Thread: Immortality or not?

I don't wanna lose myself! who cares about continuity, or life cycle, or whatever. I care about my own personal consciousness, and don't wanna lose it. Accepting death is impossible for me, unless I face it at that moment, then I have no other choice.

I'll give you a hint. Your conscious identity exists to reduce cognitive dissonance. Your perception and reactions to it are bound together merely to enable consistent behavior. You are a colony of cells that followed a strength in numbers strategy. And likewise, the business, community and society in which you participate is also a type of organism, its own awareness working through the perception of the organisms that make it up, its response based on the decisions of organisms places in management positions, just as our individual cells give us awareness and our neurons give us response.

What you are afraid of losing, you only attach yourself to through misunderstanding of what life is. You are not just an individual, you are legion.

Very very meaningful and sense full!
I always tried to comfort myself by saying that death is only the end of my perception, responses, mechanisms of thinking and acting. I will just not be anymore, like I had never been before I was born.

Edit: You seem very educated and sophisticated! That is gonna be very helpful, very! congrats for that!

It's an illusion caused by my glib verbosity.

Originally Posted by Original Poster

It's an illusion caused by my glib verbosity.

hahaha...ha...ha..........don't know what that means

I like what Original said. We think that we are something real, when we are simply a collection of atoms combined into a temporary form, no more permanent than a cloud. Our sense of time is proportionate to our lifespan, but to the consciousness of a sequoia or a planet we a a blip on the screen.

It has been determined that just by the law of averages, each human on earth contains 100-150 of the trillions of atoms that once made up the body of Jesus Christ. It doesn't matter if you believe in Jesus, since it is statistics, you can substitute any human from 2,000 years ago or earlier. We are utilizing the atoms that were dispersed from his body after it disintegrated. Logically, we likely also contain atoms from Socrates, Alexander, and everyone else as well.

We are as insignificant as every ant that is also utilizing the same atoms. But there is something interesting we can do with this temporary experience. If a person from an advanced civilization on earth from only 100 years ago were to be on one side of a curtain and be able to ask any question of you with your smartphone on the other side (or wtf, just let Siri answer), he would think that he was talking with a person from an extremely advanced, probably alien intelligence. You would be able to give accurate descriptions of any place on earth as though you were looking at it from the sky. You would be able to answer any question he could pose. He would think what you could do humanly impossible.

That is where we are today just four generations from the man from 1914. We can be the ones who take life that same 100 year distance, but in only 20 years. That is pretty awesome. Who needs eternity?

Don't do it for yourself. Do it for life.

JJ

Originally Posted by Original Poster

I'll give you a hint. Your conscious identity exists to reduce cognitive dissonance. Your perception and reactions to it are bound together merely to enable consistent behavior. You are a colony of cells that followed a strength in numbers strategy. And likewise, the business, community and society in which you participate is also a type of organism, its own awareness working through the perception of the organisms that make it up, its response based on the decisions of organisms places in management positions, just as our individual cells give us awareness and our neurons give us response.

What you are afraid of losing, you only attach yourself to through misunderstanding of what life is. You are not just an individual, you are legion.

Note the positive correlation on this site between wanting to live forever and being skeptical of shared dreaming.

Shared dreaming requires relaxing your identification of self with your own person. Do that and you don't care so much about personal immortality. Or vice versa.

my phone is horrible!
Ok, I don't believe in shared dreaming, because we don't have that mechanism in our brain, but a biological body's sustanance is possible

We don't?

Uh oh; here we go again...

Originally Posted by LouaiB

I don't believe in shared dreaming, because we don't have that mechanism in our brain, but a biological body's sustanance is possible

You don't believe in shared dreaming because you'd rather post opinions on the internet than find out about the things you're posting about. Maybe its laziness, or you want to keep your mind private.

Its almost the same as what I said about demons. In jnana yoga, you move your thought of identity. If you use that same kind of movement, you can become someone else a little bit, and allow them to become you a little bit, and share thoughts that way. Saying its not possible because you don't know the mechanism is both arrogant and ignorant. Had you lived before Maxwell, would you have disbelieved in compasses, and declined to look when someone offered to demonstrate one? Here you have to find your own internal compass, but its not hard.

A couple of months ago I argued with someone who suggested that premonitions work through entanglement. Now I think he's right, even if there's more to it than that. It works the same way as shared dreaming, and entanglement is by definition what I'm doing with my identity, at some level. In physics, all particles are entangled with all other particles, no matter how remote, except that most of those interrelationships are out of phase and add almost to zero. Apparently there's some way to intentionally amplify the engtanglement that does not require physical proximity. In any case, its empty talk unless you're willing to try it.

Funny thing, shared dreaming is nothing scientific, it is a myth, a part of early stages of the development of how we look at the world, and we develop for a reason. Why aren't the shared dreaming projects giving any results? We don't know how to do it? We know every part of the human brain, and I assure you there is not transmitters and recievers there. Telepathy? Now that is just a story human created for amusement, or to explain normal dreams or hunches.

