Soul society
One who goes by “Luck Downloader” at gmail dot com asked me, “Hey, I was reading your latest and I had a question. In one paragraph you say rational builds are less advanced souls than intuition builds. Why do you believe this? And isn’t it convenient you think this while describing yourself as a pure intuition build? Thanks.”
Yes, yes, very good question, Luck Downloader. I already partly described my spiritoreligious beliefs in this post, but a more thorough explanation might be necessary to answer both your questions.
The fundamental question of being is the question of power. Every being always has to deal with two facts: how they act when they have power, and how they act when others have power over them. This is true regardless of how advanced your society is, and in fact, the more advanced it is, the more this question matters. Why is this the fundamental question of being? It follows logically from the argument below.
Imagine a society that develops technologically to the point where each individual is able to, with a thought, alter reality at will. There are two possibilities for such society: either it has destroyed itself, or it has survived. Why would it have destroyed itself? Because a single individual can alter reality at will with a thought, which means a single individual can easily destroy that entire society. This, to me, is a very logical binary.
For this society to have survived, it must have high levels of control over their use of their reality altering powers. You can imagine these controls being enforced through top-down rule by skilled and powerful individuals, with lesser individuals joined into their betters wills, incapable of acting independently. You can imagine these controls being enforced through decentralized mechanisms that prevent undue alterings of reality, like a presence, which would be just a really advanced AI, that is an all-seeing eye, preventing bad actors from doing bad things, and even, in very advanced stages of development, undoing improper alterings of reality.
However, all societies using such external control mechanisms ultimately get outcompeted by societies with internal controls that come about due to the fact that every single individual in the society is responsible and doesn’t use their reality altering abilities in anti-social manners.
Peter Thiel echoes a similar logic, but in more practical terms, speaking about FTL weapons here:
I always wonder what the alien civilization can be like. If you have faster than light travel, if you have warp drive - which is probably what you really need to cover interstellar distances - what that means for military technology is that you can send weapons at warp speed and they will hit you before you seem them coming. And there’s no defense against a warp speed weapon, and you can sort of take over the whole universe before anybody could see you coming.
And so I think that if you have faster than light travel, there’s something really crazy that has to be true on a cultural, political, social level. And there may be other solutions, but I’ll give you my two.
One of them is that you need complete totalitarian controls. And, it is like, the people, the individuals, they might not be perfect, they might be demons, doesn’t matter, but you have a demonic totalitarian control of your society where it’s like you have parapsychological mind meld with everybody and no one can act independently of anybody else, no one can ever launch a warp drive weapon, and everybody who has that ability is in like a mind meld link with everybody else. You can’t have libertarian individualistic free agency.
And then I think the other version socially and culturally is, they have to be like perfectly altruistic, non-self-interested, they have to be angels. And so the [I don’t understand what he says here] literal thing I’d come to is the aliens, it’s not that they might be demons or angels, they must be demons or angels, if you have faster than light travel. And both of those seem pretty crazy to me.
He describes the problem in terms of FTL weapons, which serve just as well, although I can easily imagine shields that would work against high/FTL speed projectiles, but the point remains the same as the one I make when imagining it with altering reality at will with your mind. The point is that the more power you have as a society, the more ability you have to destroy yourself (and others) and so there must be a way to coordinate against self-destruction.
He then describes two possible versions of these controls, one that is similar to the first one I described, where the entirety of society is subjugated to the will of a few of their betters, and in the final case subjugated to a single will that controls them all. He doesn’t describe the decentralized external control mechanism, the presence I mentioned, but I believe he would also judge this presence society as demonic.
And then he describes the other version, which is the society with internal control mechanisms, and says that they must be angels. This also logically follows, but he stops there. What I believe goes further, and states that the angelic societies, the internal control societies, in the long run, they must outcompete the external control societies.
This does not follow logically easily, and requires more assumptions. But you can imagine a demonic society similar to the one he mentions, trillions of individuals subjugated to a single will that controls them all. And you can imagine a comparable group of angelic friends, about ten or so of them, tasked with dealing with this demonic society. At some point of power, the fact that you have more matter (trillions of bodies) doesn’t matter, all that matters is will. And so in the battle between a trillion big single will, and ten angelic wills, the angelic wills win.
