent crime, too. Crimes committed while under the influence of emotion drugs have a tendency to be more violent. The emotion drugs have cut the criminal's emotional connection to the rest of humanity, you see, and the result is he does more horrible things to his victims than he would have had he not been under the influence.)

Emotion drugs---cut you off from everything. Period. WITHOUT emotion drugs, you must interact with the world in order to get happy. WITH emotion drugs, you DON'T. Right?

You know what the definition of society is?

People interacting with other people.

What do emotion drugs do?

Shut down that interaction with other people. With everything else, too, but primarily with other people.

So, if a society makes emotion drugs legal, what, inevitably, must legal emotion drugs do to that society in the end?

DESTROY IT. UTTERLY.

Oopsie.

NOW we have a rational, logical reason for a society to make emotion drugs illegal. VIOLENTLY illegal, put-you-in-jail-for-twenty-years illegal, stand-you-up-against-a-wall-and-SHOOT-YOU-DEAD illegal.

(I'm not advocating these kinds of severe punishments, please understand. I'm saying I understand why a society would impose these kinds of severe punishments.)

Now, I know some people are NOT going to like this coldly logical conclusion, that emotion drugs really, truly are intrinsically bad things, because they use emotion drugs on a regular basis, and they are going to whine about this and refuse to be convinced. Because they LIKE emotion drugs and don't want to give them up. So they'll squinch their eyes shut as tight as they can, put their hands over their ears and refuse to believe a single word they've read. Emotion drugs are their refuge from reality, their escape from pain.

So I'm going to hit this one more time, harder.

Let's look at this one more time, in more detail.

Let's theoretically make emotion drugs legal, and see what happens to society.

Okay. Emotion drugs are legal, and corporations start fighting each other to sell them.

What happens first?

Emotion drugs get CHEAP. Cocaine, fifty cents a pound. Crack, one dollar a pound. Marijuana, two dollars for twenty one-ounce cigarettes. Heroin, five bucks a pound.

Sure, millions of people will get addicted and eventually kill themselves. You'll be stepping over dead bodies in the streets every day. Every city will have to have a crew that does nothing but pick up dead bodies. But we knew that's what was going to happen when we made emotion drugs legal. Hell, it's just cleaning up the gene pool. Just evolution in action, right?

What will happen along with this?

Well, if people can use emotion drugs to get happy---they will tend NOT to use any other method. So sales of high-speed race cars will go down. Along with parachutes. And airplanes. And video games. And whatever else you can name, because the only goal people really have is to get happy. As so fundamental a document as the Declaration of Independence recognizes.

When we made emotion drugs legal---we made that the CHEAPEST way to get happy.

So the start of the decline of society will be an economic crash. The only companies making money will be the emotion-drug companies.

What happens next?

The emotion drugs get BETTER.

Free-market competition, right? The first primitive generation of emotion drugs have an unfortunate tendency to damage and kill their users. This is like, you know, REAL bad from a profit standpoint. So the emotion-drug companies will engage in a research race to produce the best possible emotion drug, one that doesn't kill or damage their customers.

It is quite clear what the end of that research race will be.

Say hello to the Happiness Box.

The Happiness Box is the ultimate expression of the wire-to-the-brain thing, the ultimate emotion drug. It is a steel box designed to keep a human brain alive and happy. VERY happy.

The way it's used is a living brain is removed from its body and placed in the box. Various wires and tubes are connected to the brain and the box is closed. Somebody punches the start button, and that brain goes into Nirvana---and STAYS there, forever.

For as long as the brain or the box lasts, anyway. With the appropriate technology, this could easily be hundreds of years, maybe even thousands.

Various ruffles and flourishes are possible. For example, the most advanced version of the Happiness Box could, instead of just keeping you stoned all the time, be programmed so that you lived an artificial life inside the box. Of course, after the knowledge you were in a Happiness Box was removed, so it would seem completely real to you.

Hmmph. It hits me the first primitive generation of Happiness Boxes are on the market RIGHT THIS SECOND.

Video games. Right? The user gets into what's already being described as a "total immersive experience" and stays there in his own little world for hours on end, completely isolated from the rest of reality. It's not unknown for people to play these things for days on end, without even sleeping. And to get addicted to them, too.

Yeah, Happiness Boxes are already headed our way. The Playstation 10,000, the ultimate XBox, SIMS become real, Azeroth forever and ever. Just drop your brain into it, close the lid, and press the Start button.

These things will sell like hot cakes, won't they, folks? Perfect happiness living your perfect life forever, and no side-effects! People will be jumping into Happiness Boxes by the millions.

And there will be a TREMENDOUS push for everybody to jump into his own personal Happiness Box. Because as more and more people disappear, society is going to go downhill FAST. It will be a race to the bottom like nothing ever seen in history.

And once the last person goes into the last Happiness Box, that will be the end of society. Society made emotion drugs legal---and the end result was the absolutely unavoidable, total destruction of society.

And the Suicide of Man.

Once again, oopsie.

(Guess what we just found.

We just found the mechanism by which sentient races go extinct. They reach the technological point where they can build Happiness Boxes, build them, jump into them, and disappear. When the last brain dies----as it must inevitably do---that race is extinct. Not with a bang, but with a whimper. Poof.)

In the meantime, I note that in the real world, while emotion drugs are illegal, HAPPINESS BOXES ARE NOT. The world's societies haven't looked very far down the road when it comes to emotion drugs. Which makes sense, when they can't even define what an emotion drug is.

So get ready, all you young people out there. The opportunity to buy your own Happiness Box and disappear into it is going to come within your lifetime. It's going to be entirely legal to do so.

One hell of a debate is coming to this world.

SHOULD I, OR SHOULD I NOT, JUMP INTO A HAPPINESS BOX?

On the face of it, this seems a laughably absurd question. Of course, you should jump into a Happiness Box! Perfect happiness! Living a long time, maybe a thousand years! More! It's the SMART thing to do!

Sure, when the world's societies see what Happiness Boxes are doing to the world, they will try to make these Happiness Box thingies illegal, in order to stay in existence.

But does a society really have that right? To punish people for using emotion drugs, Happiness Boxes, even when it's a certain thing that society---the human race itself---will be destroyed in the end?

Does a society have the right to put its existence above the right of its members get happy anyway they want to? Does the human race have a right to put its existence above the rights of its members to get happy anyway they want to?

The answer to this question---doesn't matter. If enough people want it, and they will---Happiness Boxes WILL become legal. No matter what the answer is, no matter what it does to society, to the human race. The history of Prohibition teaches us that.

Step right up and get'em while they're hot, folks.

The world's societies are going to LOSE this War On Drugs, aren't they, folks? They don't have a snowball's chance in Hell, despite all the hundreds of billions they've spent. Society is going down, HARD. The clock is ticking, the fuse is lit, it's only a matter of time until the explosion. Happiness Boxes are going to come out, and it's going to be Game Over in less than fifty years.

And why does that even matter? Where in Nature does it say that human society HAS to exist? That the human race itself HAS to exist? Don't all species go extinct in the end anyway? It all seems just so inevitable and unavoidable.

So why not just let it happen? In fact, why not start funding research into creating Happiness Boxes for everybody immediately?

Last one in is a rotten egg!

I mean, look at the real world. A world filled with horror. With death and dying, cancer and AIDS, with terrorists and suicide bombers and a million different painful ways of getting killed.

A world---FILLED WITH UNHAPPINESS.

Compared to perfect bliss and perfect safety inside a Happiness Box. Is there anything in the world that could possibly offset that? That would make jumping into a Happiness Box a STUPID thing for an individual to do?

Because that's the one thing that would stop this from happening. If there were some EXTREMELY powerful reason for an individual NOT to jump into a Happiness Box.

Is there such a reason?

W-e-l-l, yes, there is, actually. There is ONE teeny little thing that could actually make it incredibly stupid for an individual to jump into a Happiness Box. So much so that he would look at this thing and then just walk away without so much as a backward glance at a lost Nirvana.

But I have got to warn you all first. It is a truly BIZARRE reason. Lean back and take a breath. Brace yourselves.

The reason is:

IF PEOPLE HAVE SOULS.

If people have souls. That one thing, AND THAT ONE THING ONLY, would make it stupid to jump into a Happiness Box.

Allow me to explain.

First, I must define precisely what I mean by "soul."

A "soul" is an eternally existing thinking and feeling structure that survives the death of the physical body. Souls can and do inhabit physical bodies, but don't require one.

In the simplest terms, a "soul" is you---without a body. Exactly the same---except without a body.

So how would having a soul make it stupid to jump into a Happiness Box?

Let's think about what would happen to you when you jumped into a Happiness Box and closed the lid.

