Elements of a Successful Galactic Religion

If extraterrestrials ever arrive, they might be interested in the physical conquest of our planet. Or conceivably they might be interested in spiritual conquest. Their purpose in coming might be to spread some strange alien religion to distant spots in the universe. But if they were trying to do that, what type of religion would have a good chance of being successfully spread to distant parts of the galaxy, given sufficient enthusiasm in those who were spreading the religion?

To answer that question, we should first look at what type of religions would tend to be very hard to spread across multiple solar systems. It would seem that the hardest religion to spread to many other planets would be one that was highly location-oriented. I will give an example to explain what I mean.

Imagine a spaceship were to arrive on our planet, and extraterrestrials were to come out of the spaceship, aliens who had mastered our language. Imagine that they were to begin expounding a strange alien creed, with some type of pronouncement like this:

Learn, little Earthlings, the glorious deeds that occurred 9,400 years ago on the distant planet Arzurus. On the continent Zynora in the land of Telsun there walked the great prophet Olnor, who received the holiest truths ever revealed. Many a miracle did he work back in those days, proving the truth of his supernatural claims.

Would a large fraction of the world's population be likely to give up their religious beliefs, and adopt this strange new creed? I don't think that is likely.

This strange creed would not be very suitable for spreading to many distant solar systems, because it would be so location-oriented. Someone on some other planet would hear about these events on the planet Arzurus long ago, but these events would probably seem very distant and remote. A person on our planet would react to such a narrative perhaps no more warmly than the average person reacts today when he hears about the discovery of some distant galaxy from the earliest ages of the universe. The events would seem so remote and distant that it would be hard to incite the fervor typically associated with the successful spread of a religion.

But what type of religion might have a relatively high chance of being spread across multiple solar systems? Perhaps it would be one that was more universal, some creed that was not centered upon events occurring on one particular planet, but on truths or principles that make equal sense on any planet.

I can imagine some elements that might be parts of a successful galactic religion. Such a religion might have one or more of these elements.

A belief in some God of the universe. A galactic religion might tend to be more successful if it preached some gospel of a universal deity, not some deity who seemed to have his attention focused on one particular planet. Such a doctrine could be supported by a discussion of fine-tuning in physics and cosmology, involving fundamental physical constants that are the same to all observers in our galaxy.

A belief in some universal mystical force. We can plausibly imagine a successful galactic religion that is somewhat akin to the Jedi creed in the Star Wars movies, with a belief in some universal force that an individual on any planet can somehow access and use to his benefit or enlightenment. 

 
A belief in some interplanetary brotherhood or interplanetary communion of minds. The life forms living on different planets might be tremendously divergent in their physical appearances, but conceivably some successful galactic religion might attempt to dissolve these differences, by describing some basis by which all life-forms can be considered brothers or kinfolk, or describing some means by which distant life-forms can somehow commune with each other, possibly through some type of instantaneous mysticism.

A belief in some higher destiny or state of evolution towards which individual life-forms can strive. An element in many a successful religion is the idea of progression, wherein the individual progresses to some higher state of being. We can imagine all kinds of futuristic galactic permutations on this theme, including evolution to a state of superintelligence, evolution to a state of pure energy, evolution to a purely electronic state of existence, and so forth. One of these might be an element of a successful cosmic religion, with the progression being described as some glorious destiny to be achieved, perhaps a little like the Buddhist ideal of nirvana.

A belief in some immortality that can be reached. Besides supernatural concepts of life after death, a successful galactic religion might have any number of technological descriptions of immortality, similar to those we already see developing in transhumanist circles, which imagine people becoming immortal through breakthroughs in medical science. 
 
A belief in some paradise or awesome state of organization towards which societies can strive. Christian theology has postulated some future millennium to be achieved by divine intervention. A successful galactic religion might imagine some desirable state of existence to be achieved by galactic societies, perhaps involving the godlike mastery of matter in particular solar systems, or perhaps involving the establishment of some kind of galactic empire or society of planets or a cosmic Utopia.

