Why not? An essay

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rdonnay
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Why not? An essay

#1 Post by rdonnay »

What are the odds that you would be alive today?

Have you ever thought of this? :think:

I think about it often.

Do you believe in the concept that each of us is appointed once to live and
once to die - as is often quoted from the Bible? If that is true, then what
does it mean to die? At what instantaneous point can we say that a person is
no longer alive, but is now dead? What does it mean to be alive? What does it
mean to be dead? If you are a person who does not believe in life after death
then would you say that after you are alive you are dead? If that is true,
then what were you before you are alive? Logic would say that you were dead.
So then, what does it mean to be dead?

I never thought much about this until several things happened in my life that
made me understand that there is no difference between being dead and being
unconscious.

The idea of being dead makes no logical sense because it is a concept that
defies description. It's like trying to describe the space in a vacuum.
Nearly everyone would define it as the "absence of matter". Yet when
someone is asked to define death do you ever here it defined as the "absence
of life"? And so most of us have to invent another idea of death - one that
rules out the idea of nothingness. Why, because nothingness is something to
be feared.

So let's think more deeply about this for awhile. Why would nothingness be
something to fear? If there is nothing, then there would be no awareness of
it, so why fear it? Have you ever experienced a period of unconsciousness?
I have experienced this several times in my life, about 15 or 20 times from
seizures when I was much younger, once from a motorcycle accident, twice
during an operation, and several times after being administered the "amnesia
drug". In every situation there was no concept of time passing or
self-awareness, whether the period of unconsciousness was 10 minutes or 5
hours. A loss of self-awareness is, in my opinion, no different an experience
than being dead. It's entirely possible that a period of unconsciousness could
go on for days or even months, yet the person who is unconscious has no
experience of any lapse of time at all. So using simple logic then, wouldn't
the experience of not being alive for, say 1 million years be no different
than the experience of being unconscious for 2 hours? Being unconscious is
not the same as being asleep. We all have a sense of how much time has
elapsed when we are asleep, but not when we are unconcious.

My point is this. If it is not possible to experience death, then it doesn't
exist, just as space doesn't exist. We experience the universe due to the
matter in it, not the space in it. It didn't matter what happened before the
big bang, just as it doesn't matter what happened before we were born or after
we die. I believe that there is never a time in which we are not alive, and
I define being alive as "having consciousness, or self-awareness". And I can
say this because time does not exist outside of consciousness. If you
believe that we live multiple lives, then there is no gap of time between
those lives, therefore we lead contiguous lives, forever and ever.

Let's look at this another way.

The universe is approximately 14 billions years old and the earth is
approximately 4 billion years old. If you were appointed by God to live only
once, then what are the odds that your tiny slice of life is existing right
now? If God created the earth 4 billion years ago so that He could give you
life for about 75 years then what are the odds that your 75 year slice would
be right now? Why not 1 million years ago, or 1 billion years ago or 1
million years from now? Why now? All probability would say that your odds of
being alive right now are 1 in about 50 million, and that's not even
considering the future billions of years that the earth will probably exist.
Furthermore, it has been discovered that there are trillions of galaxies each
with billions of solar systems and that it is very likely that billions more
planets exist that could support life. Why are you here on this planet at
this time? What are the odds of that?

Here's another view of things.

What if there were nothing at all? No universe, no people, no time. Just
nothing. What would be the odds of that? 50/50? Either there is nothing or
there is something. When there was nothing, how long a time did that
nothingness exist? Does it matter? I say that it doesn't matter, because
time cannot exist when nothing exists, just as time cannot exist if there is
no awareness of it. It only exists for people who are conscious of it. The
fact that you are conscious and reading this paragraph right now does not mean
that you have beat the odds, it means that the odds must be wrong. It means
that you don't get a 1 in 50 million chance at life. The odds are much better
than that and I'm betting that you are here because it's just as improbable
for you to not be here as it is for the universe not to exist.

