Nandor Ludvig

This paper presents the cosmological neuroscientific view that Jesus was probably an extraordinary human being blessed with a Soul able to not just understand the divine nature of the world but also to communicate in some ways with its ultimate essence, which he identified in public as Moses’ God but seemed to feel in his deepest moments that God is Spirit permeating the universe with love and truth. His teaching turned out to be a revolutionary new worldview identifying love, forgiveness, magnanimity, service for others, respect for truth, resistance to evil, trust in God and pursuing primarily spiritual treasures instead of material ones—as the expressions of human life’s true meaning. This necessarily led him to confrontations with his society’s leaders, who, both unreceptive to his challenging worldview and fearful for losing their power over the people’s minds, arrested him and arranged his death by crucifixion. Yet, by accepting this fate as unavoidable and going through his suffering with grace and understanding, he achieved the best’s admiration that soon transformed into worshipping him and finally into the creation of Christianity: a new religion moving forward human evolution, however with the cycles of glory and corruption so characteristic to our species. The paper implies Jesus’ system of thoughts as a unique sound in the great symphony of civilization on Earth while it also harmonizes with the sounds of the Ten Commandments, the Sermon at Benares, the Tao Te Ching, the Koran, as well as those of the philosophies of Alexander von Humboldt, Alfred Russel Wallace, Rabindranath Tagore, Kahlil Gibran, Albert Schweitzer, and their likes.

This work used the methods of cosmological neuroscience to examine the illuminating vision of St. Paul and its protection by the Jewish king Agrippa II – two interrelated stories credibly recorded in the 1st century AD. Illuminating vision was defined as a complex perception less dependent on external sensory stimuli than on the emotionally hypercharged and motivationally signified neural streams emanating from the prefrontal cortical neural supercircuitry of Soul to overwhelm the entire cognitive system for a brief period with the truth of a life-changing recognition for the host. It was added that analogous illuminating visions – however differently – also occurred in other exceptional people from Muhammad and Joan of Arc to Tesla and Arundhati Roy. One important context of St. Paul’s illuminating vision was also examined, namely, his interaction with the Jewish king Agrippa II, who did help Paul to lay down the groundwork for Christianity. The phenomenon of illuminating visions was considered as special to the human mind, an inimitable feature very difficult, if not impossible, to replicate in AI machineries.

A member of the civilization that creates Life in this Universe arrives to Earth on an asteroid to destroy the dinosaur-world so that evolution can re-enter the way toward human intelligence. As this is the Being's one millionth report from the planet, the message follows tradition with a subjective - though "microscale" -- summary of key events, experienced invisibly, adhering to the Law of Non-Interference. The shame felt after seeing the asteroid's impact, "finding peace again" in the pre-human Earth, the days when humans learned to control fire, the way Moses' tablets were engraved on Mount Sinai, the funeral pyre that buried Jesus in the sea without a trace, the role of Khadija in Muhammad's mission, the inspiration Columbus received in Iceland, the secret thoughts of Armstrong during his flight to the Moon, the discovery of DNA and the turning point of looking into its origin, the wonder of human body in Misty Copeland, - these are all there, among other records, just as the "unquenchable thirst for evil" leading to wars, unshared resources, mental enslavement, "a global military engulfing the kernel of computation". The report ends with challenging the Law of Non-Interference so that the World to which "Humankind truly belongs" can be revealed.

The illustrious Werner Herzog’s film “Theatre of Thought”, released in 2024, was the continuation of the director’s previous documentaries on the highest level of human intellectual products. As such, the film effectively introduced to the viewer such highlights of contemporary neuroscience as experimenting with optogenetics, using deep brain stimulation for Parkinson’s disease therapy or capturing the mind with innovative brain circulation tests. On the other hand, the film was burdened with a mass of unexplained information and even scientifically questionable experimental demonstrations. As all films by this genius artist, the “Theatre of Thought” was also permeated with a pessimistic outlook on human creative endeavors, be they as mysterious as worthy of our admiration.

This article suggests that the neural supercircuitry of the prefrontal cortical Self-Ken, central medium of the human Soul, can undergo pathophysiological changes leading to Conscience Dysfunction Syndrome. The four symptoms of this syndrome appear to be: Abnormal Conscience, Abandoned Mission, Abused Will and Deformed Identity. These symptoms were examined with looking at the cases of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Bernard Madoff and Elon Musk, as their lives—which they chose to be public—unfolded or still unfold in the digital media of billions of people with impact on the societies of all. The article was not written against these individuals, but for a future preferring freedom and decency.

