WE WALKED TOGETHER INTO the Forest Ranger’s quaint log cabin at the top of the Canyon. I thought, “Colt would like this. A Davy Crockett kind of place.”

Noah dialed my home number since I could barely recall it. The Ranger stepped outside, leaving Noah and me alone in the small, dark room.

“Mom?”

“Greg? Oh, I didn’t expect you to be calling so soon. Are you guys having fun?”

“Mom, we can’t find Colt. He went with Noah and the other boy on a log in the river, and we can’t find him. I’m in the Ranger’s station.”

My mother, who two years before had been rubbing her forty-year-old husband’s back when his aorta burst in front of her, let out a cry that nobody would ever want to hear. The cry of losing a child from a distance. Of not being present when it happened. Of not being able to prevent it. Of never seeing him again. Of memories holding him as a newborn, nursing him, wiping his nose, scolding him, praising him. Of his baseball games and new ninth grade love.

I don’t remember much about the drive home. Still in shock, my immediate thoughts were of the frightening helicopter ride from the bottom of the canyon to the Ranger’s Station. I kept thinking, ‘They’ll find him downstream a few miles, pissed that we left him there all alone. Pissed that we thought he was a weak swimmer and drowned.’

On the way back in the truck, I got to sit in the cabin where Colt sat hours before. We stopped at that same little roadside chapel to pray. I stood before the altar, stunned, staring blankly at the small offering table. Noah grasped my arm and pulled me downward to kneel, but I wanted nothing to do with it.

“Let’s pray that someone finds him alive,” he commanded.

I knelt. I even prayed. But they didn’t find him alive. Or dead. Indeed, they never found him at all. No clothing. No body parts. Not uncommon for that treacherous, elusive river.

I refused to attend church after that, and my mom understood why. However, a few weeks after his drowning, on a Sunday morning, Noah rang at our front door and asked to see me. Understandably, my mom was distraught at his visit, but she allowed him in anyway.

I was sitting on my bed reading a comic book and watched as he strode into our bedroom, the room I had recently shared with my presumed-dead brother.

“Greg, would you mind coming to Sunday School with me today? It would be good for both of us.”

I could see the sorrow in his face, and he, no doubt, could see the confusion in mine.

From my perspective, it was an interesting proposition. I had been thinking about the Christian Science religion since it happened. I recalled the small golden locket and its Biblical passage.

Maybe if I cleared my mind and tried very hard, I could live up to its lofty maxim and bring Colt back from the dead. Or maybe a highly revered Christian Science Practitioner, those modern-day prophets who purportedly performed such miracles, could intercede on my behalf. I wanted someone to make it happen, to fulfill the illusory promises that had been made to parishioners every Sunday.

He sat down next to me and put his arm around my shoulders. I stared at Colt’s empty bed, neatly made with a tuck of bedspread under the pillow. Untouched since the day we left on the adventure.

“I don’t really want to go. That is, unless we can get a Practitioner to help us get Colt back.”

Noah pulled back and looked puzzled.

“I don’t think we can do that.”

“Why not? They always say in church that people can perform miracles like that, and apparently these Practitioners are really good at it. So why don’t we just go find one and get my brother undrowned, to resurrect him, just like Jesus did and just like we’ve learned that some people can do.”

He fidgeted in those few uncomfortable moments while I picked at the olive cotton chenille fabric of the bedspread that matched my brother’s.

Noah must have been a little confused, too. His was the same belief construct as mine: drilled into him from childhood; diffused and percolated in a mixture of reality and hope and prayer and death and disease and remarkable lore; wrapped into a cohesive and nearly credible narrative. Like me, he was wondering why we couldn’t simply do what I suggested.

Then my mother opened the door. I don’t know how long she had been standing there, listening to our conversation.

“He doesn’t want to go, Noah, and I’m not about to make him. Greg, I have waffles ready. Why don’t we let him get to church or wherever he’s off to next?”

By her tone, she clearly had not forgiven him. It had only been a few weeks, and her son was gone at the innocent, misapplied hands of the young man sitting beside me.

He rose, said goodbye, and that was the last time I saw him, save for a single instance downtown months later. On that day, he and I spied each other from a distance. He started to come my way, but I was on my bike with a friend and quickly sped the other way. I wanted to avoid the pain of seeing him again and reliving the sorrow.

To this day, I hope the accident did not mark him for life. He was young and innocent, like myself, and full of good intentions.

