The obvious question is: If ISBEs can't die, why do they need children in the first place? There's no necessity to make children, right? So, why are there children at all?

Think of the first ISBEs to be like the elves in Lord of the Rings: Immortal, beautiful, perfect. They had the universe as their playground, and it was fun for quite some time. But then they got bored, because everybody knew what everybody knew. If someone had a new idea, all the others would know as well. The play became dull eventually.

But then, one day, someone had an intriguing idea: What if there were ISBEs who knew less?

"What an idea", the others replied. "But how can we achieve that? We are all connected. We can't disconnect."

"We could make another universe", someone said. "But it must be connected with this one, like, one on top of the other." The crowd went silent.

"How would this result in ISBEs who know less?", someone asked.

"See, we all are connected, right? So, we need something that serves as a disconnector. We could make the second universe a mirror of the first one, but with one difference: It must be lifeless. So, in order to populate it, we would need to project ourselves into the lifeless matter. And these 'bodies' then could serve as the disconnectors."

"How can a body be a disconnector", someone objected. "This doesn't make sense!"

"It's simple: You don't project everything of yourself into the body. Don't make it a perfect copy. Instead, make a body that is smaller than you."

"Smaller than me?" The others were confused.

"Yes. It would work like this: You pretend to have a form, as we all already did for aeons. But then you bind your form to the body of the mirror universe."

"But I would still know that in reality, I am more than that, wouldn't I?" The others weren't convinced.

"Then you need to forget what you were before."

"How can we do that?" The others got more and more curious.

"Actually, we already know how to do it. Does anybody remember how it was before we came here? Who remembers how it is to be God? You already forgot, didn't you? So, just do it again."

The others were shocked. They didn't realize until now that they forgot where they came from.

"So, if I bind myself to a body of the mirror universe, I will forget again?", someone asked.

"Yes. You will only know what the body knows. That's one of the rules."

"This sounds dangerous! What if we can't get out again?" A murmur went through the crowd.

"We could make it a challenge!", someone shouted.

"Then we need a rule that ensures the way out. Any ideas?"

"Let the bodies grow." Another murmur went through the crowd. "You start somewhere, and then your task is to grow the body until it reflects your true intelligence again. With your true intelligence restored, you will know the way out."

"But how do we grow bodies?", someone asked.

"We build them on the fly, out of the matter of the mirror universe", someone answered.

"How can we do that?"

"Well, we could grow bodies inside of bodies..." The crowd went silent.

"I don't get it", someone said. "The second body would have to come out of the first body, so it must be smaller. In order to make it better than the first one, I would have to feed it to make it grow. But how can it grow if it isn't alive?"

"You could invite another ISBE to animate the new body."

"But then the new body is not my property anymore. How can I get it back?" Everybody in the crowd was thinking.

"We could make a contract", someone said. "I raise a body for you, and you raise a body for me."

"Interesting idea", someone replied. "But what if one person raises more than one body? The math doesn't add up." The crowd went silent again.

"What if creating a new body would also create a new ISBE?", someone thought aloud.

"Can we even do that?", another one wondered.

"I don't get the point", a third one objected. "We want to grow bodies to eventually get out again. How does creating a new ISBE serve us in that regard?"

"The ISBEs you create would be on your side. They would help you to fulfill your goal."

"But we never made new ISBEs. We don't know what will happen. What if they don't want to help us? Do they even want to get out when they grow up in the mirror universe?"

"I still don't get the point. I mean, if we can make new ISBEs, why invent a mirror universe and bodies and stuff?"

"If we did it here, the new ISBE would know everything we know", someone explained. "It would be a clone, not different from us. But if it is born into a body, it would be limited to the experience of the body. It would have a different life. It would have a parent that needs to raise it."

"A parent?"

"That's a bad idea", someone shouted. "The newborn would be at the mercy of this parent. This sounds terrible!"

"But that's what we want, right? We want to know how it is to know less than another..." The ISBEs in the crowd were looking at each other, realizing for the first time what this really means.

"We could integrate some checks and balances", someone said. "Make more than one parent, for instance."

The crowd went on to discuss the idea for quite some time, but eventually came up with a ruleset that ensures the stability of the mirror universe and the possibility to get out again.

