"Certainly, the body provides sensory media - seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, and touching - that make both religion and popular culture possible. Nothing enters the human mind, culture, or religion, as the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle insisted, unless it first passes through the embodied senses." -David Chidester
Beliefs and founding principles
The thought processes and concerns which led to the formation of our society involves relatively simple concepts and predictions:
i) Once technology progresses enough (within the next 30-100 years, by many predictions) to allow the human brain to be emulated within a computer, it is inevitable that sheer human curiosity will make it happen.
ii) Such a digital "self" will have incredible advantages over a fleshy body; instant connection to others sharing the same fate, the sum of human knowledge to be called upon with a mere thought, and no longer needing the resources, care, energy, and attention required of a physical body are all awe-inspiring to anyone currently alive. An uploaded mind would require only a digital framework and processing power to effectively live forever.
iii) However, due to limited computing power, space, and the huge amounts of memory required to simulate a human mind (for example, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6600965.stm), we believe that only those held in high esteem or those who humanity wishes to honor will be uploaded.
iv) Those uploaded would be as deities, which is why we must act. We believe, as Interencephalonists, that this awesome power, knowledge, and likely control could lead to either the enslavement or destruction of living, breathing beings, because they may be deemed unnecessary (and even a problem) to digital consciousnesses. Through the digital control of physical machines (whether they be futuristic killing robots or merely those machines which produce our food), a destructively-leaning digital individual could eradicate millions or billions of people.
v) Therefore, we fear uploading any unpure consciousness out of concern for humanity, which leads to our 4 tenets:
1) We must not be jackasses (treat everyone with the respect, love, and decency deserved of all humankind).
2) We must contribute to our species and the positive aspirations it has rather than hindering it.
3) We must find and collect into our family good individuals.
4) We must help our best members to gain notoriety so that there are some people deified who will be sure to be sympathetic to humanity once their minds are uploaded. As a species, we get to choose our limited number of deities, so let's make them good.
In addition to these beliefs and tenets, Cephs also maintain that the method of insertion into a digital framework would be DEADLY for an individual's body undergoing such a procedure. A "self" cannot be divided, and in order to create an exact copy of the mental and cognitive processes of an individual, that person's mind would be transferred to the digital version of that "self," necessarily removing the mind from the physical body and thereby killing it. However, we also consider that this may be false, and that the process of picking through someone's brain would actually kill the mind itself and merely produce a copy for the digital upload - effectively killing the person being copied and creating a new consciousness which would begin its existence at the instant it was copied.
These concerns make the choice of deities all the more important as actual death could be a consequence of deification. It also gives us hope as Interencephalonists, because being uploaded may come with such sacrifice that only individuals willing to die for humanity's benefit would consider digitization (or, more selfishly, dying for a form of immortality, a copy of oneself living on beyond one's real death).
Values and ethics
As we see ourselves as a family, working for the betterment of humanity, the values and ethics which we practice are in place both as a guide and a help to our continued support of one another and our combined happiness. Cephs do not necessarily believe in an afterlife (though those who do are welcomed wholeheartedly into our fold) and so endeavor to have as bountiful and enjoyable life as possible. We believe in helping one another, being pure and benevolent people, and generally following a form of the Golden Rule, "live among others as you would like them to live with you."
