But what if they don’t?dastardly stem wrote: ↑Fri Sep 23, 2022 12:13 amOk. A world without evil is a world where everyone loves each other and take care of each other.
Regards,
MG
But what if they don’t?dastardly stem wrote: ↑Fri Sep 23, 2022 12:13 amOk. A world without evil is a world where everyone loves each other and take care of each other.
Why would a clone of you after you are gone be you? And how does that amount to an afterlife?Physics Guy wrote: ↑Thu Sep 22, 2022 8:52 pmAs a matter of fact our information does persist past death, as Carroll must know—it's an undergraduate point. Deterministic causality means that every detail of the present and past is always encoded, in a one-to-one way, in the future. Sufficiently advanced aliens could in principle reconstruct my personality, centuries in the future, by disentangling it from fantastically precise measurements of everything within a few light-centuries of Earth. They could probably get a close-enough representation of my life, in fact, from measuring in a much smaller volume of space.
What is preserved is only a record of my life, however, not my ongoing pattern having new experiences. Even if those curious aliens did reconstruct my whole life after my death, down to all the thoughts and feelings I ever had, the story that they reconstruct would still have ended at my death. Past that point, no new consciousness events in my brain would be recorded anywhere in this universe, because they never happened in this universe.
On the other hand, conceivably those quixotic aliens could then edit and process their data a bit more, in order to resolve the counterfactual historical question of what I would have gone on to do, and think, and feel, and see, and so on—if I had not died at that point. Working out what my experiences would have been, if I hadn't died like that, would itself be a kind of afterlife for me.
It's not clear that there would be a unique way of pushing me on past death like that. The aliens might have to make choices about exactly how I went on after death, and these choices might affect who exactly I actually was in this delayed afterlife. If the aliens distorted my soul when they continued my pattern like that, though, it might not be anything so new for me. Little random events have influenced me all my life, after all.
So aliens could in principle give me a simulated afterlife. Since consciousness is a matter of software, not hardware, the issue of simulation is moot. I would be living again after death, making new choices, having new experiences.
Perhaps there are some UFO cults somewhere that do hope for something like that. Most believers in life after death do not look to aliens for it. Instead they generally propose that it is something outside the universe—God or karma or whatever—that is keeping a copy of all our data, and will boot us up again in a whole new world (new to us, anyway).
The point about the aliens only shows that an informational soul can in principle have eternal life no matter what happens to whatever hardware hosts it in this world. Carroll's point is strong about disproving spirit as substance, and also about life not persisting naturally within this world after death, barring spectacular interventions by aliens. To suppose that this disproves life after death in most traditionally imagined forms is only begging the question, however. If there is a Heaven, it is not a zone of space just beyond Saturn's orbit (sorry, Dante), and "going to Heaven" is not a matter of ensuring that any "fine matter" drifts out to there.
Then it’s not the world I’ve conceived ofMG 2.0 wrote: ↑Fri Sep 23, 2022 12:25 amBut what if they don’t?dastardly stem wrote: ↑Fri Sep 23, 2022 12:13 am
Ok. A world without evil is a world where everyone loves each other and take care of each other.
Regards,
MG
So no tectonic plates. That could be a problem.dastardly stem wrote: ↑Fri Sep 23, 2022 12:13 amPeople don’t get hurt by natural disasters because god, on this conception, made everything to work smoothly.
Your world without ‘evil’ seems to be an impossibility. At least from what we understand about the way THIS world works.
*Recycles materials from the surface by dragging it below the surface. This allows it to melt and mix with other substances but also allows hydrothermic process to concentrate minerals. Some of what is dragged down reemerges through volcanoes
*Allows heat to escape from the interior of the Earth. When tectonic activity stopped on Venus, trapped heat caused it's surface to remelt.
*Provides different connections between parts of the Earth’s surface, influencing the evolution of plant and animal species. Likewise, the climate on various continents change as they drift to the north or south.
*Impacts mountain building, as mentioned in a previous answer
*Opens and closes oceans, influencing evolution in the ocean
*Drives volcanism which affects the release of various chemicals into the atmosphere, which affects climate as well as helping determine what kinds of minerals are deposited as rocks.