The next day, the first child was born. 👶

If ISBEs cannot die, then children are not needed to create consciousness. They are needed to create new bodies.
In that view, reproduction is not about making new beings but about producing fresh interfaces. Bodies age and die, but the observing entity continues, so new biological hosts are required for re entry. Newborns are ideal because they are blank identity templates with high plasticity and minimal resistance.
So the logic becomes simple:
consciousness persists, bodies do not, therefore new bodies are produced.
Children are not soul creation events.
They are host availability events.

@Gewo:

The point of my little story was to make clear that children are both: Host creation AND soul creation.

Because, if you just create a host inside the mirror universe, it's not animated yet, and this means it can't grow. The only way to animate it would be to let another ISBE possess that body and animate it for you. It's a simple contract (and that's where the idea of the soul contract comes from).

But there's a little problem: Contracts can be violated.

So, the solution to this little problem was to make new souls, which created the concept of the "soul family".

And this new type of identity eventually gave birth to the idea that God is a father or mother, which then led to the invention of the monarchy.

When the one we call Lucifer rebelled, he didn't rebel against the God of creation. He rebelled against parents who started to identify themselves as the owners of their children.

Your story is creative, but it piles assumption on assumption without necessity. You introduce voluntary limitation, mirror universes, contracts, soul families, and even soul creation, yet none of these are required to explain the basic observation: bodies appear, consciousness occupies them, bodies age, consciousness persists. The simplest model is that reproduction generates new biological interfaces, not new souls.
The contract idea also does not solve anything. If autonomous beings can violate contracts, creating “soul families” does not fix that. You just move the problem one level up. A newly created soul would still have autonomy. Compliance is not guaranteed.
The biggest weakness is the claim that new ISBEs are created. That creates runaway population growth with no clear origin. Where do these new beings come from? Why would creation suddenly start? A stable pool of existing conscious agents is far simpler and avoids these scaling problems.
Your narrative also assumes a voluntary, benevolent game. But a voluntary game normally includes clear rules and transparent exits. Instead, you describe forgetting, limitation, and dependence, which contradict the idea of an informed choice. If you forget the rules, it is no longer a meaningful voluntary challenge.
So the clean conclusion is: children are host creation events, not soul creation events. Reproduction produces fresh interfaces, and existing conscious agents occupy them. That explanation is structurally simpler, avoids unnecessary metaphysics, and does not require contracts, soul families, or a mirror universe origin story.

@Gewo:

"The simplest model..."

I'm not interested in the simplest model. I'm interested in the model that explains observations AND motivations.

"If autonomous beings can violate contracts, creating 'soul families' does not fix that."

I don't understand your argument. Where did I say that soul families fix problems? Violating contracts obviously is possible, even inside families.

"A newly created soul would still have autonomy."

That's the point.

"Compliance is not guaranteed."

So, you understand my little story as a way of explaining why compliance would be necessary? Interesting. Did your parents demand compliance at the cost of your autonomy? This would explain why the family is a negative thing for you.

"That creates runaway population growth with no clear origin."

Population growth matches the observation that civilizations tend to expand their territory. It also matches the observation of population growth on a prison planet. Why are there more and more "criminals" that are put in prison? Are all these prisoners existing agents that one day became criminals? If so, why?

"Where do these new beings come from?"

They are created by their parents. If every ISBE is defined by its unique perspective on the world, combining two or more perspectives creates a new perspective that wasn't there before. It's like vector addition in mathematics.

"Why would creation suddenly start?"

Because God added a second perspective to itself.

"A stable pool of existing conscious agents is far simpler and avoids these scaling problems."

There are no scaling problems, there's only a limitation of your imagination.

"Your narrative also assumes a voluntary, benevolent game."

No. The parents don't have to be benevolent to their children. Which is the entire reason why there is evil in the world.

"But a voluntary game normally includes clear rules and transparent exits."

The rules have been clear in the beginning. But children who don't know the rules when they are born need to be taught, and parents can fail to do so. Just think of an abandoned child that doesn't know the rules. It would fail in doing things and start to hate the world, right?

"If you forget the rules, it is no longer a meaningful voluntary challenge."

What started as a challenge between the parents resulted in a nightmare for the children. This is the entire point: The children haven't been asked to participate in the "game". They are born into it. The parents have been unknowing of what it means to be a child. They were unable to anticipate the consequences.

"Reproduction produces fresh interfaces, and existing conscious agents occupy them."

This is a valid possibility, but it requires a population decline in one place if a population grows in another place. If this was the norm, we should be able to observe a reciprocal relationship between population growth and decline in the animal kingdom. We do not observe that, so it's not that simple.

