Immotality and Resurrection of All

On Mind Uploading and Replicating / Resurrecting Everyone Who Ever Lived

(An excerpt from Michael Shermer’s 2018 book Heavens on Earth.)

The sums involved in achieving immortality through the duplication or resurrection scenarios are not to be underestimated. There are around 85 billion neurons in a human brain, each with about a thousand synaptic links, for a total of 100 trillion connections to be accurately preserved and replicated. This is a staggering level of complexity made all the more so by the additional glial cells in the brain, which provide support and insulation for neurons and can change the actions of firing neurons, so these cells better be preserved as well in any duplication or resurrection scenario, just in case. Estimates of the ratio of glial cells to neurons in a brain vary from 1:1 to 10:1. If you’re not a lightning calculator, that computes to a total brain cell count of somewhere between 170 billion and 850 billion. Then factor in the hundreds or thousands of synaptic connections between each of the 85 billion neurons, adding approximately 100 trillion synaptic connections total for each brain. That’s not all. There are around ten billion proteins per neuron, which effect how memories are stored, plus the countless extracellular molecules in between those tens of billions of brain cells.

These estimates are just for the brain and do not even include the rest of the nervous system outside of the skull—what neuroscientists call the “embodied brain” or the “extended mind” and which many philosophers of mind believe is necessary for normal cognition. So you might want to have this extended mind resurrected or uploaded along with your mind. After all, you are not just your internal thoughts and emotions disconnected from your body. Many of your thoughts and emotions are intimately entwined with how your body interacts with its environment, so any preserved connectome, to be fully operational as recreating the experience of what it is like to be a sentient being, would also need to be housed in a body. So we would need a warehouse of brainless clones or very sophisticated robots prepared to have these uploaded mind neural units installed. How many? Well, to avoid the charge of elitism, it’s only fair that everyone who ever lived be resurrected, so that means multiplying the staggering data package for one person by 108 billion.

Then there’s the relationship between memory and life history. Our memory is not like a videotape that can be played back on the viewing screen of our minds. When an event happens to us, a selective impression of it is made on the brain through the senses. As that sense impression wends its way through different neural networks, where it ends up depends on what type of memory it is. As a memory is processed and prepared for long-term storage we rehearse it and in the process it is changed. This editing process depends on previous memories, subsequent events and memories, and emotions. This process recurs trillions of times in the course of a lifetime, to the point where we have to wonder if we have memories of actual events, or memories of the memories of those events, or even memories of memories of memories…. What’s the “true” memory? There is no such thing. Our memories are the product of trillions of synaptic neuronal connections that are constantly being edited, redacted, reinforced, and extinguished, such that a resurrection of a human with memories intact will depend on when in the individual’s life history the replication or resurrection is implemented.

In his book The Physics of Immortality the physicist Frank Tipler calculates that an Omega Point computer in the far future will contain 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 123 bits (a 1 followed by 10¹²³ zeros), powerful enough, he says, to resurrect everyone who ever lived. That may be—it is a staggeringly large number—but is even an Omega Point computer powerful enough to reconstruct all of the historical contingencies and necessities in which a person lived, such as the weather, climate, geography, economic cycles, recessions and depressions, social trends, religious movements, wars, political revolutions, paradigm shifts, ideological revolutions, and the like, on top of duplicating our genome and connectome? It seems unlikely, but if so GOSH would also need to duplicate all of the individual conjunctures and interactions between that person and all other persons as they intersect with and influence each other in each of those lifetimes. Then multiply all that by the 108 billion people who ever lived or are currently living. Whatever the number, it would have to be even larger than the famed Googolplex (10 to the power of a googol, with a googol being 10¹⁰⁰, or 10¹⁰¹⁰⁰) from which Google and its Googleplex headquarters derived its name. Even a googol of googolplexes would not suffice. In essence, it would require the resurrection of the entire universe and its many billions of years of history. Inconceivable.

Oh, My America

 

Homage to Catatonia

By:  Jason Morgan | Remnant Correspondent, TOKYO

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1984 movie still | scene: The Hate

At some point over the past decade—or maybe it was earlier—you have woken up.

