Anything is possible of course but I prefer Aurelius:
"If thou workest at that which is before thee, following right reason seriously, vigorously, calmly, without allowing anything else to distract thee, but keeping thy divine part pure, as if thou shouldst be bound to give it back immediately; if thou holdest to this, expecting nothing, fearing nothing, but satisfied with thy present activity according to nature, and with heroic truth in every word and sound which thou utterest, thou wilt live happy. And there is no man who is able to prevent this."
Fascinating ideas to consider. Obviously there's no real way to confirm or deny any of it definitively, but religious stories and imagery do seem to really speak to us on a level that seems impossible to make sense of under a materialist worldview. Any creative artists can attest that the Muse really is irreducibly magical and mysterious. It really does make you wonder sometimes, what is this? And what and who are we?
A metaphor that seems to capture some aspect of it: imagine a world without cameras or mirrors, where the only way to know what you look like is to have someone draw a portrait of you, but everyone that you ask to do your portrait draws it differently; so none of the drawings is literally you or even looks like you, but some patterns emerge and give you an idea of what you look like. These dreamlike stories and symbols do seem to fulfill the same roles, concerning our inner likeness, as the drawings in the metaphor do for one's outer likeness.
St Paul's letters have an interesting feature. On the one hand, he speaks of knowing God intimately and of having had visions and even having visited the heavenly realms. Yet he also declares that we can, at best, only partially know and see the things of God, and that we see through a glass darkly. There's something about his writinf that really resonates with me on a deep level, beyond words or conscious formulations, that makes me think he really knew and saw things that our religious traditions, at their best, can only clumsily point towards. It really is a magical universe we live in (even if some of that magic is wielded by evil sorcerers).
I've long imagined the same - there is no legit reason to discount the idea that our soul transmigrates from world to world. I believe this world is a wondrous, magical garden, not a trap. I believe the moon is much the reason there is life on this earth, that the climate is as stable as it is - not a vampire.
One does wonder though, if it takes about 100,000 years for a radio signal to cross the Milky Way, why is it so silent out there?
Accepting the first 90% of analysis, which was effing impressive, there is a simpler conclusion in the cards.
The genetic potential of what homosapiens are today, and what we could be in 1000 years, is already imprinted in a one-celled creature. In other words, all life has the potential to evolve to where we might be in 1000 years. Equally logical, is the prospect of this being likewise throughout this universe.
This kinda suggests a pattern.
That all life evolves. Which is to say, has a direction. And as all other extant existence appears to be integrated, why would life be any different? It is fundamentally logical to consider that life has an integral function in the universe. Are there any niches we can think of that might fulfil that function. I can think of one, immediately.
We are aware of no mechanism by which this universe we currently occupy can link with other universes (or manifestations of 'is'). Is there any compelling reason to not speculate that life exists to eventually enable this universe to evolve into another, or to link with another. Or to link with many in the multiverse. One of the patterns to emerge as life evolves is that, eventually, life forms learn how to extend their physical powers... what we like to refer to as technology. Whether this is man using a lever and fulcrum to lift something previously beyond his physical capacity, or a chimp poking a stick inside a termite hill to enhance access to termites, this is technology. Many animals use it.
Eventually, we learned how to extend our mental powers beyond natural capacity with arithmetic, and the abacus, and then computer. The question is then posed... why? What, in terms of integral function in the universe, is the point of our eveolving technology. Where is all of this going?
Those cleverer than I may well elevate dozens of conceivable functions but I am kinda stuck on the idea of man and his technology eventually combining and manifesting as energy to enable this universe to conjoin with its peers, so to speak. If this is our destiny, it also makes the Big Bang seem unlikely. Light spectrography suggests so too.
Creationists need to consider that TIME need exist only as a dimension of this, our own little universe. And, increasingly, the concept of a Great Puppeteer out there is evidentially and logically unlikely. A more likely explanation is that early man was intuitively aware of the drive for evolution but could express this only in terms of religion. I regard creationists as representatives of our primitive past, lingering on futilely into the future. They will die out, but only kicking and screaming to the end.