Was I angry at God for all that had happened? Angry at losing a father so young? Angry at losing my big brother? No, not at all. I realized right then and there that God gives us the tools we need, including these big human brains, and we often misuse these tools or typically don’t use them at all. God is not at fault for such things. God creates.

Humans get to decide, at every turn, with every decision, in every collapse of a wave function of limitless possibilities, what we do with God’s creation. Sometimes this results in accidents, or worse yet, intentional harm. Noah’s wave function collapse was an accident, a matter of a spinning log in an unforgiving river, and a twelve-year-old boy accosted by currents and pulled under the water. Forever gone. A very forgivable event. Forgiven, at least by me.

So, within a period of ten years, I had witnessed the deaths of my father, mother, and brother. I was not hardened by it, but it forced me to be very pragmatic. Later on, without really ever having studied the subject in school or elsewhere, I realize that what I believed, the constructs of life that I had developed from such experiences, were surprisingly closely aligned with that of the Stoics.

What grew from this? Living pragmatism, like don’t do really stupid things or take idiot chances at any age. Being ‘in the moment’ – recognized as ‘being mindful’ these days. Being on your guard, since that is how humans made it thus far. Understanding you could go at any time, so don’t waste your time, and don’t stupidly taunt death.

Analyze. Assess. Be discerning. Don’t believe anyone or anything outright, including and especially the media or your often confounding and perverting AI-determined information sources.

When young, don’t believe adult figures if it doesn’t make sense. Investigate. Look around you and assume that nobody has a better picture of your world than you, and all are equal in that respect. Take a moment to ponder. Trust your intuition and sense of what’s right and wrong.

Recognize that nearly all of the information and opinion you consume from others, including the multitude of competing information sources, is dogma of some sort. It’s often subtle, almost always coercive, and intended to get you to do something to benefit the purveyor or someone else. At times, dogmatic people try to compel you to believe as they do since it helps them confirm their belief systems.

Irrespective of intent, the information sources you encounter at every minute are nearly always selling, so be very cautious about buying at face value. Recognize that many people, perhaps even the majority of those you come in contact with, are inherently lazy. They don’t make the effort to think beyond the desire or pleasure of the moment.

Understand the world is comprised substantially of humans who, despite typically being well-intentioned, are wholly screwed-up in some way and have only a nominal grasp of self-awareness. This human malaise extends throughout all activities in which they are involved.

I can’t tell you how or what to believe. Your job is to investigate yourself using the extensive mental resources at your disposal. Understand that your own belief systems will evolve over time, sometimes pursuing fruitless paths and dangerous rabbit holes, though you will occasionally find paths that bear fruit.

In that regard, consider what Christian Science brought to me. Being infused in this belief system as a child, nothing seemed odd about it. I only knew it was not Catholic, yet I saw no science involved. When people would ask, ‘What religion are you?’ and I’d respond accordingly, they’d seem as puzzled as I was. Some would laugh and say ‘You guys don’t believe in vaccinations’ and I’d reply ‘Then what are these marks on my arm?’

And finally, as the decades wore on, I found a little bit of insight, a fragment of truth, that aligned with its teaching. Being discerning implies that you should recognize every dogma has elements of truth. Some less, some more, but always some. And this is what makes discernment so difficult: how do you separate the bullshit from the truth?

Relative to Christian Science’s element of truth, an insight happened as I developed a layman’s curiosity in quantum physics. Though too deep to cover with any clarity here, one key thing pokes at me, as it continues to poke at scientists.

How can light be both a particle and a wave? Or better said, light can be a particle or a wave depending upon the way in which it is observed. This implies that the observer plays a role in the outcome of the observation and the state of the object.

This observation is termed a ‘collapse of the wave function’ and happens at least at the very micro level of atomic particles. Some scientists and philosophers even extend this concept of a wave function to broader things, like a presumption that all decisions made by all things – an ant turning left or right, a human deciding which shirt to wear – may cause a collapse of the probability wave of all possible outcomes. Indeed, some believe a new universe might be created with each new decision or action, whether associated with a photon’s position, an ant’s direction, or a person’s choice of the day’s clothing.

Perhaps limitless paths indeed are possible before every instance of a wave function collapse, though we may never find out. How could we? The universe I live within is this one in front of me. The ant turned left. I chose the Led Zeppelin t-shirt today. Colt’s arms slipped from the log and he sunk into the roiling abyss. Indeed, he and I may be quaffing a beer in some other universe where he survived. Nice if that were true.

