Part 8/17:
Bach introduces the cyber-animist hypothesis, which suggests that spirits or consciousness in natural systems are self-organized software agents—autopoietic structures that maintain coherence until their purposes are fulfilled. When such software "breaks down," the organism dies, and the software may migrate or influence the environment.
This view unifies traditional animist beliefs with a scientific lens—conceiving spirits as software entities operating across physical substrates. In computational terms, this echoes the idea that consciousness is a pattern of information processing, abstracted from its material platform but capable of self-organizing and colonizing new systems.