I also regard the WEF disciples as their mirror opposites... primitive hangovers intuiting future human evolution in terms of their own primitve grasp of life function. They see themselves as Gods, re-arranging the planet; having control over life and death; each individual nurturing the suspicion that he or she is actually God. Yep, they are barking mad.
Should we focus on out evolutionary future? Hell no. We are just messing about in our little universal crucible and we will advance as opportunity and resources permit. In the meantime, we should dump the idea of gods and leaders and just establish a series of democratic meritocracies, and accord with informed consensus, and enjoy the ride.
Speaking of physicalists, "...multiverse might instead, or also, consist of universes with entirely different laws of physics..."
What about universes which are not physical? If souls and imagination exist then might some universes exist which have a fundamental level that is something other than physical? Or no fundamamental level at all. If so, the space of existence would be exponentially larger even than you describe. Right?
Well, from an evolutionary standpoint, if we go beyond Neodarwinian orthodoxy, reincarnation does makes sense. Going to heaven and slack for eternity, however, does not, and neither does simply waiting till we, our civilization, and our planet just disappear without a trace.
Wow, this perambulation into the intricacies of immortality and time-travel, and so much more beyond my comprehension, has certainly opened new vistas of consideration that my small small world and life-experience may be....just may be a lot deeper and far-flung than my imagination can comprehend. I'll be paying much closer attention to my dreamworld from now on.
w0w, Prof JC, manyThanks ! Here's some grist for your MDin the CD mill-
'Aerial Ships, Nuclear Weaponry & Infinite Universes in the Sanskrit Texts
VIMANAS is India’s ancient relationship with UFOs & ETs. The Sanskrit word VIMANA is defined as 'measuring out, traversing; a car or chariot of the gods, any mythical self-moving aerial car.' The ancient Sanskrit texts are full of references to these flying VIMANAS. The famous book VAIMANIKA SHASTRA, which was sold as a Sanskrit text on spaceship aeronautics, was channeled in 1918-23.
However, there are numerous examples of aerial ships in the great Sanskrit epic, The MAHABHARATA:
… they again took to their city and employing their…wizardry flew up to the sky, city and all…their celestial, divinely effulgent, airborne city, which could move about at will. Now it would go underground, then hover high in the sky, go diagonally with speed, or submerge in the ocean.
On this sun-like, divine, wonder-working chariot [Arjuna] flew joyously upward, while becoming invisible to the mortals who walked on earth, he saw wondrous airborne chariots by the thousands.
Evidence of nuclear bombs is found in a passage from The Mahabharata: At the Time of the Great Dissolution of the Universe - Excerpts from the Mahabharata :..And there rise in the sky deep masses of clouds, looking like herds of elephants and decked with wreaths of lightning that are wonderful to behold...'
'The Mahabharata, also known as the great epic of the Bharata Dynasty, is divided into two books of more than 100,000 verses, each containing two lines or couplets totaling more than 1.8 million words. It is roughly 10 times as long as "The Illiad," one of the most notable Western epic poems.'
As to the number of galaxies in the observable universe, the key here is *observable*. We don't really have any reason to believe that the "universe is round" or topologically closed. Far from it - if anything, some of the weirdness the JWST is seeing indicate there might be some kind of hyperbolic geometry going on at extremely large scales.
Which means that, as time advances, what we should see are more and more galaxies "peeling away" and condensing from the cosmic microwave background horizon as that horizon recedes from us at the speed of light. No reason that it works out to a finite extent at all.