Rituals, stories or architecture that evoke awe and wonder. Earthly religions have evoked awe and wonder through stories of miracles, and through music and awe-inspiring architecture. Having the whole grand stage of galactic evolution and countless planets to work with, a galactic religion might find it easy to evoke far greater awe and wonder. It might include far-flung tales a hundred times more wondrous than the story of the parting of the Red Sea, and it might have rituals involving all kinds of high-tech ways to stimulate the emotions of the faithful (including electronic brain stimulation, virtual reality, and mind-expanding drugs). The religion might involve soaring robot-created architecture a hundred times grander than the Notre Dame cathedral. 

A belief in some universal ethic. Some ethical precepts make sense at some times, but don't make sense in other times (I can think of the example of “Go forth, and multiply,” which makes sense until you have a population explosion.) A successful galactic religion might preach some universal ethic that would make equal sense in all centuries and on all planets. Such an ethic would not necessarily be radically different from some precepts of successful Earth religions. I'm not sure there's any fancy cosmic rule that might improve on the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

9 Strange Mental Phenomena That May Support an Alternate Theory of Consciousness

In a previous post I advanced what I called a receptacle hypothesis of consciousness, the idea that our minds may come from some unknown external source, rather than being purely the product of our brains. I did not claim that such a hypothesis is a likelihood, but I suggested it as an interesting alternate hypothesis. I suggested only one thing that might be evidence tending to support such a hypothesis: the phenomenon of near-death experiences. But there may be other mental phenomena that lend support to this hypothesis or similar alternate ideas about human consciousness. Let's take a look at such phenomena. 

 

I'll start by mentioning two or three phenomena that are only weakly supportive of the receptacle hypothesis of mind, and then move up to some phenomena that may support this hypothesis more strongly.

Savants

Savants (once called “idiot savants,” although that seems an inappropriate term) are individuals who have some mental disability but also have some extraordinary mental talents. Many people are familiar with savants from the film Rain Man starring Dustin Hoffman, based on an actual savant. An example of a savant is Daniel Tammet, who has been diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome. He holds the European record for reciting Pi from memory, to 22,514 digits. Supposedly he learned the Icelandic language in only ten days.

Another example of a savant is the late Kim Peek, who supposedly could accurately recall the details of 12,000 books he had read, despite having an IQ of only 87. Like several savants, he had the ability to instantly calculate the day of the week on which any person he met was born.

Hyperthymesia

Hyperthymesia is the rare ability of a person to remember almost everything that has ever happened to him.  25 cases have been documented in peer-reviewed journals. Hyperthymesia was the focus of a 60 Minutes segment that interviewed a group of people with this ability, including actress Marilu Henner. Henner says she can remember almost every day of her life since she was about 11 years old. In June 2012 a journal reported the case of a man identified merely as HK. The man could clearly recall every day of his life since he was about 11. The man underwent a brain scan, which showed that his brain was smaller than average.

Another person with hyperthymesia is Jill Price, who can recall details from every day in her life since she was 14. Her brain was scanned, and found to be normal. 

These cases of hyperthymesia and savants may be hard to fit in with the hypothesis that the human mind is entirely produced by the brain, as do other examples of extraordinary mental abilities.  

Brain Surgery Anomaly

Michael S. Gazzaniga is the director of the SAGE Center of the Study of Mind at the University of California. In his book Who's In Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain, he says this about a particular type of split-brain surgery:

In this procedure, the large tract of nerves that connects the two hemispheres, the corpus callosum, is severed to prevent the spread of electrical impulses. Their isolated left brain, however, which receives no input from the right hemisphere (in essence losing half its size) remains just as intelligent as a whole brain. If brain quantity is so important, you would think there would be an effect on problem solving and hypothesizing when half the brain is lost, but there is not.

This may be hard to explain under the idea that the mind is entirely the product of the brain, but it is no difficulty under the hypothesis that the brain is a mere receptacle for consciousness.

ESP
 
ESP or extrasensory perception is the alleged ability of some people to obtain Information in some paranormal way outside of the senses. Recently we saw headlines such as “ESP Debunked in New Psychology Study.” But the study in question did not at all do that – the study didn't even mention ESP, nor did it mention a sixth sense.

