---
title: 'The Human Body, Information, and Spiritual Formation in an Increasingly Technology-Oriented Future'
slug: 'human-body-information-spiritual-formation'
date: 2026-06-05
type: 'essay'
status: 'published'
tags: ['faith', 'information-theory', 'physics', 'visual-essay']
abstract: 'A deck arguing that you are not fundamentally matter but the information that organizes matter—98% of your atoms are replaced each year while the pattern persists—and asking what that implies for spiritual formation in an age when information may increasingly reside in technological as well as biological substrates.'
license: 'CC-BY-4.0'
author: 'Jed Anderson'
co_authors: []
canonical_url: 'https://jedanderson.org/essays/human-body-information-spiritual-formation'
original_date: 2024-01-10
pdf: '/pdfs/human-body-information-spiritual-formation.pdf'
hero_image: '/images/human-body-information-spiritual-formation-hero.jpg'
hero_image_alt: 'Title slide reading ''Are you matter or information?'' over a luminous DNA double helix.'
supporting_files: []
pdf_canonical: true
---

A deck that runs a single physical fact to its spiritual conclusion. The fact: your body makes 330 billion new cells a day, replaces roughly 1% of its cells daily and 98% of its atoms each year, so that within a decade most of the matter you are made of has been swapped out entirely. The matter changed; you did not. What persisted was the pattern—the information that organizes matter into you.

From there the argument is compact. At the heart of every living thing, in Richard Dawkins's phrase, is not a spark of life but information. If you are more fundamentally information than matter—if, as the deck puts it, "matter doesn't really matter"—then a provocative question follows: does it ultimately matter where that information resides? The deck sets this beside the Human 0.0–3.0 evolutionary arc, where the substrate of human identity moves from chemical to biological to technological and perhaps to spiritual, and asks whether the flesh truly counts for nothing.

The register is exploratory rather than doctrinal, and the closing note is deliberately hopeful: exciting days ahead for humanity and spiritual growth in a quickly evolving technological world—not merely survival, but flourishing.

*The full deck is in the canonical PDF above.*