Chapter One

On the Sentient Constraints of a Sentient-Containing Universe

There is one thing scientists have never, ever thought about, not for a nanosecond.

The supreme threat that sentients pose to a Universe.

For rigor, I must pause and define exactly what I mean by “sentient.”

A “sentient” is a thinking, feeling being — with total free will — and the ability to understand the Universe’s fundamental laws: how the Universe works, and the ability to re-arrange the Universe using those fundamental laws as his free will sees fit.

One particular implication of that definition is of serious concern.

If a sentient has free will, and if a sentient can understand and re-arrange the Universe as he sees fit — ultimately, he has the power to destroy the entire Universe.

He can “re-arrange” the Universe all the way back down to quarks and gluons if he wants.

It gets worse, I’m afraid. You might think that no sentient would ever do such a thing. That there’s no possible reason whatsoever that would a make a sentient want to destroy the entire Universe, so the Universe is safe even if it’s possible for him to destroy it.

That is not true. There is one completely logical reason for a sentient to destroy the entire Universe: when the destruction of the entire Universe is the moral thing to do.

Which would be true if sentients did not have souls.

Suppose we build a soul-detector, find nothing, and assume a human being’s existence ends when his body does.

What does that mean, logically?

The coldly logical conclusion is that all human action is meaningless. Nothing we do, nothing we think, nothing we feel, has any physically significant meaning. Why?

Because good person, bad person, it doesn’t matter.

A good person lives his life and dies — and he just dissipates and is gone.

A bad person lives his life and dies — and he just dissipates and is gone.

Good or bad would all wind up in exactly the same place in the end. Therefore, for them personally, all their actions would have been, ultimately, totally without any physically real meaning.

None of your actions have any meaning. That is surely the purest, most cruel Hell there is.

And such a Hell can’t be just for us. It has to be Hell for every single sentient everywhere in the Universe. For every single sentient there has been, is, or will ever be in the Universe.

That’s worth emphasizing.

First: At this moment on Earth, for every person on Earth, life is composed mostly of pain. (I must note this will change after someone builds a soul-detector and scientifically confirms the existence of souls. But at this moment, lives of mostly pain have been true for all of human history.)

 A list of possible pains and disappointments is very, very long. The pain of desperate, constant, grinding failure, of not being the best, of always being second-, third-, or fourth-best, of not being able to make enough money, of always living on the edge financially no matter how hard you work, of living from paycheck-to-paycheck, of not getting into the college of your choice, of not being able even to go to college when you know you have the smarts, of not reaching your dream no how hard you try, of having some chronic sickness when everybody around you is in perfect health, and this is just the beginning.

I’m sure you have a long list of your own personal pains you could add to this. And the worst pain of them all is the idea none of your constant suffering and struggle has any real meaning.

(The philosophers, I observe, understood that life was mostly pain long ago. “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” said the poet-philosopher Thoreau. There are many others, too, who echo that observation.)

This hard fact has to be true not only for human beings, but for all sentients in the Universe.

If sentients’ lives are composed mostly of pain, if their existence is limited, if they don’t have souls, then both their lives and their pain are completely without meaning. Not one single action has any real, physical meaning. No life has any real, physical meaning. Sentients’ feelings, their pain, mean nothing, if those sentients all wind up in exactly the same place no matter what they do or feel — good people or bad people — totally without meaning.

If they don’t have souls, then all over the Universe, trillions and trillions of sentients right now are living completely meaningless lives composed mostly of pain. And that state will continue to happen for trillions and trillions of years.

That makes the Universe Hell for every single sentient in it. If there are no souls, the Universe —logically — is Hell.

If there are no souls, what, at its most fundamental, are all the Universe’s sentients going to do?

Live in Hell, and then die.

Destroying Hell is the moral thing to do. If we live without eternal existence, without souls, the destruction of the Universe becomes the moral thing to do.

We now have a motivation for destroying the Universe.

And even if you personally don’t agree with that idea, do you really think every single sentient in the Universe is going to have the same judgment you do?

But the concept still becomes even worse. Remember that I said a sentient could “re-arrange” the Universe back down to its component quarks and gluons if he wanted? There’s a reason I said that. A scientist recently found a way to do exactly that.

Stephen Hawking.

In 2014, Stephen Hawking made headlines with a way one sentient could destroy the entire Universe with no effort at all: simply by pushing a button once.

Hawking himself perfectly embodied and illustrated this basic problem. If anybody understood the Universe’s fundamental laws, it was Stephen Hawking. If anybody went through Hell at the hands of the Universe, it was Stephen Hawking.

And Hawking found a way to destroy the whole damned Universe.

With a twitch of his little finger.

He pointed out that the Higgs field, fundamental to the workings of the Universe, exists in an excited state, and that the existence of all the Universe’s particles depend on the Higgs field remaining in that excited state. (The Higgs field is a quantum field that pervades the entire Universe and is responsible for gravity. Wikipedia reference: Higgs field (classical) So, because the Higgs field exists in an excited state, the Universe contains a fundamental instability, which can be used to destroy it.

If the Higgs field ever drops to its ground state in any particular area, all the Universe’s particles in that area will promptly disintegrate. And from that area, the drop in energy (and therefore disintegration) will spread, exactly like dropping a spark into gunpowder. And the entire Universe dissolves into the Chaos it came from.

(Don’t believe this? Here is one source: Stephen Hawking Says 'God Particle' Could Wipe Out Universe. Google it for yourself. Or, find your favorite physicist and ask him.)