Originally Posted by LouaiB

Come on, you know I'm right. No body wants to die and face eternal unconsciousness!

I don't think you are right at all. People who are suicidal or living in extreme pain do not want to live, and they sure as hell don't want to live forever. If living forever equated to a happy hunky dory life, then sure people would go for that but it doesn't. I would neverEVER want to live forever, but maybe I am in the minority on this.

When I was suicidal the major thought that consoled me was that I'd only be alive for a few more moments anyway, surely I can wait it out.

Originally Posted by Chickadee23

I don't think you are right at all. People who are suicidal or living in extreme pain do not want to live, and they sure as hell don't want to live forever. If living forever equated to a happy hunky dory life, then sure people would go for that but it doesn't. I would neverEVER want to live forever, but maybe I am in the minority on this.

Yeah, that's why I did the poll. Actually, simply being positive is enough to change a whole state of sadness to happiness. It is very simple. In the end, we are simple biological creatures designed to react to specific actions with specific reactions, programmed.

Originally Posted by Original Poster

When I was suicidal the major thought that consoled me was that I'd only be alive for a few more moments anyway, surely I can wait it out.

Hmmm, sorry for that. Yeah, life is short

Originally Posted by LouaiB

Funny thing, shared dreaming is nothing scientific, it is a myth, a part of early stages of the development of how we look at the world, and we develop for a reason. Why aren't the shared dreaming projects giving any results? We don't know how to do it? We know every part of the human brain, and I assure you there is not transmitters and recievers there. Telepathy? Now that is just a story human created for amusement, or to explain normal dreams or hunches.

We understand only some generalities and a few specific details about the working of the human brain. Most of it is not understood by anybody. For example, the way the eye and the optic nerve works is pretty well understood, and its known that perception of color involves the visual cortex, but after that its mostly handwaving. What goes on in the visual cortex when a particular color is experienced is not known much beyond vague statements like 'activity'.

If you think telepathy involves "transmitters and receivers", you haven't been paying attention when people describe how it works, at least not in the beyond-dreaming forum. Its not like sending and receiving a signal, and if you try to do it that way you're unlikely to find anything.

I can't comment much on the success or failure of shared dreaming projects, because I have not participated or read the threads. From what I have seen, I think many of the people pursuing it are partially misunderstanding what dreaming is. I'm speaking from my own understanding and experience of what works. If someone else tries something else that doesn't work, that doesn't say much.

Try it, open yourself to it, find out how it works. Ask questions if you have them. That way, if you're right and the other person is wrong, you'll have actual understanding and experience to go with your assertions, and if they're wrong you'll be able to point out where the fallacies are. Or if they're right, you'll find out something new, so you win either way.

If you don't want to do that, that's perfectly reasonable. But then its not reasonable to continue to spout opinions about things you have no interest in becoming informed about. And its even less reasonable for me to waste my time replying.

Exactly. Our understanding of the brain is very small, and our understanding of the mind is near zero.

Currently, scientists do not even understand how the harmonious movement of a school of fish or flock of birds work, but it's clearly understood that when we learn how it works, we'll have learned something new about both physics and the nature of the mind.

We are just barely creasing the surface of the doorway toward understanding these deeper mysteries. Any presumption at this stage is a hindrance.

Currently, there remains no scientific evidence of shared dreaming. But people are doing it, anyways, just as people have been practicing all sorts of things years and centuries before scientists could grasp how these practices worked. All you can do is choose not the believe the people claiming to participate in shared dreams. I believe in nothing that I hear, too, but I remain open to possibility.

huh. Well, I'd have ti stick with my current opinion, but I will never dismiss it before hearing what the other person has to say.

Ok, thnx for your replies, I appreciate you taking the time to share with me your opinions- and many others' I'm sure

All I'm saying is there's no evidence to support your opinion. Just because you don't believe in something doesn't mean you have to believe in its falsity. I have participated in shared dreams and still don't believe in them. Why? Because I only believe in half of what I see...

yes, I am always open-minded to other opinions, and adopt an attitude of "I am a neutral participent, I have no opinion, I will give my part of the arguement are study the OP's arguement, then, like a new student figuring which is more reasonable, go for the opinion or create a hybrid."
Also, I could be wrong, so I don't attach to a certain idea(as much as a human can before he feels extremely insecure )

I would press further into a state of neutrality but I'll just refer to Buddha; only give as much attachment as you're able and if you can't do that, give up the attachment to give up more attachment than you're able. The ego likes having opinions, I suppose.

@Darkmatters and StephL
I think that a more sophisticated religious person would support longevity research. I mean, if someone truly believes that his religion is the truest truth you'd think that he would support such a thing because he "knows" that immorality is unachievable by human beings and if anything this research would better people's lives i.e. be beneficial to humanity which is exactly what most religions preach about.

Considering I believe in pure nothingness after death, immortality is my greatest ambition. Even being locked in a cave for centuries would be vaguely bearable, compared to nothingness (which, by definition, can't be bearable).

How the fuck did you logic that one?