Okay. Centuries and centuries and CENTURIES of unending pleasure and bliss. Then your brain dies, as it must do in the end.

And your soul pops loose. Is thrown back into harsh, cold reality from the artificial Nirvana it's been in.

What kind of psychological condition is your soul in? How well is it going to get along with all the other souls out there?

How strong is your soul going to be after centuries of bliss?

About as strong as wet cardboard, huh, folks. Whatever lessons your soul learned about getting along with reality and all the other souls out there have been wiped away by centuries of unending pleasure, haven't they? Just smoothed away and gone.

So all those painful lessons are going to have to be relearned. All over again. Painfully.

And the pain won't just be yours. For everybody else who has to deal with you, too.

The danger is greater than it might appear. For somebody who has been in a simplest kind of Happiness Box, one where his bliss centers were stimulated, the end result will be the creation of a child, an infant. This will be an unpleasant thing to deal with, but not too unpleasant.

But worse is possible. MUCH worse.

Consider somebody who has been in the most advanced type of Happiness Box, one where he has lived in an artificial reality designed to cater to his every whim. Centuries and centuries and CENTURIES of having his every desire fulfilled, of ALWAYS getting his own way.

What kind of psychological effect would that have on a soul?

It would turn that soul into a stone-raving sociopath, wouldn't it, folks. A true screaming psycho. Somebody who would never take anybody else's feelings into account. Who would stop short at nothing to get what he wants, not even murder.

This is a bad thing. To say the least. There's going to be a great deal of pain and agony involved for that soul to get right again, to relearn old lessons. For that soul and everybody else who has to deal with that soul.

So, in the end, when the pleasure that soul experienced unlearning those lessons is weighed against the pain that soul and everybody else experienced for that soul to relearn those lessons---the pain will be the greater amount. FAR greater.

Which makes jumping into a Happiness Box a STUPID thing to do in the first place.

If you DON'T have a soul, jumping into a Happiness Box is SMART.

If you DO have a soul, jumping into a Happiness Box is STUPID.

Note. Which one is the smart thing to do is entirely dependent on whether or not you have a soul---AND NOTHING ELSE.

So do you really, truly have a soul? That's the key thing you have to know when it comes time to make that decision.

We can get an indication of the answer to this question by examining it from a somewhat abstract viewpoint. Let's look at this question from a societal viewpoint, by examining what the impact of immortal souls would be on a society.

How would everybody having immortal souls affect a society's behavior?

(You can examine this question by examining individual human behavior too, and get the same answer, but we are talking about societies here, and so I restrict the argument here to societies.)

What kinds of rules and regulations would an immortal-soul society have to have?

One rule should be perfectly clear from all of the above.

YOU CAN'T GET HAPPY BY DIRECT STIMULATION OF YOUR EMOTION CENTERS. YOU CAN'T GET HAPPY BY ANY MEANS OTHER THAN INTERACTING WITH OTHER SOULS AND THE UNIVERSE.

In others words---emotion drugs HAVE to be ILLEGAL in an immortal-soul society, because, as we just saw, they create more pain than pleasure in the end. Any kind of emotion drugs. No Happiness Boxes. No coke. No crack. No heroin. And so on down the line, although the line starts getting fuzzy eventually, because there will be certain substances---like marijuana and wine---that will have uses other than getting stoned.

I gotta tell you, man, I see something quite incredibly strange here.

You know that single, simple rule the world's societies are using regarding getting happy we abstracted up above? Compare it to the rule we just now derived about getting happy in an immortal-soul society.

Do you see it?

IT'S THE SAME DAMN RULE!

You can't get happy by using emotion drugs! Human societies are ALREADY acting like an immortal-soul society!

Like we all have souls!

When you try to find a good, solid reason why societies make emotion drugs illegal---the rock-bottom reason you eventually run into is the deep, deep assumption by all these societies that people really, truly are immortal souls!

Although nobody knows for a scientific fact souls exist---the world's stable societies ACT like they do. ALL of them. EVERY damn one.

Funny thing, that.

Y'all have a good one.

END

"AFTER THE AWAKENING"

ON THE SENTIENT CONSTRAINTS OF A SENTIENT-CONTAINING UNIVERSE

"What is Man, that Thou art mindful of him?"

I can answer that question.

ON THE SENTIENT CONSTRAINTS OF A SENTIENT-CONTAINING UNIVERSE

by Jeffrey A. Corkern

Let’s build us a Universe. From Chaos.

What is Chaos? Let us define Chaos as a place where no fixed rules exist. There is no structure that isn’t malleable, no foundation that cannot be changed, no rule that cannot be broken. This means everything is insubstantial, shifting and formless. Space and time simply do not exist. Chaos.

So if we are going to build us a Universe from this Chaos, what this means in practical terms is we must define a set of laws that can NEVER be broken. If they can be broken, we're back in Chaos again.

So let's define a set of unbreakable physical laws and certain unchangeable constants. They will define and create our Universe.

Also, there's one peculiar capability in particular we want our Universe to have.

We want our Universe to have the capability of evolving sentient beings.

Because that's why we're going to all this trouble, to create sentients. More than anything else, that's what we want. We are building this Universe as a garden to grow sentient beings.

By "sentient" I mean thinking and feeling beings who have total free will, and who are able to discover and understand what the basic unbreakable, fundamental physical laws of our Universe are, and be able to use those laws to manipulate our Universe as their free will sees fit.

So let’s start picking laws. Since the Universe the human race is in is clearly capable of evolving sentients, let’s make every law in our Universe the same as the one the human race evolved in. We know that particular set of physical laws works for our purpose, and there’s no copyright on Universe laws we know of, and so, after looking carefully over our shoulder, let’s copy those. So gravity, electric charge, mass, energy, and so forth, are now all tied together in one neat little package guaranteed to possess that all-important ability to evolve sentients.

But there’s a problem here we need to consider, one truly enormous threat to our sentient-growing Universe.

The sentients themselves.

We are going to give them the ability to understand our Universe, and free will to do whatever they want with it. That much ability, that much power, is a very, very dangerous thing for the sentients in our Universe to have. Because if the sentient beings understand the structure of our Universe, there's one special thing they’re going to be able to do.

They're going to be able to destroy our Universe if they want.

They will know how to peer deep into our Universe's innermost workings and find its vulnerabilities, places where just the smallest change will utterly kill it, and with a twitch of their little fingers---or tentacles or whatever---bring it all crashing down. At the very least, they will be able to destroy our Universe's ability to evolve sentients, the reason we built it in the first place. And if they're really, really good, they might be able to find a way to smash it all the way back to the Chaos it came from.

When we allowed our sentients the ability to understand the fundamental physical laws of our Universe, it seems, we allowed them to have a power almost equal to our own, and possibly even equal.

So if we're going to allow sentients to evolve in our Universe, somehow we've got to also come up with some set of rules and conditions that inhibits them from destroying it. In the same sense in which we will have laws of physics that constrain the physical behavior of the matter in our Universe---like the specific law of gravity that will constrain the behavior of stars and planets, for example---we must also have specific laws of physics that constrain the behavior of the sentients.

WHAT? Laws of PHYSICS that govern the behavior of SENTIENTS?

Yes, we've got to have them. Our Universe is toast otherwise.

This is such a strange thing to realize it deserves further examination.

Consider. We've given our sentients almost-infinite power---and nothing to control how they use it. Remember, we’re GROWING sentients from scratch, and that means they’re not going to start out as mature beings, but rather as immature beings, children. As a real-world analogy, imagine letting six-year-old boys loose in a china shop stuffed floor-to-ceiling with fine crystal, and telling them they can do whatever they want.

How long would it be before the entire shop is reduced to a pile of fine white powder?

Our Universe is going to create trillions upon trillions of sentients. What are the chances at least one is going to try and destroy our Universe? We all know what sentients are like. One hundred per cent, beyond doubt. It won’t be just one, it will be billions upon billions that will at least conceive the idea.

Somehow, we’ve got to come up with a set of laws and conditions that will nip that idea in the bud. Let’s examine this problem in more abstract terms in hopes of finding a solution.

We have here a system where the output is completely uncontrolled, like a car without a brake, or a pressure cooker without a relief valve. It’s worse than that, because any destructive process will be self-accelerating. To use a grim example, it's more like a nuclear reactor without moderating rods. Theoretically, when one sentient turns violent and starts trying to destroy things, the rest will be forced to turn violent in self-defense, and this will accelerate the destruction of our Universe.

When the killing starts, it will generate more killing, which will generate more killing, feeding back upon itself and accelerating explosively like a runaway fission in a nuclear reactor, or a spark hitting gunpowder, and it won't stop until our Universe is destroyed. We've certainly seen this very process happen in our own history.

