An afterlife of our own making

[_CaliforniaKid]

I'm going to be quite frank. I want very badly to believe there is an afterlife. A lifespan of 70 years seems altogether too short. There is so much to be learned, discovered, explored, accomplished. The fact that immortality is so desirable, though, leads me to believe that any religious concept of afterlife is likely to be a product of the human imagination, designed to assuage our fears of death. It is only natural that such a concept should evolve. After all, in the course of the evolution of human society, the societies that are most successful are those whose warriors throw themselves into the task of conquest and expansion with reckless abandon, without regard for their own well-being. This is accomplished partly through the promise of afterlife. There may well be a God, but is there an afterlife? I am unfortunately quite skeptical.

In thinking about how we have created for ourselves imaginary immortalities, it occurred to me to wonder whether we might eventually make for ourselves real immortality. If society focused its efforts on advancing the field of medical science, what might we accomplish? What promises does the future of science hold? The hardest thing about this is that if the human mind exists as a product of the functions of the brain, then there is no easy way to download or to reproduce it except by creating a brain that is precisely identical (including, probably, any damage or physical deficiencies that exist in the original). And even if one could create an identical consciousness in a younger, healthier brain, it is not as though one could download one's consciousness into the new brain. One might create a replica of oneself this way, but it would be and would develop into a consciousness separate from one's own. In other words, I might be able to create a younger (or perhaps artificial) entity that thinks exactly the way I do, but it wouldn't be me. I would still have to die eventually. If you've seen the Prestige, you kind of know what I'm talking about. The magician in the movie is able-- with this machine-- to make duplicate copies of himself. He makes a comment about never knowing whether he would be the one in the tank (each time he uses it he drowns the "extra" copy of himself in a tank of water) or the one that gets transported as part of the magic trick. Maybe the truth is that he is both-- but the second after the duplication occurs, they cease to be the same person. That additional second's experience separates them from each other-- rather like how you can never step into the same river twice. And ultimately, one of them has to die.

Here's a philosophy of mind question for you. If you could create a mechanical circuit that would behave exactly the way your brain does, with the same memories, etc.-- that is, if you could duplicate your brain-- and at the same moment you duplicated it, you blew your brains out, would the new mechanical brain be "you?"

Strange musings for a Tuesday morning, I know.

Perhaps the easiest way to achieve immortality would be for medical science to advance to the point where we can repair all damage that occurs to the human body. Maybe we could grow new body parts, new organs, new tissues. The hardest part, of course, would be to repair the brain. It is such a fragile and complicated construct that it is difficult to imagine how we might repair it when it begins to deteriorate.

Any other ways you can think of that humans might artificially achieve immortality?

-CK

[_moksha]

Are you talking about like Scratch's head preserved in a cylinder like they have on Futurama?

[_CaliforniaKid]

Lol. Something like that. Orson Scott Card did that in one of his books, too.

[_Analytics]

Interesting thoughts!

It reminds me of all of those Star Trek episodes about Data, where he acted like a human and had intellectual thoughts and dilemmas like a human would, yet insisted that he really wasn’t “alive”—that despite his observable behaviors and processes he was nothing more than a machine running computer programs were nothing more than a façade of life and of consciousness.

If you buy into the concept that our consciousness is somehow something just a little bit more than the electro-chemical workings of our brains, then maybe that whatever-it-is doesn’t cease to exist when the electro-chemical functions of the brain cease operating. It is clear that processes such as thoughts and memories are driven by the brain. But is it possible that sans-thoughts-and-memories consciousness continues after death?

Sometimes I think it would be nice to exist totally in the present--to just be and not be distracted by thoughts and memories. Perhaps death is the ultimate achievement of that.

[_CaliforniaKid]

But Analytics,

Without thoughts and memories, what would it mean to "be"?

[_asbestosman]

Here is what I think: I think our spirits are not possible to copy in that way and I don't know how they relate to consciousness. All I know is that our spirits have something to do with our ability to make choices.


