Comments on: Ask Ray | How do you find the motivation to live forever?

By: Captn

Captn — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 12:44:43 +0000

This goes off on a tangent from the original question, but with regard to living indefinitely I’ve often thought “What about boredom?” What do we do when we’ve done everything there is to do a million times? I suspect that this is one of the problems resulting form the singularity that we will have to solve. One possible solution might lie in a better understanding of “novelty”. If it turns out that novelty is an emotion like anger or joy, then we should be able to simulate it. We could then restore the novelty of a given experience so that it was as new, fresh and interesting as the first time we experienced it. Goodbye boredom.

By: bill

bill — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 14:52:55 +0000

How do we know that some type 3 exoplanet civilization hasn’t already beaten us to this ultimate challenge?
With all those exoplante’s out there it’s hard to imagine that we are the most evolved life forms out there.

By: jason c

jason c — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 17:28:54 +0000

WOULDTNT WE BE ABLE TO DO THIS WITHIN A HUNDRED YEARS, AFTER THE SINGULARITY? I LIKE YOUR THINKING,,,

By: jason c

jason c — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 17:26:51 +0000

HEY CARL,, I HAD A SIMILIAR THOUGHT,, TIME TRAVEL VIOLATES NO LAWS OF PHYSICS IF IM NOT MISTAKEN,,

By: jason c

jason c — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 17:24:36 +0000

THAT IS WELL SAID,,, VERY WELL SAID

By: luke

luke — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 20:38:02 +0000

‘Bout time for Ask Ray to be updated, wouldn’t you say?

By: Bri

Bri — Sun, 19 Aug 2012 16:01:48 +0000

Here are some more musings from my view point. Many people reject them because of credibility issues, but for me, my experiences are the driving force behind them. I come to these conclusions because they are the best way to reconcile them in my mind. Sometimes I have experienced a location that doesn’t have an observer on it. Kind of like the tree falling in a forest thought experiment. For example a room in a building that I’ve never been in. What is observing? What sensory organ is collecting the light information to give me vision? Often the perspective is from above, almost like peering into a box. Over the years, which at this point is close to forty, I’ve come to the conclusion that consciousness permeates everything. That it all is alive. Maybe a better way of stating my conclusion is that, I adhere to a very Copenhagen interpretation of the double slit screen photon expeiment. I also have a very Jungian view. That it all is part of a collective unconsciousness. One of the things that has helped me to understand is thought experiments with infinity. In a black hole there is theoretically a singularity. Me personally I think it’s an almost perfect singularity, but that it’s not 100%. it’s just really close relatively speaking. Either way it illustrates that a point in space can go inward forever. If that’s the case then between my two fingers is an infinite space. One infinity to another is identical. So every square inch of everywhere contains everything. Obviously we don’t experience that. We experience an illusion of time and space, that is created by spirit. That in a similar way to the desk top pendulum toy of steel ball just touching, if yo pull away two balls on one end, it will swing two balls on the other end, information as to the relativity of things is transferred from one infinite point to another. That the world we see is just waves on a sea of infinity. It’s hard in this context of posts to really give all the thoughts and feelings that lead me to this conclusion, it just all looks like a dream that we all are dreaming together, and when I say all I mean everything. It’s like Howard Blooms hidden time with particles talking to each other. Hidden time is the real time. Our time is a illusion of relativities. All your loved ones aren’t gone. They always existed and always will.

By: melis256

melis256 — Sat, 18 Aug 2012 19:28:23 +0000

Some day in the future we will be able to look back in time and at the time of death of the person in question, measure all the quantum states in that brain.
Essentially copying mind and memories to the future.
Very powerful is such quantum archeology.

By: Bri

Bri — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 17:05:02 +0000

Many modern thinkers have proposed that the past and the future exist at the same time as the now. As someone who has psychic experiences I have a unique view on these theories. I have clearly seen events in the past and the future. On a couple of instances I have whatched events play out like a movie. If you live with someting like this it affects you in innumerable ways. Firstly you try to validate. I’m well past that stage. I’ve actually called people and told them what they were doing. That’s the present. I love when I see the future because that’s even more of a trip, because it begs the question. Did the future already happen? On two different occasions I have seen car accidents in front of me moments before they happened and took evasive action and successfully avoided being caught in them. For me when the vision comes I trust it voracity. All your loved ones and all their actions are there. In time we will be able to see it all. The mental states should be inducible. As for living forever. It can’t happen. Everything is finite. Your soul is infinite, but any discussion would strain credulity. You can extend your life for a very long time, but you will die at some point. I like how the Australian aborigines put it. There is real time and there is dream time, dream time is more real than real time.