In abstract engineering terms, this self-accelerating process is what's known as a positive-feedback loop. Positive-feedback loops are violently unstable. They might run for a little while, but eventually they all run wild and destroy themselves.

So we've got to set up some kind of inhibitory mechanism. Again in abstract engineering terms, the solution is to replace the positive-feedback loop with a negative-feedback loop. When the system starts to run hot, we need something that will automatically kick in and cool things down.

We've got a problem, though, a constraint we have placed on ourselves regarding our sentients. We've granted our sentients completely free will, so they can do anything they want. We've said they're totally free, and yet simultaneously we've realized they've got to have constraints on their free will. But if we put any kind of constraints at all on their completely free will, then their completely free will is completely gone. We've got a paradox on our hands. How can we resolve this?

It seems an impossible thing. Let us set it aside for a moment and keep going.

What kind of rules are we going to need? What's it going to take to keep our Universe safe?

One way to absolutely guarantee the destruction of our Universe is for our sentients to be no more than mayflies, their personalities, their essences, blinking in and blinking out of existence like light bulbs. Under such circumstances, our sentients can do absolutely whatever they want to our Universe.

If they do something bad to our Universe, nothing bad happens to them, you see. No negative feedback.

And something bad they surely would do, because our sentients would certainly examine themselves as well as the rest of the Universe, and when they discovered they were no more than dust, a sense of utter futility and meaninglessness would set in, and our Universe would be blown to bits and gone in a cosmic heartbeat.

And there is a deeper reason. If our sentients are mayflies, we will have made destroying our Universe the MORAL thing for them to do. Because 99.9999% of our sentients will live lives mostly composed of PAIN. Upon examining their history, our sentients will conclude---quite rightly---that we constructed our Universe only to torture sentients. And as soon as they attain the technological capability of destroying our Universe, they will certainly do so. Without hesitation. In their eyes, the Universe would be, again quite rightly, an abomination.

Fortunately, the cure for this particular hazard is self-evident. If making their existence temporary destroys our Universe, then we make their existence permanent. We make them NOT mayflies, we grant every single sentient not just long existence, but ETERNAL existence.

It has to be eternal. A merely long existence won’t work. Seventy years, seventy thousand years, seventy billion years, seventy million years, seventy trillion years, none of these work in the long run, because when a sentient gets close to its end we’re right back in positive-feedback loop territory. It can do something bad to our Universe, and nothing bad happens to it in return. And there goes our stable Universe, up in smoke.

(Note the correlation. In a sentient-containing Universe, the existence span of the Universe is naturally the same as the existence span of its sentients.)

But existence without limit---eternal existence---solves this quite nicely. That's by far the best, the safest, thing to do. Eternal existence for every single sentient gives the strongest possible guarantee of stability to our Universe.

In order to make it more clear, consider another real-world analogy.

Would you let somebody burn down your house while you were still in it? You and your entire family? No, surely you would take steps to prevent that from happening. You and everybody else who lived in that house.

Giving sentients eternal existence FORCES them to protect our Universe ETERNALLY, from whatever might threaten it, including other sentients. It is now in their self-interest to keep our Universe safe.

So what we've come up with is that all of our sentients have to have--at the very least---an eternally existing thinking and feeling self-aware component.

Which we hereby define as a "soul."

OUR SENTIENTS HAVE TO HAVE SOULS.

NOW whatever happens to our Universe also happens to every single sentient, and, to repeat, EVERY single sentient has a vested interest in keeping our terribly vulnerable Universe in one piece ETERNALLY. This works VERY well. If one sentient or group of sentients tries to destroy it, another sentient or group of sentients will automatically try to put a stop to it. Natural as gravity.

Our Universe has to have eternal existence for its sentients---souls---simply as a matter of self-defense, if for no other reason. Waddya think?

One truly amazing thing emerges from this.

We have now discovered what the physical structure of our sentients MUST be.

OUR SENTIENTS WILL BE SOULS---NOT BODIES. So we're going to have to add a little something to our Universe laws that will allow for the creation and existence of eternally existing thinking and feeling self-aware structures.

Note the physical definition of sentients as eternal souls resolves our free will-constraint paradox as best as can be done. A sentient can perform whatever actions it wants----BUT IT CANNOT ESCAPE THE CONSEQUENCES OF THOSE ACTIONS. If a sentient lights our Universe on fire, it’s gonna burn too, baby. Better than this we can't do without removing their free will, which would have the effect of removing the sentients totally.

(Also note the choice we've made. We've placed the sentients first. The free will of our sentients is more important than the stability of our Universe. But we made that choice in the beginning, when we said the purpose of our Universe was to grow sentients.)

But we're still not done yet. We can do more to protect our Universe. We need to find a way to keep our sentients from wanting to destroy our Universe in the first place. We start by asking a basic question.

Why would a sentient want to destroy our Universe?

Answer: Because it's unhappy.

(This is certainly another amazing result. In this Universe we’re constructing, everybody MATTERS, man, everybody's FEELINGS matter, they are quite literally of cosmic significance, right up there with galaxies exploding and superclusters colliding.)

Remember we have been forced to give our unhappy sentient eternal existence. Give it enough time, and it will, by sheer random chance if nothing else, one fine day find itself in a position to take out its unhappiness on our Universe by destroying it.

So if we want to keep our Universe safe, we have to make sure all the sentients are happy. On a practical level, we need to make sure that if one gets unhappy, all the sentients around it will automatically try to make it happy again.

The easiest way to do that is to make each and every sentient responsible for the happiness of every other sentient. In a weak way, they became responsible for each other’s happiness when they were granted eternal existence, because that PHYSICALLY interconnected them all one to the other on the emotional level. We need to reinforce that connection, make it as strong as possible. We need to come up with a rule that has the following emotional effect on our sentients:
"I'm not happy----unless all the other sentients around me are happy, too."

What will we call the desire to make other sentients feel happy?

Love.

We will define the desire to make other sentients happy as well as themselves as "love", and we will deliberately build this desire into our sentients. We will do it by making a rule, one single, simple rule. We won't put it into their bodies, because those are mere dust, temporary things. We will make this rule the rock-bottom of their immortal souls, every single one of them, which will have the effect of making our rule a rigid, unbreakable law of physics and affect every emotion they feel, every action they do.

We will build every single soul around the following rule, which we will call "the postulate of sentient existence" for our little Universe:

GOD LOVES EVERYBODY FOREVER.

(Because we do. Don't we?)

(I know there are some people who are not going to like this statement of the postulate of sentient existence because it invokes the concept of God. Not a problem. The concept of God can be dropped if desired. The following statement of the postulate works just as well:

EVERYBODY LOVES EVERYBODY ELSE FOREVER.

The observable effects on human behavior are the same.)

And now, at last, we're done. We've installed a necessary negative-feedback mechanism and set up the best possible system we can for our sentients to feel happy, all within the constraint of allowing them free will. We pat ourselves on the back because the rules we’ve come up with are quite neat. They reinforce each other just beautifully. We snap our fingers to start the Big Bang, sit back, relax, and watch the whole thing evolve.

And now, gentle reader, allow me to step back and address you directly.

Do these rules we’ve come up with for our theoretical Universe also present in the Universe we actually do live in? Is it possible these rules are present and real for humanity?

There are two ways to answer that question, one abstract and one direct.

The abstract way is to examine all of human behavior and see if "God loves everybody forever" (or "Everybody loves everybody else forever") is at the rock-bottom of it. I have addressed that question elsewhere and will not address it here. The gentle reader is encouraged to try the analysis for himself. Nothing is as convincing as finding the answer all by yourself.

The direct way is to detect the souls theory indicates must be there in the laboratory.

Direct soul-detection is what will jump into everyone's face and stomp around with golf shoes on, more than anything else. A soul-detector going "BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!" with dial needles swinging over, a reproducible experiment anybody can do if he wants.

The abstract way works but I know from painful experience will only seem like so much hot air to a lot of people. Direct detection of souls in a lab is what will drive the point home beyond all doubt, that the love of God is a fundamental law of physics, as real and as physical as gravity, electromagnetism, and all the other fundamental physical forces.

I can’t see any reason why souls should not be capable of laboratory detection. Every other physical entity is, and if souls are real, physical entities, it should be possible to build an instrument for detecting them.

One of these days, fairly soon in fact, some gutsy scientist is going to do precisely this, and when that happens the world will finally know something it should’ve known all along.

Y’all have a good one.

END

"AFTER THE AWAKENING"

ON SOULS

ON HUMAN MOTIVATION

by Jeffrey A. Corkern

Why do people do what they do? Is it possible to come up with one single rule that encompasses all of human motivation?

Try this one.

PEOPLE DO WHAT THEY DO IN ORDER TO TRY TO FEEL HAPPY.