How does this align with concepts in Christian Science? That religion believes in a confluence of faith and action creating a desired outcome. Indeed, for humans at least, every action involves some element of faith that it can be done. I choose the shirt because I know I can. In some views of quantum theory, the wave function of that decision collapses with an outcome of that shirt. But this apparently has limits of time and space. I can’t un-choose to visit the Grand Canyon that weekend.

Instead, the focus should be on teaching ourselves that we make such choices, big and small, every day. I choose to view the media fed to me by the AI beasts, driven by their algorithms. At some point, a concentration event occurs. The algorithms, designed for efficiency of the desired outcome to sell advertising and extract profit, gradually refine the narratives they feed me, until one, overriding narrative is left and my mind is consumed by its imperceptible, grinding influence. I become enmeshed in a self-fulfilling, ever-confirming vortex, unable to extricate my sense of self from the belief system enabled, condensed, and profitably repeated by the AI beast. Such is the future of the human mind.

On an adjacent topic, recent theories have been proposed that we are not actually extant beings. Instead, our essence, our sentience, has been created in a computerized simulation of an unimaginably sophisticated civilization. Their tech is so advanced that they can execute programs in which self-aware characters exist, utterly unaware of the programs in the background that created them.

Every person you know is simply one of those characters. Indeed, one can imagine systems where the only self-aware character in the program is you, and all other things encountered in life – people, trees, microorganisms, mountains – exist only for you.

This concept has an interesting corollary in today’s commerce and advertising. For instance, a targeted ad for shoes is consumed by you, as offered by the AI beast. It is specially designed so you will buy them – your size, color, favorite features. A shoe manufacturer then creates the shoe, made-to-order, and ships it out. In other words, you are microtargeted. That little world is focused on you and only you. It’s there to serve your needs and desires, and also to surprise you with regular change.

Sometimes called ‘ancestor simulations,’ such god-like beings might want to imagine what living was like for their far distant ancestors. Maybe an advanced being is running code with me and only me as the sentient individual in what appears to me to be a full-fledged society, world and universe. But it’s not. It’s just a program making me, made for me, and microtargeted to me.

Whether there are many worlds, whether we are in an ancestor simulation, or whether this world is only as it appears to us with no other complexities, I take at least one thing away from my Christian Science teachings from long ago, teachings about having faith to create better things: We must imagine and work toward a better future for our species. We must develop a non-religious, non-sectarian, unbiased, inclusive, and simple instruction set for human existence, one that all peoples agree upon.

This instruction set should be at ground level, forming the base for our other belief systems. A code, an ethic so direct and obvious that it is undeniable, even by the most dogmatic believers in other systems. It must be so apparent and transparent that nobody would ever need to force the ethic upon anyone else, utterly unlike all other belief systems to which humans currently adhere.

I can’t tell you what that ethic is. I can only hope, in the times you live, the billions of humans and hybrids on Earth will already be at this stage and my musings will seem humorous and antiquated.

Regardless of whether the human species has not yet advanced to this stage during your stay on this planet, today’s lack of such an ethic, even at this early technological stage, is a great concern for our species. We are only a species, after all, just another species on Earth, and my faith in the prospects for our long-term survival has waned considerably during my brief time here.

We are screwing with our planet and its ecosystems. Stripping forests, warming atmospheres, losing polar ice, and annihilating other species in our wake. Concurrently, we hold even tighter onto eroding, ancient belief systems of country, religion, political parties, tribes, and historical rights and wrongs.

Our politics continue to devolve while our belief systems are viciously radicalized by media and social networks. They gladly accept payments from sponsors while amplifying their socially corrosive and divisive messages through their new, AI-enhanced capabilities – simply to coerce us to continue consuming their content.

For the networks and purveyors of content? A virtuous cycle. For the human race? A vicious cycle.

In this same line of thinking, I must finally mention a few potentially species-ending technological threats to humanity generally unrecognized as threats. These include AI, of course, but also genetic engineering, as well as the new monitoring and control systems. However, I’ve gone on too long thus far and may cover these in more detail later.

Please be apprised that such budding technologies are never the problem. They are only tools and will arrive en masse in due time, regardless. However, we are not evolving our societal norms consistent with these new technological capabilities. Increasingly available at declining cost and widespread availability to the masses, such tech when misused, and it will be terribly misused, will vault humanity toward the hairy edge of species termination. And while we remain distracted by events of the day that cauterize our minds, our species self-annihilation countdown clock ticks faster and faster, to quote the overused analogy.