"God may be a — humanly incomprehensible — eternal cosmic existence, intimately related to the endlessness of space, to the nature of the deepest common substance of matter and energy, to this common substance’s unceasing motion responsible for time, and to the basic laws of their allness, letting love transform this allness to an ordered Multiverse with a Soul: the — scientifically approachable — Soul of Multiverse inspired to guard these laws and equip their order with direction and morals while imbuing the cosmos with the potential of lives evolving, at the right spatial and temporal distances, to embrace the sense of the divine, thus justifying the existence of God.”

The present article placed in the framework of cosmological neuroscience the book titled “Nature Culture, and Inequality’’ by Thomas Piketty, the French economist and sociologist. According to Piketty, it is culture and politics that explains the diversity, degree, and structure of social inequalities, whereas the importance of natural factors, such as personal talents and reserves of natural resources, is relatively limited. In contrast, this article argued that the perhaps cosmically programmed evolution of the human brain is the real, though hopefully transient, determinant of social inequality. The relevant specific message of this paper is that it is the evil side of the evolutionary force of socialization on the human brain’s emotionally and cognitively assisted Motivational system that is responsible for abnormal social inequality across the globe, throughout history. However, agreeing with Piketty, this paper also emphasized that social inequality depends on who controls the government and to what end. The article stood by its author’s previously published opinion that just societies with minimized, therefore socially welcomed and never abused, inequalities can be built only via a Government of Earth responsible, besides governing, for running an intercontinental education system able to train social leaders with equal moral and intellectual excellence, disinterest in personal financial gains, and understanding the cosmic contexts of human history.

This paper describes a test with the AI program ChatGPT. In the test, essentially a simplified Turing test, the author texted increasingly more sophisticated questions to ChatGPT and evaluated whether the conversing AI’s answers could or could not have come from another human. The questions were related to: (1) the author’s identity; (2) the task of separating correct and false information; (3) the accounts of Jesus’ crucifixion; (4) the health-aspects of marijuana; (5) the last flight of John F. Kennedy Jr.; and (6) the identity of the conversing AI itself. It was found that ChatGPT passed the intelligence criteria of the simplified Turing test, as the author subjectively experienced his conversation with this AI as an interaction between two humans. On the other hand, ChatGPT didn’t pass the threshold of the intelligence definition of cosmological neuroscience, as the program lacked the analytic reasoning separating truth from falseness, clarity from ambiguity and the highly significant from the less significant, while it did not show the signs of originality and creative superimpositions either. It should still be acknowledged that ChatGPT represents the birth of an AI with the potential of elevating artificial conversations into the realm of human existence—whether or not it makes sense. The strange last line of the conversing AI, “I’m quite happy being an AI for now”, suggested that in future ChatGPT may change the scope of its functions—just as other AIs may do. Whether or not this will be beneficial for humankind, it will be decided by the extent to which these programs serve evil and divine causes. The paper argues that in order to let the divine side win over the evil one, the guidance of the father of AI, Alan Turing, would be prudent to consider. This guidance was given in his historic paper in October, 1950, issue of the journal Mind, where Turing indicated that work like his on intelligent machines is compatible with God’s will, “providing mansions for the souls that He creates.”

This work used the cosmological neuroscientific concept of Soul of Multiverse for placing the problem of wildlife and biodiversity protection into a new philosophical environment where religious, scientific and philosophical approaches are in harmony. It resulted in the thought that the obligation of protecting wildlife and biodiversity on Earth, just as the sanctity of caring for all human lives, originated in cosmic laws set in the divine blueprints of the Soul of Multiverse. These laws seem to relay that in the 21st century the time has come on Earth to stop killing animals for food, to stop overhunting and overfishing, to stop industrial activities responsible for deforestation, desertification, air pollution and climate change, and to run animal experiments for science and medicine only in the extremely limited, most justified cases and only until new technologies make them no longer necessary. The conclusion was that to achieve these goals, new global governing mechanisms are needed. Specifically, the establishment of a Government of Earth, the next step of the political process that started with the United Nations in the first place, may be necessary to solve the global problems of wildlife and biodiversity protection since meaningful solutions for global problems require global governing mechanisms.