Whatever it is they do may or may not succeed, thus the process is called the "pursuit of happiness." This "pursuit of happiness" may seem like a trivial thing. It isn't. There's a reason why the American Declaration of Independence mentions "the pursuit of happiness" as one of the three inalienable rights.

Because everything people do, everything, can be stated, in the end, in terms of being happy, of reaching this particular emotional state.

Consider. You work hard to get whatever it is you want---and you feel happy if you succeed, and unhappy if you don't. Food, shelter, jobs, love, sex, relationships, all fall under this. Start a war, end a war, paint a painting, raise a family, build a building, bomb a building, what do people feel when they've accomplished their goal, good or bad?

Happy.

I can hear the gentle reader raising an objection to this. Surely, he is saying, we have all seen people doing things that even they knew would wind up making them unhappy. Yes, surely we all have, but even that particular case can be expressed like this:
"I’m not happy----unless I’m unhappy."

(Yes, it’s twisted, but hey, that’s people, baby. They can do whatever they want. Free will, you know.)

However, we can cover this case too by putting our original statement into more general terms. Let's also be a tad more specific about what it is that's feeling this happiness emotion. (Let us call the following the "happiness rule.")

PEOPLE DO WHAT THEY DO IN ORDER TO TRY TO PUT THEIR BRAINS INTO A DESIRED EMOTIONAL STATE.

We give people the choice of what emotional state they want their brains to be in---although this, too, can be expressed in terms of happiness, showing how very basic this happiness thing is. (Let us call the following the "happiness statement.")

"I'm not happy---unless I'm {insert desired emotional state here}."

I can hear the gentle reader raising another objection.

Okay, he is saying, people do what they do in order to put their brains into certain emotional states. Fine.

But what about when people deliberately do something that destroys their brains, their feeling organs, huh? Specifically, what about people who choose to die for some weird reason, like, to protect other people or democracy or global jihad? They're not happy, they're not anything, THEY'RE JUST PLAIN DEAD, dead and wiped out, man!

The gentle reader appears to be perfectly right. After all, in death the brain stops working and is without doubt no longer capable of feeling emotion. This one specific action does NOT fit into our happiness rule. All other human action fits that happiness rule---except the act of giving your life for something, wherein your emotion-feeling organ is destroyed.

This is a glaring problem. Let's look at this closer.

For a rational, intelligent, self-aware individual to give his life---his existence, to strike the rock-bottom---for anything, anything at all, makes ZERO sense. For an animal driven by instinct to propagate his gene line, such behavior is understandable. An animal isn't in total control of its actions the way a human being is. But for an intelligent, self-aware human being, it isn't. It is irrational in the extreme, so absolutely, totally stupid you really have to wonder why such behavior appeared and persisted in supposedly intelligent human beings in the first place.

Some scientists would argue it's because people are NOT truly intelligent, that they STILL ARE instinct-dominated animals, totally driven by certain subsets of their genes---CONTROLLED by certain subsets of their genes---to perform self-sacrificing behavior in order to propagate their gene line. This is known as the gene-controlled theory of human behavior.

I see a tremendous money-making opportunity here for some ambitious bio-technology company looking for new markets. If there really are some genes inside you that can FORCE you to sacrifice your life, then clearly the SMART thing to do is to CHANGE those genes, to turn those damn genes OFF!

Get in on the ground floor, folks. But hey, I notice something more than a little awkward.

If somebody can change his genes, are his genes controlling him, or is he controlling his genes?

There is a MAJOR problem with the gene-controlled theory of human behavior.

Hmmm. It strikes me there is an unconscious (COMPLETELY UNPROVEN!) assumption in the statement that somebody who dies for something is just plain DEAD.

That he's no longer feeling emotion. That the person who died is no longer feeling or thinking anything. That his personality, his essence, zeroed out, that he blinked out of existence when he died the way a light bulb blows out.

You know, there is ONE way you could fit the act of giving your life into our happiness rule, ONE way it could become rational for an intelligent, self-aware human being to die for something. A way that could make giving up your own life possibly correct and sensible, that would make ALL of human behavior fit into our happiness rule, ONE way such an act could survive and persist in human behavior.

If human beings can still think---and more importantly, feel---after dying.

If human beings survive death. If your life and your existence are NOT the same.

If human beings have souls. Self-aware thinking and feeling structures that survive the death of the physical body.

If souls are truly what human beings are, not physical bodies.

In such a case, the act of giving your life for some reason can actually be a thoroughly rational action, depending on the circumstances. (I don't mean to imply for a second that dying for some reason renders that reason right, or that people who die for something are automatically some kind of saint. Dying for something can be stupid just like any other human action.) If you have a soul and die for something, you've given up your life, all right---but NOT your existence.

This requires a slight modification to our happiness rule.

PEOPLE DO WHAT THEY DO IN ORDER TO TRY TO PUT THEIR SOULS INTO A DESIRED EMOTIONAL STATE.

(Of course, this implies souls are the true feeling organ, the emotion organ, not the brain. The brain's emotion centers, at most, can only be a mirror, a reflection of a more fundamental physical structure.)

Finally, we have a single, simple rule for why people do what they do that encompasses ALL of human behavior, including dying for a cause. Now, it ALL fits.

Whether our final happiness rule is correct or not is another question, since it requires souls.

The modification we've had to make is quite stunning, to say the least. We don't know for a solid scientific fact if souls exist or not.

Let’s look a little closer at this particular problem, using this happiness rule we’ve come up with.

ON THE EXISTENCE OF SOULS

People have been arguing about whether or not souls exist for what? Three thousand years now? For so long the assumption has arisen it’s not possible to solve this problem by pure, objective reason and logic, and therefore it must be left to faith and religion.

As someone with physical-scientist training, I resist this assumption. If souls exist as real, physical entities or DON'T exist as real, physical entities, I maintain this existence or non-existence MUST be deducible by logical arguments. Simple logical arguments, too, arguments anyone can understand.

Allow me to take a stab at this, at trying to determine whether souls exist or not in a scientific manner, by pure, objective reason and logic alone. Whether or not I succeed I will leave to the gentle reader's judgment.

YOU, gentle reader, are specifically charged with making the final judgment for yourself, whether my attempt at pure, objective reason and logic is correct and rigorous, or isn't.

Off we go.

First, a definition of a "soul."

A "soul" is an eternally existing thinking and feeling structure that can exist with or without a physical body. They can and do inhabit physical bodies from time to time, but don't require one.

Now, what would this weird thing do to people? How would the existence of a soul, if somebody has one, affect his behavior?

Let us phrase this question in a scientific manner.

What would be the observable differences between with-soul and without-soul human behavior?

Or, the best way of stating the problem:

What is the smart, rational way for somebody to act if he has a soul? What is the smart, rational way for somebody to act if he doesn't?

This is the best way to state the problem because, with human beings, we must take into account the strong---and increasing by the second---influence of intelligence on behavior. As humanity continues to evolve, pure intelligence more and more is influencing human behavior, and in the end will be THE dominant force influencing human behavior. To state this in abstract theoretical terms, as evolution progresses, sentient behavior tends toward the rational (where "rational" is defined as "in conformity with physical law"). So what we must derive is the end state behavioral evolution is driving toward, if such an end state exists.

Hmmm. People do what they do in order to feel happy. And they want to get happy by the cheapest possible route, too, at minimum cost to them.

Okay, suppose you don't have a soul, and there's something you've decided you need in order to feel happy. What's the rational thing to do?

Answer: Just take it. Any method whatsoever of getting what you want is fine, up to and including killing as many people as necessary---just make SURE you can get away with it. Wipe out the entire human race if you have to. Killing is perfectly acceptable, as long as you make sure nobody's looking first, and be sure to shoot them in the back to be safe.

It's the rational, the SMART thing to do.

Why?

BECAUSE YOU CAN ESCAPE THE CONSEQUENCES OF YOUR ACTIONS.

If you can make it to your own death without anybody finding out and making you pay, you've succeeded as much as it's possible to succeed. If there are no souls, the only variable you should consider when selecting a path to happiness is the cost to you, how it affects you personally. Other than that, all paths to happiness are physically equivalent. The only REAL, PHYSICAL difference is the cost to you. If killing people is the cheapest thing to do, get behind them, sight them up, and gun them down.

Worried about how everybody else might feel about this? Don't. It's not rational. Not in conformity with physical law.

Without a soul, you are a Universe Of One. You are fundamentally absolutely, completely alone. Any feeling of connection you might have to other people is strictly false and an illusion. As far as you personally are concerned, the Universe began when you were born and will end when you die. Nothing truly matters except what you want. Nobody's feelings matter in any real sense except yours.

From an abstract theoretical viewpoint, without souls---eternal existence, to strike the rock-bottom---your emotional state is NOT dependent on, NOT PHYSICALLY LINKED to, anyone else's emotional state.