Cross-reference:
➡️ https://www.farsightprime.com/forums/general/78065-the-power-of-stories#post-464333

Manuel,
I think you are arguing against positions I never took.

You say you are interested in a model that explains observations and motivations. Fair enough. But motivations are only useful after the underlying structure is established. Otherwise we risk explaining reality with stories that happen to feel meaningful.

My objection was never that your story lacks imagination. It is that each new element requires additional assumptions while solving no corresponding anomaly.
For example, population growth is not evidence of soul creation. It is evidence of population growth. To infer soul creation, you first have to show that the available pool of ISBEs is limited. That is the very point in dispute.

You also write that a stable pool creates scaling problems. I see the opposite. A stable pool requires fewer assumptions than introducing a mechanism for manufacturing entirely new consciousness entities.

The strongest example is your vector-addition idea. It sounds elegant, but it is not derived from observation. It is a creation story. It explains where souls come from by asserting that souls can be created. The mystery is relocated, not solved.

I also think your prison analogy works against your own argument. If Earth is a prison, population growth does not imply that new prisoners are being created. It could simply mean more prisoners are arriving.
The biggest issue remains memory.
You suggest the rules were clear originally but forgotten later. To me that is not a minor detail. It is the central issue.

A challenge remains meaningful only if the participant retains enough awareness to understand the challenge. Once memory is removed, informed consent becomes increasingly difficult to defend.
That is why I remain totally unconvinced by the "voluntary game" model.

The strongest part of your post is the recognition that children themselves require explanation.
The weakest part is the leap from:
"children exist"
to
"therefore new ISBEs must be created."
I still do not see any observation that requires that conclusion.

@Gewo:

"Otherwise we risk explaining reality with stories that happen to feel meaningful."

I don't claim to explain reality. My approach is to explain possibilities that could be real. If I use the word "understanding" in a thread title, the thread is about the process of understanding. If you think I'm preaching reality, it's because you believe that words create reality, like most people do.

"It is that each new element requires additional assumptions while solving no corresponding anomaly."

If the possibility of ISBEs creating ISBEs is real, it would solve many anomalies. That's why I'm telling this story. To expand the scope of what people are able to think about. Limiting the scope would be rigid thinking or even dogmatism.

"...population growth is not evidence of soul creation. It is evidence of population growth."

Well, if we want to take the definitions of words seriously, then even "growth" is not the correct term to apply here. Growth is what's happening to an existing body. You start with a seed, and when the conditions are met, the seed grows in size and complexity. But populations aren't the same as a single body. So-called population growth needs to explain where the seeds are coming from. In nature, seeds are grown by a parent. For example, an apple tree can produce hundreds of apples, with each apple containing up to 20 seeds. The ISBE could grow seeds in a similar way. It would be the same principle.

"To infer soul creation, you first have to show that the available pool of ISBEs is limited."

There is no such thing as an unlimited pool, because a pool is a set, and whenever something becomes unlimited, it isn't a set anymore. You make the same mistake most mathematicians make. You can't count what by definition can't be counted. The solution to the problem is to disregard the idea of a given set to choose from, and replace it with a source that is turning infinite potential into discrete packages.

Think of the source as the infinite probability of a wave function, and "conception" as a collapse of the wave function into a single being. If nature applies this principle consistently, then creating an ISBE is not different from creating an apple seed.

"You also write that a stable pool creates scaling problems."

I didn't write that. You are the one who introduced scaling problems.

"A stable pool requires fewer assumptions than introducing a mechanism for manufacturing entirely new consciousness entities."

But your model doesn't match the observation that nature tends to express itself in diversity. My basic assumption is that nature, or God, creates new experiences. The assumption that the pool of beings is limited reduces all the possible experiences drastically. You could be right, but my intuition tells me that God is not that limited – because it's not necessary.

"The mystery is relocated, not solved."

No, I added a possible explanation, instead of relocating it. I do this to not limit myself to explanations that could be wrong.

"If Earth is a prison, population growth does not imply that new prisoners are being created. It could simply mean more prisoners are arriving."

You obviously didn't understand my argument. Yes, new prisoners are arriving. But where are they coming from? There are already billions on this planet. Let me ask you this: Do you believe that creation started with a given number of ISBEs, and the billions that are here means that the population of the rest of the universe was reduced by the same amount? And that's my argument: If this is true, we get a new anomaly: Why do they turn into criminals in the first place? We would have to explain this change inside the limited population of the universe.