I have had this discussion with a few people in my life and every time I
received the same response. Huh? This concept is as odd an idea as is the
idea that all matter in the universe came from a single point - a singularity,
and that it eventually collapses to that singularity again - a black hole.
There is now so much evidence to support this idea that the entire world
community of physicists and cosmologists believe and understand this. Yet
these same people who spend their entire lives trying to understand the
nuances of quantum mechanics don't waste a single thought on the why and how
of their existence. What does it mean to exist as a person? Is my spirit
separate from my body? If so, then why does it seem to be encapsulated in
my body and goes wherever my body goes? What happens to it when my body turns
to dust? Is is a singularity that will eventually inhabit another body in a
big bang called birth? Is my mind (my personality) separate from my spirit or
is it lost forever with the loss of my body?

When most people talk about life and death they bring to the discussion years
of baggage that was piled on from the time they were little children. Their
parents fed them "their religion" and that has been their only view for their
entire life. Nobody seems to like the idea of being dead but they have no
problem with the idea of going to some other place for eternity. So what is
eternity? Is that something like a billion years? Or is there no time in
eternity? If that's true, then how can there be any self-awareness in
eternity? The problem with religions is that they all seek to answer the same
question - "why"? Whereas science never asks that question because the why
is unknowable. There is nearly universal understanding about the nature of
things because it can be tested and proved, yet there are probably millions
of different views about why we are here and where we are going when we die.
If the why is so knowable, then how is it that there are a million different
answers? This essay does not seek to give yet another answer to the why of
life and death. It is not for us to reason why, it is for us to reason "why
not?"
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Re: Why not? An essay

#2 Post by rdonnay »

I received this response by private email yesterday. It was too good not to post here. Thanks Jon.

You die every time you go to sleep, that is : your inner you - the bit you call "me" gets turned off and is no longer functional. The biological part of you, if it is still functional, does a little house cleaning - it moves shit around from the short term memory to the long term memory, but the code (the bit that is "YOU") is turned off. When your body is done with its house cleaning it restarts the application ("you" ) and you run until your body decides to turn you off again because it has no more battery power (energy) to run you. People with efficiently written code (smart people) can run for much longer than the ones with infinite loops all over the place (stupid people) - they need to sleep all the time to recharge the constant draining battery. When your biological part breaks to the point where it can no longer supply even the tiniest amount of power (the amount needed to keep the memory cells from dumping all their data) - there is no longer any use for the biological entity and it decays away into dust. The application ("you") was always a copy of the original, which is sitting in some dudes library in the world of xyz - a to us unknown place where the inhabitants (lets call them Gronks) can go down to their local "people store" and buy applications that they can then put into their "play machine" (one of which what we call earth) for input into the next entity to pop out of the downspout of the self-regenerating avatar that we call humans. Since the application has no memory - it starts up from scratch, but since 'YOU" are the code - there you are! You new memory starts getting populated and the whole thing runs again.

Then the "child Gronk" who put 'you' into his/her/its plaything (our world) decides that 'you' are a boring sort and wants one with brown skin instead. The gronk pulls your card and you are immediately shot dead by the Gronk's other toy - the Hitman! etc.. etc... etc..
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Tom
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Re: Why not? An essay

#3 Post by Tom »

Hi, Roger.

This is something I think about rather often. I'd love to discuss this topic with you and others, but my english is not good enough to do so.

The bible - and most of the popular monotheistic religions - separates soul and body. This is somehow a basic concept, and it is needed to give people reasons to believe. If you die, your body vanishes, and your soul goes to heaven or hell. So, keep your soul "innocent", and it will stay in heaven until eternity, whatever that means (imagine sitting on a cloud until the end of days and listening to John Lennon singing "Give peace a chance"). After all, the popular monotheistic religions are the followers of several multitheistic and "natural" religions, and some atheists (as I am) say: Okay, people still believe in one god more than I do, but this is a good step into the right direction. :D

Being dead is not a state. It is not "being" something. This is what people do not understand - and it's hard to understand. To be honest, it's not to understand. As you mentioned: Try to describe the "nothing" inside a vacuum. People think materialistic, and that means, they always expect "something" to be somewhere. And people are very, very egocentric, even if they are altruistic at the same time. This is something all the religions force, because the concept of the "personal god" is a very egocentric idea. If the center vanishes, the whole concept fails. This makes people believe in something like a "soul", which is NOT a part of the body. Some scientists still search for this phenomenon. I remember an article I read two ore three years ago, and it was about those twenty grams a dieing person loses in the moment of death. This is the soul! some scientists said. It was not. It was a mistake of measurement.

