From: joedees@bellsouth.net
Date: Mon Jan 28 2002 - 22:35:18 MST
On 28 Jan 2002 at 14:13, ben wrote:
> > [Bill2] In order to suggest that God was the first object in the universe
> > would
> > be like saying "The most complex entity formed from nothing, and the
> simple
> > stuff came later". I have never considered the notion of complexity before
> > simplicity before, but it does seem awfully unlikely. I am not aware of
> > something as complex as I imagine a god to be forming spontaneously with
> > consciousness and power to boot.
> >
> > [ben 2] Which is more complex? A single being housing all possible energy
> > and sentience directing it all to the same goals, or thousands of
> trillions
> > each having a small portion of it and directing it sometimes with,
> sometimes
> > against each other seemingly at random?
>
> [Joe]Simple. The much greater complexity required to marshall all
> matter/energy in the service of a single complexly recursive self-
> conscious awareness. It would have to not only subsume all the others
> as parts, but supervene its own level of organization upon them.
> Random, lacking all organization whatsoever, is the opposite of complex.
>
> [ben 3]
> Where's the marshalling? If all the enrgy started in one central being, and
> then dissipated, there is no need for any marshalling. Start central, then
> dissipate... just like we know it does normally...
>
Sorry; self-conscious awareness requires sufficient complexity to allow for
recursivity; such complexity must breach the godelian threshhold. Awareness
of itself is necessary to the monotheistic definition of a deity (I did not say
awareness of other, for there can be no other for an omnipresent deity). Such
necessary complexity to allow the fulfillment of a necessary condition for the
monotheistic definition of deity is clearly absent in the rather random and
uniform plasmic soup blown out of a Big Bang.
>
> > [ben 2] The brain under certain circumstances emits radio waves (
> > http://www.hhmi.org/senses/e/e120.htm ), providing at least a basic
> > 'wireless' capability. Theoretically (expanding that idea, and making up
> > neuroscience fiction as I go along here) it is then possible for a human
> > brain to project its entire conscienceness outwards. If it is possible for
> > anything to receive, translate and organize the data then we have just had
> a
> > direct host-to-host soul transfer. Perhaps Heaven is the name given to the
> > electrochemical dance in the recipient brain resulting from a successful
> > transfer in the seconds before death, and Hell is the name for the error
> > message if it fails... (STP error 403: Access Denied = bad bad painful
> > dance)
> >
> [Joe] Death is the irreversible degradation of dynamic cerebral complexity
> below the level at which it can maintain as a material/energetic substrate
> for the emergence of recursively complex self-conscious awareness.
> And if someone is shot in the head with a howitzer and their head
> explodes in a single millisecond, where's the dance? And what about
> those who die in their sleep?
>
> [Ben 3] Faster-than-millisecond data transfers are possible already, with
> our clumsy silicon. I don't see speed as a limiting factor.
>
But the whole point that began this was the NDE inner journey, a subjective
experience that would itself be impossible in such a short time.
>
> [Joe] Now heaven is something that each and every individual brain has the
> capacity to differentially synthecize at the point of death, ayy? That
> would
> make heaven plural, and more than that, a multiple naturally occurring
> terminal illusion. Which is better than negotiating between Bin Laden and
> Gandhi in which version of heaven both are required to reside.
>
> [Ben 3] Absolutely!
>
The key words here are 'naturally occurring" and "illusion"; it's a lie that the
brain (most likely serendipitously) tells itself as it begins to die, and remembers
should the process be interrrupted.
>
> > [Ben 2] Just for the record, I love the clone/soul argument :) However, I
> > can't remember if it says anywhere that god gives _each_ human a soul, or
> if
> > he gave souls to the species in general. If the latter, then the clone
> > example fails in this discussion, in no means of course detracting from
> its
> > efficacy vs. fundies who are against cloning for religious reasons.
>
> [Joe] And what do you say to identical twins, which are the same thing
> produced by more natural means? that one of them is soulless, Do they
> then flip a coin and leave it in god's hands to give them a heads or tails
> sign?
>
> [Ben 3] That example passes either way: If god gives each individual a soul
> individually, well then he just drops off a double order, saving himself a
> trip I suppose. If given to the race as a whole, then the souls of twins
> would develop the same as those of non-twins.
>
It is much more Occamically parsiminous to simply assert that at a certain level
of developmental complexity of the physical substrate (beyond the godelian
threshhold), recursive self-reference emerges, and that when that substrate
degrades below the support level, the emergent quality vanishes. This does
not require the existence of multiply self-contradictory refugees from ancient
and ignorant myths.
>
> [Joe] We can build a human from a de-nucleized egg and some DNA (from
> most cells). Where would the soul reside there? In the DNA (a chemical
> definition of soul)?
>
> [Ben 3] Hmm gives whole new meaning to the idea that the soul departs the
> body at death...
>
The DNA resides in the body for a long time after death before it degrades
significantly.
>
> -ben
>
>
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