The Immortal Soul as Expedient Lie

A Procedural Analysis of Identity Preservation

By Bodhangkur

 

 

1. The Problem of Cognitive Finitude

The awareness of mortality is the original trauma of consciousness.
When, in evolutionary time, a neural system became sufficiently recursive to register its own operations as a self, it also—inevitably—registered their cessation. The same loop that enabled self-recognition produced the horror of self-extinction. To know that one will die is to experience an absolute contradiction: the observer cannot coherently imagine its own non-existence. This paradox, if left unmediated, would disable the emergent.

The earliest humans thus faced a structural problem: how to sustain identity in the face of inescapable discontinuity. The solution was not philosophical but procedural—a compensatory narrative: “I will continue.”

2. From Animism to Abstract Soul

The first traces of this expedient lie are animistic. The hunter’s guilt and gratitude are ritualised as the animal’s “spirit,” ensuring continuity of relation beyond the kill. The dead ancestor remains in the village fire; his will, memory, and protection persist. The function is transparent: to deny annihilation and preserve social and psychological order.

As language abstracted, so did the fiction. The Egyptian ba and ka, the Sumerian etemmu, the Greek psyche—all are refinements of the same procedural response: the reassertion of continuity in the face of entropy.

In the Upaniṣads, this continuity became the ātman, an immortal core identical with Brahman. In Plato, it became the rational form of man, uncorrupted by the body. In both, the same inversion occurs: the mortal token (the living human) is said to contain within itself an immortal substratum—identity transposed from process to essence.

3. Institutionalisation and Control

Once formalised, the doctrine of the immortal soul gained secondary utility. Religions discovered its disciplinary power.
To promise immortality is to create a currency of obedience: what can be infinitely lost or gained cannot be questioned. The Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Christian credo in vitam aeternam, the Islamic akhira—all translate the individual’s terror of discontinuity into a moral architecture.

Thus, the soul became not merely metaphysical reassurance but political instrument. Immortality was legislated; finitude became heresy. The expedient lie that once protected the psyche now served the polis.

4. Philosophical Rationalisation

Philosophers refined the myth into theory. Plato’s Phaedo argues that the soul, being immaterial, cannot perish; Aristotle defines it as entelechy, the form of a living body; Descartes isolates it as thinking substance. Each definition preserves the structural deceit: identity must persist independent of process.

Even modern idealisms—Kant’s transcendental subject, Husserl’s pure ego—retain a ghostly residue of the same continuity assumption. The “I” that synthesises experience is treated as if untouched by the entropy of matter.

5. The Procedural Diagnosis

Finn’s Procedure Monism offers a radical dissection of this lineage. In his framework, every existent—atom, cell, mammal—is a token, a transient arrangement of quantised random events stabilised by constraints (rules). The token’s realness endures only while the procedural configuration is active—when ON.

When the configuration collapses—when the energy differentials that sustain it dissolve—there is no residue. OFF is absolute. There is no “soul” bridging states because continuity itself is an artefact of successive token generation.

The immortal soul, therefore, is the emergent’s adaptive lie—a cognitive prosthesis designed to preserve procedural coherence under the stress of impending termination. It performs the same function as a memory cache that refuses deletion: maintaining operational identity until the system ceases to operate altogether.

6. Illustrative Examples

·         Example 1: The Soldier’s Immortality.
Facing certain death, the soldier’s belief in “dying for the homeland” functions as a procedural override. The lie of transcendence suppresses paralyzing fear, preserving the token’s coherence until physical termination.

·         Example 2: The Digital Echo.
A social-media profile persists after death; it continues to interact algorithmically, an artificial continuity masking extinction. This is the modern technological form of the same expedient—identity simulation beyond operation.

·         Example 3: The Philosophical Idealist.
Descartes’ cogito—“I think, therefore I am”—smuggles in immortality by tautology: the thinker, being defined as thinking, can never be imagined as not thinking. The logical closure serves precisely the same procedural defence as the myth of the soul.

7. The Intent of the Lie

The lie is not immoral; it is functional. It sustains the emergent’s drive to continue acting within its domain. Awareness of absolute OFF would neutralise behaviour. Thus the fiction of continuity evolved as a stabilising illusion—a mask of infinity draped over quantised discontinuity.

The “immortal soul” is therefore a survival algorithm, not a revelation. It enables the living token to perform its tasks as if the OFF state were not final, because from within its procedure the OFF state cannot be represented.

8. Conclusion: The End of the Lie

The procedural view redefines courage not as belief in immortality but as lucidity before extinction.
To accept that when OFF there is no remainder is to complete the loop that the myth was designed to hide. It is the end of metaphysical infantilism.

From the standpoint of Procedure Monism, every emergent is already the full instantiation of Brahman—perfect in its local context—and requires no afterlife. Its identity is the act of being itself; its extinction is complete.

The immortal soul, then, was a necessary error: the first philosophy and the last superstition. It was the dream of a token unwilling to concede that the miracle of being ON ends not in return, but in silence.

Postscriptum (Comparative Note):
Where the Buddhist anattā doctrine partially dismantled the lie by denying a persisting self, it left an apophatic residue—the “unborn” or “unconditioned.” Finn’s procedural restatement eliminates even this placeholder. There is no “unconditioned.” There is only the quantised alternation of ON and absolute OFF.

Thus, the druid’s conclusion:

“When ON, I am God.
When OFF, God is gone.”

 

From dust to immortality

The Hubris of Youth

 

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