X-Message-Number: 25197
From: "Brook Norton" <>
Subject: survival is an illusion?
Date: Thu, 2 Dec 2004 07:58:29 -0800

Below Bob Ettinger asserts that if physical systems have extension in space
and time, that this might give meaning to survival and may validate our
concern for our future selves. I have never understood Bob's assertion that
things have extensions over time. The closest I have come is with regards to
consciousness in which it seems that a certain duration in time is necessary
for consciousness to arise, say on the order of one quarter second (time for
several oscillations of the self-circuit standing wave), in which your brain
combines sensory input and subconscious reaction to this input of the last
quarter second, into the act of being conscious. But this could also be
explained by your brain recording the last quarter second in highly
accessible short term memory and combining that memory with the present-time
sensations, resulting in consciousness, consciousness existing only in the
present moment.

 

Even if we have extensions over time, that just adds to our physical
description and does not change my previous message's assertion that we
simply change over time, without the added complication of considering
"survival".

 

As for why we do value long term planning, I believe it is simply an
effective means of passing on our genes to future generations. Just as we
have the instinctual drive for food and sex, so do we have the drive to plan
for our future. But possessing that drive does not in any way imply we
"survive" to the future in any meaningful way.

 

Going hand in hand with an instinctual desire to plan ahead, is the
instinctual concept of "I" as an entity that "survives" from day to day.
Without that instinctual viewpoint, we would likely die due to lack of
planning for our survival, and that approach to life would not be passed on
to offspring. But just because we have an instinctual sense of self and
survival does not make it so. We instinctually fear an explosion in a movie
even though there is no danger.

 

Brook Norton

 

Per Bob Ettinger in msg 25192:

>Brook Norton concludes that we (probably) never survive from day to day, or


>that "survival" is without meaning, since every system changes over time
and we 

>must take the "quantitative" view, viz., that the only meaningful
statements 

>are those describing physical conditions and changes. He appears to believe


>that survival is an illusion, or misleading language, and the validity of
our 

>interest in the future is questionable.

 

>I have said that our interest in the future (and the past) may be validated


>by the fact (?) that physical systems have extension in space and time, so
that 

>I overlap my predecessors and continuers.



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