Are Spirits Computer Programs?

Reflections on "cyber animism," Gödel's incompleteness theorem, psychedelic sanghas, and much more

I thought, today, I would assemble a bit of a cultural diary about my last week in New York City, reviewing some talks and events I attended. I hate that so much of my Psyche is now occupied by Trumpocalypse, yet again. Say what you will about the boring, irritating Democrats. In retrospect, I found it a fun, easy time when Biden was President. I didn’t wake up each morning fretting about narcissists and psychopaths wielding immense amounts of power for their own private interest. I didn’t feel like I had a Trump/Musk/Thiel-shaped splinter lodged in my brain. I didn’t feel immense daily concern that the people running the government were going to make everyone poor by destroying the economy, invade neighboring peaceful countries, steal all of our data to build a massive surveillance system, put us in El Salvadoran prisons for no reason, or perhaps start nuclear war by accident. But those days are gone now.

Currently, I am watching the Supreme Court with deep concern. It seems like they want to go “all in” on the fascinating new idea that anyone (legal resident, American citizen, etc) can be grabbed off the street with no due process, then stuffed in a foreign concentration camp, for as long as Trump or his cronies want. Yesterday, writing in The New York Times, two legal experts, Erwin Chemerinsky and Laurence H. Tribe, rubbed this in, warning us, “We Should All Be Very, Very Afraid”:

Of all the lawless acts by the Trump administration in its first two and a half months, none are more frightening than its dumping of human beings who have not had their day in court into an infamous maximum-security prison in El Salvador — and then contending that no federal court has the authority to right these brazen wrongs.

In an astounding brief filed in the Supreme Court on Monday, the solicitor general of the United States argued that even when the government concedes that it has mistakenly deported someone to El Salvador and had him imprisoned there, the federal courts are powerless to do anything about it. The Supreme Court must immediately and emphatically reject this unwarranted claim of unlimited power to deprive people of their liberty without due process.

Last month, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a lawful resident of the United States, was mistakenly picked up and deported to an El Salvadoran prison, for absolutely no reason. When Trump’s press secretary was asked about why this person hadn’t been returned as a Judge ordered, she answered that the U.S. judge has no jurisdiction nor authority over the country of El Salvador.

According to Tribe and Chemirinsky, the administration’s refusal to release of Mr. Abrego Garcia is a calculated move. While tormenting this innocent human being, they are asserting a dreadful new precedent. If the Supreme Court allows this, the U.S. government will be able to detain individuals abroad without judicial oversight. In a brief to the Supreme Court, the administration claims that while habeas corpus is the only remedy for unlawful detention, U.S. courts lack authority to issue such writs for individuals held in foreign prisons. If this is allowed to stand, it will mean that federal agencies can arrest anyone, send them to another country, and place them beyond the reach of American law:

Armed with this power, the government would know that Immigration and Customs Enforcement or the F.B.I. or any federal law enforcement agency could apprehend any people, ignore the requirements for due process and ship them to El Salvador or any country that would take them. These individuals would have no legal recourse whatsoever from any American court. The administration could create its own gulags with no more judicial review than existed when Stalin did the same thing in the Soviet Union.

That’s definitely a way to “own the libs!”

For a long time, I’ve had this problem where people sometimes mock me for being too alarmist. I wrote about the prophecies of ancient and indigenous cultures in past books. Many foresaw our time as a period of massive upheavals and destruction (perhaps followed by a rapid evolution of consciousness). I also studied the ecological crisis at enough depth to be deeply concerned about what is coming soon. I will say I find the dissolution of the rule of law and the Constitution of the U.S. by the current government to be exceptionally chilling. I am actively exploring my options for escaping this country before things get much, much worse. Some of you, reading this, may want to consider this as well.

But never mind! Today I wanted to talk about some of the amazing cultural events I went to last week in New York City. New York is still a beautiful jewel of fantastic art and profound thinking. Here, all of the world’s cultures mesh together in a kind of living Cubist collage, held together by faith, love, care, curiosity, and unity.

In case you were wondering, this is a typical day in my life according to Chat-GPT, although I rarely see beavers in Tompkins Square.

As a part of Deep Tech week, I went to a talk on consciousness at the expansive Brooklyn Navy Yard with speakers including Stuart Hamerhoff and Joscha Bach. Hamerhoff, an anesthesiologist, is know for developing quantum consciousness theory — also known as Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch-OR) — with physicist Roger Penrose. They posit that consciousness arises as a result of quantum computations performed by microtubules, which are tiny protein structures inside our neurons. The microtubules supposedly support quantum coherence, a state where quantum bits can exist in multiple states simultaneously.

Penrose has developed a thesis (“objective reduction”) on how the collapse of the quantum wave-form happens because of processes linked to the fundamental nature of space-time, rather than through measurement or observation. He theorizes that gravity and the structure of spacetime itself can’t support large-scale “superpositions” for long. When the difference in mass-energy between various potential states reaches a critical threshold—creating significantly different curvatures in spacetime—the superposition becomes unstable and collapses on its own, objectively, without any external observer. This collapse is not random, but influenced by the deep geometry of spacetime, and Penrose speculates that it lies at the origin of conscious experience.

Penrose and Hameroff’s thesis aims to explain the "hard problem" of consciousness by rooting it in the quantum fabric of reality itself. I find it an interesting question whether their work on quantum microtubules supports or contradicts analytic idealism, a philosophical perspective championed by Bernardo Kastrup, Amit Goswami, and other thinkers, including myself. While “Orch-OR” proposes a physicalist framework in which certain quantum computations in the brain give rise to subjective experience, a synthesis seems plausible.

Instead of fully explaining consciousness, Penrose and Hameroff’s thesis could be a description of how localized, individual awareness arises within a deeper, universal field of mind. The quantum microtubules would be something like tuning forks resonating with the more fundamental, indivisible substrate of consciousness. They would not be instruments that generate it ex nihilo.

While Hameroff was fascinating, I was most tickled by Joscha Bach, who spoke on his idea of “cyber animism” — a new concept for me. Bach proposes that consciousness, often viewed as a purely biological phenomenon, can be better understood through the lens of software and self-organizing systems.