So, all we have to do is to build a Universe-killing doomsday machine — a Hawking Machine — that will catalyze a drop of the Higgs field to its ground state. We will only have to use it once. We punch the button and poof, no more Universe. At the speed of light.

So, we exist in a Universe wherein a) there is a very strong motivation for destroying that Universe ( to prevent the meaningless suffering of trillions of innocents), and b) it is possible for one single sentient to destroy the entire Universe, and c) there are trillions and trillions and trillions of possible-Universe-destroying sentients in the Universe.

Not a good situation for a Universe to be in, in my opinion. We have a real problem here.

But we’re still not done getting worse. A Hawking Machine isn’t the only way to destroy the entire Universe. It’s simply the most elegant, simple way known, currently. There are a million different ways to destroy the Universe.

I invite the thinking reader to come up with his own personal way. “Destruction of the Universe” is defined as “removal of the Universe’s ability to evolve sentients”, because stopping meaningless suffering is to be our goal.

Have at it.

I have a cold purpose in asking you to come up with a way of your own for destroying the entire Universe.

It makes this problem much more comprehensible and real. I know the idea that one single sentient can destroy the entire Universe seems absolutely incredible, completely abstract, beyond all possibility, but . . .

The thing is, it’s not. It’s quite easily doable. The only limit is your imagination.

Nothing will shrink this problem down to its correct size more than you, the thinking reader, coming up with his own personal way of smashing the entire Universe.

Because when you come up with your own personal way, I think this apparently abstract problem suddenly becomes very real and immediate.

“Damn, I did it. I figured out my own way of destroying the whole Universe. But, but, but, the Universe contains trillions of sentients. W-o-o-ow, and every single one has the capacity to blow us all the hell up. If I can find a way, they all certainly can, too. Man, the Universe has one hell of a problem here — “.

Don’t find just one way, thinking reader. Come with up as many ways as you can. Four, five, six, seven, eight —

Now, having shown you this incredible, impossible problem, let me drop solving it on your shoulders.

You are now responsible for finding a way to keep every single sentient in the Universe from blowing the Universe the hell up.

So: Suppose you are a Universe Engineer. You have been handed the problem of designing a Universe that is going to evolve smart sentients. Smart sentients who, moreover, have been directly required by the Boss to possess the property of completely, totally, free will, because sentients will get smart quickest if they have free will.

It gradually sinks in that you have an incredible design headache.

How in the world are you going to stop all those trillions and trillions and trillions of smart sentients, every single one of whom will have the theoretical capacity of destroying the entire Universe, from doing just that? While retaining completely free will?

Oh, to complicate the problem, there are a number of inherent weaknesses in this Universe that you can’t remove! There are flaws that make it possible for just one sentient to destroy the entire thing by pushing a button just once!

And you are supposed to find a way to protect such an incredibly fragile Universe?

Man, that’s just impossible! Just flat-out impossible!

There seems to be only one way out of this mess. You can remove free will and then make “I’m going to destroy the Universe!” a Forbidden Thought.

You go back and ask the Boss to let that free-will requirement go. It’s just too dangerous.

But . . . the Boss says: “NO!”

Back to the drawing board. You make your coffee while grumbling to yourself about impossible Bosses with impossible demands, lean back in your chair, and you think.

You think, and you think, and you think, and you think.

And one day, the solution hits you out of nowhere: a bolt from the blue.

You will make every single sentient — an eternal being. Beings for whom existence has no limit. This will keep your free-will-sentient-containing Universe safe for a brilliantly simple reason.

Nobody sane is going to burn down their house while they are still in it.

Right?

And even if somebody tried, all the other free-will sentients would quickly exercise their own free will by putting a crashing halt to it.

From an engineering standpoint, you want to inhibit this sentient-evolving system from running wild and destroying itself. And that’s what this eternal-existence idea does. If a sentient tries to burn down the Universe — he’s going to feel the flames too.

The pain will — feed back — to him.

That’s a negative-feedback mechanism.

Eternal existence is precisely that: a negative-feedback mechanism.

Ha! That’s it! That’s it!

That’s a perfect engineering solution. Hmm . . . now . . . how to implement this solution on a practical basis.

Souls. To make all sentients be eternal beings, you will give them an eternal component. You will give them eternal souls. They will be eternal souls. Not bodies.

So, you immediately set up laws of physics such that all sentients will be eternal beings and have eternal souls. And bang, you have set up a Universe that is as safe from its free-will sentients as it is possible to be, given the Boss’s constraints. And you privately note that the requirement of free will means the Universe is not as safe as it could be.

Eternal existence only inhibits the Universe’s destruction. It does not prevent it. The requirement of free will means it’s still possible for the Boss’s Universe to be destroyed.

For some odd reason, the Boss clearly values his smart free-will sentients more than his Universe. But you know, that make sense, given that the Boss’s purpose for this Universe is to evolve smart, free-will sentients. Still, the, ahem, Boss is gonna be really, really happy with you. The problem of how to keep His terribly fragile Universe as safe as possible from its own sentients is solved.

Q E D

quod erat demonstrandum

Thus, it is demonstrated.

If a Universe is going to evolve smart, free-will sentients, they had all damned well better be eternal beings with eternal souls. If the Universe is going to survive.

Right?

(Entire book is finished and available as a free e-book on Amazon Kindle in the U.S. and U.K., and $0.99 American in all other markets. See my book list. Quite short, basically a pamphlet. This is an easy problem.)