What if, I am going to wonder out loud, Big Tech–and particularly Google, which employs Ray Kurzweil–spent, say, 10% of its Singularity budget on Electronic Voice Phenomena/Instrumental Transcommunication?
And specifically, what if there a way to make it relatively easy for a spirit trying to communicate to do so through some functional equivalent of the keyboard Stephen Hawking used, as rendered more able by a skillful use of AI as an interpretive algorithm?
To me, the keys to the future lie in meaning formation, and meaning, in turn, is contextual. If you think the universe operates one way, then you perform logical operations on this understanding in creating your explicit or implied life philosophy, which is embodied in what you do and think and feel every day. What you believe and who you are are two sides of the same coin. It is by far the most important question.
And if we can establish scientifically that we are essences, spirits, packets of intelligent information embedded within a field of infinite information, then reasonable people who currently believe the contrary, will in short order change both their belief systems, and the way they live their lives based on those beliefs.
If you believe this is all there is, then the arguments against greed, pleasure and thrill seeking, and a perceptual horizon limited to your own life are not as compelling as they would be if you KNEW that some part of you carried on, consciously.
I’m not one of these people who say that atheists have no basis for their moralities, but I am very certainly one of those people who believes it is HARDER to take a long term view, to justify self sacrifice, to limit the one life you have for the sake of others. Practically, via socialism, many make of the “Public Good” a religion, and a God of Society, but this in some respects is as related to wishful thinking as the notion that if you pray for something you will get it.
If we are simply evolved animals, and all our deepest impulses merely an expression of instincts which were once adaptive, then our very bodies lie to us continually. And those of a philosophical bent–which is to say those who value ordered thinking and principled consistency–cannot with confidence posit any absolute principles. They cannot even value an Earth populated with our species over one devoid of life, or one simply devoid of us–which outcome, indeed, is a wished-for outcome by some misanthropic environmentalists.
And why should they not hate themselves? Why should they not rue waking up within a terrible dream, one which ends badly, and is filled with confusion, distraction, alienation, and frustration in the beginning and middle?
In all things, I try to go for the jugular. I go for the core, the essence, the most important part. The part which, when I understand it, causes all sorts of other consequences to flow freely. Where is the beginning of the river? Where does the water come from? This is always an important question, even if answering it is difficult, and perhaps sometimes impossible.