But all that aside. Putting on my skeptic hat, one could look at things another way. The Dude mentioned that The missionarry Dude and the 20-something Dude are all dead. This is something Richard Dawkins mentions in his Delusion. If you assume there is no spirit, then I think it makes sense. We probably retain very few atoms in brains that were there decades ago. What is the individual anyhow? Is the the mocules of the brain? Is it the memories? If there is no spirit, then I think it would be the latter. In that sense, it doesn't matter who is the copy and who is the original. There is no original because our past continuously dies. We just don't notice it dying. We only have recollections of it and of how we are different from our old memories.

Perhaps there are some parallels when we kill the natural man and become a new creature in Christ of which baptism is a symbol.

[_Analytics]

But Analytics,

Without thoughts and memories, what would it mean to "be"?

I don't know. What I do know that this PC has thoughts and memories. Yet it isn't alive. What is it that gives you a personal, first-hand sense of being, that you know a computer could never have? That "spark" exists somehow, does it not? If memories and thoughts (i.e. a computer) can exist without that spark, could that spark exist without a computer (i.e. brain)?

[_Ray A]

There are only two things to worry about: There is either an afterlife, or there is no afterlife. If there is an alferlife there are only two things to worry about: You are either going to heaven or you are going to hell. If you go to heaven you have nothing to worry about, and if you go to hell, you'll be with all your friends.

But seriously, my brother has studied NDE phenomena for a life time, and in the last ten years has become a publicly recognised expert in NDE phenomena, yet he told me in a recent email that he's still not sure there is life after death. Maybe it's just his skeptical ways. I'm not sure either but I do believe there are some strong evidences for life after death that cannot easily be dismissed, and I don't look at those evidences with "hope", I really don't care one way or the other. Living in hope is like hoping to win the $20 million lottery. Then, I know NDErs who are 100% convinced that there is life after death, from personal experience, not religious beliefs, created mythologies, or hope, they say they know. I can understand this, because I had what you might call a "paranormal" experience, and nothing in the whole wide world could have convinced me this was possible until I experienced it, and I can't blame people for disbelieving me. I read of such experiences, but until it happened to me, it was only reading words, and finding it difficult to place it into my rational thinking. My brother can't explain it either and doesn't like to talk about it, because he finds it difficult to believe, and cannot "register" it in his rational thinking. Yet he has seen the evidence I produced, and cannot refute nor explain it rationally. There is no current "law" in science or physics that explains this, so the reader is left with choices: "Ray, there MUST have been a rational explanation", or "maybe you were seeing things", or having "lapsed memory syndrome", and the one I sigh at the most "if science says it can't happen, it can't happen". This is what I call "the citadel of science", not genuine science. I don't care, I know what I experienced, and this is one reason I don't close my mind to anything. One thing I do think is that it's quite presumptious of us to think that like ants in a universe so large that it defies imagination, that we have even the basic answers, and an ant can no more comprehend relativity theory than we can comprehend what the universe holds. In fact, I don't think I even comprehend relativity theory!

Creating religious beliefs may help, as an attempt to explain what we don't fully understand, but the problem is that religions tend to get bogged down in unhelpful dogma, and all contradict one another. So there are two things I find difficult to wear - dogmatic religion, and dogmatic science.

[_CaliforniaKid]

Ray,

Might you be willing to share your experience? I definitely do not autmoatically discount the possibility of paranormal events occurring. My mom had some experiences that very much reinforced her belief that God and angels are real, and in some respects my faith in her credibility has been an anchor for my faith in God. I have had mildly "paranormal" experiences of my own, but none that would be difficult for me to explain away.

-CK

[_Ray A]

Ray,

Might you be willing to share your experience? I definitely do not autmoatically discount the possibility of paranormal events occurring. My mom had some experiences that very much reinforced her belief that God and angels are real, and in some respects my faith in her credibility has been an anchor for my faith in God. I have had mildly "paranormal" experiences of my own, but none that would be difficult for me to explain away.

-CK

Celestial Kingdom, my experience does not involve God or angels, but it's what I would call paranormal. I'm still not willing to share it publicly, and the only reason I bring it up occasionally is because I see such closedmindedness, not that this will change thinking. I think there is as much dogma and personal belief in many who claim "science" as their "guide to truth", as there is in religion. Maybe one day in the future I will post it for comment, probably a couple of years after the date it happened.