The most compelling evidence for ESP comes from what are called ganzfeld experiments. A ganzfeld experiment is one in which a test for extra-sensory perception is combined with sensory deprivation achieved through methods such as cutting a ping-pong ball in half and taping it over someone's eyes, and having someone wear an earphone transmitting white noise. In these ESP experiments, the expected chance hit rate (matching of a user's selection and a random target) is 25%. But as wikipedia reports here, “In 2010, Lance Storm, Patrizio Tressoldi, and Lorenzo Di Risio analyzed 29 ganzfeld studies from 1997 to 2008. Of the 1,498 trials, 483 produced hits, corresponding to a hit rate of 32.2%.” That success rate of 32.2% is hugely above the expected by-chance success rate of 25%. The review article can be found here. The probability of such a hit rate occurring by chance is incredibly low. The Law of Large Numbers dictates that whenever you do a huge number of trials, there is only a very low chance of exceeding the result expected by chance.

If ESP exists, it is very hard to fit in with the idea that our consciousness is entirely produced by our brains.

The Placebo Effect

A placebo is typically a sugar pill that a doctor gives to a patient, merely in the hopes that the patient's belief that he is getting an effective treatment will actually do some good. The placebo effect is the astonishing degree to which placebos are actually effective in reducing symptoms. This study indicates that half of a drug's effectiveness may be due to the placebo effect. This study indicates that when patients are given a placebo pill labeled as a drug, it does just as well in alleviating migraine headaches as when patients are given an actual drug labeled as a placebo. The placebo seems to work not just for problems involving the brain, but also other parts of the body. Wikipedia says, “A meta-study of 31 placebo-controlled trials of the gastric acid secretion inhibitor drug cimetidine in the treatment of gastric or duodenal ulcers found that placebo treatments, in many cases, were as effective as active drugs.” 

The placebo effect is very difficult to account for under the theory that your mind is entirely produced by your brain. But imagine if your whole body is a receptacle for your consciousness, which somehow arose from some unknown distant source. In that case something like the placebo effect would not be so surprising.

The Global Consciousness Project

The Global Consciousness Project is a long-running study to see whether random number generators behave differently during significant world events. The project uses random number generators scattered all over the world, and has operated for more than 15 years. The web site for the project indicates that overall the project has produced results with a probability of less than one in a million, indicating a significant deviation from the results expected by chance. It is as if somehow the human mind has an influence on computerized mechanical devices. Such an effect is hard to account for under the idea that your mind is entirely the product of your brain, but may be easier to explain under the hypothesis that your consciousness has some mysterious distant origin.

Near Death Experiences

The site here www.nderf.org gives over 1800 accounts of near death experiences, which have for several decades been the subject of serious investigation by researchers. But weren't near-death experiences debunked by some recent scientific study? No, the study involved rats, not humans, and merely showed that for 30 seconds at the time of death they had a particular type of brain wave. The conclusion that some people drew from this study (“Rats show signs of higher consciousness at death”) was quite strained, considering that we haven't the slightest idea how these rats thought or felt when they were dying, and even the very idea of talking about consciousness in rats may be rather laughable. In any case, I doubt anyone reading some of the long, involved accounts at the site above would think that most of the people were describing something that occurred in 30 seconds of time. 

In quite a few near death experiences, people report floating above their bodies, an observation which seems to be completely incompatible with the idea that the mind is produced solely by the brain.  

Alleged Ghost Sightings

People have reported seeing ghosts throughout human history. Many people would like to classify ghosts as a superstition of the past, like the belief in witches. The problem is that people keep reporting that they have seen ghosts. For example, for 5 years on the television show Celebrity Ghost Stories numerous celebrities  have gone on camera to report seeing ghosts (a list of these celebrities is found here).

Alleged Reincarnation Evidence

Reincarnation is the hypothesis that one person can be born with the soul or consciousness of another person who previously died. If all we had as evidence for reincarnation were uncorroborated stories of past-lives told during hypnotic regression, such evidence could easily be dismissed as mere fantasies produced during an abnormal mental condition. However, the evidence is a lot more substantial. After decades of research, Professor Ian Stevenson at the University of Virginia published a 2268-page two volume work Reincarnation and Biology, in which he described in meticulous detail thousands of cases of alleged reincarnation, involving small children who claimed to have had a previous life. According to this link in a Scientific American blog, “Reincarnation and Biology contained 225 case reports of children who remembered previous lives and who also had physical anomalies that matched those previous lives, details that could in some cases be confirmed by the dead person’s autopsy record and photos.” Stevenson's work has been carried on by Jim Tucker, a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia who has recently published a book Return to Life: Extraordinary Cases of Children who Remember Past Lives. See this link for an interview.

