5 replies to this topic

[myworldline]

Most models of the after live I find extremely implausible, but there is one model I find particularly plausible and I do not consider it a product of wishful thinking; it just resolves a paradox about how your soul was generated into existence.

I feel that when you die you forget that you were ever born at all in the first place, which of course begs the question "how did you managed to be born in the first place in spited of the exponential odds? So I speculate that your sense of self is not entirely obliterated at death it is just very much reduced. Reduced to the phase when the universe reached a critical level of complexity for consciousness to emerge. This critical level of complexity was inclusive of a form of consciousness that existed but only at an unstable "blank slate" level. Then because of the instability, a phase in nature known as a "phase transition" it fragmented in to millions of possible directions millions of possible entities and chaotic randomness selected you as just one of them though a world line through space and time.

My theory speculates that when you die you once again feel at one with this universal unstable blank slate, then a Gestalt Switching mechanism forces you along just one world line of one entity of a brain through space and time. Over trillions of lifetimes you will eventually experience the life of every conscious being that ever lived and ever will live, because you will keep switching back and forth through time as time is just a fixed dimension and does not really flow from the past to the future.

MWL

[Lazarus Long]

Wishing does not equal willing and the very existence of the will implies a direct assault on the paradox of determinism and freedom, dare I say it, free versus predetermined "will".

Self preservation is predicated on self recognition and derivative of evolutionary psychology. The benefits of this strategy are profound but why develop a natural falsehood?

Death as the reboot model of Psychic Programs is one argument that has been around for a while, since long before the terminology I am substituting as a new lexicon for the analytical register but it still begs a different question of what is the substrate?

In otherwords we have no measure of any support substrate OTHER than the tangible mass/energy Universe that we identify with existence and this Universe doesn't appear to be hiding any secret places where souls go "between" after death so to qualify your claim we need to discover what substrate contains "Platonic Forms" of coherent cognizence and then what method of translation allows such conscious self awareness to be transformed back and forth between this state and our own.

This is a vastly more subtle and profound topic than mere uploading but any model for successful uploading can be benefitted by this analysis.

[myworldline]

The substrate IMHO is an emergent property when the universe achieves its critical level of complexity through as it has previously demonstrated though a series of "phase transitions" in its evolutionary history for consciousness to be at all possible. Rather like a hologram you can keep cutting it in half and you will still retain the complete image even though the quality is reduced. Then at a critical point division the image there and as you cut it in half again it totally disappears.

As the universe evolves there is a critical flash point at around 14 billion years for the simplest form of blank slate consciousness to emerge.

Once I believed we were just an accidental collocation of atoms, but given the immense size of the universe then the chances of that one person ever eventuating in existence in the first place would be so exponentially improbable I really dismiss that outcome as being virtually impossible, because if one wound back the hands of time to when the universe began at the big bang and started it all over again then those atoms that were eventually to become you would be far more likely to be scattered billions of light years apart. In fact it would be even far more improbable than a mad monkey accidently typing Shakespeare on a typewriter.

I of the view that your conscious self is not so much made of matter but information per se, and information has not well defined boundaries. So I see no reason why another fetal brain that exists in the universal blank slate state can just as easily process all the necessary information that generates your sense of self into existence. First you are at one with all fetal brains past, present and future and a random self selection results in you self selecting just one of them.

I go so far as to say you are not so much a contingent entity of conscious amongst millions of others, but you are the actual observation of the point where the universe that is observing itself. You are the reality of the universal subjective reality oriented around and observer. Rather like a single room lit up on very large building and if you assume the wattage is always governed at say 100 watts which means only one room can illuminated up at any given time. So if that light goes out (when you die) the entire building(universe) will not stay in the dark, it randomly selected another room(sense of self) to take its place. Since the entire universe appears of center around you at the moment it will not go down all that easily, there will be a Gestalt Switching mechanism that will switch your sense of self to another brain.

Edited by myworldline, 06 July 2003 - 06:35 AM.

[bacopa]

but how do you account for the fact that this defies the laws of physics because Gestalt Switching mechanism or not what is actually physically carrying your "ethos" into another self...I find this very objectively irrational

[MichaelAnissimov]

"Ethos"? There need not necessarily be physical continuity for a person to continue surviving; only informational continuity. If you suddenly died now, and random dust collisions in the Andromeda galaxy happened to reassemble you with the same memories you had when you died, then...? That person would *claim* to be you, or might concede that the definition of "identity" itself is fuzzy, and if your version of identity doesn't allow you to move from place to place faster than light, then he guesses he isn't you - although he has your memories and personality.

[bacopa]

Wow so as long as I have my thoughts safe in my brain than I could continue to live. But my point was against reincarnation in that something of substance has to carry one's thoughts over and without physical form there is only the fabled "ether" , no ethos, that some believed existed of course we know now that there is no such thing and it defies the laws of physics.