Frankly, I believe that accomplishing such a fantastic, herculean, almost magical feat, such as making an exact copy of a human mind would by force need to be preceeded by such incredible breakthroughs in science and technology, that the need or desire for copying a human brain would have long disappeared.
Or maybe not.
Anyway, right now, there is a natural means by which two minds become exactly alike. At the moment of death.
When we die, all of our minds will go into a ‘null’ state.
As I believe the universe doesn’t bother in creating multiple souls for identical states of consciousness, we will effectively become one.
Then there is a roll of the dice and of we go into the body of a newborn… baby?..animal?..alien?..being?
My only hesitation in the “roll of the dice” is that no matter how I think about it, how could it be a random “roll”? Bare with me as I’m only hanging onto this concept by a couple of threads and by no means wish to imply anything…
I follow the entire ‘null’ state (even after failing to grasp it in two prior threads) but then to randomly switch to a different consciousness is a bit of a stretch for me to make (not switch per se, but take on a different subjective viewpoint? Ack, I’m no good with words). I just have a hard time seeing that as random.
Perhaps (no get ready for a REALLY big stretch) there is only one subjective consciouness that rotates around seemingly focusing on one individual at a time but without the constraint of time thus inhabiting all individuals concurrently. This subjective viewpoint is independent of space/time, and has no “memory” or any retained consciousness, infact it is not a universal consciouness, but a universal viewpoint… but still, what determines where the subjective viewpoint goes next?
That subjective viewpoint theory also resolves my problems with the concepts of both eternity and nothingness as the viewpoint is always in the present. A continous everlasting finite present…
You made absolute perfect sense to me.
Actually, I used the concept of “a roll of the dice” as a kind of metaphor. It’s easier for me to understand the idea of a “universal viepoint” jumping sequentially from one life-thread to another, than it is for me to grasp the idea of it being everywhere, all the time.
Now, should all this be considered just metaphysical nonesense with no practical implications at all for our lives, or… does it really mean that each time we do someone good, we’re doing good to the “universal viewpoint”, and therefore doing good to ourselves?
I think you’re right about the universal viewpoint- certainly does dramatically underline the Golden Rule eh? Perhaps that’s why it is so easy to understand “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Collectively the more good we do the better lives the universal viewpoint will have.
I’m still fuzzy though as to how the subjective present viewpoint changes. I mean I get that at death my consciousness ends and such, but what determines which view the subjective viewpoint focuses on next?
I’ve been living the last four days now feeiling guilty that my present self had taken over from the consciousness that owned my body yesterday, and angry at the SOB who’s going to take it from me tonight. Damn that Arnold Schwarzenegger.
SwimmingwithChickens
I guess the difficulty in grasping the concept arises because we have a subjective notion of something we call time. I think “time” is something that is inherent to our life experience. It hasn’t the same meaning outside of our lives.
Maybe it doesn’t make sense to ask, “where does the universal viewpoint go next?”. The universal viewpoint is “doing” everybody, all the time. (ajem)
This notion is so counterintuitive with respect to all that we know, that maybe the best we can do to deal with it is to wrap an artificial handle on the concept. That is to say: we can assume that “after” we die, we “randomly” go to another “viewpoint”.
RickJay
What if we change bodies every hour?
If the crossover is seamless, we wouldn’t notice either.
How about every minute?,… second?.. nanosecond?..
Logically, this could be happening and we wouldn’t be aware of it. This seems to reduce itself to absurdity.
I think this suggests that time is not involved in the way we think it is.