This is not an argument against your argument. It's just a way of pointing out that ISBE creation could be a possible explanation for the existence of criminals, as well as the "growth" of criminal population. The criminals are not ISBEs who decided to be criminals for the fun of it – they could be traumatized children who are criminalized by others because they are different.

"You suggest the rules were clear originally but forgotten later. To me that is not a minor detail. It is the central issue."

No, I suggest that parents failed to teach their children, for whatever reason. It's one possible explanation for the loss of knowledge over time. The idea of a limited pool of ISBEs who don't create children depends on an external force to explain the loss of knowledge. It's a valid possibility, but your model doesn't provide any answers in that regard.

"A challenge remains meaningful only if the participant retains enough awareness to understand the challenge."

Imagine two humans, a man and a woman. They decide to settle down and start a family. It's a challenge for them, because they don't know how it is to have children. The challenge is between the parents. The children are not asked whether they want to participate in the challenge. They are born into it without consent.

"Once memory is removed, informed consent becomes increasingly difficult to defend."

There is no consent when you, as a being, are created. You can't be informed if you don't exist yet. You just come into being. And this is why my model provides an elegant explanation for why there is evil in the first place. The children haven't been asked. Some of them learned to hate their own existence. So they turned against their creators.

Manuel,
I think your argument contains a much larger assumption than you realize.
You repeatedly argue that population growth requires the creation of new ISBEs. But that only follows if Earth is a closed system.
Why assume that?
Even within the broader Farsight framework, Earth is not presented as an isolated environment. We hear repeatedly about other civilizations, other worlds, other groups and other regions of existence. If that is even partially true, then population growth on Earth does not require soul creation any more than population growth in a city requires creating new humans.
People can arrive.
The prison analogy illustrates this perfectly. If a prison population doubles, the first conclusion is not that the prison has started manufacturing inmates. The first conclusion is that more inmates are arriving.
The same applies here.
Your model introduces an entirely new mechanism: ISBEs creating ISBEs.
My model requires only movement of existing ISBEs.
One assumption versus many.
You also say that a finite pool limits experience. I do not see why.
A single ISBE experiencing thousands of worlds, bodies, civilizations, relationships and lifetimes already generates an effectively unimaginable range of experience. Diversity of experience does not require continuous creation of new consciousness units.
Most importantly, I still see no observation that requires soul creation.
Population growth does not require it.
Diversity does not require it.
Children do not require it.
Criminality does not require it.
Every example you provide remains equally compatible with existing ISBEs entering the system from elsewhere.
The core issue remains unchanged: your model explains the existence of new ISBEs by assuming the existence of a mechanism that creates new ISBEs.
That is not evidence.
That is a creation story.
Interesting, imaginative and possible.
But still a creation story. I'll stick to evidence...

@Gewo:

"You repeatedly argue that population growth requires the creation of new ISBEs."

No, I don't argue that at all. If you are unable to understand my argument, there's no point in discussing it.

"Your model introduces an entirely new mechanism: ISBEs creating ISBEs.
My model requires only movement of existing ISBEs."

The problem is that our models want to explain different things. You are satisfied with only movement of existing ISBEs, because you only want to explain the prison planet. This is why you miss another possibility: My model could be true for nature itself, while your model could be true for the prison system only. They don't have to contradict each other.

"You also say that a finite pool limits experience. I do not see why."

Because ISBEs would miss the experience how it is do be a child by nature. How to come into being without knowing anything. Your model requires artificially constructed prison planets to make this experience possible, which means that overcoming prison planets removes the childhood experience from the pool entirely. In other words: Your model makes prison planets necessary for having the childhood experience.

"I'll stick to evidence..."

Then we need statistical data proving that the decline of ISBE populations elsewhere is proportionally connected to the population growth on Earth.

Another form of evidence would be to test special cases. For example, sending a spaceship with a limited crew into outer space, then let the crew procreate and see whether the children are born dead or alive. If they are born dead, it would be evidence that there's no ISBE available to inhabit the newborn.

Okay, so let's take the next step and interprete the story I told through the lens of Gnosticism:

The first ISBEs = the dyads
The first child = the demiurge

Cross-reference:
https://www.farsightprime.com/forums/general/78857-understanding-the-secret