DEATH AND THE PURSUIT OF ETERNITY - Part III

DIGGING UP THE GRAVEYARD

We never seem satisfied with just being who we are. If the answer to why we exist has no satisfactory answer, many opt for answering a more verifiable question, from whence do we come?  People can spend a great deal of time and money tracing their ancestry and genome. We search for identity by looking at the past; a past that leads to me - a past that somehow tells me who I am.  It seems that people of every race, culture, and lifestyle are drawn to a history that explains who they are. We crave for detail on any particular ancestor. We want to know if we share similar views, have similar habits, all in an effort to understand "me."

What must be disappointing to some is that the further back one goes, one's particular ancestry is no longer uniquely one's own.  We find that much of who we are connected by lineage to a host of others currently alive and well.  My family attended a reunion of descendants to a distant Bavarian great-great... grandfather born over two hundred years ago who migrated to this country.  Although not everyone could make it, the over one hundred people who did included many people I didn't know existed and who I could pass on the street as a complete stranger. Those who shared my distant great grandfather were people of mixed race and ethnicity, including Asians, Blacks, and Hispanics.

Many people would like to know if they are related to royalty.

The answer to that question is quite simple:

Yes - eventually.

When I was younger, I had a strong interest in knowing who my ancestors were. I remember my father telling me, "Don't dig into the past. You never know when you'll dig up a horse thief." His intuition was correct.  The likelihood of having a direct ancestor who was a murderer, prostitute, or thief is a more likely occurrence than being directly related to some historical celebrity.

This, of course, is not to mention the countless everyday Joes and Marys who made few waves in the fabric of history but probably contributed the most to who we are. In essence we are all mutts, a mixed bag of genetics that we largely share with every other person.

The fun thing about evolution, in my opinion, is it's randomness. As alike as we humans are, no two humans are totally alike, once you really get to know them. We may have our doppelgangers, but there are so many variations of the same that we cannot be totally the same. As such, I am convinced we are not the products of intelligent design by some cosmic manipulator of energy and matter who would have mass produced us, but rather we are the products of a random creative power that exposes the beauty of being from the bubbling chaos from which life emerges and takes on myriad forms.

We are works of art!

THE  AMORTAL

The first time I ran across the term  amortal was in Yuval Harari's book "Sapiens." It seems an apt description of those who are unwilling to risk death.  The amortal appears to represent a small minority of people who are unaffected by a sense of lineage, which recognizes that our existence is, in part, the result of our ancestors no longer existing.

Think about this for a moment:

The longer we live the less children are being born.  Yes the population of the world is growing, but not in areas were life expectancy is lengthening.

The single child family is increasing, which means that couples are not being numerically replaced by their offspring; particularly in developed nations. While there are many factors for this phenomenon, one of them is that people in socially developed nations are less dependent on the need for offspring to accommodate them in their old age.  The age of retirement is going up in some countries as the state takes on the responsibility of providing for their aging populations and longevity is the result.

I find it ironic that those who are seeking a path to amortality are people who describe themselves as evolutionists; individuals who would likely argue against the notion of an intelligent designer. Yet, here they are attempting to merge humans and their machines as the next phase in human evolution and acting as would be intelligent designers themselves.

THEODICIDE

Killing God to become a god seems to be the objective of the unimaginative, intellectual designing would be amortals, who seemingly possess an underlying fear of life's randomness. They do not want to be works of art, but rather a carbon/silicon hybrid species that will likely lack the creative randomness found in the human imagination.

It is in the imagination of our metaphorical hearts, not the concrete mind, that is linked with the creative imagination of what is called God, the random ("My ways are not your ways") creating force of all that is.  For the amortal, the purpose of understanding the universe is not to find an answer to why we exist but rather how to control, harness, and extract its secrets in order to manipulate its power to ensure their personal longevity.  They do not see in this pursuit that they are acting from a sense of selfishness and are unwilling to let go of the life they have not willed in the first place. 

The more we know, the more we think we can go it alone. For many, the concept of God is dead or, if not dead, is dying every time there is a new discovery about what makes us tick.  For me, every time we discover what makes us tick and what our universe is made of the God concept expands and new avenues of exploration are opened into wonderment of creation.

ARROGANCE

Pride goes before destruction, says the book of Proverbs (16:18).  This is not a prediction.  It is an observation of an age old problem we humans are prone to.