This essay is a bit of an antidote to an attitude that I've encountered in too many other places: A sort of "closed worldview": The world can only ever be this way, this old, this big, the only things that concern mankind or ever should concern mankind are these things, etc. As a kid I had people literally tell me that the stars simply do not concern mankind, they are superfluous, they might as well be lights in the sky. The only thing we should ever do is wait for the world to end. For the religious, it was some biblical apocalypse, for the leftists it was eco-doom. To even imagine anything diverging from "the worldview" was at best woefully childish self-indulgence, and at worst sinful.
There is a hell of a lot of "elsewhere" out there.
These ideas are interesting, but there are things about it that bug me:
If any particular track of conscious experiences "out there" in Platonic space are as real as any other, then why do we experience what we do? Why am I me and not someone else? Why do my experiences follow some internally and externally consistent arc? (Why experience a world at all? Why not some jumbled up random mess?) How do you put a measure over this space?
One thing I don't think too many people realize about interstellar communications is that, unless you have nigh arbitrary energy to spend, it is necessarily a directional affair. That we don't see anyone sending us signals probably doesn't indicate anything other than that we aren't on anyones "point-to" list.
If earthlike worlds are extremely common, there may be even less of a reason to send signals to any particular place until you are sure there is someone there listening. Or you have a spare hundred million years of radio/laser time to burn or something.
It was mentioned earlier in the thread, 'why have we not received signals from alien cultures', and the potentially scary reasons. My theory is called 'galactic mouse utopia'
At first technological advancement is purely beneficial, it makes life easier without interfering with biological imperatives. Eventually the pace quickens, in our case when european men began the industrial revolution and onwards, however the sentient life-form cannot keep up with unrelenting technological advancement and the drastic social changes... or rather adapt to it. A very slow process vs the tech rush. Despite living in a vastly different world to a few decades ago we are still hunter gatherers at heart, with a mentality from 30,000 years ago.
Tech becomes a yolk around the neck, denying us from indulging in our biological imperatives (war, tribalism, etc). This leads to insanity and suicidal impulses... modern european civilization being a good example. We end up in our version of mouse utopia, committing suicide by technology. Europeans, with their vast nuclear stockpiles, could easily see this world to the grave. Why not they have already lost the plot, pushing the button will become ever more tempting... I wonder if this has already happened to countless other civilizations around the galaxy, suicide by technology.
The moon as the realm of the dead does strike me as well supported by the deeper mythological substata of our minds. The Moon Godess Artemis-Hekate-Selene, or Freya/Idun does rule not only the living sublunary creatures but also the souls of the dead ancestor spirits. Our lives replenishing the cup of the Gods, the eternal apple of youth of the Gods which passes from God to God with each new full moon. The Gods eating the apple one at a time. Reincarnation being the millstone around our neck, for ever drowning us in the river of time, again and again.
Til we break free from our bonds, escape the clutching embrace of the lady of the night, the Mara/Mare and find our true Soul in Sol.
This is the foundational layer of our myths, so now we only need to grasp that which is further down, below even this darkened cave and into the foundational rock itself.
Thought provoking as always. Reminiscent of Camille Flammarion's theories about interstellar transmigration (but with the added bonus of vampire moons). A few scattered thoughts:
One thing that has always occurred to me when pondering the notion of reincarnation is that no one I've run across has proposed a compelling model for an economy of souls. The generation of new discrete bodies is the unpredictable result of agents/souls acting in spacetime. In the case of bodies whose actions we might consider to be animated by souls (i.e. those beings equipped with organic structures capable of demonstrating agency/intentionality), new body generation is the result of a cocktail of choices and forces, expressed across a given span of time. Bodies are likewise destroyed by choice and force (whether entropic or violent), and also cannot be predicted with precision.
As a result, an economy of souls that supports reincarnation would need to either be in closed system equilibrium (with an omnipotent Cupid and/or Grim Reaper ruthlessly policing transmigrations via pinpopint sex magic and/or herd culling), or it must account for the production of new souls to inhabit new flesh when the universe is in a “flesh boom” period (and perhaps the destruction of souls to account for recessions, although this may result in those disembodied “roaming spirits” many human cultures have recognized).
