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Memories of the 28th Century

Eternal souls?

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Over the decades I have had various thoughts about the concept of the eternal soul. I like the idea, and I find it horrible that I might someday become nothing. On the other hand, the ideas of Heaven and Hell are downright silly. The ideas expressed in “Thanatopsis”. By William Cullen Bryant seem to be reasonable and logical. My personal preference was for the ancient Indo-European concept of reincarnation after 49 days in the Underworld.

The matter of reincarnation seemed very reasonable, and relatively efficient, but the best evidence was from people who may not have sipped from the River Lethe and forgotten their past lives. Physics requires that information cannot be lost, because losing information prevents Quantum processes from being reversed. As knowledge builds on knowledge and the precision of instruments improves, some things that were considered facts have been demoted to conjectures, and some have been ignored. Planck's constants are still there, but Planck's Length is getting closer to being noticeable. The amount of energy that it takes to capture a piece on information in the Human brain is quite small, and people have claimed to communicate directly with brainwaves, so how much more difficult would it be to observe memories from outside?

The information has to exist, but the question is how can we perceive it. Another question is: what happens to the information over time?

In the past, I imagined a level of existence where human consciousnesses existed alongside high-level quantum machines, but that was before I started thinking about the requirement that information not be lost. While I suppose that a consciousness going to Heaven means that the information is not lost, but that would only be true, if Heaven would be accessible from the material world without dying, and the same is true of Hell, but there are few recorded trips to and from the Afterlife by living humans. I even imagined mystics floating through the region alongside inter dimensional travellers, and in that region souls would float around also. Some mystical traditions have teachings about Astral Plains, regions where souls live detached from bodies, and there have been traditions that assert that living humans have visited those regions. It is interesting to speculate on such matters, but hard science demands that information not be lost, and that requires that the consciousnesses of people continue to exist after death. Human memories are not simply molecular bonds. For the memories to exist, they have to exist in a small space in which they can refer to other memories, and that requires that the memories are in a cloud-like formation, rather like the traditional translucent forms of ghosts.

Whether ghosts were human memories separated from their bodies or simply dreams of a storyteller can't be determined readily, but they approximate what those eternal souls would have to be. I wonder if there is some way that we could determine the nature of the disembodied memories of human. There is information, so that has to be some way to retrieve the information, because it can't be lost.

I also wonder how one might go about communicating with disembodied memories. Since they contain information they may be useful, if we can crack the communications question. It might not be all that difficult to communicate with such things, if they remain in an accessible place. If the problem could be programmed into an AI, the AI might be able to work out the technique for communication. The problem is that most souls do not stay near where they died. Most souls quickly go to Hades, the recycling facility, where they relax and lose their personal memories of the last life, or so the ancient scriptures say, but information can't be lost, so it would be more likely that the memories are integrated along with memories of earlier lives.

I will have to get someone to look into this matter. I believe that the current thinking on information dragged into Black Hopes is that the information exists but cannot be retrieved. The situation with memories of dead people might be similar. This deserves more research. In the past, I delved into some mystical paths, and I found it to be a reasonable and logical system, at least up to certain points. Perhaps I should look further into mysticism.


https://dailygalaxy.com/2020/05/its-...-88N4wNXt27Naw

https://physicsworld.com/a/informati...n-black-holes/

Updated 05-31-2020 at 05:06 PM by PeterL

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