RE: Corrupting Science to Eliminate Facts
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What a time to be alive... do you believe in reincarnation? I fear more for my future selves than my future self to be honest. This life is going to be a wild ride and I’m going to keep on riding it hard, but I’m afraid I’ll wake up one day in a zombie body... and again, and again...
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I may or may not believe in reincarnation, depending on how you define it. From your comment I reckon you will say I do not, but I do believe we will be reborn, but as us, and fully informed as to who we are. I do not believe this because of faith in God, but because I see that science will make it possible, and in an infinite universe barren and waste, our good company will be more valuable to our posterity than we can possibly understand.
I reckon your fear unfounded. When we are restored to life, it will be life vibrant and full, not some simulacrum thereof. When you are reborn, you will know joy you could not have anticipated, because we simply have no basis for understanding what awesome power physics mandates is potential.
Be encouraged therefore, and live deeply and fully the life you are given today.
That sounds really interesting. Are you suggesting that what we are currently experiencing is some sort of (perhaps matrix like) simulacrum, and that upon death from this life we will awaken into our true, or a truer, version of reality? Or that we will somehow all be technologically brought back to life in the future?
I know this isn’t your usual MO but i’d love to hear about that in detail.
I’ll definitely keep soaking up this experience and learning as much about it as i can along the way.
From time to time I have attempted to detail the complicated rationale that compels me to believe we will be resurrected. The principles are simple, but their full reckoning is complex.
I'll try to explain. Science, unlike evolution, is directional. Weather forecasting requires models of the atmosphere to produce, and over time these models improve. Decades ago our computers enabled a single data point in 100 cubic kilometers of atmosphere. Recently that definition has been improved by orders of magnitude, and the volume of atmosphere per data point will continue to shrink as scientific research improves computers, to a cubic kilometer, 100 meters, 10 meters, a meter, and so on.
This will continue forever.
Or will it? There is a quantum barrier to the infinite improvement, and this reveals that not only is this improvement quantitative, it is also qualitative. The nature of predictions is improved, not merely their accuracy.
Just so with manufacturing. Today we are seeing an explosion of nano-technology, and single atoms - the limit of physical size due to quantum effects - are the building blocks of our products. However, there is no such limit on the qualitative improvements of our products that are possible, and since we are at the quantitative limit, all technological advance will be in qualitative aspects of our goods.
We won't be able to keep making things smaller, but will continue to keep making them better.
The assembling of individual atoms enables an item, say a sword of iron,to be produced. The addition of other atoms in particular patterns produces items with qualitative differences to a sword of iron. Adding a few atoms of carbon appropriately placed will produce a sword of steel. Adding more atoms of other elements here and there will produce your finger.
The continual advance of technology will be in improving the kinds of items that can be manufactured, and the assembling of products at the atomic scale will be improved infinitely. Eventually, the atmosphere of Earth will be modeled on an atomic scale.
Every atom on Earth will be modeled in real time.
What's next? Well, once we look at where these atoms are going, and know where each of them are, we'll also be able to look backwards, and see where they've been.
Eventually, both these technological abilities will concatenate. We'll be able to actually manufacture things that used to exist because we'll be able to know exactly what atoms were where and simply recreate that exact thing with our advanced nanotech production capability. There are additional features of things, particularly things that are alive, that affect their function, such as behaviour, and our scientific grasp continues today to advance in that direction as well, which will also continue and contribute necessarily to such manufacturing.
As you can see, ultimately the ability to recreate a living breathing you long after you died will inevitably become possible as manufacturing and modeling technology advances.
This is the basis for my strong confidence that we will be resurrected, when humanity has become able to travel the stars. At that time, no physical resource will be particularly in short supply. No matter how Malthusian the calculation, the infinite universe provides more resources than could be necessary.
What will be in short supply in that infinite barren waste is good company.
This means both opportunity and motive are established for the resurrection. I have little doubt in the logic, physics, or social understanding my prediction is based on.
I am convinced it's true, and therefore live as if I'm immortal and every aspect of my life will be public knowledge, including my private thoughts. I hope you are so inspired by these facts as well.
Edit: I will add that today you can purchase a printer that uses living cells to make organs, tissues, or whole organisms via additive manufacturing, for the cost of lunch for you and some friends.
IMG source - 3DPrintingIndustry.com
Does that reasoning imply that consciousness is an emergent property of matter? Basically the idea is that by tracing back the position and state of all atoms you can know the physical world, potentially thought and emotion are included as i suppose neurons and the electrons and chemicals sent between them could be presumably mapped and decoded at this future point and this would provide a model to “reincarnate”. But does that imply that there is nothing more to our consciousness than chemistry and physics? No ghost in this machine? Does it preclude a “soul”?
I have no logical basis to believe in a universal substrate that is more subtle than the energy/matter current science seems to be content with, but techno reincarnation or not that is just too depressing for me.
It just makes life seem so meaningless, so directionless. Granted the whole “full disclosure” of thoughts and emotion gives motivation for self refinement, but not an actual reason for it...
I’m partial to the idea that there is a higher evolution that is not directionless, that we get an unfathomable span of time and series of incarnations in many forms to continue to learn and refine some part of ourselves which is ultimately part of the very fabric of the universe, call it universal consciousness if you like, or the awareness of some cosmic consciousness. Ultimately our little part of the whole re-merges with that whole and is part of an even greater evolution. Dolls within dolls I guess.
I don’t know, my logic is a bit fuzzy but also the idea that we can begin to comprehend the magnitude of a universe that has birthed conscious beings with our 5 pounds of grey matter is also something I can’t really get behind.
I do very much like the accountability aspect and the way it opposes the whole individual experience trip we’re on now...
Man that is some good port.
I cannot confirm or deny God, or things beyond my ken, but consciousness certainly appears to emerge from physics, and there's no basis to deny consciousness might have spawned the universe. Science isn't at a place to address these issues.
Personally, I'm with you in that I am not averse to a more meaningful aspect to our existence than it's mechanical state. That, however, does not mean it doesn't have a mechanical state. As you said, I'm a bit fuzzy on such details.
But I had a vision once of a vast region of space, where the energies of galaxies colliding, of black holes merging, and a million, billion stars all intersected, and for a moment a thought; a conscious being and the love of life sprang from the concatenation of the innumerable forces at play, and then, without a form to continue it, without a past or company, it no longer existed.
I think that happens every day in the infinite universe.
We at least persist for a bit, and have a chance to make the acquaintance of our good fellows. If nothing else, I rejoice in that. That has meaning.
That does have beauty in it. Maybe if science is simply the act of learning/knowing, we are talking about a very similar thing with different words...