Again we have a case of an alleged phenomena that is quite inconsistent with the idea that our consciousness is solely produced by the brain, but which is quite compatible with the receptacle hypothesis of consciousness.

Conclusion

I have cited here quite a few type of phenomena that may tend to support the theory I previously discussed, that our brains or bodies may be a mere receptacle of our minds, and that our minds may have arisen elsewhere, from some unknown external source outside of our bodies. The various phenomena discussed here may all tend to lend credibility to such a hypothesis. All of these phenomena are hard to explain under the alternate hypothesis, that the mind is produced solely by the brain. I am not claiming that all of these phenomena are necessarily what they appear to be; I am merely pointing out that they may tend to conflict with the conventional theory that our minds are produced solely  by brain activity. 

None of this proves that this receptacle hypothesis of consciousness is true, but at least these items may indicate that such a theory should be given serious consideration.

No doubt some will denounce some of these items I have cited as things that are too “weird” or far-out. But I think it is remarkable that a scientist who might make such a dismissal might then later proceed to spend lots of time writing about multiverses, parallel universes, string theory, time travel, distant extraterrestrial civilizations, and space-time wormholes – all of which are things just as strange (or stranger) than any of the items I have mentioned here.

In fact, there seems to be a very strange double standard in the minds of many a modern scientist. You might describe this double standard like this:

It is acceptable and encouraged to discuss multiverses, parallel universes, distant extraterrestrial civilizations, time travel, string theory, and space-time wormholes, things for which there is no observational evidence. But it is forbidden to discuss things like ESP, ghosts, and near-death experiences, which seem to be supported by many observations.

Such an ass-backwards principle makes no sense at all.

Postscript: for a discussion of other strange phenomena that may support an alternate hypothesis of consciousness, see this post. Among the cases discussed are two astonishing cases of people who managed to function well despite having hardly any brain tissue.  

Post-postscript: For other fascinating cases of savants, see this link. 

Phone Call From the Future: A Science Fiction Story

On June 12, 2025, Joey Martinez was awoken from a sound sleep at 3:15 AM by his cell phone. He considered letting the phone ring unanswered, but then he got up and picked up the phone.

“Who is it?” said Joey.

“Is this Joey Martinez?” asked a woman.

“Yes,” said Joey. “What's up?”

“Joey, I'm glad I got you,” said the woman. “Joey, I have a warning for you. Your life is in danger.”

“Who is this?” asked Joey, sitting down on his sofa.

“My name's Karen,” said the woman. “Joey, I have to tell you something you may find very hard to believe. This morning everyone in your city, Smith City, is going to die. You've got to get out now, or you'll be one of the people who dies.”

“How do you know this?” asked Joey.

“You wouldn't believe me if I told you,” said the woman. “Please, just take my word for it. Jump in your car, and start driving. You can save your life.”

“No way am I going to do that,” said Joey. “Not unless you tell me how you know that everyone in the city is going to die. Is it some terrorist plot?”

“No, it's not that,” said the woman. “OK, I'll tell you. It's going to be a meteor. It will hit this morning at exactly 9:15 AM. It's going to wipe out your entire city.”

Joey had a fancy new digital phone that allowed a user to engage in a conversation and check the Internet at the same time. Joey checked the news. There was nothing at all about an incoming meteor.

“You're full of it,” said Joey. “I just checked the news, and there's not a word about a meteor heading for Smith City.”

“That's because they don't know about it,” said the woman. “It's not one of those big asteroids that the astronomers can detect way ahead of time. It's just a little chunk of rock the size of a small building. But it will hit your city with such kinetic energy, that everything will be destroyed.”

“So how come you know about it?” asked Joey skeptically. There was a pause.

