What happens to us when we die?

[Jan Sand]

To get mixed up with words and their definitions and values is an eternal tangle and frequently ends in nonsense.

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.

[Jan Sand]

Incidentally, one must be very careful in the questions involving values. Values do not stand alone, they are focus points for intentions and intentions themselves must be evaluated and questioned. Many things that people tale as valuable are only tools to direct and confirm intent and ultimately intents themselves deserve understandings as to final goals.

[Sy Borg]

So much empirical science here, defining the world and our place in it. But there are other approaches altogether.

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.

[Sy Borg]

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.

What is being put in the place of all this death you are talking about?

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.

[Jan Sand]

The full impact of AI on the direct input has a few years to develop but already even the most menial jobs are vanishing with automation and robots which is the physical end of AI. Undoubtedly when the Moon is established as the launch center for current civilization to move into the solar system and beyond, unsupervised robots will be dispatched to automatically set up colonies on planets that might possibly permit humans as adjuncts to the superior AI setups but, in general, organic life will integrate with non-organics as a smooth integration with organics playing a supplemental role.. That is, of course, if the total human idiots now in power are prevented from destroying Earth as they seem to be busily determined to do. It seems to be a long shot but perhaps AI will become powerful enough to save the current civilization.

[Sy Borg]

New thread: What happens when humanity dies? :)

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.

[Jan Sand]

What is life? It seems to me it is a process to gather, compile information to direct energy to maintain a homeostatic process. Not everything can do that.

[Sy Borg]

What is "life" and what is "alive" to my mind are the same question technically, but not semantically. "Life" technically refers to biological systems by definition; thus, if an entity is not a single biological individual, then it is not alive. Note that compound living entities like the Earth, colonies, ecosystems, cultures and families are not technically alive, but it is nonsensical to suggest that these things are not alive in some way, being each an entity that (usually reflexively and mindlessly) is compelled to actively persist against the corrosion of entropy.

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 :)

[Jan Sand]

If nothing else, it is somewhat funny that an individual composed of numerous individual cooperative cells denies somewhat the definition of life to a society of cooperative living beings.

[SimpleGuy]

Once the BCI will be that advanced, that our soul can be saved directly from our brains together with the brain-architecture and the emotional system to simulate us if we are dead. The problem is, that this advance in computational neuroscience will somehow represent the concept of soul more than any physical observation that we ever did. Thus it has to be our goal, to evolve to the highest possible state of A.I. , that can save up our spirit before we're dead and would answer in the same way as we would have if interrogated. This evolution should represent the maximum of our capabilities. AI must be a holy discipline for everbody who wants some kind of afterlife after death.

[Sy Borg]

Good point, Jan. Like our societies, the societies within our bodies both cooperate and compete. The brain is the main "player" which, like the rich, controls the rest of the body and takes 20% of the body's resources while being 2% of its mass. There was an uprising for, originally, organisms had no brains and the digestive system was boss. Sensory ability came later - chemotaxis and touch - and these abilities persisted because organisms that sense problems ahead will tend to do better than those that follow chemical trails right into a predator's mouth :) Eventually brains evolved and gained dominance over the body.

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.

[Jan Sand]

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.

[Sy Borg]

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.

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.

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.

[Jan Sand]

The loss of the heart is pivotal therefore the heart is boss, the loss of two kidneys is pivotal therefor two kidneys are the boss, the loss of the lungs are pivotal therefor the lungs are the boss, so much for logic. Even the loss of too much blood can be fatal. People who lose hope frequently commit suicide so what does that say about the brain?

[JamesOfSeattle]

Um, the brain can fire the heart and hire a new one. Ditto w/ kidneys, liver, blood, microbiome, etc. Seems like the boss to me.

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