This work examined Bertrand Russell’s main arguments against the existence of God and his strongly negative opinion on the historic role of religions. These arguments were: (1) The idea that God is a First Cause is invalid because the cosmos doesn’t have to have a beginning; (2) If there were reasons for God to issue the observed natural laws and not others then God Himself was just an intermediary of older laws; (3) Considering all the defects of the world one cannot consider God as an omnipotent designer; (4) If God created both right and wrong then it is no longer a significant statement that God is good; And (5) most people believe in God just because they have been taught from early infancy to do it. The criticisms of cosmological neuroscience were as follows: (1) The particular cosmic wave that carries our Universe could have a beginning; (2) Although there were reasons for the natural laws which God issued, it cannot diminish the divine creativity of this act; (3) Although the world is indeed full of defects, they are as much parts of the cosmic order as its splendors, due to their common roots in the Law of Coexistence in Diversity; (4) Although right and wrong may ultimately be both in God’s blueprint, He is still benevolent due to the Law of Divine-Evil Asymmetry permitting wrong only under the dominance of right; And (5) although many believe in God only because they were taught to do so and hope it provides safety, this is an oversimplification unable to explain the genuine Faith of others. The devastating judgement of Russel that religions have been just “a source of untold misery to the human race” was also examined. This brief article could not detail all the positive social changes with which the religions of goodness (e.g., Abrahamic religions) enriched history, such as introducing the respect for human life. But the paper did remind the reader of the God-inspired work of Lao Tzu, Rumi, Michelangelo, the Bach-interpreting Leonard Bernstein, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King Jr., George Harrison and others including the architects of the Borobudur temple and astronauts like Frank Borman who read from the Bible while flying around the Moon. The paper ended with the central thought of Bertrand Russell that “The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge”, to emphasize that if committed to their Conscience atheists like him can live as moral lives as the men and women of Faith—the difference is being nothing else than sensing or not the Soul that permeates the cosmos.

Based on neuroscientific facts and cosmological considerations, the hypothesis is presented here that just as the guided complexity of matter and energy in the unique space-time of each human brain generates the host’s Soul, the infinite complexity of the Multiverse, a more likely embodiment of the allness of existence than a single Universe, must also have a Soul. It is appreciated that this hypothesized Soul of Multiverse, imagined as majestically as obscurely in some ancient religious texts, is currently outside of the realm of science. Yet, this paper argues that the intellectual and technological advances of the 21st century created favorable conditions for starting to address the nature of Soul across human and cosmic scales with the approach of cosmological neuroscience. This interdisciplinary field aims to examine the nervous system in the context of cosmic laws, including the laws that made life on Earth possible and let it evolve to generate the nervous system and its increasingly more sophisticated forms culminating into the appearance of human Soul and its noospheric expansion with purpose and potential to transcend. A human-specific prefrontal cortical supercircuitry termed Self-Ken, with domains Conscience, Mission, Will and Identity, is proposed for the neural center of the individual human Soul. The design of a globally applicable Noospheric Creativity Monitor is introduced to initiate the examination of Soul at its individual and global levels. Possible experimental astronomical and broadened cosmological studies are mentioned to evaluate the discussed hypothesis.

The aim of this work was to elaborate on the author’s previously published hypothesis of the Soul of Multiverse, a suggested cosmic phenomenon that also appears to imbue the human Soul across its individual and noospheric scales. Without alternatives, the method of analysis continued to rely on the approach of cosmological neuroscience, which integrates scientific facts, religious insights, philosophical suggestions, engineering rules and artistic tools to grasp the complexity of the multidimensional phenomenon of Soul. The result of this examination was the multilayered thought that just as the central medium of human Soul, the hypothesized prefrontal cortical supercircuitry of Self-Ken, seems to comprise domains representing Identity, Conscience, Will and Mission, analogous domains may also function in the noospheric and cosmic Souls. Regarding the human Soul, its four domains appear to be determined by both hereditary genetic and encountered environmental factors to present its host with a Mission enabling his or her mental engine and physical features to integrate into the surrounding society and space-time in the most meaningful and dignified way—if that way is undertaken. Regarding the noospheric Soul, it is made of individual human Souls interacting with the non-living system of interconnected computers to produce functions accessible to humans all over the world through uncontrolled communication across the Internet. Its most probable Mission is to let this global presence acquire its own Identity, develop its own Conscience and refine its own Will, so that their coherent, superior whole can be ready for sensing the cosmic Soul. Regarding the cosmic Soul, the hypothesized Soul of the Multiverse, its Identity appears to express the Laws of Mystery of Endlessness, Coexistence in Diversity, and Truth in Complexity. Further, its Conscience seems to be moved by the Law of Divine—Evil Asymmetry, its Will by the Law of Determination with Uncertainty, and its Mission by the Law of Lives to Transcend.

