> Date: Wed, 6 May 2009 11:33:52 -0700
> Subject: Re: Temporary Reality
> From: daddycaylor.domain.name.hidden
> To: everything-list.domain.name.hidden
>
>
> On May 4, 6:13 am, Stathis Papaioannou <stath....domain.name.hidden> wrote:
>> 2009/5/4 <daddycay....domain.name.hidden>:
>>
>>
>>
>>> I agree that religion, and a lot of other stuff, produces a lot of
>>> fake certainty. Not good. So that implies that atheism is the way to
>>> go?
>>
>>> But doesn't it make sense that if God were personal, and a human
>>> person like us could relate to him/her as a person, then that would
>>> result in expanding our consciousness?
>>
>> Perhaps. But saying that something would be nice doesn't have any any
>> bearing whatsoever on whether it is so.
>>
>> --
>> Stathis Papaioannou
>
> The purpose of my questions was to question the suggested advantage of
> using atheism as the [preferred] fixed point from which to view the
> universe [by a person]. As part of the process of calling Kim's
> suggestion into question, I'm suggesting the the consideration of the
> possibility that the fact that we are persons is more profound than
> simply being inescapable, but is fundamental.
>
What do you mean when you say that *we* are "persons", though? The word can carry different hidden connotations for different people. Would you say that a deterministic A.I. computer program could be a "person" or does the word suggest free will or a soul? Does the word suggest we have some sort of essential self that remains unchanged over time, in contrast to the view of the self as an ever-changing dynamical process that's suggested by modern neuroscience (and perhaps also by Buddhism)? Do "persons" have natural boundaries or can there be something subjective about where one person ends and another begins--for example, would it be wrong in any absolute sense to view my left and right brain as two separate persons cooperating and sharing information by a high-bandwidth channel? If technology allowed different human brains to share information in the same way, a la the "Borg" in Star Trek, could the resulting collective mind be seen as a single person? Some mystical/idealist philosophies might say that our minds are already all connected on a sort of subconscious or implicit level, and that "God" is a name for this sort of collective self shared by all of us...I sometimes think that something like this could be true in some sort of transhumanist "Omega Point" theory in which intelligence is destined to expand towards infinite complexity, with every "smaller" mind existing both as an entity in itself but also recreated within "larger" minds further in the future (I offered some speculations about this in the context of reconciling the ASSA with quantum immortality at
http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list/msg/988c1148d589747d )
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Received on Wed May 06 2009 - 15:47:34 PDT