Recipe for Heaven Pt 2: Steps
“Their skulls are full of electronic chips instead of brains,” I said.”Maybe they’re immortal,” Fat said.”…They can travel backward in time.”-Philip K. Dick, VALIS
RECIPE FOR HEAVEN
Pt 2: Steps
Step 1: You’re going to want to set up your heaven’s space first before you start adding souls to it. This means getting out your solutions to suffering, your solutions to spacetime limitations on populations, and your transcendental bodies. Fold these together in an infinitely expandable mixing bowl and set aside.
Note Before Proceeding with Step 2: You’re going to want to start peopling your heaven with the most divine people first, then gradually incorporate less heaven-fit souls into the mix. So for the following steps, begin by applying them to the most perfect people who’ve ever lived and gradually work your way toward putting every last soul through the process.
Step 2: Take out your observational spacetime machine and use it to home in on the life of a soul. You’ll want to avoid aiming the observational spacetime machine at yourself, unless you really like vertigo.
Step 3: Use your full spectral analyzer to completely document this soul’s life from birth to death, scanning the soul’s every atom at every millisecond, and also monitoring the causal events affecting the soul at each second as well as the consequences of the soul’s actions, including the intracranial experiences of those souls affected by the soul in question. You’ll need a large container for all of this.
Step 4: Use your full neural analyzer to interpret your full, lifelong scan of the soul’s head’s interior (part of the data harvested in Step 3) to determine the soul’s thoughts, emotions, sensations, and mental capacities at each moment of his life.
Step 5: Use my definition of free will from the post “What’s Memetics, Game Theory, Free Will and Transfinite Math Got to Do with It” to determine which of the soul’s actions, and to what extent, were the result of free will. Pour this as well as all other data from Step 3 and 4 into your full ethical analyzer. If all works well, the result will be a smooth lump-free description of everything the soul lacked in making choices in violation of the golden and platinum rules as described in my post “Golden & Platinum: Rationality and the Two Laws of Love.”
Step 6: Use the result from Step 5 to determine what precise solutions to evil the soul in question requires. Remember to leave open the possibility of a soul that doesn’t really need any solutions to evil; more than one great religious leader insisted on the possibility that you’ll find some perfectly ripe specimens that can bypass the next few steps and go right into Step 9.
Step 7: Use the results from step 6 to construct a virtual reality in which your soul will gain everything he lacked in order to make choices fully in compliance with the golden and platinum laws of love. Now it’ll be tempting for an inexperienced cook to go overboard in this step; remember the golden rule, though-don’t dish out what you can’t take. You want the virtual reality to be isomorphic with what the soul deserves and needs in order to be perfected. Not that you can go off and whip up a virtual reality that destroys the soul’s free will or bypasses it; the soul’s choosing process is what we’re trying to perfect, and that means leaving it intact, and that means the soul might not cooperate.
Step 8: Using your full neural translator, determine the last possible moment at which the soul stopped developing and from that moment begin translating the soul into virtual form. Note that in most cases, this key moment will be the moment of the soul’s natural death, but in such cases as Alzheimer’s or other dementias, you may have to translate different components of the mind as they die over a span of years. In any case, be sure that at the end of this translation process, you have a virtualized soul as identical as possible in structural patterns to the original mind. Rest assured, due to the physical continuity and endpoint identicality of the translating process, the resulting mind WILL BE the selfsame soul you have been monitoring and mapping; if you flub the translation slightly, the soul will still retain its sense of continuity of self, it’ll just notice some slight alterations-nothing different than what happens when you wake up after a haunting dream or come to after a car wreck.
A Note of Caution: When executing a full neural translation, be aware that you can in the wrong circumstances cause a soul to brachiate or duplicate, which can get very messy in terms of property and identity, especially if done with an unpurified, pre-heavenly soul.
Step 9: Pour or load the virtualized soul into his tailor-made virtual reality, being sure to monitor him the whole time he’s in-you don’t want to leave a soul in his virtual purgation too long or he could char. Note that this process will annihilate some souls who absolutely refuse to adopt anything other than a solipsistic perspective; instead of becoming flexible and translucent, you’ll see these souls curl up into themselves, blacken, become extremely brittle, and shatter or crumble upon any attempt to remove them.
Step 10: If all has gone well, the soul should now be ready for translation from a virtualized state into a transcendent body. Note that the soul should be translucent at this point, and flexible, but should retain the unique flavor he had before being processed in Step 8. Examine the qualities of the now-purified, still-virtualized soul. Determine the range of its abilities, the flavor of its personality, the degree of its wisdom and maturity. From these factors, determine the maximally transcendent body with which it can be entrusted.
Step 11. Take the soul and very carefully download it into the transcendent body you have chosen for it in the infinitely expandable mixing bowl. Congratulations-you now have a heavenly feast. But remember, repeat Steps 2 through 10 until you’ve processed every possible soul-after all, there’s infinite room in that mixing bowl, and infinite love, and the laws of love dictate we share the love as much as we can with whomever we can.
Tags: future, heaven, inventions, tech