Maybe science isn’t the answer

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If it wasn't for science, we may have never come up with vaccines that prevent life-threatening diseases that used to kill many people or leave them crippled, like polio.

We might have all died of water-born diseases a long time ago if we didn't learn how to treat water in order to kill dangerous bacteria. Cholera was once every pioneer's worst nightmare.

And then there's indoor plumbing. I just can't say enough how lucky we are to have it. Too bad that there are literally billions of other people in the world who don't.

Didn't militarisation start in the first 15 years of the 20th century among all the colonial powers? the Kaiser was industrialising Germany from the 1890s so naturally R&D into military applications of air flight was being implemented from the time the Wright brothers successfully flew their Kittyhawk.

Believe it or not but I get anxiety watching period films which skirt the obvious trips to the bathroom....oh wait, what bathroom

I think that perspective is going to change in current in future generations when instead of weighing nonexistence against eternal paradise they're weighing it against thousands of incarnations on earth as the most plausible alternative - at which point nonexistence is what they'd hope and pray for (well... figuratively pray).

Maybe. My own feeling about the way things are going is that the secular "out like a candle flame" theory of death will eventually prevail. Though currently, although atheism is getting more popular, remarkably few people seem willing to drop the notion that there's something cosmic out there that's an alternative to just vanishing, so you may be right. Nonexistence seems to really scare people. It scares me, but my logic tells me that's what it'll be.

I might be a uniquely jaded individual but from my vantage point - what reality is here on the ground - 'something cosmic' would be considerably worse than not existing after death. What scares me more is I have had experiences that I can't explain via selection bias or apophenia that would suggest that this whole thing is very Dawkins'esque 99.99% of the time until the physical world starts behaving like an information conduit in ways one wouldn't expect (ie. the occasional wild - key words *intricate and complex* Jungian external stuff).

I tend to doubt that we're truly in a 'dead matter' universe for those reasons but - it's still possible that reality could be less consistent than we'd imagine, even strangely haunted in some ways, and we could still cease to exist at death because whatever 'that' is isn't what we are (and TBH I'm hoping it's the case that we do still cease to exist because the alternative, IMHO, is eternal Darwinian hell - ie. making one's grappling with lies, deception, Machiavellianism, an
eternal rather than an 80 or 90 year stressor).

Last edited by techstepgenr8tion on 07 Oct 2024, 5:29 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Nonexistence sounds to me like such a relief, especially compared to the alternative of going on forever in some form, like reincarnation or Heaven.

Or a situation where we're eternally sticking each other over dominance, where decency and self awareness is for slaves and psychopathy is for the strong, a place where the strong do what they can and the weak, decent, or simply 'people who have lives' and don't spend every waking moment figuring out how to weaponize themselves to dominate others suffer what they must - no thank you, give me eternal deletion.

My own limited Hermetic and Jungian practices are a bit like Pascal's mysticism, not in a heaven vs. hell concern but a 'just in case I die and find out my consciousness still exists - I don't want to be the sweetest / freshest thing on the cell block'.

From people's recollections from NDEs, the entities on the "other side" are actually quite caring and helpful.

I'd say watch / listen to more NDE accounts. 'Caring and helpful' might fit so long as you remember - in about the most useless and manipulative way possible (and when it comes to life review - add gaslighting).

A lot of the NDE accounts match experiences people taking ayahuasca or experiencing oxygen starvation to the brain. there is also a religious element for those who are christian. I would be interested to see if hindus or buddhists have the same?

The main difference seems to be that DMT is more skeletal / geometric / kaleidoscopic (see all the geometries Andres Gomez Emilsson studies) where NDE's are more... padded... where what's there is more surreal but more 'natural' in tambour? It could be multiple chemicals with DMT as one of the structuring threads. It's like DMT is more Alex Grey where NDE's are more Dali.