Without a soul, there is NO PHYSICAL REASON for you to take anybody else's feelings into account, NO PHYSICAL REASON for you to act in accordance with anybody's desires other than your own.

This type of behavior is known to humanity. It is called sociopathic behavior.

IF THERE ARE NO SOULS, THE ONLY RATIONAL THING TO BE IS A SOCIOPATH.

Let us look at the societal implications of this, what the end state of this behavioral evolution would be.

Let's conduct a thought experiment. Theoretically, we convince everybody in the world souls don't exist. In practical terms, we will create a society of sociopaths, since sentient behavior tends toward the rational as evolution does its thing.

But the word "sociopath" means "one who hates society." A "society of sociopaths" is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. It can't exist.

In practical terms, we convince people souls don't exist---and WHAM! Society is totally destroyed, just like that.

(Observation: If removing a certain assumption from society totally destroys society, that assumption is what was holding society up in the first place.

The deeper implication is that, without souls, the very concept of "society" itself cannot appear. Souls, it turns out, are critically necessary for the existence of society. No souls---no society, and that's it.)

Given scientists are currently trying to do exactly this---convince the entire world souls do not exist---the gentle reader should be feeling a cold wind on his back about now. The implications for the very survival of the human race on Earth are chilling.

However, the gentle reader can breathe a sigh of relief. There's an almost-zero-effort way for the modern rational sociopath to achieve happiness that doesn't involve a bullet in the back for the rest of us. The modern rational sociopath can put his brain into whatever emotional state he wants, and not risk anything. Not have to sweat a single drop, wait a single second, spend significant amounts of money, or, fortunately for the rest of us, shoot one single person in the back. We live in an age of technological wonder. If the ultimate aim is to feel happy by the cheapest possible route, it is now possible to buy happiness in chemical form.

Drugs.

Emotion drugs. Drugs that have as their sole purpose the inducement of emotional states in the brain. Pot, alcohol, meth, smack, cocaine, crack, LSD, Ecstasy (note the revealing name), crank, uppers, downers, the list goes on and on and gets longer on a daily basis.

Better living through chemistry, baby.

Some might object that all these drugs, since they are chemicals, are very likely to have negative side effects, i.e. will make their user unhappy in the long run. True enough, but side effects are strictly a technological problem, and therefore can be eliminated totally.

By direct stimulation of the brain’s pleasure centers with electrical wire, say. There’s already been considerable work done on that. No nasty chemicals, so no nasty chemical side effects to make the modern rational sociopath unhappy.

Technology marches on.

Soon, it will be easily possible to feel happy---or whatever you want to feel---all the time, without any side effects.

People do what they do in order to feel happy. If you believe you have no soul, drugs are the cheapest, the best, way to achieve this emotional state. (At least, until they perfect the neuro-electrical stimulation system.) So what is the only goal the modern rational sociopath should aspire to?

TO BE STONED ALL THE DAMN TIME.

Seal himself up in an underground steel vault for maximum safety, stick a needle in his arm or a wire into his prefrontal lobes, shoot the juice to himself and STAY THAT WAY.

How strange. Right off the bat, you would think that somebody who thinks he has no soul would be much freer in his actions than somebody who thinks he does, but this turns out to be completely dead wrong. When artificial emotion stimulation---direct stimulation of the brain’s emotion centers---becomes possible, without-soul behavior becomes rationally restricted to only one thing.

If you meet somebody---a smart somebody---who thinks he has no soul, there's only one thing he should say to you.

"Hey, man, can you tell me where I can find some drugs?"

It is now clear what the end-state of a without-souls "society" would be.

One person, and only one, sealed deep underground in a steel vault with a wire running into his brain.

I say only one because that's the long-run absolute safest thing for the one person who survives, that every other human being be dead. By far the most dangerous threat to an individual human being is, and always has been, another human being. Without souls, that's all another human being is, a threat, and the rational thing to do to a threat is eliminate it.

(Note this demonstrates again convincing people souls don’t exist will have the long-term effect of destroying society.)

The gentle reader still has cause for alarm, alas. Given scientists are going around telling people souls don’t exist, the body-armor industry might be about to experience a sudden boom.

So we now know what without-soul behavior would be. Let's look at with-soul behavior.

Once again, we start from the basic observation that people do what they do in order to feel happy.

Okay, suppose you DO have a soul, and there's something you've decided you need in order to feel happy. What do you do?

Well, your actions are MUCH more restricted than in the previous case. The cost to you is now a function of many more variables, the emotions of other human beings. Start shooting people in the back, and the very same people are certainly going to search for you and find you and HURT you.

Remember, if you've got an immortal soul, SO DO THEY. You make them unhappy by shooting them in the back, one day, if it takes a million billion years (immortal, remember), they're going to show up breathing fire and brimstone and make YOU unhappy.

Immortality might be nice, but immortality has a price.

YOU CANNOT ESCAPE THE CONSEQUENCES OF YOUR ACTIONS.

(Interesting. The very first effect of immortal souls is to PHYSICALLY interconnect everyone’s emotional state, although in an extremely crude, inefficient fashion.)

All right, you have a soul, and there's something you've decided you need in order to feel happy. So what's fundamentally different about your actions?

You're going to have to take everybody else's feelings into account before you act.

It is now the RATIONAL thing to do, in your self-interest, in total conformity with physical law.

In the previous case, everybody else's feelings didn't matter. But in this case, they do.

Oh, man, life just got REALLY complicated. As we all know, making EVERYBODY happy is just about impossible. You're going to spend more time worrying about other peoples feelings than your own. Your specific action to get what you want can’t be predicted, because it’s going to depend on the desires of the other people involved, on the infinite vagaries of human emotion.

What would be the societal end-state?

Well, it's clear by now the first effect would be to make society itself possible. Groups of interacting human beings would now be perfectly stable. The behaviors that would evolve as people---immortal souls, actually---interacted would be complex and numerous. As severely restricted in its behavior as a without-souls society would be, a with-souls society would be unrestricted. Though not completely unrestricted, mind, because immortality imposes its own restrictions.

Hmmm. We are looking for observable differences between with-soul and without-soul behavior. What would be really nice to find is some behavior where the difference would be as different as possible, a huge difference, a whacking great big whale of a difference, a Mount Everest of a difference, a difference that would resolve the problem beyond all doubt.

What is the overwhelming characteristic of without-soul behavior?

Sociopathy. Me-me-me above all. Absolute, uncaring selfishness.

What is the exact opposite of selfish?

Selfless.

This is correct but doesn't quite fit. Selfless means "no self" and this is exactly wrong for an immortal soul, an immortal self. We need a better-fitting term.

(The word "selfless" is actually a sign of confusion. It would arise in a situation where a sentient gave up its life for some reason, and it would appear to those who didn't know sentients possessed immortal souls as if the sentient had given up its existence.)

Sacrifice?

Yeah, sacrifice. That's it. To pin it down precisely, sociopathic behavior is where you make yourself happy with no thought given to the happiness of others, and sacrificial behavior is where you give up your own happiness so that others can be happy instead. But, remembering all actions can be stated in term of being happy, you're basically making the following happiness statement:

"I'm not happy---unless everybody else is happy, too."

(This statement is truly scary, because the best, strongest way to enforce this would be for all sentients' emotional states to be PHYSICALLY interconnected. Immortality does this, but the interconnection is weak at best. It is my gut feeling something MUCH stronger is required for stability, something like spiritual copper wires connecting everybody's souls, along which emotional "currents" would run.

In plain English, if somebody hurts, you have to be able to feel it, too. Their pain is yours, quite literally.

In precisely the same sense as all the stars are physically interconnected by gravity, all sentients' emotional states---every single sentient that exists in the Universe---may also be all physically interconnected.)

But, to be completely rigorous, it doesn't necessarily have to be for other people's happiness. More generally, it can be so some other goal can be accomplished. It might even be something like "the preservation of the Earth." The happiness statement would be:

"I'm not happy---unless I know the Earth is safe."

Would you see this kind of behavior in a with-souls society?

Oh, hell, yes, you'd see it.

Because, in a with-souls society, it's RATIONAL behavior. Supremely rational.

If you're surrounded by unhappy people, what are the odds you're going to be unhappy too?

One hundred per cent, and you know it.

And you can't shoot them in the back to make them go away, although you might wish you could. I mean, they're immortal souls, right? They ain't going anywhere, they're always going to be there. So what's the only possible course of action to take so you can be happy?

Make the unhappy people happy.

Yes, it's gonna be a MAJOR pain in the rear end, but it's the only thing you can do.

(This is the rock-bottom. However, depending on how strong the interconnection is between human beings' emotional states, it could easily be that it is PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE for you to feel completely happy UNLESS everybody around you is completely happy, too.)

