What happens to us when we die?
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Re: What happens to us when we die?
I must apologize for the typos that sneak into my responses. Although I am generally untalented my inherent skills in inserting typos and then missing them when I try to recheck is immense and undefeatable.
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Re: What happens to us when we die?
- Sy Borg
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Re: What happens to us when we die?
There are also ways of addressing with "empirical science". One may gloss over it, like a utilitarian glossing over the relative badness of torturing one child vs millions, but if one considers what the science means in terms of existence, there is a world of meaning to be found in each observation that invites, rather than demands, you to notice.Hereandnow wrote: ↑January 21st, 2018, 11:31 pmSo much empirical science here, defining the world and our place in it. But there are other approaches altogether.
- Sy Borg
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What is being put in the place of all this death you are talking about?Jan Sand wrote: ↑January 21st, 2018, 11:39 pm Al5hough I agree with you that AI will replace humans it seems to me is is happening a lot faster than you realize. Already the viable need for humans in the dynamics of civilization is rapidly vanishing. The latest reports that around 30% of the birds have vanished and over half of the insects that provide food for them has likewise disappeared. The highly amusing tendencies to put the stupidest people in charge of the world seems to ensure that humans will vanish also within only a few decades. That evolution highly approves of its latest trick to use robots as its means of evolving seems well in hand. I suspect that those now acknowledged reports of UFOs may take a hand in the final stages of getting rid of the idiotic humans now destroying the ecology. Although I am very fond of birds whose brains are much more efficient than human brains still lag to a large degree behind the AI versions in ability to develop rapidly. No doubt humans can be rather cute and amusing but it seems they have had their day and even cockroaches seem more durable.
While I agree that AI is already taking over, it may not in the way that you are envisioning.
I see the germ of AI in corporations, since it's not individuals creating these systems but companies with plentiful resources. Corporations themselves are collective intelligences that are governed by policies like a program, and they are taking over, with ever more influence on governments than individuals.
Now consider a corporation run mostly by AI, since AI's decision-making will surely increasingly be found to be more reliable than that of humans. In that sense we are perhaps not far from the AI takeover; it appears that it will happen quietly as we conduct business as usual. Once AI control is fully in place I expect it will still feel more or less like business as usual for the average person - just new bosses at the top pulling the strings.
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Re: What happens to us when we die?
- Sy Borg
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The blending of human and machine may yet blur the line between being alive and not alive, in which case it might turn out that everything is alive (or dead!) in its own way.
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Re: What happens to us when we die?
- Sy Borg
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However, it would be a typical conceit of biology say that biology was the only life, just as it was humanity's conceit to claim that it was the only animal with consciousness, believing themselves to be above animals rather than animals with powerful emergent qualities. Even sophisticated indigenous people were "disowned" by European colonists, as though these peers were idiot bastard sons to be locked in shame beneath the stairwell. Even today, the Bantu people of Congo consider their diminutive pygmy neighbours as sub-human.
So there's some ego baggage to discard when comparing biology with other ostensibly living systems. In truth, the main difference between animals and plants is time, ditto the difference between flora and geology. In each case, like an Alka Seltzer tablet, an entity will burn through its initial apportionment until it breaks down. Each entity adds to its bulk via the environment as it simultaneously bubbles away. When the gains from the environment are greater than the losses, it's called growth. Rocks too add to their bulk during their existence - passively of course :) - via aggregation and chemical reactions over very long periods of time. I think rocks deserve more respect; anyone with a garden or who spends time in nature knows that rocks are important players in nature, platforms for mini ecosystems of fungi and mosses on the surface, niches for the tiny in any crevice between the rock and the Earth.
Some entities, like biology and black holes, add much more to their bulk during their existence than they dissipate, but they too will reach a peak before the inevitable drift towards dissolution. The Earth is an interesting example, with each life on its surface akin to microscopic pimples on a billiard ball flashing in and out of existence like virtual particles in a vacuum :)
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Re: What happens to us when we die?
- SimpleGuy
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- Sy Borg
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We already have numerous external auxiliary "attachments" to our brains in our communications and data storage devices. The level of advancement of these and their influence will increase, perhaps to the point where our "brain peripherals" become dominant over the brain itself in more or less the same way as the brain wrested ultimate control from the digestive system, as suggested in SimpleGuy's AI post above.
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Re: What happens to us when we die?
- Sy Borg
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Actually, nature almost entirely works by hierarchies. No social animal has a fully flat hierarchic structure. Predators and prey abound everywhere. There is constant control and manipulation of species by other species.Jan Sand wrote: ↑January 24th, 2018, 1:07 am Humans in general seem to prefer a hierarchical form of organization with kings and emperors and corporate bosses and military generals but nature in general does not seem to work that way. The brain is not a boss of the body any more than the digestive system or the chemical hormone system. It is a highly integrated whole and each division plays a very important part to keep the whole thing functioning to sirvive. There is even a section devoted to captured non-human bacteria in the gut which differs between individuals called the microbiome and this can have a striking effect on the function of the brain. There is no boss, merely a reasonably well functioning community.
The brain certain is the body's boss, akin to the CEO, while the digestive system is more like the company owners. These entities entirely control the rest of the body, hence the term "central nervous system", unlike primitive animals like echinoderms who, have a decentralised nerve net that makes all body parts aside from organs "equal". If you cut the arm off a starfish, the other arms are unaffected. the a limb from a brained animal and the entire body system is profoundly affected.
Meanwhile, brained animals can survive losing even all four limbs and also various organs, but the loss of the brain is pivotal.
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- JamesOfSeattle
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