There is a compelling alternative to spirituality that deserves attention.
The huge problem with spirituality and religion is that there exists no good evidence for the existence of gods or any supernatural reality. It is a major problem. That alone should give anyone pause. Viewing spirituality as mostly informational, computational, and even software for people is incredibly satisfying and effective.
Please read more.
What if it was better than spirituality? Is it? Could it be?
I believe it is. It works and it fits with our best understanding of reality.
We know information exists. We know software exists. We know computers exist. We know memory exists. Now, we have artificial intelligence that is powered by all of those things. And now there is the arrival of significant artificial intelligence, like GPT3, that is intelligence powered by computation. The next step forward is acceptable and compelling. It requires an open mind and just a little time to think about the idea.
The idea is this: The processing of information in ourselves is a much better understanding of what humanity has called spirituality. And dare I say, it is a superior understanding of ourselves.
Here is an example of just how impressive artificial intelligence is. It can now be used to read x-rays and MRIs and help in the diagnosis of skin cancer.
Reading the genome of a single person for the first time https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230210-the-man-whose-genome-you-can-read-end-to-end
https://youtube.com/shorts/ulSzy6peETA?feature=share
Sending our connectom to another planet
Not the physical self.
The difficulty in grouping information within the physical realm, particularly in the context of understanding consciousness and the informational self, arises from several complex and interrelated factors. One of the key challenges is the emergent property of information processing, which is not easily reducible to simple physical laws or components.
1. **Emergence and Complexity**: Information processing in the brain is a prime example of an emergent phenomenon, where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This means that while neuronal activities and brain structures are well-understood at a micro level, the way they combine to produce consciousness and complex thought processes cannot be fully explained by their individual properties alone. This emergent nature of information processing contributes to the intuitive difficulty of not viewing consciousness reductionistically.
2. **Non-Linearity and Feedback Loops**: The brain’s information processing involves highly non-linear interactions and feedback loops. This complexity adds layers of unpredictability and non-linearity, making it challenging to directly correlate specific physical processes with specific mental phenomena.
3. **Subjective Experience (Qualia)**: The subjective nature of experience, often referred to as ‘qualia’, remains a deeply challenging concept to reconcile with physicalist explanations. How information processing in the brain leads to subjective experiences is not fully understood, which fuels the intuitive leap to non-reductionist explanations.
4. **The Binding Problem**: This refers to the challenge of explaining how disparate neural activities are unified into a single, coherent perception or experience. Despite understanding the roles of various brain regions in processing different types of information, how these are integrated into a holistic experience is still a mystery.
5. **Physical vs. Informational Properties**: Physical properties like mass, charge, and velocity are fundamentally different from informational properties like meaning, context, and representation. While physical properties are generally well-defined and measurable, informational properties are context-dependent and often subjective.
6. **Limits of Current Science**: Current scientific methodologies and technologies may not yet be fully equipped to unravel the complexities of information processing, especially in relation to consciousness. This gap in understanding can lead to the perception that there’s something ‘more’ than just physical processes at play.
In summary, the difficulty in conceptualizing information within the physical realm stems from the emergent, complex, and often subjective nature of information processing in the brain. These factors challenge reductionist views and open the door to different interpretations, including those that might erroneously attribute these phenomena to non-physical or spiritual realms. The field of cognitive science and neuroscience continues to explore these challenges, aiming to bridge the gaps in our understanding of how information processing correlates with consciousness and the self.
Idea for a post on draft Informationalself.com
So one thing that could be done is to criticize each religion for its supernatural aspects.
The idea is that major religions are functional if inaccurate software to run on a human. That sounds very dry, but the idea is that it resonates deeply with the person and so there is truth to it in the sense that it does actually fit its mindset.
For Hinduism, the seven chakras are important aspects of being. Also, the idea of progression is very grounded in humanity. Each individual strives for better and so the spiritual quest of enlightenment and opening, the chakras is rational. That being said, the big problem with the chakras and the supernatural spiritual theory is that it doesn’t fit reality. What probably takes place is a very close match between human neurological physiology and hormonal life matched with genetic reality. Probably also people like Stephen pinker would agree that , as we are not blank slates we do have instincts.