Enhancing and being able to make and replace living organs to preserve and sustain the quality of natural life as long as possible is a noble cause.  I see nothing ethically or morally dissonant in that pursuit.  But that is far different than making robots or instilling and enslaving a human-like mind in a cyborg to make a better functioning machine or a better functioning human, which strikes me as anti-evolutionary and a form of bio-mechanical slavery.  And yes - if done successfully, intelligent machines endowed with a human thought process similar to our current process will be prone to rebellion, just as we are.  We cannot extract that element from our intellect and remain intelligent.

As smart as we have become, we remain our worst enemy.  We are prone to self destructive behaviors because we have never been able to totally reject the reptilian mind that prompts us to steal the fire of the gods and eat forbidden fruit, nor are we capable of doing so by sheer intellectual prowess.  Our pride, as it has in the past, may prove to be our undoing.

We are at a nexus regarding who we are and where we're going as a species.  Humans have the ability to choose a course regarding where we are going and what we become within the limited confines of our earthbound existence.  Death is a necessary part of life as it ultimately makes way for new life.  I am mindful of this every time I walk on an ocean beach, over the calcified remains of sea life from which we emerged and when I breathe the same air that sustained the life of those before me.  The whole of humanity's brief history is a fabric of experiential learning in which every human who breathes our air contributes at least a stitch or two to its composition.

The abundance of life on this planet is truly amazing. I am comfortable with the concept of a wild, random, creative force, I recognize as God, that takes the elements of chaos, the lifeless matter and energizes it, resurrects it for a time to create works of living art that I have the privilege of being and the privilege to enjoy at this time.  What comes next I'm content to leave to the creative imagination that gave me life in the first place. 

Until next time, stay faithful.

DEATH AND THE PURSUIT OF ETERNITY - Part II

LIFE

Being born was not a choice any of us personally had a say in. Our being conceived was, at the very least, a decision consciously or unconsciously made by our parents who then choose to see it through and, barring any natural event which could have ended our birth, we entered this world whether we wanted to or not.  Life gets thrust upon us as we get thrust into life.

Most of us grow up embracing life - no matter what  it brings.  While we have no choice in being born, the conditions of one's birth is not the sole predictor of how life will turn out because choice plays a role in our development.   Although our personal choices are limited by our faculties and environment, we have choice within the parameter of being human.

The human mind, as it currently is, with all of its perceived limitations and weaknesses is and has been the single most important tool we humans possess in meeting our personal and collective needs. It permits us to adapt to a variety of situations that life throws our way.

The hope is with bioengineering and the ability to merge with AI technology some limitations will be lessened if not eliminated in the future, but as pointed out in another post, the human mind is readily addicted to ease and can inadvertently put a hold on the natural evolution of being.

As new and as innovative all of  technological advances appear, there is a sense we've been down this path before.  I believe the role of theism and its mythic stories is intended, in part, to prevent us from getting ahead of ourselves, to provide a paradigm for asking important life-sustaining questions that guide us in finding answers to help preserve and sustain natural life on this planet.

In the pursuit of eternal life, the question becomes if this is the only life to be lived?

As much as I like this life and don't want to die, is there more to life than this life?

For all practical purposes and from a purely personal perspective this life was a complete surprise.  Of course, I have no recall of being born but reflecting on the fact that I exist conjures up a sense of surprise.

Do more surprises await?

THE FUNCTION OF DEATH

We humans have a strange relationship with death.   We personify it as a god or a god-like creature or force that gathers us at the time of our demise.  In Christianity, death is personified as the "enemy." In Abrahamic monotheism, the belief is that God's intent was for humans to live forever. The only reason we die is because our first parents screwed up.  According to the Christian doctrine of original sin, we've been screwed ever since.

The concept of eternal life on this planet in Abrahamic monotheism comes from the warning our mythic first parents would know death the moment they ate the forbidden fruit of knowledge.  Eternal life on this planet  is a deduction made from that warning.  The creation story of humankind is a myth telling us why we experience suffering, not why we die.  Death becomes part of that suffering; something we worry about and some spend a lifetime trying to avoid.

Yet, this and stories like it tease the mind with the thought that we have been deprived, if not robbed of our rightful status of being immortal.  The fear of death is so strong that we live in denial which takes on many forms.

