The Weight of Expectation

I've recently completed my "A-Z" book of short stories. Whether it sees the light of day beyond being serialised here remains to be seen. I can share, though, that the theme of all the stories is the "soul" or "spirit" - leading me to the working title of the book: The Soul-Spirit Series. I am fascinated by the pilot of this meat hulk I wander around in everyday... What is it and where did it come from?

Having been raised with a Christian faith through childhood, I have always felt that the idea of a God was credible - both spiritually and scientifically. I also have a healthy humanist streak and a logical grounding in the scientific method. Without science there can be no proof of god - and nothing should exist on faith alone. I have had too much experience of the Human Condition now to think human clergy or prophets are infallible, primary sources for proof of the almighty.

It wasn't until I had children, and another 20 years to ponder it, that I came up with my own theory on it all. My hypothesis, which is all this can ever be until science disproves it, or I die, was triggered by the emergence of Quantum Dynamics.

If you aren't familiar with this wizardry form of physics, it makes the impossible possible. Put simply, something can both exist and not exist. Quantum allows for an atom to have "two states" - and to do so without breaking the prior fundamental rules of "physics" (the physical world) that we know presently to hold true.

This means the soul could both exist and be manifest through your body and also have another state. Like code on a computer must have some mass or "weight" - yet at the same time it is negligible to the overall weight - so might the soul. One byte of data is reported to have the weight of 1 Attogram - that's a stunningly tiny one-quintillionth of a gram. Consider that when you think about your brain and soul. It's pretty hard to measure something that weights as little as that.

It challenged me - I started thinking of our brain as a CPU. I then considered my first memory. Do you remember yours? Most people I subtly ask about this usually tell me their first memory is from "around 4". Some people remember flashes beforehand - but mainly it's 3-4 years.

Is that when the soul finishes "downloading"? When the OS is fully booted up?

Now, that's not to say littlies like my kids - who can speak long before 4 years old - aren't conscious, aware or have souls - more that all the core software is still downloading. After all, a soul is likely to be a pretty complex piece of code. It's taken 45 terabytes to train AI programmes like GPT-4o. The programme itself is also rumoured to have 1 TRILLION parameters. If we were to see the human soul in code, it's likely it would be far, far more complex than GPT-4o (a total understatement, right?).

It was the ethno-biologist Terence McKenna who bizarrely suggested that human intelligence rapidly evolved because of our forebear's use of Psilocybin psychedelics. His theory was that it triggered language and other evolutionary pathways that grey our brains.

entheogen - meaning "the god within".

The substance is still used by some indigenous groups today to get them close to their idea of sacred. But what is clear from the theory is that the brain evolved - and all of a sudden, we're not just animals with simple emotions - we're sentient beings. I get that many see animals and creatures as sentient - but am pretty certain that no dogs or dolphins have developed faith or religion. My dog doesn't pray! Well, sometimes for steak.

The emergence of sentience and then a "big idea" to existence seems symbiotic. Without our scientific curiosity and intelligence - there would be no religion. They use the same synapses to develop.

This isn't purely me meditating on spirituality. There are curious facets of human consciousness that suggest there's something in this. Remote Viewing is a genuine discipline that the CIA has historically taken seriously. Anecdotally, it is told that one of their Remote Viewers had a vision of a new class of Russian nuclear missile submarine. When it was verified later by other forms of intelligence, the discipline gained a new mystic credibility. Intelligence agencies will do anything to get an edge, they have no ego on it.

Some have proposed that Remote Viewing is the product of something called Quantum Entanglement - that somehow humans can use parts of their brain and senses to navigate across the quantum plane. You can actually learn to become a Remote Viewer - the CIA declassified some of the training materials!

If indeed the human brain did evolve enough to enable the downloading of sentient intelligence, all the religious theories start to make sense when you pool them together. Revelations, afterlife, everything.

Atheists would argue that "this is it", science can't prove there's a heaven, so live your life. Well, science is opening up the quantum realm. The god an athiest sneers at could have just been an archaic means to explain that 0 and 1 are simultaneous states. Those without faith or an open mind to the scientific potential of this kind of idea have to explain what the soul is before they can be definitive.

If a soul exists, it must have some kind of mass. When you die, something must happen to that mass - all energy is forever.

Law of Conservation of Energy:

Energy cannot be created or destroyed; it can only be transformed from one form to another or transferred from one system to another. The total energy of an isolated system remains constant over time.

Are we just starting to uncover the quantumness of existence? The non-physical realm that we cannot interact with? Our souls could feasibly be quantum, even if we are not physically so. They can exist in both the physical and non-physical - which is our tether to it and the source of our faith. If a realm or indeed multiple other universes exist - they may not all be physical as ours is. Perhaps the realm of the soul is different and we must consider the primary common physical force to our realm.

My final musing on this was of the importance of Gravity. It seems, of all the forces of the universe, the most important. It clings us to this rock. It clings the air we breath to it. It tethers us to the sun. A star that is dragging us across the cosmos, because it is also in tow to some far off gravity.

If your soul "weighs" something - could the experience of life be its diet? Do evil acts load up your soul like fat round a belly? Do acts of purity and goodness shed you of this sinful cargo?

Imagine that. When you die, it is the weight of your soul that decides whether you float upward, to a realm of "lightness", or whether you a heavy, dragged down into the depths of the quantum. Where the pressure and heat is intense.

It turns out, through the lens of quantum physics, you can make for a pretty equivalent vision of heaven and hell.

So, dear reader, unladen your soul of its sinful fat. Live a life of goodness and generosity. Perhaps then, when your inevitable end arrives, you'll float like helium into the upper reaches of the next quantum atmosphere. Until you latch onto another physical life... somewhere.

And thus did I resolve the conflict in my heart between faith and science.