“OK, I'll tell you,” said the woman. “But you'll never believe me. I know about it... because I'm from the future.”

“Oh, that explains it,” said Joey incredulously. “So you're a time traveler from the future?”

“No, we tried to do that, but it didn't work,” said the woman. “I'm not someone who traveled to your time from the future. But I am from the future. You see, I'm not calling from your time. I'm calling from 300 years ahead of your time.”

“You seriously want me to believe that this is...a phone call from the future?” asked Joey.

“That's the truth, incredible as it sounds,” said the woman. “Let me tell you the whole story. In my time, three hundred years from your time, in the year 2310, scientists started a huge program designed to create a time machine. They put together all kinds of fancy technology. Then they tried to create a spacetime wormhole they could use to send a robot back into the past. But it didn't work. Every time they tried it, the wormhole destroyed the robot, rather than sending it back in time.”

“Go on,” said Joey, not believing a word of the tale.

“The scientists were about to shut down the program, but then I got involved,” explained the woman. “I studied the technology, and realized that it would never work to try to use the spacetime wormhole to send a robot back in time. But I also realized that the technology could be used for another purpose. It could be used to create a communication channel allowing someone from my time to talk to someone in your time.”

“So I decided to test my theory,” continued the woman. “I got a list of all the victims of the Smith City Meteor Fire of 2025. I found your name on the list. It took some more time to get your phone number, but I also got that. Then I tried using the spacetime wormhole technology to make this phone call. The phone call worked. Don't you realize how important this call is? It's the first phone call ever made between two different time eras.”

“What is this, some kind of prank?” asked Joey.

“No, it's no prank,” said the woman. “You've got to believe me. That meteor is heading right now for your city – not in my time, but in your time. You've got to get out of your city, or you're going to die.”

“Don't call this number again,” said Joey. “Haven't you got something better to do than to pull these kind of pranks? Get a life!”

Joey hung up the phone, and went back to sleep.

He woke up the next morning, and dressed, showered and shaved, not in any particular hurry. After eating his regular breakfast, Joey got in his car, and began driving toward his job in downtown Smith City.

But after driving a short while, he looked at the clock on his dashboard. It was 8:45. What if the phone caller was right? He would have only 30 minutes left to live.

Somehow that calculation did the trick. He turned his car around, and began driving away from the city as fast as he could.

After driving for 30 minutes, he suddenly saw the sky light up mysteriously. It was as if the sun was streaking across the sky.

Joey heard a deafening sound, a sound like nothing he had ever heard. He covered his ears, and looked towards Smith City.

There in the distance he saw a giant orange mushroom cloud, the aftermath of the meteor striking the city and incinerating it.

Singularity Near? Hardware Says “Yes,” Software Says “No”

According to futurists such as Ray Kurzweil, around the year 2045 we will see an intelligence explosion in which artificial intelligence vastly exceeds human intelligence. This predicted time is known as the Singularity. Kurzweil assures that science and technology are progressing at an accelerating rate, and he implies that in light of such a conclusion it makes sense to think that we will see the Singularity by the year 2045.

The main argument given for this technological singularity is based on the rapid rate of progress in hardware. For quite a few years, a law called Moore's Law has held true. It has been described as the law that every 18 months the number of transistors that can be put on a chip tends to double. Because of advances in hardware described by Moore's Law, your hand-held computing unit has more computing power than a refrigerator-sized computer decades ago.

However, there are some reasons why we should be skeptical about using Moore's Law as a basis for concluding that a technological singularity is a few decades away. One reason is that Moore's Law may stop working in future years, as we reach limits of miniaturization. But a bigger reason is that a technological singularity would require not just our hardware but also our software to increase in power by a thousand-fold or more – and our software is not progressing at a rate remotely close to the very rapid rate described by Moore's Law.

How fast is the rate of progress in software? It is relatively slow. We do not at all have anything like a situation where our software gets twice as good every 18 months. Software seems to progress at a rate that is only a small fraction of the rate at which hardware progresses.