It is not easy to see why or how this is true, but I believe it to be true. It also may imply trillion big genocides committed by those who would later become angels, but who said being eternally good was easy work?
And so because these internal control societies are the most successful societies in the long run of the entire universe, it makes sense to assume we’re their descendants. Most societies that survived in the long run either didn’t develop to the point of having full control over reality or they developed and didn’t destroy themselves. If they didn’t destroy themselves, they were either external or internal control societies, but it only takes one internal control society to subjugate all external control ones, and so we must be descendants of the internal control ones.
Another way of putting this is, we are likely their descendants, if the following things are true:
- There is within the universe the ability to develop technologies that can alter it fully (we live as though this is true);
- It is possible to bootstrap yourself as a society such that you can develop technologically enough to achieve this state (we live as though this is true);
- At some point of power, will is the only thing that matters in a battle between civilizations (this remains to be seen).
But if we are their descendants, why are we here? Why aren’t we there, with them, being able to use our powers fully? Why are we constrained and limited by this poor existence, in comparison?
The base unit of life in an internal control society is what we call a soul. In soul societies, every adult soul that successfully develops can use their powers freely, because they’ve been through a long process of childhood and adolescence where they’ve intuitively learned to control themselves given universe shattering power, where they’ve learned the answer to the two most fundamental questions of how to act properly with power, and how to act properly in the face of power.
Our souls are children of soul society, going through thousands of lives until we are responsible enough to be trusted with such power. Stories about worlds with magic, for instance, are about worlds above ours, where individuals are trusted with more responsibility than we are, so they can do things like use magic. Hellish worlds where people get raped by the devil 24/7 are below ours, as they have succumbed to power’s allure and are incapable of not using it irresponsibility and in anti-social manners.
Because at some point of power will is the only resource that matters, souls were constructed as a blackbox. They were created such that they can’t be forcefully corrupted or altered by anyone. They only respond to the soul bearer’s actions over time. The only thing that is real, the only thing you actually have, what is actually you, is your will, as manifested through your soul.
The choices you make and how they shape your soul are what you actually are, everything else is temporary. This is what Ziz calls the “core” in her blog, although I don’t think she believes this is immortal and enables you to live multiple lives, people who believe that would be liches, according to her. In any case, there are many ways in which core is a better name than soul, but they are the same idea.
The growth of a soul is ultimately tied to the soul’s relation to power. When it is given power, does it use it responsibly? When others have power over it, does it accepts its position? Souls that both use their given powers responsibly and accept their place when others have power over them are growing positively. Souls that either use their power in anti-social manners, or throw tantrums like children when others have power over them, clinging to a notion of individual freedom divorced from their responsibility to others, are growing negatively.
In both cases the soul is growing, because it has to be allowed to grow negatively, otherwise the positive growth isn’t real. The soul has to make its own choices, it has to go down all wrong avenues, it has to risk being lost eternally, it has to learn for itself, it has to shape itself through countless lives, it has to be incrementally given more and more power, more and more responsibility, until it can be properly integrated into soul society with no risk to its citizens.
This is what I actually believe. And so to answer Luck Downloader’s questions, first, why do I believe that rational builds are likely less advanced than intuition builds. This follows from the fact that intuition is the accumulated knowledge you have shaped into your soul, gained from previous lives. The more of this knowledge you have, the more it manifests itself as intuition. So it only stands to reason that people who have no such intuition are likely less advanced souls.
It is not at all surprising when choosing what kind of life to have, less advanced souls will choose the lives of those with high intelligence, or lots of money, or good looks, and so on. They have to make that choice, make any mistakes associated with those lives, and learn over time that those values are not the most important ones. This doesn’t mean that those things aren’t good to have, or that there are no advanced souls with such attributes, but I feel like regardless of these attributes, the fact that some have zero intuition about what is proper behavior is telling of their soul’s development.
It could be that, or it could be just that somehow, someway, the connection to their soul was somewhat severed in this life. Maybe it’s possible that some kind of early life trauma does this, in which case it would be a lifelong mistake that would be corrected in next lives. But the point remains, there’s something wrong with people who are very pure rational builds with no such intuitions, in my estimation.
