Realm

I'd like to advance our scale and boundary language with another concept: a realm is a venue of human existence. Consider with me three realms: the physical, the mental, and the spiritual.

The physical realm encompasses all objects having mass. The mental realm encompasses all objects present to our consciousness.

We all exist in the same physical realm, but we each inhabit our own mental realm. Because our experience of the world is tantamount to our consciousness, the only objects we can ever be said to experience directly are in fact mental objects. However, many objects in our mental realm have a referent in the physical realm. A golf ball is a physical object, but insofar as it is present to my consciousness, it is a mental object with a physical referent. Our conscious experience of the physical realm is mediated and indirect.

There is also, though, a direct connection between the physical and mental realms. The physical realm gives rise to the mental realm in the chemistry and physics of our brain. The bits of information—patterns in data—that we denominate thoughts or emotions—this information is encoded via chemicals or energy within the structures of our brain. These chemicals and energy in turn have mass, and are part of the physical realm. A person exists in both the mental and physical realms. As a mental object, we are coterminous with the former. But as ourselves a physical object, a body, we are of a much higher order than our mental realm as a physical object, that is, as the sum-total of the chemicals and energy in our brain.

Now, we store and transmit mental objects to each other—thoughts, emotions, volitions, etc.—via such technologies as language, speech, music, and writing. These involve representing a mental object (more or less accurately) as an information pattern, encoding that information in a physical medium (be it vibrations in air or ink on a page), and then reconstructing another mental object (more or less accurately) on the blueprint of the encoded pattern. In so doing, we gradually form a sort of shared mental realm, and this is where we can locate the higher-order objects of human discourse—theories and doctrines and governments and economies.

The computer leapfrogs all other information technology. It succeeds by mimicking the human mental realm: first, it encodes information in the physical realm with electricity (specifically, as electrons within N-type silicon). Secondly, it transmits information to other computers, forming a shared mental realm called the Internet. As with our individual mental realms, the mass of a computer's "mental realm" is drastically out of scale to our personal experience of it; the entire Internet weighs 0.2 millionths of an ounce. But perhaps most remarkably, we are creating objects out of computers that are actually starting to exhibit certain properties of personhood.

Now consider that humanity through the ages has generally understood there to also be a spiritual realm, which we may define negatively as encompassing all objects not within the physical and mental realms. As with the physical realm, our experience of this spiritual realm could only ever be via mental objects with a spiritual referent. However, we have not been able to collectively observe the spiritual realm with the same rigor with which we can observe the physical. Many doubt its existence. But the foregoing discussion, I think, gives us tools to newly explore its possibility. I propose the following general principle, then, not as a metaphor, but as a possible description of reality:

The spiritual realm gives rise to the physical, as the physical gives rise to the mental.

I am suggesting that there is a direct connection between the physical realm and the spiritual realm that parallels the direct connection between the mental realm and the physical realm. If so, then the invention of an artificial mental realm, the computer, gives us an incredible sandbox in which to explore the nature of this type of boundary.