Kurzweil’s pedantic step-by-cheaper-step towards ethereal post-material transcendence is Buying A Stairway To Heaven. Funny, the spiritual terms ultimate materialist gurus assume so easily - and without shame or self-reflection - as they lack concepts and art to describe the truly new or useful, or ‘above+beyond’ ascendant.
Transhumanism essentially replaces the Christian quest of redeeming the bodily realm by spiritualizing it with the inverted project of mimicking the spiritual through technological advancement; immortality, transcendence of personal subjectivity, gnosis, etc etc
Can I recommend reviewing Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove's award winning entry in the Bigelow Institute of Consciousness Studies essay competition which sought the best evidence for survival of consciousness beyond death? (The contest awarded $1M in prizes, so attracted great authors.) There is a *massive* amount of evidence, in a variety of unrelated categories, gathered by scholars and scientists over decades, for the "afterlife". Neither metaphysics proposals nor the world's mythologies reflect this evidence well.
Exploring Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove's essay and the broader topic of evidence for survival of consciousness beyond death sounds intriguing. The Bigelow Institute of Consciousness Studies essay competition sounds like it attracted significant attention and contributions from various experts in the field. If you're interested in the evidence presented by scholars and scientists over decades regarding the afterlife, it can indeed be a thought-provoking and extensive topic. Researchers often approach this subject through various disciplines, including parapsychology, near-death experiences, reincarnation studies, and more, aiming to explore the potential continuity of consciousness beyond physical death. It's important to note that while there are many perspectives and pieces of evidence discussed in these fields, the topic remains controversial and highly debated within scientific and philosophical circles. The interpretation of such evidence can vary widely, and conclusions often depend on one's philosophical, religious, or scientific worldview. If you have specific aspects of Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove's essay or the evidence for the afterlife that you find compelling or wish to discuss further, feel free to share. I'm here to engage in conversation and provide insights to the best of my ability!
Damn you guys are so fucking awesome i work construction so it can be hard, not bring able to talk about and think about such deep topics. But you guys dive head first into the deep end, and i love being able to tangentially experience it with you!
I see some similarity between ontological inertia/morphic reasonance and the Buddhist conception of karma and rebirth. This idea of the reasonance of an individual passing through morphic fields is similar to how personal karma creates the illusion of self. Interestingly if we take this analogy further then what happens upon death is that a persons field simply reapears elsewhere in the world as a new individual which lines up with some of the reincarnation experiences that you talked about in an earlier video. I'm not sure if you've ever referenced buddhist philosophy directly so I wonder if you have any thoughts on the subject.
I’ve been thinking about how the actions taken our life determine the speed and direction of the inertia and then the next life would be a continuation of that inertia. Your karma doesn’t trap you with destiny, but there is an inertia that takes effort to change.
I'm of the opinion that a traumatic death is more likely to carry over inherent characteristics of an individual into their next life in the form of unresolved potentials/traumas. I've heard that the vast majority of documented cases of say, children remembering a past life are memories of traumatic events leading up to or including death. This has been my experience as well. And for me personally, what it seems like I carried over into this life were my final feelings from the last one that I simply could not let go of. Anger, terror, shame, guilt, helplessness, etc. All of these feelings were with me from the very beginning of my current life, waiting for me to come to understand them and work through untying the knots that they have bound up in my soul. I only remember the final moments of my last life and a sense of it being ripped away from me unfairly and very early. There was also a feeling of everything being very blissful up to that point. Like I had won the jackpot and was expecting a life of luxury and privilege.
I also heard someone once remark that that the duration of one’s metempsychosis (in the afterlife) will vary depending on how much stuff one needs to process before one is able to come back into another lifetime. Since various figures in the Roman Catholic church likely sensed that, they burned one of their biggest troublemakers Giordano Bruno at the stake (ditto Joan of Arc) as the intense suffering to be processed would prevent them from returning anytime soon (1000+ years perhaps)…
@@PetrusSolus Thanks for sharing that. I made the assumption that time was not linear in the "spirit world" or whatever you want to call it. So even though my past life seems to have taken place at least far enough in the past that spears were still being used in developed societies, I never really considered that I could have spent a long time processing things before coming back to our current era. Interesting perspective.