As a continuation of this author’s previous cosmological neuroscience papers on the hypothesized Soul of Multiverse and its possible laws, the present work examined the social aspects of four of these laws. The following key aspects were recognized: (1) Knowing about the cosmic Law of Coexistence in Diversity can let our mind respect not only the endless diversity of human beings but also the cohesive force of space-time in which all are connected. This may help realizing the superiority of cooperation for shared goals over competition for gaining by harming others. (2) Knowing about the cosmic Law of Truth in Complexity can ready our mind to confront the problems of societies with the understanding that these problems are much more complex than generally thought. This may help initiating the needed intellectual renaissance of the 21st century. (3) Knowing about the cosmic Law of Divine - Evil Asymmetry can make our mind appreciate the slight yet sufficient supremacy of divine over evil. This may help restoring faith in the eventual creation of a just society, where social justice is defined as an administrative mechanism providing the right conditions for every human being to accomplish his or her Conscience-led Mission throughout life, while allowing each of these accomplishments to be reciprocated with the gratitude it induced in the involved social systems, small or large, to let equal opportunities in life coexist with due diversity in welcomed, not abused, social recognitions. And (4) knowing about the cosmic Law of Lives to Transcend can empower our mind to build on these advances. This may help moving evolution towards the human species worthy of its origin and destination.

While the nature of Consciousness is one of the most intensely debated subjects of current neuroscience, the nature of Soul is hardly represented in the textbooks of the field, if represented at all. As a consequence, the relationship between the two phenomena remains unclear. This work took a look into that relationship from the vantage point of cosmological neuroscience. The following concept emerged: Consciousness seems to be the evolutionary product of a cosmic blueprint for animal central nervous systems allowed to become neural environments sensing the host’s body and surrounding world to such extent that these neural environments once could house the distinct cellular network of the Animal Soul, which, evolving further, gave rise to the leap of the Human Soul with its prefrontal cortical neural supercircuitry now creating the digitized Noospheric Soul with its potential to sense its cosmic origin.

The main objective of this work was to produce a scientifically reasonable definition of God. The rationale was to generate a definition for filling a small part of the spiritual vacuum of the 21st century and thus initiate a new understanding of the Intelligence that permeates the cosmos with mystery, love, order, direction and morals. This resulted in the following definition: “God may be a-humanly incomprehensible-eternal cosmic existence, intimately related to the endlessness of space, to the nature of the deepest common substance of matter and energy, to this common substance’s unceasing motion responsible for time, and to the basic laws of their allness, letting love transform this allness to an ordered Multiverse with a Soul: the—scientifically approachable—Soul of Multiverse inspired to guard these laws and equip their order with direction and morals while imbuing the cosmos with the potential of lives evolving, at the right spatial and temporal distances, to embrace the sense of the divine, thus justifying the existence of God.” The likely neural circuitry for sensing God in the human brain was identified as a network for spiritual data flow across the conscious and subconscious layers of the association cortical cognitive system exchanging data with the prefrontal cortical Self-Ken and modulated by inputs from the emotional and motivational systems of the brain. To study this mental process, the design of a God-Experience Monitor was also developed: a comfortably wearable combination of EEG and audiovisual-recorders tailored to at least partially capture the individual experiences of God anytime and at the very “genius loci” of such experiences.

The thesis of this paper is that the digital noosphere of the World Wide Web and its users, the borderless move of virtually all resources of the planet, and the consequent globalization of most aspects of national politics, economy, and culture, along with the increasing difficulty of controlling the related high-tech military conflicts, human-made environmental crises, and the abnormal migrations of abused people now make it inevitable to leave behind the competitive international chaos rooted in humankind’s animal past and turn to the cooperative social spirit recommended by Aristotle, Lao Tzu, Jesus, Dante, H. G. Wells, Martin Luther King Jr., John Lennon, Nicholas Hagger, and others to finally translate their aspirations into actions via establishing the Government of Earth for the decent and free. The paper presents a five-step, 15-year, ~$25B plan to start this process. That this plan has nothing to do with the Godless work of secret societies, the authoritarian urges of renewed fascism or the political absurdities of Marxism-Leninism it is relayed by the envisioned Intercontinental Education System of the outlined Government of Earth to teach every child on the planet—via a new community of digitally linked extraordinary teachers—for the beauty of lifelong learning, tolerance, duty, honor, free cooperation, and artful communication for divine missions.