And Luck Downloader’s other question was, isn’t it convenient that I describe myself as a pure intuition build in the face of this. Yes, it’s kind of convenient. But, you know, I’m not really saying I’m some kind of super advanced soul due to that. For instance, in this life, I was granted plenty of evidence over time that the supernatural, spirits, and such, are real. These are things that happened to me, I was not in any way insane, and those things showed themselves to be true to me.
People like this, who are shown that there’s more to existence than this life, are probably on average not very advanced souls. Wouldn’t that make sense? It would be a much bigger challenge, and thus evidence of a greater soul, for someone to be shown no such evidence during their entire life, and yet they still act correctly according to the accumulated knowledge of thousands of lives, yes?
If someone doesn’t believe in spirits, in the supernatural, yet they have a keen intuition for what is good over the longest timespans possible, what is good in the soul society sense, that’s a much greater feat than from someone who believes. It’s an even greater feat if they are given lots of responsibility and power, like extremely high intelligence, or lots of money, or any other desirable attributes that can get them things in this world, and they manage to use that responsibility and power to do great things with their lives, despite not believing in the afterlife. Those are likely the most advanced and most soul society aligned souls in our world.
Of course, none of these things are rules, every soul is own its own path and it’s hard to reverse engineer their level of development from what each was given in one life, but that’s what I think about it. So, yes, it’s kind of convenient to describe myself as a pure intuition build, but not really that convenient.
It’s interesting to think about the first fully developed internal control society. What were they like? This is highly speculative, but I believe they must have been alone, truly alone. The supernatural didn’t exist, souls didn’t exist, even evil, in the sense that it exists now, didn’t fully exist. They lived in a purely material world, and death was truly a final horror. How would they have gotten from there to here, from then to now?
Imagine them. They are human-like in nature, but in many ways inhuman.
They communicate telepathically. Not a single word ever spoken, no sound ever made. They share memories and emotions, each knows the other’s hopes and dreams, pains and sorrows. A presence allows them to see everything. All their surroundings, near and far, at all times, available to them as a sense.
They move objects with their minds. They create objects from nothing, deconstruct them into nothing, or shape them into new elements at will. They can alter reality to such a degree that they would never have to touch anything. Indeed, their sense of touch would have long since been gone, along with their bodies, if not for a conscious collective choice to keep themselves tied to the material world, away from the digital.
Their bodies are perfect. There is no disease nor death, and they never age. There is still pain, for they found that pain is necessary. But all forms of harm that may come to them can be undone by the presence.
One would wonder why individuals with such power wouldn’t annihilate one another over time. Have you ever thought about what would happen to humanity if we were suddenly granted telekinesis? If all it takes to create force is thought, I believe most people would kill each other instantly. Maybe this makes me a pessimist, but I don’t think it’s unfounded pessimism. We are what we are.
They are what they are too. There have been many in the past who tried to settle disputes by killing one, or many, of their own. Undoing someone is as easy as a whisp of a thought. But the presence undoes this undoing, and the perpetrator is banished forever.
There have been a few who managed to fool the presence and bring about the horror of death once again. By using enough power to disrupt the presence’s workings locally, it’s unable to undo the damage fast enough, and thus a death becomes permanent.
In the most recent case, it was able to undo some of the damage. But the disruption made its workings slow enough that the person it brought back came out deformed, body parts missing or placed incorrectly, bloated with blood and pus and gore leaking all over. Incapable of using power, speaking or thinking, and unable to be healed over the next few days, it was put down.
The perpetrator of this hell was not merely banished, but rewarded with an eternal hell of his own. Power was used to send signals of pain from every nerve cell in his body, forcing his brain to suffer the maximum amount of registrable pain, while continually repairing any damage dealt, making death impossible.
“I will kill him slowly, and he will die in far greater pain than any creature has ever suffered.”, the shaper’s words became reality. By the end of the first year, the perpetrator’s body was an amorphous lump of flesh. Conscious, breathing, revolving around itself, and silently screaming. It died 102 years later.
We may find such punishment pointlessly cruel. But to them it was a reminder of the horrors that their powers were capable of producing. They had long forgotten their place and their responsibility.