I believe death is, always has been, and always will be a part of life as the end state of this life - that life in this universe is finite.  Planets die, stars die, galaxies get swallowed up by their dark holes. Death is a function of existence.  It is nothing more or nothing less than that.  It is not a punishment, in and of itself, like causing someone to die can be.  Death is being dead.  What happens after death, if anything, is anybody's guess.

Death is the end of physical existence, the end of physical suffering and the mental angst associated with it. That much we know - and there is value in knowing that death serves that function.  The reservation most have about death is whether the mind or soul dies.

Culturally, these have been treated as animating and identifying properties of the physical being which separates from the physical body at the time of its death.   Mind and soul are not necessarily synonymous terms, as soul is sometimes considered one's life force and mind one's collective sense of being.

As the mind possesses what appears to be both organic and inorganic properties, it's hard to determine if our thoughts and memories die with our brains or if such things are being stored in some sort of cosmic cloud that can be accessed after death; much like information gathered on a computer can be regained should that computer die and it's information accessed by different or new computer from the internet's cloud.

Theoretically, as long as this universe exists the resonance of our being remains traceable.  The past is always detectable and is why scientists can study the origins of the universe.  While the mass of the universe expands and changes, it remains constant according to Lavosier's conservation of mass.

The question is whether thoughts and memories have mass.  If thoughts are observable as energized particles that can be traced in neural imaging they, theoretically at least, have an equivalency with mass, or is memory and thought merely conveyed by energy?

My point is that becoming an individual life form is a unique emerging of a universal constant that was present from the dawn of time.  What we are made of may be thought of as eternal matter and energy, existing at the dawn of time.  In essence there is no new mass or new energy, just new fluctuating manifestations of it; such as, ourselves.

While the universe is composed of constants, it does not act consistently.  Its mass evolves, devolves, expands and contracts as it generates and degenerates energy.  Life and death are part of this universal process.

The question is whether in the short span of our universal existence something "other" is taking place. The human mind hints at such a possibility as evident in our ability to imagine.

Where does the energy of life go when it is expended?

Does it remain constant like mass?

"Being" appears to be a universal constant, what happens to the "beingness" -  the energy that manifests the identity of individual beings that cease to be?

Are there dimensions of being that this stage we call life is totally incapable of perceiving?

Is death merely a threshold as some imagine it to be, the start of a new beginning?

Until next time, stay faithful.

DEATH AND THE PURSUIT OF ETERNITY - Part I

Before getting into this post, I have a couple of book recommendations to make.  If you have not already done so, I strongly suggest reading Yuval Harari's "Sapiens - A Brief history of  Humankind" and "Homo Deus - A Brief History of Tomorrow." These frank and insightful books will challenge one's thinking on a number of subjects.   If you find what I write about a little interesting, you will find what he writes about immensely interesting and worth taking the time to read. 

* * * * * * * * * * 

This is the first part of what may be a two or three part series of posts on the topic of Death and Eternity.  In these posts I will ponder the perennial human fascination with death and eternal life in the light of scientific and technological advances that are likely to result in a merger between humankind and the machines we humans make, which is known by some as "Singularity."  If you have read my last post on Artificial Intelligence, you know that I have, as do others, misgivings about this adventure while being fascinated by the possibilities such advances possess in improving our finite lives.

THE NORMALACY OF DEATH

Death interests me because someday I will die.  It's personal.  I'm intrigued by it because I also know that some want to find ways to avoid death by merging with AI and robotic technologies which theoretically, at least, can keep people not only alive, but also vastly improved physically and intellectually than ever in human history.  It all sounds like science fiction, but it's not.  The thought that life can be eternalized makes me wonder about the value we give to natural life and the importance, if any, we give to death in the course of a natural life.

Like most, I don't want to die, but I also recognize an intuitive feeling that living forever may not be the best thing to aim for in a rather chaotic and changing universe which suggests a finite nature rather than an infinite one.   It makes me wonder about the concept of eternity, whether such a thing actually exists and what, exactly, does eternity mean ?  Is it normal to want live forever or is the desire that some have to live forever as human/machine blend something our reptilian drive to survive and our reasoning ability have come up with to help us cope and stave off the reality of death?