They both can have a way of mucking with reality outside of and after the experience (ie. sharp / high-content synchronicities for example) and that raises a whole different question - are we 'hallucinating' (in the Anile Seth sense) our waking reality so deeply that we can even maneuver people to places they aren't to say things they didn't or is that crushed too when you ask the person who said or did the uncanny thing and they're like 'Yeah, what about it?'. That throws us against stuff like the idea that our individual umwelts are literally their own universes with only tenuous sharing of information across umwelts (yet somehow we rarely, unless under high stress situations like giving a police report after a violent crime, do we have any trouble agreeing on where physical objects are at or their characteristics). It's enough to do one's head in for sure because there are this many contradictions and this is probably why most people tap out at either 'Heaven is real!' or 'Plural of anecdote is not evidence'. It's like we're getting into the kind of territory Chomsky talked about several years ago where it might be real and there but it's either not humanly accessible to understanding or we just have too few pieces of the puzzle (like five and some edges on a 500 piece) to where it may be a long time before enough things stack up.

There's also Donald Hoffman and Chetan Prakash's 'Conscious Realism' which seems like the most intuitively credible - ie. granular Darwinian idealism with stacking functionalist properties and multiple realizability (ie. a cell can have it's own consciousness and simultaneously be part of an organ's experience and the organ part of the brain's experience).

^^^ Much of the theories pivot over a specific binary

Is consciousness a figment of our imagination (byproducts of our nuerons firing) OR
Is consciousness real and our "self" can exist outside our bodies?

I kinda think of option 3....our self is linked to our body but we may be able to project ourselves outside of the body, but that our perception of self can't be separated from our bodies.

I think once we are actually dead (and not coming back) I find it hard to see how some type of consciousness can be linked anymore to our long decomposed body. the buddist belief is that our life force returns to a type of universal consciousness (kind of like the force in star wars).

I think we may be SOL on really understanding it until we can find something in nature analogous enough to cover most of the contact points and tell us something about consciousness that we could never have seen from our own direct observations of our own consciousness. The problem is we don't, at least that I'm aware, have any such analogous process to work with which really limits our ability to do proper inspection of it because we have no idea how to see it (and while I think it's way too early to say this for certain - there's a possibility that it's tacked in perpendicular from outside this system, thinking of the 'transcendent' in Forrest Landry's Imminent Metaphysics).

One additional note - Nick Lane had an IAI where they followed the trail of the effects of anesthesia and to the best they can tell preventing cells from getting oxygen, via anesthetic, caused the same sort of shutdown / paralysis that appears to happen in humans under anesthesia. Will they be able to open any doors with that particular angle of elimination? Hard call and it remains to be seen.

For eliminative materialism it's always seemed incoherent / hand-wavy, sort of 'materialism of the gaps' from the standpoint that being conscious feels like you're in something like an invisible control room, tasked with custodianship / guardianship of your mind and body, and so it feels like consciousness makes what manual adjustments that it's allowed to for both keeping internal homeostasis (or restoring it after damage) as well as linking outside to inside in order to dock to opportunities or assess and avoid threats (IMHO if it really does none of that it shouldn't be there otherwise parsimony's out the window). I'd also love to know how functionalism with multiple realizability (as I described - multiple reuse of consciousness at different levels) gets handled by eliminativists or whether they just ignore that possibility. Consciousness feels almost like what you'd think of in the Javascript rxjs library as a kind of observable but instead of just piping things through itself and keeping a memory of what piped through it has additional regulatory requirements that it has to free-wing from whatever data it has available to it. It's one thing to say all of that's true but our sense of the surrounding context is so far off that 'illusion' would be a better word for it (I still don't know what the specific claim would be along those lines) but to claim that this whole drive-train is an illusion and doesn't exist - that feels like we're breaking out Officer Barbrady from South Park to tell people 'Nothing to see here - move along'. If it's the later and if it's as I describe that's politics / realpolitik, not science.

Yes the black box concept of the mind (not being able to verify what happens beyond our conscious thoughts) halted any further (and interesting) directions taken by Freud and Jung.

Yes this is interesting. the two times I was under a GA I could only remember waking up in my hospital bed. Alas no wonderful journeys in the spirit realm for me.