I’m not a huge fan of our words for many things. What exactly do we mean my spiritual or supernatural? Einstein once described what we now call “entanglement” as “spooky action at a distance”. One particle interacting with another particle instantaneously across any distance was too “spooky” for Einstein. All these labels we put on things are an attempt to make sense of our complicated world. They are needed, but they can easily get in the way of truly understanding things.. or keep us from exploring new ideas.
One of my favorite lines in the movie Nacho Libre is “I don’t believe in God, I believe in Science.”. It’s hard to tell what exactly the writer was thinking when they put that line in there. It’s only really funny because of the characters and the situation but that’s how a lot of people think. For most people science means: Things I can touch, test, and stuff really smart people tell me is true. God and religion is the realm of fairy dust and hypocrites.
Back to the whole “entanglement” thing. I think this is where things get a little gray. It’s now a proven scientific “fact”.. but it sounds much too much like fairy dust. When you believe “Science” you don’t really get to pick and choose. To believe in science means to believe that there was nothing and then one day “nothing” exploded and the Universe popped out. Not only that, but of the near infinite ways it could have come about it just so happened to work out in our favor.
I’ve always believed that if there is a “spiritual” it’s mostly likely a “physical” that is just we don’t understand or aren’t capable of accessing. At some point the spiritual realm would need to interact with the physical realm anyway (what would be the point otherwise?). Entanglement is an easy one here. Teleportation and prayer (instant distant communication) suddenly seem much less fairy dust-like. But what about other things that still belong to the fairy dust realm?
God. The idea of an all knowing, all powerful being still lives in the fairy dust realm. But what about AI? It’s not that hard to build a case that at SOME point in our future an AI could be capable of becoming an all knowing, all powerful being. Especially if it mastered the use of entanglement to communicate with itself (and others?) throughout the Universe. This is not a new idea.. it’s at least as old as Issac Asimov. But with recent at advances it’s looking more and more inevitable.
Heaven. We are busy building virtual worlds and ways to interact with these virtual worlds. Why not make them “perfect”? No death, only fun. Sure, you’ll die in the real world.. but then why not work on uploading our brains to this virtual world.. aren’t we just essentially software running on bad hardware anyway? Why couldn’t there be backup copies of us already? If entanglement worked a bit like the Internet’s “cloud” it would be easy. Delete the copy of me here.. don’t worry there is a copy on another server somewhere that is updated in realtime. W00t.
Angels & Demons. This is easy. If we lowly humans are capable (or will be in a 100 years or so) of creating super power AI beings/robots/cyborgs whatever that are capable of operating at a higher level of physics.. whose to say in the few billion years that the Universe has been around someone else hasn’t been us to it? What’s the first thing we humans do when we create virtual worlds? We create “virtual” characters to inhabit them for us to befriend or fight or whatever. They don’t even need to obey the same laws of physics (physics is just “code” anyway).
Dragons & Magic (why not?). Easy too. Genes are becoming as easy write as software. Why not design and “print” a dinosaur? It’s coming. Because we can. Magic? I can ask a black box on my phone to call someone on the other side of the planet.
We are in our infancy when it comes to this new science and technology. Our words don’t begin address what many of these things really mean. If I woke up in a “virtual” world one day. How many days would I need to spend in there before that became my world? And don’t picture simple silly pixelated graphics. I mean a virtual world where I can breathe, touch, and taste. At what point does “virtual” vanish and become “real”. If I’ve spent YEARS in this world getting to know “characters” that are as smarter (or smarter) then real people. Would I be sad if one died? Would I be sad if I died? It would become really hard to convince me otherwise if I had “lived” there long enough. Some physicists are now trying to conduct tests to make sure that we aren’t already living in a “virtual” world. Would it matter? What would it change anything? And.. what would be the purpose of this “Earth” simulation? (Perhaps to learn to love an all powerful being in spite of everything else?)>
As a Christian.. aren’t we kind of in a virtual world already? There is a creator on the outside (and inside) looking in and controlling aspects. He has the power to flip a switch and shut the whole “program” down at any moment.. when it’s powered down we are told there is a “back up” copy of each and everyone of us.. destined to go on either to a Hell simulation or Heaven simulation (simulation probably isn’t the best world to use here). Those are big topics to flippantly blow past.. but this is a blog post.