Most of the people I grew up with were “religious.” They called themselves followers of their parents’ religion out of a sense of cultural belonging or duty, but not quite because they followed a doctrine of deeply held beliefs.

I don’t think faith is a bad thing. I also think most physicalists characterize their belief systems by what they don’t believe in: maybe they don’t believe in a god, or heaven, or reincarnation, etc.

I haven’t found a belief system that is as broad as a typical religion, while still being as grounded in physical reality and technology (even future technology) as physicalism. The closest things we have are transhumanism or e/acc, but they still feel more like hope in something that isn’t eternal or transcendental. Put differently, physicalism doesn’t quite have an eschatology or soteriology strong enough to make it a comprehensive belief system.

Physicalism by definition boxes itself out of transcendental ideas and hopes. I think that’s a bad thing, because there’s a way that these things do fit.

Let’s start with salvation, because it’s one of the most “woo-woo” ideas from religion that physicalism doesn’t have a replacement for.

Abrahamic versions tend to come down to: “if you believe, good things will happen.” Eastern versions tend to come down to: “if you do your duty, good things will happen.” What do I need to do, under physicalism, for good things to happen to me - and for them to keep happening even after my body passes away?

(Note: if I’m a scholar in anything, it’s in the nuances different cultures bring to their ideas of the afterlife. I know the above is very lossy.)

What does a physicalist heaven, made of bytes and atoms, look like? I think we need to take a few steps to get there. And I think we’ll get there in my lifetime.

1. Humans are their mental states - technically, their connectomes.
2. Mental states are substrate-independent.
3. Mental states can be encoded in carbon, and they can be encoded, for example, in sand.
4. There is something unique about each person’s mental map of all their states. It is worth keeping that map clean or pure, whatever that means.
5. The story you tell yourself about yourself is driven partly by what you believe and partly by what you do. The stronger that story, the more pure your mental map remains.
6. You should believe in a good story about yourself and do good things to recursively maintain that story. As your mental states are encoded into longer-lasting substrates, good things will happen to you.
7. In the far future, the only thing humans need to continue existing is lots of energy.
8. There is a future where humans have lots of energy and remain individual selves. There are so many possible mental states that the chance of overlap is effectively zero. This maps cleanly onto religious beliefs in salvation where souls remain unique into eternity.
9. There is also a future where every mental state ever gets mapped and becomes queryable. You could configure, on demand and from scratch, a version of yourself experiencing a specific experience. In that world, mental states are no longer unique or special into eternity, but they are still, in many senses, embodied and capable of experience. This maps cleanly onto religious beliefs in salvation where souls merge with some absolute entity - God, atman, etc. - into eternity.

In short: even in a physicalist universe, we are all saved.