Scientific possibility of an afterlife? ...of somesort

peaceboi wrote: »

Sorry, correct link for Dr.Peter Fenwick http://youtu.be/-6kDMl6N3C4

How about a brief summary of what he says not just a link?

shane9689 wrote: »

yes, a repeat life....but one in which everything is the exact same up to a point...so if take it from an atheist stand point, then it is me! because what else am i other than a collection of matter

We are not just a collection of matter! We are our thoughts, knowledge, experiences, loves, hates and feelings collected over a lifetime.

shane9689 wrote: »

everyone wants there to be one)

Well I certainly don't

It is not possible for an intelligence to exist outside of a medium capable of hosting it. Our intelligence exists within the structures of our brain and nervous system.

A computers intelligence exists within the structures of the physical computer and the virtual machines that are created in the software.

There is no plausible mechanism for a soul to exist outside of the physical body, however, because of our advancing technology, in the distant future it should be possible for humans to create computers capable of hosting our intelligence, basically brain emulators where we can download our consciousness through some kind of interface

The first person to download his/her brain to an artificial computer will be the first person to ever have an 'afterlife'

GCU Flexible Demeanour wrote: »

Depends on your definition of "person". I doubt the process you describe would amount to the transfer of a consciousness.

What is a person? What is the definition of death?

Death used to be defined as the moment the heart stopped, this was before we had the ability to restart the heart or put people on life support machines or transplant organs.
Now the definition of death is much more difficult to nail down. We can have people who have total brain inactivity except for the brain stem and can survive for decades on life support machines, or even just with feeding tubes and nursing care. The brain stem is capable of maintaining bodily functions but without self awareness or any higher cognitive function.

I would define someone in a persistent vegetative state to be dead as a 'person' because to me, the personage of someone is linked to their cognition more than it is to their corporeality.

If we can make a machine that can successfully emulate the brain and host a persons consciousness then I would have no problems in calling that a 'person'. There would be a legal and philosophical minefield in terms of the consequences of duplicating this personality, but regardless, each instance of this consciousness would be a 'person'.

Furthermore, artificial intelligence would also be entitled to the status of personhood once it reaches a level of self awareness such that it has an interest in it's own welfare.

I can see this merger between the mind and technology to be the way that humans will ultimately explore the universe. Would you volunteer to download your consciousness to a computer that will be installed on a probe/rover and sent to explore space? For you as a human, you would not have any of the experiences of the explorer, but you would also have a deep empathetic connection to what the explorer will experience/suffer on his journey. (I would only agree on two conditions. 1. there is a self destruct option, and 2, there is a hibernation mode that can alleviate the boredom of interstellar space travel)

nagirrac wrote: »

What you are describing is generally known as the theory of Eternal Return. Put simply this states that time is not liner but cyclical and that everything that occurs will continue to repeat itself in cycles for eternity. It was specifically this idea that led Nietzsche to his philosophy that existence is ultimately pointless and absurd, as we are just destined to repeat the same lives over and over for eternity. A somewhat horrendous thought if you think about it, even if there are specific life events that one might consider well worth it

Never heard that phrase before, but the block universe theory basically says everything that can happen not only will, but already has happened. Time is basically an illusion, the universe is similar to a movie reel we perceive time as flowing because we can only experience 1 frame at a time, the present, but the past and the future are just as real, we just don't inhabit them, we have done (the past) and we will do (the future) and so we perceive time as flowing, but to an outside observer we are just frame hopping. The downside of this theory is that we have no control over anything that we do - it's all set in stone.
Basically the lingering doubt I have regarding some god type figure (probably about 0.1%) is that I can't see how free will could exist without one, and I just don't like the idea that it doesn't exist at all. But it certainly looks unlikely to if you consider the evidence!

smacl wrote: »

Not really. If you consider a neural network as being a class of state machine, you need not just to construct an identical network, you also need to restore it to an identical state. e.g. if we are playing a game on a computer, and turn the computer off without saving the game, turning the computer back on will not restore the game. The problem with comparing the state of the brain to that of a computer is that the brain operates with analogue variables (electrical levesl, neurotransmitter chemical make up, etc..) whereas most computers deal with discrete variables. This means that while the brain can reasonably be considered a state machine, it cannot necessarily be considered a finite state machine, as the number of states is infinite on the basis of the infinite variability of analogue variables.

