Sunday, July 4, 2021

Solving the Problem of Death: how to begin?


I believe Scientology blogs should occasionally discuss the (im?)possibility of human minds surviving beyond their present lifetimes. After all, that is half of what Scientology is about, and its main promise to its members. Hubbard sought to suppress the fear of death right from the outset, to get his followers to focus on other things and carry out his goals.
Unfortunately, death can't be defeated through spiritual or religious means, because these things aren't real. (Unless you believe they are real, but either way we get no data.)
That's also why mind "technology" groups like Scientology (and communism) are so ruthless. Because the subject is generally made up, it's not "self executing", but has to be brutally enforced to maintain participation.
Which brings us to the "scientific" or "technological" subject of Mind Backup technology - which also doesn't exist, but perhaps it might someday. A precursor to workable cryonics, it's the deeper subject this blog has always been about.
Certainly there should be more research. Or any research, really.
Over the years, we have discussed ways some of our memories and mental patterns could be "extracted" from our brains for future safekeeping. A long running theme is that a partial mind backup is better than no mind backup.
All it would take is sufficiently advanced technology. Here is a list of services you WON'T find at the Flag Land Base:

* Make a long list of all your best memories. These could be life events or settings.

* The average person has lived maybe a dozen lifetimes, where they lived at different places or in different ways. Each of these distinct life settings should be reconstructed separately.

* "Branching tree" or random walk methods to record many diversely linked memories in a hurry. "Synthetic dream" methods would record ongoing elaborations of imaginary settings or even false memories to measure personality patterns.

* Create a "personal encyclopedia" containing everything that can be recorded in one long volume. It could start with a general overview entry.

* An automatic life recorder or categorizer to watch everything you are doing and turn it into a detailed narrative.

* Memories of a single life event described in full could be a "holographic" encompassment or map of a whole personality. The same could be true for a random thought, fully extrapolated to all the other memories it links to.

* Your awareness might be reverse engineered, by recording or describing many different things that you know. All these things could then be combined, or thought about simultaneously, in an artificial mind. Though these things are not part of your mind, if linked together in one system they might describe an outline of your mind.

* The brain doesn't make awareness by itself. Brains are not enough. They need a constant stream of complex inputs. These create deeper layers of self-input, which compile the personality. This process could be software-simulated at lower resolution, but allowed to continue further than happens in nature.

A novel about this subject:
https://www.wattpad.com/myworks/263500574-singularity-soon

2 comments:

Sea Orgers at the Flag Land Base in Clearwater, FL

A post about life in the Sea Org in the "good old days" in LA: tonyortega.substack.com/p/scientology-in-the-good-old-days Today...