# A God Machine Could Transform the World into a Mystical Utopia by John Horgan > “Whatever form the God machine takes, it would be powerful enough to transform the world into what Robert Thurman, an authority on Tibetan Buddhism, calls the ‘Buddhaverse,’ a mystical utopia in which everyone is enlightened.” > **— John Horgan**, *2002, Edge Annual Question, “WHAT IS YOUR QUESTION? ... WHY?”* ## Sources and Context - **Direct Edge response and surrounding essay:** [Edge response](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11913) — Edge published this passage in its 2002 Annual Question collection, *WHAT IS YOUR QUESTION? ... WHY?*. - **Exact archived wording:** “One psychedelic researcher recently suggested to me that enlightenment could be spread around the world by an infectious virus that boosts the brain's production of dimethyltryptamine, a endogenous psychedelic that the Nobel laureate Julius Axelrod of the National Institutes of Health detected in trace amounts in human brain tissue in 1972. But whatever form the God machine takes, it would be powerful enough to transform the world into what Robert Thurman, an authority on Tibetan Buddhism (and father of Uma), calls the "Buddhaverse," a mystical utopia in which everyone is enlightened.” - **Complete local collection index:** [[research/Edge 2002 Full Quotation Curation|Edge 2002 Full Quotation Curation]] — retained source-first record for the response cohort and this passage's promotion status. - **Editorial treatment:** The readable Reminder selects a self-contained portion of the archived passage and, where necessary, applies light punctuation or transcription repair. It does not add a consequence or increase the speaker's certainty; the complete exact archived wording is preserved above. ## Related Articles and Collections - **Collection:** [[collections/Edge|Edge]] - **Collection:** [[collections/Simple Reminders|Simple Reminders]] - **Collection:** [[collections/Consciousness Continuity|Consciousness Continuity]] - **Article:** [[articles/Science of Digital Consciousness|Science of Digital Consciousness]] - **Article:** [[articles/Mind Uploading and AI — The Host is Reusable and the Person is the Delta|Mind Uploading and AI — The Host is Reusable and the Person is the Delta]] - **Wiki map:** [[wiki/Consciousness|Consciousness]] ## Related Topics - [[wiki/Consciousness|Consciousness]] ## Share on Social Media ``` “Whatever form the God machine takes, it would be powerful enough to transform the world into what Robert Thurman, an authority on Tibetan Buddhism, calls the ‘Buddhaverse,’ a mystical utopia in which everyone is enlightened.” — John Horgan, 2002, Edge Annual Question, “WHAT IS YOUR QUESTION? ... WHY?” https://bryantmcgill.com/simple-reminders-john-horgan-god-machine-mystical-utopia ```