A Quantum Soul?

A Quantum Soul?

This is the 46th Postcard from The Dark Peak, and the final one for a while whilst I take an hiatus to give me full attention to working on Darker Peak, the second novel in The Dark Peak Chronicles trilogy -- can you guess the title of the third novel?

"Postcards" has been a worthwhile experiment, and as with everything, will not go to waste, but engagement has not been what I would have hoped, so time to put things on hold for a while.

There are a number of topics that I am tackling in The Dark Peak Chronicles trilogy, but I am going to use this last postcard to try and explain one of them:

The Quantum Soul.

In the 2040s, nanobots will be able to enter a living person's brain and replicate all the data that form the memories and personality of a person. This data can then be used to create a replica version of that person. Of you.

Here's a question for you. If that data could be implanted in a genetically grown duplicate of you, would that resultant person have a soul? Would it be you? Would anyone know, would anyone notice the difference?

They are interesting questions, aren't they?

In The Legend of Loxley Bottom, the nascenti recreate Sophie Hinchcliffe from her DNA. But in Sophie's case, her former memories are lost to the annals of history, there was no opportunity for them to be preserved. But if there had have been, would her soul have been resurrected?

If we decide that a replica like Sophie does not have a soul, does this mean that the supernatural world is not possible either?

I'll explain that:

Without an everlasting soul, there is no supernatural. My personal belief.

Based on my research, consciousness is a quantum state. The soul is an emergent property of the quantum behaviour of the human brain.

Since that is the only way that I can reconcile things that I believe, and I may have witnessed -- although witnessing these phenomena are nothing more than my own subjective experience, if a soul does not exist, than neither do barghests, or murkwraiths, or hobs or boggarts.

What if there are multiple copies of you? In the quantum world, does this mean multiple souls as well?

My hypothesis is that yes, a separate consciousness would indeed lead to a separate soul -- think Schrödinger's cat, and multiple quantum states.

Would these souls be linked? Yes, of course, quantum entanglement would make a great deal of sense -- and might explain supernatural phenomenon such as past lives.

You have to stake your territory and beliefs somewhere, and that's my position: The soul is extraneous to human consciousness.

And so the Quantum Soul is the biggest question that I try and answer in the trilogy -- of course, it is all conjecture.

Other topics are in there that you might be concerned about:

• The murk and the collapse of The Hinge as an analogy for climate change

• the fostered capitalism of the nascenti and perceived rise of fascism under the vegahorn and the Jellyheads as a reaction to the rise of right wing politics in Europe and the USA

• and most especially, the current dominance of Big Tech cloudalists, the dangers of social scoring, surveillance capitalism and the rise of technofeudalism, as envisioned by the Hivemind, the organic network, the fungai and the Farantees retail empire

The Hellsborough Chronicles Book two -- Darker Peak -- is in progress, and will be released as soon as it is finished.

I'll let you know when. In the meantime, I'm signing off for a bit.

Love.

Pip

If you know anyone else that you think might find this interesting, then please forward this email to them :)

In other news, Hellsborough Chronicles book one “Dark Peak” is now available on Kindle and paperback.

If you can leave a review of Dark Peak on Amazon, I'd be more than grateful.

Hellsborough Chronicles book two “Darker Peak” is now being worked on — look out for early releases.

Cheers, until next time,

Pip :)