Ok. So at least we can agree that it’s all in your head.
Of course it’s a different world completely. No t-plates, no magma. No sun,completely differentMG 2.0 wrote: ↑Fri Sep 23, 2022 12:32 amSo no tectonic plates. That could be a problem.dastardly stem wrote: ↑Fri Sep 23, 2022 12:13 amPeople don’t get hurt by natural disasters because god, on this conception, made everything to work smoothly.
Your world without ‘evil’ seems to be an impossibility. At least from what we understand about the way THIS world works.
*Recycles materials from the surface by dragging it below the surface. This allows it to melt and mix with other substances but also allows hydrothermic process to concentrate minerals. Some of what is dragged down reemerges through volcanoes
*Allows heat to escape from the interior of the Earth. When tectonic activity stopped on Venus, trapped heat caused it's surface to remelt.
*Provides different connections between parts of the Earth’s surface, influencing the evolution of plant and animal species. Likewise, the climate on various continents change as they drift to the north or south.
*Impacts mountain building, as mentioned in a previous answer
*Opens and closes oceans, influencing evolution in the ocean
*Drives volcanism which affects the release of various chemicals into the atmosphere, which affects climate as well as helping determine what kinds of minerals are deposited as rocks.
Regards,
MG
Occam’s razor.dastardly stem wrote: ↑Fri Sep 23, 2022 12:34 amOf course it’s a different world completely. No t-plates, no magma. No sun,completely different
Personally I don’t think the creator is hidden. He manifests Himself in the creation itself.
Honestly, what do you think of stem’s imaginary reality?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Polkinghorne
On the existence of God
Polkinghorne considers that "the question of the existence of God is the single most important question we face about the nature of reality"[34] and quotes with approval Anthony Kenny: "After all, if there is no God, then God is incalculably the greatest single creation of the human imagination." He addresses the questions of "Does the concept of God make sense? If so, do we have reason for believing in such a thing?" He is "cautious about our powers to assess coherence," pointing out that in 1900 a "competent… undergraduate could have demonstrated the 'incoherence'" of quantum ideas.[citation needed] He suggests that "the nearest analogy in the physical world [to God] would be… the Quantum Vacuum."[32]
He suggests that God is the ultimate answer to Leibniz's great question "why is there something rather than nothing?" The atheist's "plain assertion of the world's existence" is a "grossly impoverished view of reality… [arguing that] theism explains more than a reductionist atheism can ever address.".[citation needed] He is very doubtful of St Anselm's Ontological Argument. Referring to Gödel's incompleteness theory, he said: "If we cannot prove the consistency of arithmetic it seems a bit much to hope that God's existence is easier to deal with," concluding that God is "ontologically necessary, but not logically necessary." He "does not assert that God's existence can be demonstrated in a logically coercive way (any more than God's non-existence can) but that theism makes more sense of the world, and of human experience, than does atheism."[35] He cites in particular:
The intelligibility of the universe: One would anticipate that evolutionary selection would produce hominid minds apt for coping with everyday experience, but that these minds should also be able to understand the subatomic world and general relativity goes far beyond anything of relevance to survival fitness. The mystery deepens when one recognises the proven fruitfulness of mathematical beauty as a guide to successful theory choice.[36]
The anthropic fine tuning of the universe: He quotes with approval Freeman Dyson, who said "the more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming"[37] and suggests there is a wide consensus amongst physicists that either there are a very large number of other universes in the Multiverse or that "there is just one universe which is the way it is in its anthropic fruitfulness because it is the expression of the purposive design of a Creator, who has endowed it with the finely tuned potentialty for life."[38]
A wider humane reality: He considers that theism offers a more persuasive account of ethical and aesthetic perceptions. He argues that it is difficult to accommodate the idea that "we have real moral knowledge" and that statements such as 'torturing children is wrong' are more than "simply social conventions of the societies within which they are uttered" within an atheistic or naturalistic world view. He also believes such a world view finds it hard to explain how "Something of lasting significance is glimpsed in the beauty of the natural world and the beauty of the fruits of human creativity."[39]