Seekers Soul

Visionary thinking compels us to reconsider the foundations of our being, from the most intimate to the most cosmic. We speak, for instance, of “soulmates,” a concept inherited in part from the Romantic Era philosophers, who championed the idea of a connection that transcends the purely material and temporal. This deeply felt, though unproven, notion—that two souls are fundamentally intertwined—is but a single, modern echo of a far older and more prevalent global precept.

This precept is, of course, that of the soul’s persistence. The ideas of ascendancy, of spiritual progression, or of reincarnation are not fringe theories in the grand arc of human history; they are foundational pillars in religions both great and small, from the high philosophies of the East to the animist traditions of cultures past and present. They all grapple with the same essential query.

The concept of the human soul? It’s hard to say just how long it’s been around, but it is an ancient precept. In human history, it remains a recurring idea, woven through the fabric of more than one religion. For this discussion, let’s take spirit and soul as sort of interchangeable. We are grounded in physical existence, but then the question often comes up of something less tangible—an incorporeal element that, as some believe, persists past death.

What if it did?

Assume for the sake of discussion that some form of spirit does persist, perhaps through a mechanism like reincarnation. Picture it a bit like a science fiction movie, one where they take the mind of an elderly person and download it, entire, into the mind of a young, waiting clone. Except, in this model, it’s happening “in the wild,” so to speak. It is simply the nature of the beast.

If this were the case, it might offer a new lens on an old biological question. When you talk on a species level, where do you think predispositions come from? Consider the instinct of migratory waterfowl or the incredible journey of Monarch butterflies. Might a reincorporated butterfly, on some level, even remember the way of the great migrations? If such a mechanism did evolve over a vast amount of time, it might be indistinguishable from what we currently call an evolutionary trait.

Evolved traits often make sense in a physical, tangible way, like the opposable thumb. But with the soul, you would be talking about something else entirely—something that involves dimensions beyond our immediate perception. If you can’t yet detect or quantify these extended dimensions, this complex, unseen geometry could be a very good hiding place for a soul. As our understanding of the quantum world deepens, more dimensions may indeed become quantifiable.

This brings us to the physics of it. What, precisely, is the nature of this spiritual energy? One reason its existence may be seen as inconclusive is that it simply can’t be detected with present technology. The world really isn’t ready for the Quantum Age, in my view. Not most people.

The true challenge, however, emerges where this new age of physics couples with artificial intelligence. This is where you start to get AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), and that is where humanity is going to be challenged the most. AGI will likely spur massive leaps in other fields, accelerating materials development and figuring out how to make spaceship engines go a lot faster. It will also most likely increase building materials strength by a factor of ten, leading to much safer space travel.

But this new, combined force of Quantum and AGI will do more than build ships; it’s going to affect the entire population of the world. In time, it will likely remake the world, including our very politics.

The thing about the internet is that it erases borders. With AGI, this border-fading may go into a new phase. We may be witnessing a continuation of the decline of the nation-state model. Such things are never easy; in fact, they tend to be dangerous. We are already seeing the shifting of norms and traditions, accompanied by massive economic shifts for better or worse. You can see the cracks in the international system appearing all around the world. Syria, for a few years at least, was a failed state, and the jury is still out on the new government. Somalia was another. These are places with no functioning central government, and they tend to break down into rival power centers.

Government can be good or evil, and really powerful ones can be both at once, depending on the circumstances. As these old structures are challenged, perhaps we can see the “body politic” itself in a new light. It might be seen as a sort of Oversoul or a planetary connecting mechanism, a collective consciousness struggling to be born from the shell of the old.

This is where the speculation must take its final, and perhaps most necessary, leap. This “Oversoul,” this nascent collective consciousness forged in the digital-quantum fire, may be the very thing required for our next great evolutionary step.

We must assume that, given time, the likely increased size of humanity will demand expansion not on this planet, but beyond it. We will eventually move into space, first in colonies, then in self-sustaining habitats. The old models of governance—the nation-states that are already cracking under the strain of global information—will be utterly insufficient for a humanity spread across the solar system, a people for whom “border” is a line drawn not on a map, but at the edge of an atmosphere.

What new political form, what new connecting philosophy, will bind a humanity so vast and so separated by the void? Perhaps this is the ultimate function of the “soul” in our philosophical framework. Not just a mechanism for individual persistence or romantic connection, but a framework for a species-level consciousness. A consciousness, tempered by AGI and understood through a new quantum physics, that is capable of transcending not just the borders on a map, but the very void of space itself.

The political and the spiritual, in this grand future, may find they are, and perhaps always were, one and the same. The inquiry remains essential.