It's hard to believe that those < 100 years everybody stays on earth have no real value, no result, no sense at all. If a person dies, a complex chemical process is initiated, and after a while, the substance this person was made of becomes part of other things - bacteria, worms, plants, animals. After some time, the person will be part of other persons. Chemically. Nothing else. So, death means: Being recycled. And this is it. The earth and other people will still exist, but the existance of the dead person ended. The person didn't change the state. Consciousness only works as long as we're alive, and it ends at the moment we die. But consciousness is needed to reflect ideas like having a "soul".

All the best,
Tom
Last edited by Tom on Mon Mar 01, 2010 5:30 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Best regards,
Tom

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"No."
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Re: Why not? An essay

#4 Post by rdonnay »

Tom -

Thank you for your thoughtful response. Usually, when I make an effort to put a lot of thought into something and then share that idea with others, I tend to get short "1-liner" replies that are completely thoughtless or condescending. I sent this out as an email to a few friends and was surprised at the thoughtful responses I received instead of the usual - "More silly talk" or "Jesus is the answer".

I wrote this little essay one evening when I was frustrated with the level of discourse I was hearing on television and in private conversations.

There is an old Jewish proverb:

Large minds talk about ideas.
Medium minds talk about things.
Small minds talk about other people.


I find that I can get small-minded at times when I watch too much TV. :violence-hammer:

I needed to write this so I could feel a little better about myself.:romance-grouphug:

Roger
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Re: Why not? An essay

#5 Post by rdonnay »

My brother Wayne threw a real curve ball at me with the following conundrum:
If I die and my body is frozen to preserve it for possible resurrection in
the future, would I still be me if I was resurrected?
Such a question invites more questions, such as:
If your body is frozen, what happens to your memory?
As a computer engineer, I understand the concept of memory and I know that it
is lost when the computer is turned off. So when the computer is turned on
again, its memory is restored from disk and it so its personality and
experiences are restored. But what if a different disk were put into the
computer before it was rebooted. Suddenly, the same piece of hardware (ie the
body) thinks it is someone else because it has an entirely different
personality and set of life experiences.

So to answer this question, the only part of "me" that would be restored would
be the body. There would be no personality, no life's experiences, no ability
to function as a human being without going through the entire learning process
all over again. Not only would your body need to be frozen, but also your
memory. I don't think they know how to do that.

So, let's say that they learn how to freeze a person's memory and store it on
a flash drive. Then many years later they unfreeze my body and reboot it
from the flash drive with my memory, but they make a mistake and grab the
wrong flash drive. My resurrected body would actually believe that I am
someone else and had the same life experiences as that person.

Now let's assume that we could use my flash drive again and again to boot up
multiple frozen people. Would they not believe that they are all me? What a
conundrum! Is this the next evolution of cloning?

Here is the problem with this concept. If I capture every bit of memory from
a computer and transfer it to another computer, the only way it will run
without error is if the receiving computer is an exact physical copy of the
donor computer. This means that its hardware, mac addresses, etc must be
identical. If anything is different, the software will fail. This is the
same problem with transferring memory back to an unfrozen body. If any part
of the donor body is different from the receiving body the boot up would fail
and the new person would not function. This holds true for even the same
person who was frozen, because there is no guarantee that the body could be
restored to the exact same state it was in when the memory was saved. There
is more to the brain and memory than just life's experiences. There is also
the part of the brain and memory that talks to the hardware, ie the nervous
system.

But just for fun, let's assume that the body and brain (and its contents)
could be perfectly restored many years in the future. Would that be me? I
guess it would depend on whether or not the essence of me decided to abandon
this body and take up a new residence. If that happens, then the resurrected
body will think it is me but it will be someone else.

How's that for a confusing explanation?
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