The essence of all ‘religious’ thought is not God, as such, but rather the problem of what happens to consciousness after death. God is really only an afterthought, an attempt to give a positive explanation anchored in a metaphysically unquestionable idea. However, once God had been created it became almost impossible to tackle the original question without it. Almost impossible …

 If consciousness does transcend life, a scientific explanation of how that can come about will also have to eventuate. At the moment we cannot even properly explain what consciousness is, and that little drawback hinders any scientific pronouncement on the problem. Nevertheless, with the development of computer science, and especially the quest to develop super artificial intelligence, this question of what consciousness is has become more relevant. This in turn has sparked a surge in sci fi narratives like the Matrix films dealing with alternate realities or parallel states of unconscious realities that may help us understand physical conditions of reality that could allow the idea of an immortal form of consciousness to become more scientifically feasible.

At the moment it seems to us that nature, which deeply values consciousness[i], could have a way of storing individual consciousness in a virtual space, much in the same way that Internet companies store individual clients information in their virtual cloud banks.[ii]

If we were to build an android with self-consciousness surely we would do the same. The android would be an enormously valuable object for us, and we would want to ensure that its superintelligent mind was preserved. It would not be necessary for the robot to know that this backup was taking place – in fact it would be better if it didn’t know, for it might not like the idea. The backup would allow us to reproduce the unique personality of our robot in any other mechanical body once the original form had become obsolete: the same way we pass on our iPad or smartphone information (and identity) whenever we update to a newer model.

In fact if we accept that consciousness was an intentional result of the universe’s evolution, then we need to also seriously consider that a backup of the individual conscious parts of existence would also become an evolutionary intention.

If this is accepted then the paranormal and supernatural would also be rendered normal as normal parts of the extended scope of reality that includes the information backed up in the great cosmological cloud of all existence. This also means that if we can one day access that Cloud then all past existence can be investigated and analysed in the same scientific way that all other natural, normal experiences are studied.

Consciousness in the Cloud creates innumerable other questions, beginning with the question of whether the consciousness in the Cloud would actually be a singular form of consciousness itself, i.e., the idea of an omniscient God-like entity. Would a truly intersubjective consciousness consisting of a multitude of egos actually be able to function in a conscious way? I would imagine not, which perhaps indicates the idea that an omniscient concept of God is also impossible.  

On another level, perhaps not all individual ego’s consciousnesses are deemed worthy of backing up. This evokes the ethical sense of life that is uppermost in religious morality, that some consciousnesses are just not worthy to be saved and their information is sent straight to the wastebasket.

But whether we are worthy of becoming eternal or not, the great takeaway here is that an eternal existence for one’s consciousness is a very logical possibility, independent of any religious faith.      

[i] For our general metaphysical ideas of the universe’s relation to and dependence on consciousness see our post SPECULATIONS ON METAPHYSICAL PURPOSES EMBEDDED IN COSMOLOGICAL EVOLUTION https://pauladkin.wordpress.com/2022/09/30/speculations-on-metaphysical-purposes-embedded-in-cosmological-evolution/

[ii] The possibility of this is developed in our posts on the binary condition of quantum reality and its capability of sharing and storing information in our articles on cosmological will like THE UNIVERSE AS WILL or Binary Metaphysics and the World Will