Did Yahweh do us a favor by denying us eternal life?
It seems that the older I get, the less enjoyable and desirable the thought of living eternally becomes, even though I am quite pleased with how my life has evolved and how I will end this life.
Be it with a body here on earth, or as a spirit in some heaven, I cannot imagine anyone living eternally and enjoying it.
It would be like living watching the same T V program running over and over and over, since there is nothing new under the sun. All would be seen as allegories and or analogous of other situations.
Thoughts?
Regards
DL
Typically those who have had a full-on entheogenic experience report it as being the most intense and profound experience of their life, particularly with N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT). Reports of boredom don't feature prominently in full-blown DMT experiences. Apropos to which, I find the following audio from February 1992 by ethnobotanist Terence McKenna (Requiescat in pace) to be inspirational. With the present rate of the exponential advancement of technology, it won't be much longer before humans themselves become McKenna's self-transforming machine elves.
* "Terence McKenna - Death by Astonishment", lifeacademy (
youtube.com/channel/UCyvqWQFVGfHMzLKBswtce3w ), Dec. 31, 2014
Mirror: "Terence McKenna - DMT: Death by Astonishment", MckennaCountrCulture, Apr. 4, 2015,
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eqn5FKISlTw
Interestingly, N,N-dimethyltryptamine is a Schedule I substance, and the way the law is written, any material which contains any quantity of DMT is a Schedule I substance, quite literally making all human beings illegal drugs under US federal law (CFR 2013, Title 21, Vol. 9, Sec. 1308.11[d]), since DMT is a neurotransmitter in mammalian brains, including humans.
Fittingly, our good ethnobotanist Mr. McKenna was enthusiastic about physicist and mathematician Prof. Frank J. Tipler's Omega Point cosmology. That's not an accident, either, as McKenna's entheogenic experiences brought him to the realization that the future will be extraordinarily technological and scientific, yet profoundly spiritual at the same time: i.e., especially with his DMT experiences, he experienced a future technologically immortal and superintelligent society, i.e., a race of superintelligent machine-creatures who could self-transform into anything they could conceive.
Soon technology will become advanced enough to convert our human brains into artificial computer hardware (i.e., at the cellular level, such as by using nanobots), at which point we will be technologically immortal; and due to the vast amounts of computational resources at that time, we will also be superintelligent. The leading technologists place this epoch circa 2045, although it can come much quicker, particularly given the incredible recent advancements in machine-learning Artificial Intelligence via artificial neural networks. Said epoch is often termed the Singularity, or the Technological Singularity, and the field of interest pertaining to it is most commonly called transhumanism.
For much more on Prof. Tipler's Omega Point cosmology, which has been extensively peer-reviewed and published in a number of the world's leading physics and science journals, see my following post:
* James Redford, "God's Existence Is a Mathematical Theorem within Standard Physics", Political Hotwire, July 23, 2020,
God's Existence Is a Mathematical Theorem within Standard Physics .
* * * * *
The below is an excellent lecture by neuroscientist Dr. Sam Harris, one of the main leaders of the New Atheist movement, at a June 2016 TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference.
* "Can we build AI without losing control over it? | Sam Harris", TED (
youtube.com/user/TEDtalksDirector ), Oct. 19, 2016
Mirror:
Can we build AI without losing control over it?
As Dr. Harris points out, unless there is something literally magic about the operations of our brains, then it is a purely physical process that can be replicated via advanced-enough technology. Harris further points out that given any rate of progress, it is inevitable that superintelligent godlike machines will one day be constructed. So Harris believes in the existence of gods, it's just that he knows--as do I--that they exist in the future; and the not-so-distant future, at that. Therefore we come to the ironic insight that materialistic atheism, consistently applied, unavoidably results in theism. Consistent scientific atheism turns out to be theism.