This is where I have problems with the notion that, given appropriate technology, laws of determinism suggest you could store and recreate something like the human brain in a given state, to a level of accuracy that it would be include exact memories and psychological make up when restored. It is quite possible that this is not technically achievable, in much the same way is that it is possible that faster than light travel will never be achievable. At the same time, I don't doubt we'll come up with an artificial intelligence in the near future that will include persistence to the degree that it will effectively be immortal, but just not human.

I wouldn't discount the possibility that future computers will incorporate many of the same features that give organic brains such flexibility and the ability to perform so well with a tiny fraction of the energy it takes to power silicon based technology

It's likely that the computer architecture we have today will be nothing like the computer architecture that's common in 2114. For a start, silicon will be replaced with graphene which will give us a massive performance and efficiency boost (overheating is not an issue with graphene which has been demonstrated to have the ability to 'self cool' due to it's extremely low electrical resistance. In the meantime, we're also running experiments on how to re-program organic cells to get them to perform tasks for us. We can already remotely control small insects by directly manipulating their brain. In 50 to 100 years, I can see organic computer components that are capable of the kinds of fuzzy logic that brains can do but computers find so difficult. First we will simply hijack the biological processes to do our bidding without necessarily fully understanding how they work, but eventually, we will be able to reverse engineer them and replicate them using materials that are easier for us to work with and more robust (we don't have to worry about path dependent evolution, we can make things more efficient by clever engineering.)

GarIT wrote: »

With a lottery every time you produce a result your chances increase of getting on specific result, in the Irish lottery there is a 1 in 8 million chance of any single combination coming up, if I do it twice there is a 1 in 4 million

Actually, if you do the lottery twice, you'll have a 2 in 8 million chance of winning, not a 1 in 4 million chance

Everything runs in circles, even our very Universe is birth, maturity and death on a repeating cycle.

There is no reason to believe that our selves wont follow the same pattern.

Also, as we develop AI we are finding that the collection of electronics are taking on human like forms and attitudes that were not programmed for ~ speculation is a chemical computer could become life as we know it.

Funny thing is we are in fact already a chemical computer and our bodies are largely dependent on chemicals, so theoretically, it's not too far a summation to suggest that as we evolve further, we might not actually need our physical form at all.

I take all this as a matter of fact, what I ponder sometimes is this going to happen at all, has it already happened in our past and can every living person on the planet do this, or are some permanently trapped. ?

Just a few thoughts on points raised:

Time might be infinite but the matter and energy of the universe isn't. The universe is expanding and going cold all the time. Once heat death occurs nothing changes ever again, and everything gets so far away from everything else that galaxies don't exist anymore. A few billion years is by no means infinite, and it is in fact a very short time when you consider the ludicrously improbable chain of events that would be required to recreate a human brain in its exact configuration.

Even if that were not the case it does not mean that everything that can potentially happen would happen. The universe could go on infinitely and never see you or anything like you again. Even if we assume it could do so: It's a very deep rabbit-hole. If you will get perfect copies of yourself then you will get inaccurate copies as well. The you where you remember being Hitler. The you where you were a serial killer. The you where you were abandoned as a child. the you where you grew up in Mexico. Are any of these any less of an afterlife than the one you imagine? Do any of them matter? There is no reason to believe there would be any continuity of consciousness.

There's nothing fundamentally different to machine intelligence compared to human intelligence, beyond current limitations. We are nothing more than an adaptive set of behaviours, behaviours that could be copied or approximated easily in a sufficiently advanced virtual environment. You could posit that a machine, however complex, could only ever emulate consciousness rather than truly experience it - but then again: we assume that other human beings are experiencing consciousness as we do simply because of their outward appearance of it, why not the same for a machine? It would be rather small minded to assume the fact that our brain-computers are wet makes all the difference.

Finally: You can't 'upload' your brain anywhere. Data doesn't move, it is copied. You copy/paste a brain, you don't cut/paste - unless you shoot yourself in the head immediately afterwards but that doesn't seem productive. You create a digital copy of your brain, nothing more. Potentially that copy could experience sentience if your virtual environment if well designed, but you don't 'go' there.

GarIT wrote: »

Our thoughts, emotions, memories are all physical things, how could a physical storage system be mapped onto something that is not physical.

My own thoughts on that is we are possessed soon after birth and that being is then you or I.

I know some religions like to consider this soon after birth phenomenon as the arrival of a holy spirit of some sort, so the idea is not new by any means.

If there were to be any factor of this, it suggests that a personality could exist out of a host, but this also suggests that a time period is evolved and I have no thoughts on that part.