By: Jon

Jon — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 13:28:39 +0000

Solaris is a book (and movie). It’s an artistic form of expression, sketching a future scenario so the writer can tell a story. I see no reason why it would be a likely future outcome. It’s a fabrication.

Mr. Kurzweil has charts and data on which to base his predictions. And he’s definitely not just optimistic, he discusses potential downsides as well. You should consider reading his books.

By: Andrew Gibson

Andrew Gibson — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 13:13:17 +0000

Has anybody here seen Solaris, and have you thought about the implications of all this one-sided techno-utopianism whereby we decide to resurrect memory slaves for our own diversion?

By: Carl Brooks

Carl Brooks — Sat, 16 Jun 2012 23:17:44 +0000

Like ray, i can see that in the future, super-intelligence will probably bring the dead back to life and make the lost, found. It will be through a means of extrapolation. With enough intelligence it is possible to extrapolate anything, anything in the universe including the universe. I’m reminded of the philosophic question, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” the answer depends on whether or not there is a super-intelligent being in the universe were the tree falls. An intelligent enough being can map the position of every atom in the universe, that includes the atoms in the fallen tree and can extrapolate backwards or forwards (in time). The original sound the tree makes is lost, however the sound can be perfectly replicated. Can you consider this perfectly replicated sound, to be the sound the tree makes as it falls? This is an interesting line of thought because surely if you consider this sound to be perfectly accurate then that would mean that time travel to the past is a distinct possibility. Just a thought.

By: luke

luke — Wed, 06 Jun 2012 20:08:12 +0000

Will there not be a point in the future where super intelligent AI can actually construct a replica of a lost one’s brain (based on memories, video, writings, etc.), thus recreating that person?

By: Andre Ratel

Andre Ratel — Mon, 04 Jun 2012 10:30:00 +0000

The irreversible loss of a loved one is indeed quite depressing.

One is reminded of the beautiful poem of Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven, in which the mourning lover steps deeper and deeper into melancholy each time the bird replies “Nevermore”.

However, complete information about the deceased person might not be irremediably lost forever. It might still be around somewhere in this physical universe. We may imagine
– some kind of material field a bit like the one postulated in
Rupert Sheldrake,
Morphic resonance: The nature of formative causation
(Park Street Press, 2009)
– a static spacetime still containing the past, frozen into its fabric
– some residual remanence of all past quantum entanglements.

Alternatively, we might reach The Singularity and become all so closely linked to one another, forming a kind of Superorganism for who our present day personal tragedies would loose all their emotional significance.

At present, we only know that (at least) 96 % of the Universe escapes us and we speak of some mysterious “dark matter” and “dark energy”. And this represents only the “known unknowns”…

As long as we keep a scientific mind and continue to explore what is out there, the adventure of life and consciousness is far from over. We need to keep on looking for new paths and finding where they could lead to. The task is admittedly often difficult and sometime discouraging but not totally hopeless.

Maybe Poe’s raven should be replaced by a cat answering “Not now”.

Andre

By: Allan Campbell

Allan Campbell — Sat, 02 Jun 2012 10:29:11 +0000

It is most probable that we will have the ability to radically customize our own minds. So we may choose to deactivate memories that cause us pain or to alter our emotional response to those memories.

By: Kieran Griffith

Kieran Griffith — Sat, 02 Jun 2012 05:10:33 +0000

I am actually a very spiritual person and believe in the concept of life after death and other existential theories involving the existence of a soul. However, I find the one driving force for my desire to live indefinitely be that the sooner that I die the less time I have had to do everything I want in this life and I want do do an infinite number of things, most of which I don’t even know that I want to do yet. I want to do things like climb the mountains of the Moon and other planets and even visit other star systems. I want to see the world in the year 3000 and I want to enjoy every single good movie up to that point. I want to have a family and see that family grow up and not just watch my kids but my grand kids and great grand kids and great, great grandkids and so on and so fourth. The sooner you die the less you have done, even if you continue your existence in an afterlife where you would either have to start back at square one and build up your life again in the case of reincarnation or just loaf around with no drama in your life in paradise.

By: H.K. Fauskanger

H.K. Fauskanger — Tue, 29 May 2012 00:13:09 +0000

The big question is whether the detailed information needed to perform genuine “resurrections” can be retrieved at some point in the future, even though the brains in question have long crumbled into dust. It would require some mechanism we cannot now foresee, but the future is long and we simply don’t know what can eventually be done. Imagine how difficult it would be to foresee some of the tools WE have for examining the past, such as carbon dating, a mere 150 years ago.

By: Gorden Russell

Gorden Russell — Mon, 28 May 2012 17:27:54 +0000

We have always had to live on with the memory of our deceased loved ones. We will just keep on keepin’ on even with extended lifespans.