Blog post4/17/16
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Every person is an experiment into seeing what consciousness a particular structure and functioning of matter will produce over time. Duplicating this experiment closely enough should produce the same consciousness. Scientists have learned that experiments are carried out with different matter in different places and times with closely identical results. Duplicating the same consciousness does not have to be in the same place in space, in the same time period or made of identical matter. What scientists know about the production of consciousness is that the brain through its complex structure and functioning creates consciousness. To other conscious beings you are a body because they can not see the consciousness that your body is producing. But to yourself, if you are not conscious you do not exist. When you die your brain no longer functions in the correct way to produce a consciousness that you experience. The atheist often expresses the belief that death is a permanent ending aspect of life and as atheists we need to face this fact even though they often express the sentiment that being alive or conscious again would be very desirable. Fear of death is often the reason stated for why people become or stay religious even though religions are irrational and anti-scientific. If science can offer a better theory of conscious life after death than religions then it should be a positive thing for science and rationality which atheism is supposed to be working toward. Restoration of structure and functioning is one way of looking at recreating a consciousness that has existed in the past. The concept of the restoration of structure and functioning does not require the same body to restore the same consciousness. To understand consciousness and life after death we need a new concept. This concept is called "ixperiencitness" pronounced "I experience it ness". If any physical body produces a consciousness that you do not experience it is not you. But any physical body that produces a consciousness that you do experience is a conscious version of you. By definition, any body that produces a consciousness that you experience, that body produces your ixperiencitness. Most people believe that most of the consciousness that their body has produced in the past and will produce into the future they have experienced in the past and will experience in the future. More later---
Thank you "CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain" for responding to my incomplete but nonetheless longish blog!
Religions give hope to people by offering them fantasies about heaven (or a better life after death) and being with loved ones again after their death. Superimmortality can do this without any supernatural concepts like souls, gods, spirits, a spiritual after death world or supernatural processes like resurrection or reincarnation. Superimmortality is a complicated theory that can not be explained in a few sentences, paragraphs, pages, or even books. It is a theory that seems way to good to be true and as a skeptical scientist I have spent most of may time trying to understand these ideas and disprove them. The more I try to disprove them the more arguments become apparent that support superimmortality. Superimmortality does not guarantee that a person will experience being conscious again after death, so as most atheists believe we should make the most out of this life. If however, you were to consciously exist again after your bodies death, it will not be in a spiritual world like many religions propose but likely in this physical world. So it is to our advantage to take good care of this world so that it can continue to produce conscious beings way into the future. Since it is a random natural process if a physapath will come into existence that will produce an awarepath that you experience, one might say the more people that exist at a time the better. But the more people that exist over time may improve the chance that one of them will produce a consciousness that you experience, it may not improve the quality of life of this version of you. So it is important to improve the quality of life on earth so if somebody was to produce a consciousness that you experience it will be as good as we can make it at that time. Superimmortality has many other advantages over religious forms of immortality besides likely being true. If the more (in number) conscious being exist the more likely a structure and functioning of matter will produce a consciousness that you will experience then you and all the rest of us (we) have reasons to spread through the universe a multitude of conscious beings experiencing good positive lives.
Thank you Chikoppi and Sky Captain for your replies!
I do not mind negative feedback. It, for a scientific theory, is nearly always better than positive feedback because it gives us new insights into the ideas we are dealing with. I will admit that the awaretheory wiki web site is greatly flawed and very incomplete. But it does contain many apparently novel concepts that could be wrong (or right) to various degrees. The reason I have come out in a more public fashion with these ideas here is that the one thing I disagree with the atheist perspective is the belief that the death of the body is the permanent end of conscious existence for any particular ixperiencitness grouping of consciousnesses. This belief, I believe, causes unnecessary suffering for people that want to rid themselves of oppressive dogmatic supernatural none sense. Superimmortality allows one to say to a child that has lost a parent, friend, or relative that they may experience being with these loved one again in the future without lying or the need for any supernatural concepts like gods, souls, or heavens. Superimmortality does not limit the consciousnesses that can exist, it shows how to scientifically improve them. For example, people have suffered and died after short lives in very unpleasant ways in the past. The holocaust victims are an example. If we consider one holocaust victim lets say a young child, if he had not been killed by the Nazis’s his body would have continued to produce a functioning that was based on the changing structure of his body and the environment that he went through in his life to this point. There are an enumerable amount of different environmental conditions that potentially could have effected his body’s functioning. Many of them would have produced difference sequences of consciousness that he would have experienced if he had not died. The ixperiencit theory of consciousness predicts that any of those sequences of varying structures and functionings of matter produced in a body that would have produced a consciousness that he would have experienced, if he had not prematurely been killed, would, if created at any where and time in the universe with any matter organized in the right way will produce the same consciousness and ixperiencitness that could have other wise been produced. This theory does not need continuousness or continuity of either consciousness, ixperiencitness, the body, or the structure and functioning of the body to produce identical consciousness and ixperiencitness at a later time and at a different place.
In reference to Chikoppi 24
You are right superimmortality would make many interesting and fun fantasy novels. But you have missed the whole point this theory does not require a mind substance or soul at all. It is a completely physical materialistic theory of consciousness based on the concept that matter and energy through its functioning produces consciousness with no need for souls or a mind substance. It goes one step further like all experimental sciences and asks "What happens when you duplicate the experiment, do you get the same consciousness produced?" What do you think and why?
The atheist experience