CROSSING THE BORDER

I don't know what happens to people after they die or what will happen to me.  I don't think what happens, if anything, is dependent on what one believes.  I don't put much faith in beliefs about what happens once one is dead.  We really don't know anything about what it is to be dead beyond us living beings being able to observe a truly lifeless corpse decompose, releasing its basic atomic elements to the universe from which all things originate. Whatever held these elements together as a person, that animated it, energized it, and made it an individual with a unique personality is missing. The lights have gone out and no one is home.  I know.  I've watched people die, even held their hands as they passed away in a hospital bed and the warmth of life turned cold in my hand.

Of course we are free to speculate all we want about what happens to one's sense of self after death. We know what happens to the body, but what happens to the energy and personality that was the life of an individual?  There has to be more to a living person than an animated shell of atomic particles that give shape and presence to the person.  Isn't there?  Is there?

I don't know.

There's an intuition that results from our collective, historical experiences that death, itself, is nothing more than a transition from one type of being into a whole new way of being that is independent of our carbon based physical existence. There are ambiguous hints in nature that lead us to such intuitive thoughts.   Perhaps, the desire to live forever by merging with the finite machines we make is the equivalent of behaving like a cosmic juvenile.  It's one thing not wanting to die. I don't want to go through the process of dying, but it seems to be an entirely different thing wanting to live forever.

Becoming a superhuman cyborg might lessen physical suffering but one would have to deal with a degree of intellectual anguish or systems angst if one's system started to malfunction.  The fact is nothing in the known universe is indestructible. Things might last for what seems like an eternity, but the universe strongly indicates that there is nothing in it that can be defined as truly eternal.

TIME AND ETERNITY

Knowing the age of the universe clues us to the fact that there was a point before time, a point of nonexistence - a point of nothing - including time.  Before time, was there an eternity?  After time, will there be an eternity?

In essence, eternity is nothing more than a measure of ongoing time, and time, ironically, is the measurement of decay. Time, as a force, is always being expended from a point of anticipation to a point of fulfillment. I believe it was the ancient Greeks who posited that the future is always behind us and that past is always in front of us.

So where did the concept of eternity come from?

It would appear that the concept of eternity is a deduction made from observing the passing of time; in that, as living things pass away other things remain for a time and new living things come into being.  This repetitious life cycle; of the birth and death of individual life forms, demonstrates a pattern that is ongoing, that is eternal. Nothing physical that we know of is eternal.  The concept of eternity teases the imagination by asking what if one could break this repetitious life cycle pattern and not die?

ARTIFICIAL IMMORTALITY

Immortality, the realm of the gods, theoretically will be within reach of some human beings, but what is the price one would pay to become an immortal super-human?  Who will qualify?  At present, the general consensus is only those who could afford to pay for immortality would qualify.  In other words evolution will become a matter of economy, turning the natural progression of the survival of the fittest into the survival of the richest.   

Let me say, I don't see the merger between humankind and machine as evolution, but rather as an attempt  to augment a select few.  Will it result in a super-human species? 

Perhaps, but if so, it will be a species caught in the amber of time.

Death, I suspect,  will remain as a choice, unless other natural forces or other super-human specie situations cause it.   Yes - death as a choice is something I can see being made if, for no other reason then when one tires of being an "artificial" immortal. 

A merged carbon and silicon human life form will not last forever, no matter how durable they are made. In this caustic, oxygenated planet everything eventually deteriorates and needs parts replacement and updating.  At what point will the natural human disappear, leaving only an artificial artifact - a robotic zombie - a device resembling a dead species?   It seems that such a merger will end human evolution. 

We humans are not good at species preservation. Our innovations historically have led to ruination of life rather than sustaining the variety life that exists or has existed on this planet.  Yes - there have been remarkable advances in medicine and smart prosthetics that have made human life immensely improved.   Prolonging life is not a bad thing as long as it is not done at the expense eliminating the variety of life forms on this planet. The fact is we are already merging with the technologies of our making. 

Science is making us rethink existence on many levels.  AI technologies and robotics are changing how we do business and manufacturing. They will, I believe, force us to establish a new economic system that will be used globally.  It already is influencing philosophy and theology in subtle ways.  It is forcing us to rethink what it means to be alive.  As advanced as we have become scientifically and technologically, we have yet to find a way to tame our impulse for destruction and distortion.  Putting that embedded factor of the human mind in a super human cyborg is something to give us pause.

Until next time, stay faithful