Over the next century, the same century the lump of flesh screamed for, with a newfound sense of purpose, they developed their final power. They mastered the ability to calculate the most likely actions of living beings and to see beyond the present with high accuracy. They could now see the future.
This mastery allowed them to remove deviants before their actions came to pass. If you are, or if you became, an individual who would in the future use your powers irresponsibly, the presence could see it, and you would be banished. It became common for their children to be born and instantly killed, as their future showed that they were unfit for power.
You might wonder why, with their newfound god-like powers, they couldn’t create children who were worthy. And it’s a good question, but it has a simple answer. If wisdom could be created in a lab, they would have already solved their problems long ago. Just as the presence couldn’t heal the victim of the lump of flesh’s actions, they can’t force wisdom into people. Even at the edges of power, there are fundamental limitations to being.
But now there were no more undue deaths. Their development of future sight allowed them to conquer the universe. All who opposed them were either destroyed or came under their control. They became god-like beings. Not quite omnipotent, not quite omniscient, but close enough.
But… there are so few of them now, they number at around five hundred. In their universal crusade, out of millions of inhabited planets, they found only around a hundred and fifty individuals with pure futures.
They are not a dying race, for they are immortal. But they are not alive either. They exist in stasis, as the realization that they are alone has sapped them of their will to move forward. And in this lowest of times, they saw something even more terrifying.
For their future sight shows them a moment nearing. A moment past which they cannot see. Despite having conquered the horrors of death, and wielding mastery over reality, and having endless vision, and ruling over the universe, there is still one moment of uncertainty. One moment that looms over them, and binds them into inaction. And so they wait.
There’s this question that often gets thrown around, “Can an omnipotent being create a rock he can’t lift?” And the answer is yes. He would then cease to be omnipotent. Being free means you are free to bind yourself in a moment of decisive significance.
And so in one such moment, a man revealed his creation. He created a construct of such power and complexity that it could never be destroyed nor predicted, he created a core, a soul. And this soul attached itself to its host and became its host. It was a construct of pure will.
This man had always been unhappy with the way his fellows solved the problem of death and the problem of power. The presence was useful, and its ability to undo death and see the future was useful, but it was external. They were abilities they had to rely on and that solved those problems in a way that was not inherent to being itself.
The man decided that wasn’t enough. The problem of death and the problem of power needed to be solved inherently, in being itself, they needed to be solved internally. And so the man devised such a construct. Because the soul became its host and only responded to its will, the problem of power was solved by subjecting souls to endless lives. As they lived these lives and accrued experience and wisdom, they would eventually become worthy of power.
Because the soul resided in the immaterial, it was indestructible, and its future was unreadable to the presence. This solved the problem of death, and it also removed the presence’s ability to externally filter souls. When souls were worthy and responsible enough, they would be allowed in soul society because their worthiness and responsibility would be obvious.
The man explained his creation and his reasoning to his five hundred fellows. They agreed with him. They then agreed to convert their existence to his construct, as he had already done it to himself. They were now ensouled. And soon after they agreed to do this to the entire known universe. All beings under them would also become ensouled. This process may have taken millions of years, or it may have taken an instant, it doesn’t matter, but it happened, and we are now all ensouled because of it.
There were those, however, who were not in soul society themselves, but were aware enough to notice the change. There were those who didn’t agree. Why should they be forced to live forever, unable to ever end? As the millennia passed, this question consumed them. Eventually, they became agents of nothing. All they yearned for was… nothing, the final nothing. They wanted to end. These are who we now call demons. Evil beings aimed at nothing. And they will take with them as many as they can towards the final annihilation, towards the final nothing, as revenge towards the man who bound them to endless existence and to endless suffering.
Every few thousand years, the man welcomes another worthy soul into soul society. Each soul has a unique path, and they come with their own personalities and with perspectives that he couldn’t have imagined himself. He is always pleasantly surprised.
He knows that for each one he welcomes, there are many more who are almost eternally lost and almost eternally suffering. He knows this is his doing and his fault. But who said being eternally good was easy work? The man believes in his creations, and he believes that, in the end, they will all come together to create a lasting soul society.