I was less interested in the cults or marketing gimmicks of so-called Illuminati than in this mathematical ontology. I don’t know whether the Pythagorean Illuminists take themselves seriously. The evidence at hand includes their website and many books. The books seem to be real, so someone’s writing them. And there’s some discussion online about the identity of the authors.

Bach also talks about God as a super-simulation operating on many minds. The Church forces people to think a certain way, which gives rise to shared mental and social patterns that take on a life of their own, which become the sacred space for the lower-level minds. God is a higher-level, group-mind in the Hegelian sense that evolves from lower-level activity (thought-control).

Bach also seems interested in some radical ecological ideas, like Derrick Jensen who also talks about the intelligence of plants. Bach says plants don’t seem intelligent to us, because their intelligence may unfold over a much greater timescale. He uses “spirit” as a synonym for culture, the operating system, or superego, I think. What science overlooks isn’t the existence of anything supernatural, but the computational validity of ancient dualism and also the ecological idea that humans may not be the most intelligent creatures on the planet, that intelligence can be instantiated in different forms. The clue to his ecological radicalism is his long discourse on how our civilization may be doomed.