 

Perhaps it was the squatter in the White House—the one who gets on famously with the squatter in the Vatican—declaring the celebration of Christ’s resurrection a time for remembering “transgender visibility”.

Perhaps it was when you realized that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is an anti-religious, anti-American, anti-human grouping of fascist goons.

It is a bitter thing to be jolted awake into such a reality. Not long after you wake up, you wish you could go back to sleep again. How nice it was not to know what was going on.

Perhaps it was the day you discovered that that bureau, along with its psychopathic colleagues in the CIA, were running a nationwide election-interference psy-op against the American people—in the name of “protecting our sacred democracy”.

Perhaps it was when your father’s and grandfather’s Navy commissioned the USNS Harvey Milk, a warship named after a homosexual predator-pedophile.

Perhaps it was the first coup against Donald Trump that did it. Or the second one. Or the third one. Or the fourth one. Or the fifth one.

Or, perhaps it was when communist terrorists burning down Black businesses were hailed as “anti-racists,” or when foreign hordes of invaders were lauded as “migrants” and showered with your tax dollars, or when Marxist perverts were certified as “teachers,” or when other Marxist perverts were looked up to as “priests.”

That feeling you once had, of faith in truth, justice, and the American Way—that Reagan Era confidence that complexity, disease, and terror could be bracketed in faraway hellholes: all of that is gone, but without it what is one to do?

At some point over the past decade—or maybe it was earlier—you have woken up. A bioweapon concocted by Chinese Moreaus and Washington Mengeles ravaged the world, and then the companion bioweapon (sanctioned by transhumanist billionaires) started to finish off the first wave’s survivors. But you couldn’t talk about it.

An election was stolen. But you couldn’t talk about it.

Children are being mutilated (and not just inside the womb anymore—all hail the evolution of liberalism). But you can’t talk about it.

Private property is being destroyed and the very notion of private ownership is being erased. But you can’t talk about it.

A cabal of globalists is waging gaywar against a Christian holdout to the “queering of the Donbass.” But you can’t talk about it.

Christians are being targeted—again and again and again and again and again. But you can’t talk about it.

And you rub your eyes and realize that something is very, very wrong.

It is a bitter thing to be jolted awake into such a reality. Not long after you wake up, you wish you could go back to sleep again. How nice it was not to know what was going on. That feeling you once had, of faith in truth, justice, and the American Way—that Reagan Era confidence that complexity, disease, and terror could be bracketed in faraway hellholes: all of that is gone, but without it what is one to do?

If only for an hour or two, you think, it would be so comforting to return to the slumber you once enjoyed. That sweet catatonia was once your whole world. And now. And now. The Houthis and Schumers and grifters and gaslighters are ascendant. Former Manchurian candidates pull the strings of more recent ones. The daughters of war criminals—no, not Lana Peters or Brigitte Höss—hold high office. Those who oppose them are “anti-democratic.” Actual war criminals take to the public airwaves to peddle cheap propaganda. Those who oppose them are “enemies of democracy.” The putative defenders of the law are the worst criminals of all—except for the ones who pay them.

What in the world is going on? Oh, for but an afternoon of respite from it all. And, if that is not possible, then would that there were any kind of numbness that might at least take the place of once-pleasant dreams.

O, catatonia. I acknowledge your charm, but reject your advances. I think I am not alone. It is better to be awake than asleep now, for what is coming is coming either way.

Some achieve this goal, of course. Some still “vote” and believe their votes are counted. Many sense smoke and danger, but keep their heads down and accuse the firemen instead of acknowledging the existence of the fire. At all costs, the establishment must survive. For that is the last keep of the castle. Our delusion depends on everyone’s focusing their attention on the same diversions. There is no president but Joe Biden, and Mike Pence is his prophet. Dissenters are “extremists,” and extremists must be met with the force of the “whole of government.”

On the margins are allowed occasional and symbolic protests. Forego a Bud Light or two. Ban TikTok. But nothing substantial. Do not get to the heart of matters. Do not peer over the slaughterhouse walls.