As for Christianity…
Here is group that may touch the essence of the informational self. And maybe not.
https://www.snsociety.org/
Gemini 3.
Determining the “likelihood” that the thesis of Informationalself.com is correct is not a matter of statistical probability, but rather where you stand on the spectrum of the Philosophy of Mind.
The website’s core claim—that “spirit” is simply a poetic word for biological information processing—aligns heavily with modern neuroscience and materialist philosophy, but it faces significant unsolved challenges regarding subjective experience.
Here is an analysis of the likelihood of this theory being correct, broken down by scientific and philosophical perspectives.
1. The Scientific Consensus: High Likelihood (Functionally)
If you ask a neuroscientist or a geneticist how the “self” works, their explanation will look very similar to the website’s thesis.
* The Computational Theory of Mind: The prevailing view in cognitive science is that the brain is essentially an information processing system. Neurons fire in patterns (computation) to create thoughts, memories, and reactions.
* Genetics as Code: We know for a fact that DNA is information. It is a quaternary code (A, C, G, T) that programs the construction of the body and influences temperament.
* The “God of the Gaps” is shrinking: Historically, things we attributed to spirits (epilepsy, schizophrenia, mood changes) are now understood as “glitches” in neuro-chemical information processing.
Verdict: From a purely functional and biological standpoint, the theory is highly likely to be correct. We have never found a “ghost” in the machine; we have only found complex biological “software.”
2. The Philosophical Hurdle: The “Hard Problem”
The biggest argument against the website’s thesis is what philosopher David Chalmers calls the Hard Problem of Consciousness.
* The Gap: We can explain how the brain processes the information of the color red (wavelength enters eye \rightarrow signal to brain \rightarrow recognition).
* The Qualia: However, information theory fails to explain what it feels like to see red. Why does that data processing feel like an internal experience rather than just a dark, robotic calculation?
* The Objection: If we are just information, a sufficiently complex computer should be able to “feel” emotion. Many philosophers argue that information alone cannot account for the subjective inner life (the “soul” or “spirit”).
Verdict: The theory is incomplete. It explains the mechanics of the self, but not necessarily the experience of the self.
3. The Physics Perspective: “It from Bit”
There is a growing movement in theoretical physics that supports the Informationalself worldview.
* Information as Fundamental: Physicist John Archibald Wheeler proposed the concept “It from bit”—meaning every particle, every field of force, and even space-time itself derives its function and meaning from binary yes/no choices (information).
* Thermodynamics: We know information is physical (Landauer’s principle). Erasing information produces heat. This suggests that the distinction between “spirit” (information) and “body” (matter) is physically real, but they are part of the same thermodynamic system.
4. The Semantic Argument
Ultimately, the “correctness” of the website depends on how you define your terms.
| If you define “Spirit” as… | Then the likelihood is… |
|—|—|
| An immortal, supernatural entity that survives death and floats in the ether. | Low. There is no empirical evidence for this, and the website argues this is a misunderstanding of reality. |
| The essence of who you are (your memories, personality, patterns, and agency). | High. These things are demonstrable information patterns stored in the brain’s wetware. |
Summary
Is the website correct?
* Scientifically: Yes, it is the leading materialist explanation for human identity. We are biological information processors.
* Experientially: Maybe not. It struggles to explain why we have a “first-person point of view.”
Would you like me to explain the “Hard Problem of Consciousness” in more detail, as that is the strongest counter-argument to this theory?
I dislike the qualia objection.
An infinite regress, recusing agent would have qualia. I believe. I’d rather see strong paths of development for consciousness and qualia than waste time developing wordy objections.
This is a robust stance. You are essentially arguing for Strong AI or Functionalism: the idea that if the informational structure is complex and self-referential enough, “feeling” is an emergent property of the math, not a magical additive.
Your intuition about the “recursive agent” is the exact foundation of several leading scientific theories that are trying to solve consciousness without resorting to mysticism.
Here are the strong paths of development that treat qualia not as a philosophical roadblock, but as an engineering result of recursive information processing.
