When you think about something in any great detail you are basically running a simulation in your head.
Ergo,
Could we infer that our thoughts are simulations?
Or, conversely,
That computer simulations are the (…planned and directed) thoughts of the CPU?
And what of those who think that this universe is a simulation?
Photo by KNLphotos2010 
In contemplating the future
My partner raised the question;
What if there’s a point in your life
Where you become too old to face your demons?
So,
If you didn’t make the effort to change
When you were younger
You never will.
Did this cautionary tale ever happen to someone who is old?
Or will it happen one day to someone who is now young?
The idea of Pascal’s Wager is that you can live a godless life and then convert to religion right before you die, just in case you were going to go to hell for your godless ways.
Nobody seems to think about the ‘Reverse Pascal’s Wager‘, the very real idea that you could be wasting your life living as a religious person, preparing for an afterlife that may not exist.
The caveat here, of course, is how we define ‘religious’ behaviour – which, like human behaviour, can encompass both the best and the worst of what humanity has to offer.
The Reverse Pascal’s wager may not apply to the guy who volunteers at his Church every weekend to feed and clothe the homeless. It may, however, apply to the guy who devotes significant time and energy to trying to spiritually blackmail the non-believers surrounding him.
Then again, a Hedonist might tell you that, if a man abuses others in the name of his God and enjoys his life – that was a life well lived.
Like most things, we should probably err on the side of not being a twat.
As usual, there is no certainty and no answers… only questions.
As, on one level, time is an entirely subjective thing, could you live longer (…in a psychological sense) if you slowed your perception of time? And thus make life seem longer?
If so, can we train ourselves to do this?
If so, how?
More boring experiences? The practice of daily mindfulness? Something else?
“The bad news is time flies. The good news is you’re the pilot.” – Michael Altshuler
When the last human is gone, who will be left to regret it?
Photo by Mr B’s Photography
If your last desire was to be free of your desires,
You would still desire,
And you would not be free of them.
A catastrophe faces humanity – everything and everybody is doomed.
Some cruel twist of fate dictates that only you can avert the apocalypse.
To do this, you have to give your life in a heroic, but painful fashion.
No glory, just ‘the right thing’.
The choice comes down to dying now, in anonymity and perhaps doing the ‘right thing’. Or dying later, alongside everyone else, perhaps your loved ones.
You’d have no conscience to nag you because you’ll be wiped out with everyone else (…unless you happen to believe in some kind of meritocratic afterlife… perhaps)
Whatever good (or, dare I say, bad) that you do, will eventually be forgotten. The paper or hard drives that hold the information about you will eventually fail and never be replaced. The people who hold you in their memories will eventually pass away.
Knowing that, would you still be willing to ‘do the right thing’?
Can you find a better reason to do the ‘right thing’?
Is the ‘right thing’ even right for you?
First, your thoughts;
As we understand it, your thoughts are tied to electrochemical processes in the brain
Electrochemical processes which, at their root ,
Are tied to subatomic , quantum processes
Which are random
And by their nature unknowable.
…Here we have randomness
Secondly, your desires;
You can choose to act upon your desires or not
But you can’t choose your desires.
…Here we have determinism.
Neither randomness, nor determinism, are compatible with Free Will.
Obviously, you are not ‘a robot’.
Or, if you are, you are at least a fleshy robot that is, much more unpredictable than a regular robot.
Inspired by things I read in ‘Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow ‘ by Yuval Noah Harari
Photo by MassiveKontent
Mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, 1st cousins…3rd cousins, 11th cousins twice removed
(etc.)
Like a great many things, it’s all relative
Go back far enough and we all share the same grandmother
(‘Mitochondrial Eve’)
Or take this argument back further
To some sort of floppy, spineless, water based creature
From which we are all descended
Back further still to single celled bacteria
Hanging out, multiplying and swallowing each other
(…great grandparents taken to orders of magnitude and ridiculous extremes)
Even further still to the pool of amino acids
Waiting for life to happen
And bubbling in the Primordial Soup
In one way ‘family’ is defined by amount of genetic divergence between two organisms
The less divergence, the more ‘related’ you could call us
If we take the amount of genetic similarity as a measurement…
So, when I call you my brother or my sister perhaps it means something
If it can be worked out at the point our grandparents diverged
Then it really is a matter of degree
Put another way, all of our grandparents were the same ‘person’, up until a very recent point in the biological timeline
And so,
Maybe we can take a more expansive view and realise
That, to a great extent, all of Earth’s life is related
I mean, Jesus, you already share 60% of your genes with a chicken
Yes,
At one point you and that chicken’s extremely-great-grandparent
Where one and the same
Of carbon and trace elements
Currently animate complex matter
Source material born in the heart of a star
Subatomic material born in the Big Bang
(….again, it depends how far back you look)
Back to that old stardust trope again
Yeah
Despite being an only child of an only child of an only child of an only child
I like to think of everybody and everything as my brothers and sisters
The Orion Spiral Arm Crew
Meaninglessly large numbers
Trillions or quadrillions of us;
All living and dying and recycling our matter
Over and over again
All fighting the war against entropy, frailty, futility and Oblivion
Over and over again
Some searching for meaning
Most just trying to survive and reproduce
So that their children can do just the same,
Forever and ever
Until there is no space for ghosts
Until there is just space
Empty space
And what will the point of it all have been?
Photo by vishwaant