So you set your own feelings aside for a while and go to work.

So, stepping back, what would be observed in a with-souls society is people working like dogs and giving up lives of ease and comfort to, fundamentally, make other people happy. There would be many, many people who would apparently "die" for this single cause. The odds are there would be so many people willing to dedicate themselves to making other people happy they would form organizations. These organizations would be recognizable by very unique characteristics. They would transcend barriers of race(genes), money, politics, time, and space. This is because they would be the group expression of the wills of eternal beings.
People would also dedicate their lives to the study of what it takes to make people happy, and professions would appear where people specialized in helping unhappy people to get happy. Which is a sacrifice because dealing with unhappy people all the time is like wallowing in sewage for a living. There are much easier and more lucrative ways of making money.

Let’s put souls into our happiness statement:

"My soul is not happy---unless everybody else's soul is happy, too."

Now let’s add sacrifice to it:

"I'm willing for my soul to be unhappy, for a little while---so that everybody else's soul, including mine, will be happy in the end."

(Scientists have got this odd notion that self-sacrifice is impelled by genes, that people are controlled by their genes, so this is something I have to pause for a minute and address.

What would we observe in human behavior that would be different in the two cases, one where self-sacrifice is driven by the instinct to protect your gene line, and the other, where self-sacrifice is driven by the desire to keep everybody's soul happy, your own included?

Answer: For the gene-driven model, self-sacrificial behavior would be observed ONLY when the person or persons being sacrificed for is a close genetic relative. For the soul-driven model, self-sacrificing behavior would be observed for ALL people, even when the person or persons being sacrificed for is not a close genetic relative.

Also, for the gene-driven model, the fundamental reason for the sacrifice will be propagation of the gene line. For the soul-driven model, the fundamental reason for the sacrifice will be the happiness of the person or persons being sacrificed for.

There is one situation in particular where the difference in behavior would be stark.

Where parents have a child who is disabled, to the point of not being physically capable of reproducing, not capable of passing on the gene line.

For the gene-driven model, the rational behavior would be to toss the disabled kid out the front door and forget him. That's what should be observed.

For the soul-driven model, the rational behavior would be the same as the other children---to love the kid just as much as the others, maybe more. Because he's fundamentally the same as the other children. He's got a soul, too.

Which behavior is observed in the real world I leave to the gentle reader's judgment.)

Note that the addition of souls takes most of the sting out of sacrifice. Without souls, sacrifice means permanent loss. With souls, it means temporary loss. You're gonna be happy, too, it's just going to take a little longer. You can even argue that, all things considered, it's not really sacrifice at all, that it's something that MIGHT be called "enlightened self-interest."

(Some might accuse me of taking the romance out of sacrifice, or taking the mystery out of much of the world. They're right. I plead necessity. This has to be done. The insane technological killing power Man has created and is going to continue to create makes it absolutely necessary to prove, beyond all possible doubt, that justice cannot be escaped.)

There now, I've established sacrifice would be the main observable difference between a with-souls society and a without-soul society, excepting the existence of society itself.

Also, note a without-souls "society" (actually impossible) would be sociopathic and revolve around selfishness, and a with-souls society would revolve around everybody being happy.

Whether this is correct or not, as always, I leave to the gentle reader's judgment. (By the way, gentle reader, if you have ever in your life dropped so much as a penny in a Salvation Army bucket, you were making a sacrifice for the happiness of others and therefore acting like you had a soul---whether you knew it or not. Right?)

But that's not the only difference, just the biggest one. There are others. For example, in a with-souls society, as societal evolution progressed and sentient behavior tended toward the rational, this everybody-has-to-be-happy thing would begin to bubble towards consciousness and be expressed in their fundamental rules for society. Phrases like "the pursuit of happiness" would appear and be described as "inalienable rights" in the foundation documents of societies.

I invite the gentle reader to find others. Go for it.

But I haven't described the societal end-state yet.

But it's clear as glass, given all the preceding.

A society where EVERYBODY is happy.

Now, people being people---or, souls being souls---eternity might not be long enough to reach this particular goal, but that's the end-state.

One additional thing is certain from all the preceding. Right at the moment, nobody knows for a solid scientific fact if souls exist or not. As far as I know, there is NO credible scientific data for or against the existence of souls.

But it is stunningly clear human society is critically dependent on the existence on souls. When everybody is aware of this, how critically important these things are, there is no question what will happen next.

Scientists might not have gone looking for souls in a determined fashion yet---but they're going to. It's as inevitable as the sun rising in the morning.

I will make a flat statement. The experiment to detect souls will be the most important scientific experiment that has been done, or ever will be done, in the history of the human race. (And the name of the scientist who detects souls first will outshine all other scientists' names in human history, forever.)

In the meantime, until scientists get around to detecting souls, a bit of practical advice: If the smart, gentle reader meets somebody who says he doesn’t believe in souls, there’s one thing I HIGHLY recommend the smart, gentle reader avoid doing.

Don’t turn your back to him.

Y’all have a good one.

END

"AFTER THE AWAKENING"

ON THE INFLUENCE OF EMOTION DRUGS ON HISTORY

(Actually posted 8/26/07 1:55 PM. I just changed the date to keep the order of the posts the way I like it.)

ON THE INFLUENCE OF EMOTION DRUGS ON HISTORY

by Jeffrey A. Corkern

In the early 1500's, the Spanish culture landed in the Americas and encountered the early native American cultures.

And VERY shortly after that, on a historical time scale, the early native American cultures were gone. With hardly any effort at all. Wiped out, crushed, extinct, one with the dodo bird, baby. While the people who had composed those cultures were still there, the cultures themselves had been eradicated.

(Certainly pockets lingered. But as a significant historical force, they were gone.)

Hardy a whisper of what those early American cultures were remains behind today. There is no more than the barest detectable trace in the current American cultures of any of the old Aztec/Maya/Inca and so forth cultures. (With one notable exception. More on this in a bit.) Certainly nothing in our law, religion, or societal customs can be traced back to any early American culture.

Why were these early American cultures wiped out so easily?

Yeah, disease had a lot to do with it. And also the Spanish had vastly superior technology. The early American cultures were what? About Late Stone Age? Not even metal. The Spanish were WELL beyond that. They had steel swords and armor, not to mention matchlock firearms.

Why were the Spanish so superior in technology, though?

This is actually a strange thing, that the Spanish were so superior. The more you think about it, the odder it gets.

Because the early Americans should've been about EQUAL in technology. At the very least.

They really should've. Right? They had the time. They had the time, and the resources. They surely had the time and resources to develop technology equal to--or even SUPERIOR---to the Spanish. Humans had been in the Americas since the time of the glaciers, man! They could've done it. The competitive pressures to innovate---wars, floods, plagues, etc---were EXACTLY the same as the Spanish. They had more than enough physical resources and time to develop and even surpass anything the Spanish had. Time to develop steel, time to develop guns, time even to develop the germ theory of disease that could've done so much to keep their entire culture from being erased.

There's NO physical reason the Spanish couldn't have landed and found the early native Americans driving around in Cadillacs.

And yet---it didn't happen. Their culture wasn't technologically equal to the Spanish, and so it got rubbed out. With the greatest of ease.

(Cultures, it seems, undergo Darwinian selection pressures just as much as physical organisms do.)

Why?

Now I don't think it was because the early Americans were less intelligent than the Spanish. Not for any idiotic racial reasons. They had their innovations and clever inventions. They studied and knew the stars, engineered and built massive temples and cities. They had the motions of Venus in the sky all mapped out, a thing that took centuries of precise record-keeping to do.

Without question, they could think. As well as the Spanish.

But they were like, SL-O-O-O-W to do it, man, you know?

It's as if some unknown factor---SEVERELY retarded the rate of growth of the early American cultures. Something that was NOT present in Spanish culture, European culture.

(From here on in, I'm going to refer to Spanish culture as European culture. Certainly from the standpoint of the early American cultures, they were the same.)

What might that factor be? It would have to be something that was all over the early American cultures, but NOT present in European culture, and also capable of SEVERELY slowing the growth of a culture.

Is there one single factor that meets all these criteria?

Um, well, yes, there is ONE such factor. There is one STRIKING difference between early native American culture and European culture.

Emotion drugs.

(A brief pause here to define what I mean by “emotion drug.” The definition is obvious, but must be stated for reasons of rigor.

An “emotion drug” is a chemical substance whose SOLE purpose is to induce a specific emotion in a user's brain.)

Emotion drug use was endemic in the native American cultures---but NOT in the European cultures, not to the extent it was in the Americas. Early Native American religions actively ENCOURAGED the use of emotion drugs, while the religion of the Europeans----Catholicism and all the religions that derived from it---actively DISCOURAGED the use of emotion drugs.