I feel similarly. There is something about the "intensity" (as Bergson describes) that might result in living patterns sticking around after death or being passed on more completely.
Have you not looked at research on near death experiences? The type conducted by the likes of Bruce Greyson, Jeffrey Long, Pim van Lommel, Janice Holden, Michael Sabom, Kenneth Ring, Raymond Moody, and so on? The IANDS Journal of Near Death Studies provides a decent collection of this sort of thing
It seems to me that we use science (the scientific method) to DESCRIBE phenomena moreso than to EXPLAIN anything. For example, we can figure out the equations necessary to describe how to USE electricity, but not really how it actually WORKS. Same goes for nearly every other domain. We are great a spotting patterns (which I believe is the most basic definition of consciousness: "The act of pattern recognition"), but not so much at explaining the causality of anything because we are so confused between cause and effect.
Yes, but this was not always the case. Science did indeed aspire to actually explain natural phenomena prior to the early twentieth century, when it began to completely abandon that project. Science became unscientific.
If man is an image of God, it has the potential to be like God. But as a self, with freedom, it can be choose to listen to its form by faith (from which it is an image) or choose to be removed from its form into chaos. In some sense this is sin or death. If forms are eternal objects, intuitively we can be united with (God) and still be a self since forms can be interrelated. Have you read Kierkegaard's sickness unto death and concept of anxiety, these are some interesting works on this matter?
I like transhumanism work, but I don't think a supercomputer could do better than nature, life, death, etc. It would just be more of that. In fact, in optimizing, the machine stops being mechanistic, the server lab shrinks to the personal computer, and the file size makes shipping hard drives more cost effective than transmitting data. And the best thing to protect that data? A body. It turns out biology solved some pretty interesting stuff, and some of our tech might be at the opposite end of convergent evolution. If you lower the GPU voltage and remove the error correction, then a GPU can actually become a true random number generator due to occasional quantum tunneling through the transistors. This is equivalent to optimizing the GPU through overclocking and undervolting up to an acceptable error rate. It seems like our brains went through a similar optimization too, with pyramidal neurons in the hippocampus and neocortex having the lowest voltage thresholds and highest rate of firing. Those were the neurons specifically evolved to solve the SLAM problem: figuring out the world and our place in it, which transformers neural networks seem to solve in the exact same way, with similar firing patterns. I believe both neurons and transistors should be capable of equal levels of spirituality, since the specific material shouldn't matter here. And I wonder if a future machine intelligence might think that genetic engineers are treating life too mechanistically. I think working on transhumanism for the sake of flipping everything is more fun than working on transhumanism for the sake of trying to live forever.
Have you ever come across Denis Noble or James Shapiro?? I'm wondering because I think that you'll find their ideas and evidence contesting Neodarwinism to be of interest. @Formscapes
Thanx for this sharing. Yes, PSYCHEDELIC is a helping tool to see behind the veil. As LEO GURA said for EGOS like KURTWEIL : " He wants to upload SANTA-CLAUZ onto a computer " What a funny infantile desire or spiritual stupidity ! Thanx to psychedelics, i think i passed that stage of spiritual childhood. DANIEL DENNET passed away : GOOD NEWS for the NON PHILO ZOMBIES like my humble french ass. Peace & love
thanks guys, awesome work. I was reminded of reading in Freud (no idea where) the observation that you can't really consider the fact of your own death, because what you will be contemplating is never your actual death, but only an image thereof. I tend to agree, it might not be possible for the mind to have any authentic reaction to death at all. (But then, what mind does seem to react to is whether it can ...um... sorry this might just be a Dune word... whether it can mentate or not. So a mind can be happy trying to consider its death, but if confronted with the possibility of not considering at all...then there is recoil.) .... totally on another limb, I think Alex is right, and this doesn't connect I don't think with what I just wrote, but if you consider yourself as consciousness, then there too there is an impossibility of death as anything that you can experience at all, because if you're experiencing it... it ain't death, baby. not sure any of that is contributing anything, but i thought i'd splash my oar in the murk a little.
