Error of the immaterial mind

On extrapolating earthly experiences into the sphere of metareality

Our reality is a manifestation of a broader context that I call metareality. Some of the most general facts about the world undoubtedly shed light on it, but it is a mistake to assume that everything we observe can be translated into metareality.

Our situation resembles that of a child in a wealthy family where no one makes an effort to make it aware of its situation. Such a child may think that wealth is the default state of humanity—that it doesn't require life skills, entrepreneurship, hard work, or taking risks. To understand the real situation, the child would have to comprehend the broader context of the environment in which it grows up and what allowed for its creation. Without this, it will believe that this artificial, rare environment is the universal human condition, independent of the place and times in which one lives.

Similarly, an unawakened person may extrapolate experiences gained during their life onto metareality, believing that most of them find analogies there. Folk superstitions propagated by the Church are an extreme example of such a familiar, Earth-life-based metaphysics. It postulates that metareality is populated by various anthropomorphic figures like angels, saints, the Spirit, and a personal God.

One of the most common errors of this type is what I call the

"error of the immaterial mind." For some reason—perhaps due to the specific structure of the brain—it is entirely natural and easy for humans to imagine mental faculties that are independent of the body. A personal God, gods, spirits, angels, souls, demons, saints, the Holy Spirit, and many other immaterial but cognitively endowed beings are commonplace in all cultures worldwide, regardless of time and geographical location.

The human mind is the result of the functioning of the nervous system—an incredibly complex computational machine with a precisely defined architecture based on neural networks. Consciousness, thinking, planning, emotions—all these manifestations of human mental life are essentially expressions of information processing carried out by the nervous system. Similarly, the very popular large language models (LLMs), which are beginning to effectively mimic human mental abilities, are possible only thanks to information processing. Their computations are performed differently than in the human brain. Instead of biological neural networks, they use programmed neural networks ultimately implemented through binary computations performed by silicon processors. In today's world, we have two manifestations of intelligence—in living organisms and computers, and nowhere else. In both cases, it is the result of information processing carried out by a machine or organ specifically designed for this purpose.

Therefore, it seems doubtful to directly attribute mental functions analogous to human ones to entities in metareality. For example, by postulating that God thought X, felt Y, and planned, we assume that God has a mind similar to the human mind and therefore must have some organ responsible for its emergence. Such suggestions can be accepted only as analogies, implying that God possesses something akin to human mental functions but only within a limited scope of similarity—for example, not requiring a physical carrier, being unlimited, and not requiring energy or effort. However, admitting that we are dealing with an analogy entails a significant weakening of our ability to determine the nature of mental faculties. So not only must we qualify our postulates in this area by stating that we are dealing only with a certain comparison, but we must also acknowledge that this fact effectively limits our predictive capabilities regarding the being or phenomenon to which we apply this comparison.

Therefore, I avoid all kinds of teleological explanations when it comes to metareality. I consider them naive, unjustified transfers of experiences from our reality into a realm that most likely operates under completely different laws, whose nature is not directly accessible to us and for understanding which we are simply too limited and primitive beings.

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