So I am about to launch The Turing Church, which will be a minimalist, open, extensible Cosmic Religion. I am sending this to several mailing list, but the discussion will continue on the Turing Church mailing list, please join if you want to participate.

The Turing Church is:

– Minimalist, because it is a simple, compact cosmology, deliberately open to interpretation, and without geography or zoning laws.

– Open, because it is a minimalist foundation to build upon, and also because it’s open to everyone and doesn’t impose zoning laws.

– Extensible, because it can be used as a framework or library and extended vertically.

The Turing Church is built around this shared Cosmic Vision:

– We will go to the stars and find Gods, build Gods, become Gods, and resurrect the dead from the past with advanced science, space-time engineering and “time magic.”

– God is emerging from the community of advanced forms of life and civilizations in the universe, and able to influence space-time events anywhere, anytime, including here and now.

– God elevates love and compassion to the status of fundamental forces, key drivers for the evolution of the universe.

In a 2011 interview with Ben Goertzel I said: “I am not planning to develop the Turing Church into more than a discussion group. I may change my mind, but at this moment I prefer being an active member of existing spiritual groups. I am not really interested in becoming a leader, or a guru.”

I changed my mind because no existing group is focused on this Cosmic Vision with a minimalist, open, and extensible approach. At the same time I will not be a guru, or a leader – leaders must be young, strong, beautiful, and charismatic, and I am none of that. I will act as an organizer, find other organizers, and launch The Turing Church.

Swarmwise.

The Turing Church will be a self-organizing swarm built around the organizational principles outlined in Rick Falkvinge‘s Swarmwise – The Tactical Manual To Changing The World. Swarmwise is required reading, see the excerpts below and try to read at least Chapter 1 in full.

Don’t ask to become a member of the Turing Church. Just be a member, and join one or more of the Turing Church online groups.

There is no hierarchy and there are no formal leaders. If you want leadership, be a leader. Pick something that you want to do, find collaborators, and Just Do It.

Swarm.

I will find about six other enthusiastic organizers to form “a scaffolding of go-to people” (see Swarmwise excerpt below) for the launch of The Turing Church. Why a group of seven? Well, seven is a nice magic number (see Falkvinge’s book for a more detailed explanation). Of course this is flexible (like everything here), say four to eight.

Excerpts from Rick Falkvinge‘s Swarmwise – The Tactical Manual To Changing The World.

“A swarm organization is a decentralized, collaborative effort of volunteers that looks like a hierarchical, traditional organization from the outside. It is built by a small core of people that construct a scaffolding of go-to people, enabling a large number of volunteers to cooperate on a common goal in quantities of people not possible before the net was available.”

“You need to release the control of your brand and its messages. You need to delegate authority to the point where anybody can make almost any decision for the entire organization. You need to accept and embrace that people in the organization will do exactly as they please, and the only way to lead is to inspire them to want to go where you want the organization as a whole to go.”

“[I]f you start talking about abstract concepts, you’ll just have yawns among your prospective volunteers. We’ll need a large recruitment surface with concepts that are easy to relate to people’s everyday lives in order to grow the swarm to critical mass. Once inside the swarm, people and activists will strive to understand the concepts on a deeper level. But the surface area of the swarm’s idea must be large enough to attain the sufficient quantity of people for success.”

“If you want leadership in a swarm, you stand up and say, ‘I’m going to do X, because I think it will accomplish Y. Anybody who wants to join me in doing X is more than welcome.’ Anybody in the swarm can stand up and say this, and everybody is encouraged to.”

“Granted, some work will be a duplication of effort since many people will be working on the same thing when nobody gets to tell other people what to do – but the result will be several solutions that are tried in parallel, and the swarm quickly learns which solutions work and which don’t. The workflow becomes an iterative, evolutionary process of trial and error, of constantly adapting and improving, without anybody’s supervision to make it happen.”

The featured image by Steve Bowers, Orion’s Arm, shows a cosmic swarm consisting of several shells of independently orbiting units, collecting power for computation and manufacturing.