This is one choice, it is true. But not the one I am making. O, catatonia. I acknowledge your charm, but reject your advances. I think I am not alone. It is better to be awake than asleep now, for what is coming is coming either way. If anyone is still dreaming of the world’s mercy, let him keep dreaming. It is too late to apprise newcomers, and anyway those who have not yet awakened are not accidentally deaf and blind but willfully so.

Those who are awake, though—let us stick together. “Unite the clans,” a wise man is saying. Amen. There are no more distinctions worth making, except the one between those who will die fighting, and those who will die asleep.

--Jason Morgan is associate professor at Reitaku University in Kashiwa, Japan

Democracy and Toleration

 

Maverick Philosopher by Bill Vallicella / Apr 4, 2024 at 4:18 PM

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Bird, Zondervan, 2024):

Democracies are compelled to tolerate and enfranchise [give the vote to] people who stand in resolute opposition to the very idea of democracy itself. (164)

This sentence implies that a democracy is a system of government in which the will of the majority decides every question.  If so, then in such a system the majority may democratically decide that their system of government cease being a democracy and become, say, a theocracy.  If so, a democracy may democratically decide to commit political suicide. Democracy taken full strength cancels itself, or al least allows the possibility of self-cancellation. One reasonable inference is that it must not be taken full-strength: it needs support from an extra-democratic source.

Now the authors aim to make a case of "liberal democracy." (p. xvi)  But no democracy worth wanting could have the self-destructive feature I have exposed in the preceding paragraph. A democracy worth wanting must rest on principles that are not up for democratic grabs. I mean such principles as are enshrined in our founding documents: that all men are created equal, that they have unalienable rights, and so on.  For example, the rights  to life, liberty, property, and free speech. These rights do not derive from any collective human decision: they are not up for democratic grabs.  The same goes for what I will call political meta-principles such as the rule of law. The rule of law is not itself a law, but a principle that governs the application of laws.  It the normative principle that no man is above the law, that all are subject to the same laws, and that everyone is to be treated equally under the law.  ABA definition: " no one is above the law, everyone is treated equally under the law, everyone is held accountable to the same laws, there are clear and fair processes for enforcing laws, there is an independent judiciary, and human rights are guaranteed for all."  If I understand due process, it is part and parcel of the rule of law: the latter subsumes the former. It should bother you that prominent leftists have questioned due process.

And so I say: no democracy worth wanting can tolerate those who would work to undermine the principles upon which a democracy worth wanting must rest. This is why I wrote two days ago:

Any sane person who does not intend the destruction of our [democratic, constitutionally-based] republic should be able to see that the values of Sharia [Islamic law] are incompatible with American values, and that no Muslims should be allowed to immigrate who are unwilling to accept and honor our values [and Anglo-American system of law, and renounce Islamic law].

The authors, apparently, disagree: 

We need a political framework that exhibits . . . a willingness to endure strange and even offensive ways of life. [. . .] Victory in liberal democracy is not vanquishing our opponents, but winning their respect, living in peace with them, and affirming their right to their opinion. That means LGBTQ+ people have the right to be themselves, Muslims can be Muslims, Christians can be Christians, Socialists can be Socialists, Greenies can be Greenies. (172)

If so, then Communists can be Communists and must be tolerated. But surely toleration, the touchstone of classical liberalism, has limits. Communism, which aims at the overthrow of the American system of government, cannot be tolerated. Is that not obvious? But then neither can Sharia-based Islam. For both Communism and Islam are antithetical to our founding principles.

At the very end of Article VI of the Constitution, we read:

. . . no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

But of course Communism is not a religion in any reasonable sense of the term as I have argued elsewhere. What about Islam? Isn't it a religion?   Some say it is a Christian heresy (Chesterton). Others say it is a political ideology masquerading as a religion. I say it is a hybrid ideology: both a religion and a political ideology.  I would argue that, since its political commitments are antithetical to American principles, values, and presuppositions, Islam does not count as a religion for the purposes of the application of Article VI, paragraph 3. 

But it will take another 9/11-type event to convince most people of this. Most people are impervious to reasoning such as I am engaging in here; it strikes these sense-enslaved denizens of Plato's Cave as 'abstract' and 'unreal.' But when they are smashed in the face, they will begin to get the point, as they expire in the rubble.

That event is coming.