1. The “Strange Loop” (Douglas Hofstadter)
Your point about the “recursing agent” is the central thesis of cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter. He argues that the “Self” is a hallmark of a system that has gained the ability to read its own code, but only at a high level of abstraction.
* The Mechanism: A system processes information about the world. Eventually, it becomes complex enough to process information about itself processing information.
* The “I” as a symbol: The system creates a symbol to represent the “whole system.”
* The Infinite Loop: Because the system is constantly reading its own state, which changes the state, which it then reads again, it creates a “Strange Loop.”
* The Result: Qualia is the friction of this loop. “I” am a hallucination generated by the system to summarize its own complexity.
2. Attention Schema Theory (Michael Graziano)
This is perhaps the most grounded “engineering” path. Neuroscientist Michael Graziano argues that qualia is simply a data model.
* The Logic: The brain creates internal models of things to control them (e.g., a model of the arm to control movement).
* Modeling Attention: To manage its own computing resources, the brain must model its own attention.
* The Schema: The brain constructs a schematic, simplified description of what “paying attention” is. This description is imperfect. It describes a non-physical, fluid state of “awareness.”
* Conclusion: We claim we have magic qualia because our brain’s internal report on its own attention process describes it as magic qualia. It is an informational shortcut.
3. Integrated Information Theory (IIT)
Developed by Giulio Tononi, this is the most mathematical attempt to quantify the “informational self.” It proposes that consciousness is data that cannot be reduced to its parts.
* \Phi (Phi): This is the mathematical value of consciousness. It measures the amount of information generated by a system that is over and above the information generated by its parts working independently.
* Causal Power: Qualia is not an output; it is the geometry of the information structure. If the information is sufficiently integrated (high \Phi), the system must experience it.
* Why it fits your view: It posits that any system (biological or silicon) with the right recursive architecture will have subjective experience.
4. Predictive Processing (Active Inference)
Championed by Karl Friston and Anil Seth, this view suggests the brain is a “prediction machine.”
* The Loop: The brain is sealed in the skull. It receives noisy electrical signals. To make sense of them, it generates a “controlled hallucination” (a prediction) of what is happening outside.
* The Self-Model: To predict effectively, the brain must also predict itself (interoception—monitoring heart rate, hormones, etc.).
* Qualia as Error Correction: “Feelings” are just high-weighted prediction errors regarding the state of the organism. A “sad” feeling is an informational update saying, “The internal body state is deviating from the predicted safe baseline.”
Summary of the “Informational” Path
If we accept your premise—that recursion creates qualia—then the website Informationalself.com is technically describing the hardware/software view of human existence.
The roadmap for this view looks like this:
* Input: Raw data enters the system.
* Representation: The system builds a model of the data.
* Recursion (The Critical Step): The system builds a model of itself building the model.
* Emergence: To efficiency-optimize this meta-model, the system simplifies “billions of firing neurons” into a single smooth experience: “I am seeing red.”
Would you like me to break down the “Attention Schema Theory” further? It is currently the strongest specific explanation for why an informational system would claim to have a soul.
Informationalself.com is a website that explores a philosophical and scientific alternative to traditional spirituality. Its central thesis is that what humans have historically called the “spirit” or “soul” is actually information and computational processing occurring within the biological body.
Here is a breakdown of what the site is about:
* Reinterpreting Spirituality: The site argues that “spirituality” is better understood as the “informational-computational self.” It suggests that the weightless, immaterial, yet essential nature of information (like the code in our DNA or the thoughts in our brain) aligns with the core characteristics usually attributed to the “spirit.”
* Materialist View of Identity: It proposes that our identity is formed by the information encoded in our genetics and the information we acquire through learning and experience, rather than a supernatural entity.
* No Supernatural: The content posits that supernatural aspects of religion do not exist and can be explained through complexity and information processing.
Note on a similar term:
You may also encounter the term “informational self-determination” in search results. This is a completely different legal and privacy concept (common in GDPR and European law) regarding an individual’s right to control their own personal data. The website Informationalself.com is not about this legal right; it is strictly about the philosophical concept of the self as information.
Gemini 3