To put it crudely---the Pope DIDN'T smoke dope. But in the early native American cultures, the Pope-equivalents DID smoke dope. And encourage everybody else to do it, too. Plus ingest mescaline. And alcohol. And mushrooms. And marijuana. And peyote. And coca.

Man. Look at that list. That incredibly LONG list of emotion drugs they left behind is very strong evidence getting stoned was a MAJOR part of their culture. With all the emotion drugs they had available, those early native American dudes must've spent a LOT of their time ripped out of their minds, huh.

And damn, tobacco. I nearly missed tobacco because it is so common and everyday. (You could make a strong case tobacco is the early native Americans' revenge for having their culture wiped out, couldn't you.)

Funny. A lot of the emotion drugs existing today---come DIRECTLY from those early native American cultures. In fact, thinking about it, emotion drugs are the one and only significant cultural thing they left behind. Other than that---nothing.

(Sure, chocolate and potatoes, the odd word or two. But these are extremely minor. They have had no effect on the bedrock of our culture.)

Could extensive emotion drug use actually HARM a culture over time?

Well, if somebody's stoned out of his mind on whatever---he, or she, is NOT, like, you know, THINKING. Right? So, if you compared the two cultures in the pre-invasion centuries, what you would see in the early American cultures is a great number of people NOT thinking, as opposed to the Europeans, where you would see a great number of people with their index fingers earnestly pressed against their temples like the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz, staring off into space, and THINKING.

Thinking about ways to make their lives better, to get what they want. Like, well, how to make steel, and ways to forge that steel into swords, armor, and guns.

Thinking, fundamentally, about ways to make their lives HAPPIER.

Would a significant fraction of a culture's populace always being stoned at any one time, NOT THINKING, have a severely retarding effect on a culture's progress over centuries?

Waddya---THINK?

Ahem.

There is another somewhat more subtle retarding effect.

People do what they do to be happy. You can describe all human action as an effort to achieve happiness.

Emotion drugs---MAKE you feel happy.

And you don't have to do ANY work for it. Or, more accurately, not as much work as you would have to do otherwise.

And this airy-fairy stuff means what, in practical terms?

In an emotion-drug culture, happiness is only a snort, a swallow, or a toke away.

And so it is very, very easy to get away from reality in an emotion-drug culture, from anything that makes you unhappy. Like being tired from carrying rocks on your back to build temples with all day. Or your entire family dying from some weird disease. Or having a permanent headache from the boss bopping you on the head all the time as you carry him around in his palanquin. Things like that.

Instead of sitting down and dreaming up inventions like the wheel to make your life easier (which the Maya NEVER did), or creating an antibiotic to cure that weird disease, or planning a revolution to kick that head-bopping boss out, you could just sit down and get stoned to make all the pain and bad feelings go away.

Emotion-drug cultures have a definite built-in tendency to remain STATIC, don't they? Nothing's going to change very fast in an emotion-drug culture.

This is NOT true in a culture where emotion drugs are illegal. You can't easily escape from something that makes you unhappy.

You can only---deal with it directly. By changing something about yourself or your environment. You just CAN'T get away.

In an non-emotion-drug culture---you are FORCED to deal with the real world, FORCED to think. If you want to be happy.

You think this would have an accelerating effect on a culture's progress?

There are effects on moral progress, too. So much moral advancement has taken place because of empathy, the ability to feel what the victim is feeling. Emotion drugs severely hamper the feeling of empathy. The more intense the emotion drug, the more diminished your ability to feel empathy. The more emotionally cut off you are from other human beings.

If you're on emotion drugs, you feel happy---NO MATTER WHAT YOU'RE DOING. You can do anything you want to people, and it's not going to affect your own emotions the least little bit.

Like bending people backward over onto stone altars and cutting their beating hearts out of their chests, for example. Not just every once in a while, but ALL the damn time.

Think that's evidence of retarded moral progress? The Spanish were certainly no moral paragons, but at least they didn't routinely bend people backward over stone altars and rip their hearts out!

(The possibility of having your heart ripped out one day isn't going to generate a whole lot of like, you know, LOYALTY to a culture, either. You can only imagine the conversation.

"Wait a second. You evil invading imperialistic capitalist Spanish DON'T rip peoples' hearts out?"

"No. We don't do that."

"Never ever?"

"No, never ever."

"Oh, I have seen the light! Bless me, Father, for I have sinned!")

One more subtle effect. The most subtle effect of all, but perhaps the most significant, powerful, dangerous, lethal effect of them all.

How many geniuses are there in a culture, at any given time? Not many, right?

What if even ONE of those geniuses spent all of his time STONED? Would that have a retarding effect on a culture's progress?

So much progress is not due to mass action, but rather to the solitary effort of a single individual. What if that single individual decided he liked emotion drugs better than thinking?

What if Newton had spent all of his time stoned? Maxwell? Pasteur? Galileo? Einstein? Gibbs? Curie? Fleming? Salk? The list goes on and on.

Except, whoops, they couldn't do that, because emotion drugs were FROWNED ON in the cultures they lived in. There weren't even that many emotion drugs to use in the first place. Certainly not compared to what the early native American cultures had.

What about the early native American scientific geniuses?

Oops. Pardon me. There aren't ANY known early native American scientific geniuses, are there? NOT ONE. No Aztec Newtons, no Maya Maxwells, no Inca Pasteurs. NOBODY, MAN!

(Oh, they had their potential scientific geniuses, right enough. But they were either stoned, or trapped in a retarded culture that had developed no place for their genius to flower.

"Hey, Jaguar Paw! Let's go invent the germ theory and keep thousands and thousands of our people from dying when the Spanish arrive!"

"Naah. I'm gonna kick back here at the temple and do some spirit-travelin'." (D-e-e-p drag on joint) "Oh, man, this is some really GOOD spirit-travelin'!")

So when you add all these effects up, what does it mean?

It means one day Spanish sailing ships arrive at your beaches, instead of YOUR sailing ships arriving at THEIRS. It means the Spanish come rowing ashore carrying steel swords, armor, and guns, and you, well, you AIN'T driving Cadillacs. You're still stuck in the Stone Age. With rocks, clubs, throwing sticks, and spears.

It means when the Europeans arrive, your culture gets STOMPED, and it's not even close.

Are there any historical lessons we should take from this? Something that applies to societal conflicts the world's societies are currently having?

Given all the preceding----would you, the gentle reader, make emotion drugs LEGAL in YOUR society TODAY?

The world's stable societies are currently engaged in an epic battle to stop people from using emotion drugs.

And they're LOSING. Big-time. Emotion drugs are far more common than they were fifty years ago. When you look at this struggle on a historical time scale, it is quite clear they are losing this battle.

It is also quite clear WHY they are losing this battle.

They don't understand the enemy. Don't have the slightest clue. You can tell that by what they're calling this war.

The “War On Drugs.”

What? We're fighting penicillin, sulfonamides, aspirin, quinine? That doesn't make any sense, man!

And it doesn't, either.

It's not the “War on Drugs.”

It's the “War on EMOTION Drugs.”

They're fighting it entirely the wrong way, too. The world's stable societies are trying to fight this battle by citing what are, essentially, unimportant side-effects. Tobacco is loaded with carcinogens and give you cancer. Marijuana is also loaded with carcinogens and can give you cancer. Alcohol can cause cirrhosis of the liver and a host of other problems that will kill you also. Psychedelics can cause permanent brain damage. Just a pinch too much of other emotion drugs will kill you in a heartbeat.

But that's not the most lethal effect of these things, is it? Not by a country mile. The most lethal effect of these things is what they fundamentally do, make people feel happy.

You cut these things loose in your culture----AND ONE FINE DAY, YOUR CULTURE JUST WON'T BE THERE ANYMORE. It will have been out-competed and rolled over by some non-emotion-drug culture. Just like what happened to the early native American cultures.

Right?

Y'all have a good one.

END

"AFTER THE AWAKENING"

IDEAS ON SOUL-DETECTOR DESIGN

(First posted 3/12/08 6:34 PM)

IDEAS ON SOUL-DETECTOR DESIGN

by Jeffrey A. Corkern

Y'all wanna know something strange?

People have been arguing back and forth over the existence of souls for centuries. Writing tons of books and pamphlets, slaughtering thousands of trees, spending endless hours wrangling back and forth.

But one little thing NOBODY has ever done.

NOBODY has really, seriously tried to prove the truth of whatever side they're on in a science lab. Nobody has EVER gotten off his lazy rear end, gone into the lab, and actually done some nasty, filthy WORK to prove his point.

Nobody. Pro or con.