Let's look at the current state of software and software development. Are we seeing many breathtaking breakthroughs that revolutionize the field? No, we aren't. What's surprising is how relatively little things have changed in recent years. The most popular languages used for software development are Java, C#, C, HTML, JavaScript, PHP, Python, Perl, and Ruby. All of these languages were developed in the 1990's and 1980's (although C# wasn't released until the year 2000). Not even 10 percent of programming is done in a language developed in the past 12 years (I'm not counting JQuery, which is a JavaScript library) . As for data manipulation languages, everyone is still using mainly SQL, a miniature language developed more than 20 years ago. The process of creating a program has not changed much in 25 years: type some code, run it through a compiler, fix any errors, build the program, and see if it does what you were trying to make it do.

Does this give you any reason for thinking that software is a few decades away from all the monumental breakthroughs needed for anything like a technological singularity? It shouldn't.

To get some kind of idea about why hardware advances alone won't give us what we need for a technological singularity, let's imagine some software developers working in New York City. The developers are hired by a publishing firm that is tired of paying human editors to read manuscripts. The developers are told to develop software that will be able to read in a word processing file, and determine whether the manuscript is a likely best seller. Suppose that the publishing firm tells the developers that they will have access to basically unlimited computer speed, unlimited disk storage, and unlimited random-access memory.

Would this hardware bonanza mean that the developers would be able to quickly accomplish their task? Not at all. In fact, the developers would hardly know where to begin to accomplish this task. After doing the easiest part (something that rejects manuscripts having many grammatical or spelling errors), the developers would be stuck. They would know that the work ahead of them would be almost like constructing the Great Pyramid of Cheops. First they would have to construct one layer of functionality that would be hard to create. Then they would have to build upon that layer another layer of functionality that would be even harder. Then there would be several other layers of functionality that would need to be built – each building upon the previous layer, and each layer far harder to create than the previous layer. That is how things works when you are accomplishing a difficult software task. All of this would take tons of time and manual labor. Having unlimited memory and super-fast hardware would help very little. As the developers reached the top of this pyramid, they would find themselves with insanely hard tasks to accomplish, even given all the previous layers that had been built.

The following visual illustrates the difficulty of achieving a technological singularity in which machine intelligence exceeds that of human intelligence. For the singularity to happen, each pyramid must be built. But each pyramid is incredibly hard to build, mainly because of monumental software requirements. The bottom layer of each pyramid is hard to build; the second layer is much harder; and the third layer is incredibly hard to build. By the time you get up to the fourth and fifth layers, you have tasks that seems to require many decades or centuries to accomplish.

Now some may say that things will get a lot faster, because computers will start generating software themselves. It is true that there are computer programs called code generators capable of creating other computer programs (I've written several such tools myself). But as a general rule code generators aren't good for doing really hard programming. Code generators tend to be good only for doing fairly easy programming that requires lots of repetitive grunt work (something like making various input forms after reading a database schema). Really hard programming requires a level of insight, imagination, and creativity that is almost impossible for a computer program to produce. If we ever produce artificial intelligence rivaling a human intelligence, then there will be a huge blossom of computers that create code for other computers. But it's hard to see how automatic code generation will help us very much in getting to such a level in the first place.

There was a lot of interest several years back about using genetic algorithms to get computers programs to generate software. Not much has come from such an approach. Genetic algorithms have not proved to be a very fruitful way to squeeze creativity out of a computer.

Will quantum computers help this “slow software progress” problem? Absolutely not. Quantum computers would just be lightning-fast hardware. To achieve a technological singularity, there would still be an ocean of software work to be done, even if you have infinitely fast computers. 

Will we be able to overcome this difficult by scanning the human brain and somehow figuring out how the software in our brain works, using that to create software for our machines? That's the longest of long shots. No one really has any clear idea of how thoughts or knowledge or rules are represented in the brain, and there is no reason to think we will be able to unravel that mystery in this century. 

To summarize, hardware is getting faster and faster, but software is still stumbling along pretty much as it has for the past few decades, without any dramatic change. To get to a singularity, you need for both hardware and software to make a kind of million mile journey. Hardware may well be able to make such a journey within a few decades. But I see little hope that software will be able to make such a journey within this century.

If we ever get to the point where most software is developed in a fundamentally different way – some way vastly more productive than typing code line by line – then we may be able to say that we're a few decades away from a technological singularity.