Oh, there was that worthless MacDougall experiment, (Duncan MacDougall (doctor) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) but that was a lost cause from the word “Go.” Detecting souls by weight loss upon death? Even if MacDougall HAD picked up a weight loss, how does that PROVE the existence of souls?

It's like trying to prove the existence of electrons by putting a metal block on a balance, pulling out an electron, and trying to pick up the weight loss.

Even if you COULD pick up the difference (which you couldn't do, not even with the balances of today), how does that PROVE the existence of electrons?

Worthless.

Perhaps I should say nobody COMPETENT has ever tried to build a soul-detector.

Not even the simplest experiments have been done. Nobody has tried to do even the EASY experiments.

Ergo this post.

This post is a list of random ideas for either designing a soul-detector, or finding a way to design a soul-detector. I list them in case any scientist who is capable of building a soul-detector reads The Nine Point Five Theses and starts wondering how this could actually be accomplished. Some of these experiments are easy. Some are not.

If anybody has any ideas of his own for doing this, PLEASE post them in a comment. (PLEASE, man! I’m getting S-O-O-O tired of having to do ALL the thinking here!) Or post them in your own blog, and put the link in your comment. I’ll put up anything I judge to be credible.

To strictly define the experimental problem: The objective is to kill an experimental animal and detect its soul leaving its body. The problem is how to build an instrument that will do this. NOTHING ELSE. Anything not STRICTLY focused on this will be deleted and ignored.

I’m not saying other things aren’t legitimate. I’m only saying they are NOT the problem I’m trying to solve here.

Update added 2/25/09

There is experimental evidence indicating the presence of a soul in the brain. These scientists have monitored brain behavior and observed behavior that indicates there is a field permeating the brain. Here is the Wikipedia link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_theories_of_consciousness

"This theory accounts for several otherwise puzzling facts, such as the finding that attention and awareness tend to be correlated with the synchronous firing of multiple neurons rather than the firing of individual neurons"

Man, ain't that a HELL of a statement!

On to the list.

MAKING A SOUL-DETECTOR FROM NERVES:

There must be some way the soul has of interacting with nervous tissue. Somehow, information has to be transmitted back and forth between the soul and the brain.

So somewhere in nervous tissue there is the equivalent of an antenna. It's GOT to be in there somewhere, man.

So that might be how a soul-detector could be built. Out of nerves. Wire up a network of nerves in the shape of a hollow globe, kill an experimental animal in the middle of it, and see if you get a signal. A coherent field leaving the body.

This is a neat idea because you don't have to know what the actual mechanism of the soul-brain interaction is, which could be something very exotic and weird and therefore hard to find, like the ability to vary the value of h over short distances.

I am told a practical problem with this is it is currently NOT possible to wire up human nerves in this fashion. I am also told it is not currently possible to keep human nerves alive long enough to be functional.

It should be possible to use other kinds of nerves. Some of the earliest research on nerves was on giant-squid nerves. (Squid giant axon - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) In an odd fact of nature, giant squids have VERY large nerves that can be wired up.

Of course, that depends on whether or not squids have souls, too. (Sorry, people, but I'm going to have to digress into some real strangeness here for a minute.) If they've got souls, their nerves will have this antenna and might work in this experiment, if they don't have souls, they won't work at all.

Can we answer this question?

Yup. There's something that pops up in the analysis of this subject, over and over and over again.

The source of emotion is the soul---NOT the brain. You get angry, you get happy, you get sad, you get whatever, it started in your soul, man, not your brain.

So this gives us a rock-solid indicator of whether or not a particular species of animal has a soul.

If it displays emotion---IT HAS A SOUL. In particular, if it can love, it has a soul.

(My cat-soul-diving-through-my-chest experience suddenly makes a whole lot more sense. Waddya know, it fits!)

So, if giant squids display emotion, we can try their really HUGE nerves out as a soul-detector.

Worth a shot.

THEORETICAL EXAMINATION OF NERVE CELLS:

This one is for you theoretical physicists out there.

As I stated above, somewhere in nervous tissue is Nature's soul antenna.

Go find it.

Take a nervous system cell, take it apart and throw the things away that are obviously not soul-antennae. Things like the mitochondrion, the DNA strands, the various enzymes, and so forth.

Now poke through what's left and see what could possibly be a soul-antenna. When you find the structure, examination of how it works will tell PRECISELY how a functioning soul-detector can be built.

I suggest you look VERY closely at the structures involved in cell-to-cell communication. One of those things receives information DIRECTLY from the soul, man.

You might compare the nerve-cell structure of organisms that don't exhibit emotional behavior---like ants----with the structure of those that do. One of the differences between the two will be a soul-antenna.

Good luck, and good hunting.

Note added 5/20/08:

Some digging into this subject (not by me) has revealed there are a number of physicists trying to solve "the problem of consciousness" by examining nerve cells. (In fact, the study of consciousness is a deep undercurrent of theoretical physics at the moment. Their work is far more important than they know.)

And they keep talking about these things nerve cells have called "microtubules." Why they've focused on this structure, I don't know, but they have.

Here is a paper that illustrates my point. (Be warned. Unless you're a cross between a cell biologist and a quantum physicist like these guys are, you're not going to be able to understand this.)

http://arxiv.org/pdf/physics/0505080v1

Now, the "problem of consciousness" is a lot simpler than these people think, but that's not my point here. My point here is to find the soul antenna nerve cells MUST have. This is certainly the most likely candidate at the moment.


Note on "GHOST HUNTERS":(added 6/29/08)

There is this reality-TV show here in the States put on by the Sci-Fi Channel, "GHOST HUNTERS." This bunch of Roto-Rooter plumbers have formed this organization, TAPS, "The Atlantic Paranormal Society", that goes around investigating haunted-house claims. The Sci-Fi Channel records what they do and makes a program out of it.

(Yeah, the most important research in history is being done by Roto-Rooter plumbers. It's a sad commentary on the state of science today, it really is.)

The stated purpose of TAPS is to find evidence of life after death. It's not quite clear what is to be done with this evidence. These guys are just, like, you know, collecting "evidence", man. The truth is out there.

The truly strange thing is they succeed. On a ROUTINE basis.

I've known this show existed but discounted it. I figured it would be a bunch of "believers" who would go into a house waving antennas around and claim every little static burst and stray shadow was a ghost.

But they're not like that. They try to take as scientific attitude as they know how. They're definitely not trained scientists, and it shows, but they do the best they know how. They go in with the goal of debunking the reports (which is the scientifically correct thing to do), and they do a pretty good job, although not a perfect one. I've seen them throw away evidence that was actually perfectly good.

I saw this one episode where they totally blew the lid off for about ten minutes.

They were investigating a haunted house located in the middle of Wright-Patterson Air Force base. There was a short stretch where, for unknown reason, they actually appeared to be communicating with a disembodied soul. They would ask a question, and get one tap for "Yes" and two taps for "No." It was an astonishing thing to hear. I could the taps, which came only after a question was asked, quite clearly. One, two and even three taps you could discount as coincidence, but six, seven, eight? You're stretching the laws of probability all out of shape, man.

Then one of the plumbers blew the lid off.

Communication was going so well one of the plumbers decided to try something he had tried before, without success. He pulled a flashlight from his pocket, held it up and explained how to turn it on. He then asked the ghost to turn it on. He put it on the floor and backed away.

The damned light came on.

Now, man, THAT was insane.

The definitive experiment to prove people have souls would be to communicate with a disembodied soul.

This goal may have ALREADY been accomplished!

I say "may" because, while I don't think these guys are committing fraud, they don't have, in my opinion, sufficient safeguards against it. They don't seem to realize their TV's show's success can create a VERY strong temptation to commit fraud.

This experiment they ran needs to be repeated, and it needs to be repeated with VERY tight safeguards against fraud.

There have actually been a number of incidents close to this. They recorded a ghost pushing a sheet back once, for example. No fuzziness when that happened. This EVP thing the paranormal people are pushing is apparently a genuine phenomenon. They play back what they record. Yeah, you can make out real English words, entire sentences.

Some smart technician out there somewhere really needs to figure out a way to pick up a cleaner EVP signal, either through better equipment or better signal-processing or both.

Just thought I'd mention this to any potential researchers who drop by here. I really can't endorse this because of the lack of proper fraud controls, but just thought I'd mention it.


IR DETECTION:

"Cold spots" are often reported in association with ghosts.

Well, okay, test this. Surround a test animal with the most sensitive IR detectors you can find and see if you can pick up a soul by the temperature drop it causes by absorbing heat from the air.

Worth a shot.

CLOUD-CHAMBERS:

Cloud chambers can pick up teeny-tiny elementary particles and cosmic rays. ( Cloud chamber - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

Why not try this for souls?

Worth a shot.

"AFTER THE AWAKENING"