Since the former solution seems so bug-shagging insane it might make the hoariest of utilitarian-determinists blush. we are thrust back into the problem of how souls are created (or perhaps pro-or-multi-created). But I think there may be a model that accommodates both the reincarnation model and the life/afterlife concept. I just haven't come up with the right words for it yet, heh.
Anything is possible of course but I prefer Aurelius:
"If thou workest at that which is before thee, following right reason seriously, vigorously, calmly, without allowing anything else to distract thee, but keeping thy divine part pure, as if thou shouldst be bound to give it back immediately; if thou holdest to this, expecting nothing, fearing nothing, but satisfied with thy present activity according to nature, and with heroic truth in every word and sound which thou utterest, thou wilt live happy. And there is no man who is able to prevent this."
–Meditations
Fascinating ideas to consider. Obviously there's no real way to confirm or deny any of it definitively, but religious stories and imagery do seem to really speak to us on a level that seems impossible to make sense of under a materialist worldview. Any creative artists can attest that the Muse really is irreducibly magical and mysterious. It really does make you wonder sometimes, what is this? And what and who are we?
A metaphor that seems to capture some aspect of it: imagine a world without cameras or mirrors, where the only way to know what you look like is to have someone draw a portrait of you, but everyone that you ask to do your portrait draws it differently; so none of the drawings is literally you or even looks like you, but some patterns emerge and give you an idea of what you look like. These dreamlike stories and symbols do seem to fulfill the same roles, concerning our inner likeness, as the drawings in the metaphor do for one's outer likeness.
St Paul's letters have an interesting feature. On the one hand, he speaks of knowing God intimately and of having had visions and even having visited the heavenly realms. Yet he also declares that we can, at best, only partially know and see the things of God, and that we see through a glass darkly. There's something about his writinf that really resonates with me on a deep level, beyond words or conscious formulations, that makes me think he really knew and saw things that our religious traditions, at their best, can only clumsily point towards. It really is a magical universe we live in (even if some of that magic is wielded by evil sorcerers).
I've long imagined the same - there is no legit reason to discount the idea that our soul transmigrates from world to world. I believe this world is a wondrous, magical garden, not a trap. I believe the moon is much the reason there is life on this earth, that the climate is as stable as it is - not a vampire.
One does wonder though, if it takes about 100,000 years for a radio signal to cross the Milky Way, why is it so silent out there?
Accepting the first 90% of analysis, which was effing impressive, there is a simpler conclusion in the cards.
The genetic potential of what homosapiens are today, and what we could be in 1000 years, is already imprinted in a one-celled creature. In other words, all life has the potential to evolve to where we might be in 1000 years. Equally logical, is the prospect of this being likewise throughout this universe.
This kinda suggests a pattern.
That all life evolves. Which is to say, has a direction. And as all other extant existence appears to be integrated, why would life be any different? It is fundamentally logical to consider that life has an integral function in the universe. Are there any niches we can think of that might fulfil that function. I can think of one, immediately.
We are aware of no mechanism by which this universe we currently occupy can link with other universes (or manifestations of 'is'). Is there any compelling reason to not speculate that life exists to eventually enable this universe to evolve into another, or to link with another. Or to link with many in the multiverse. One of the patterns to emerge as life evolves is that, eventually, life forms learn how to extend their physical powers... what we like to refer to as technology. Whether this is man using a lever and fulcrum to lift something previously beyond his physical capacity, or a chimp poking a stick inside a termite hill to enhance access to termites, this is technology. Many animals use it.
Eventually, we learned how to extend our mental powers beyond natural capacity with arithmetic, and the abacus, and then computer. The question is then posed... why? What, in terms of integral function in the universe, is the point of our eveolving technology. Where is all of this going?
Those cleverer than I may well elevate dozens of conceivable functions but I am kinda stuck on the idea of man and his technology eventually combining and manifesting as energy to enable this universe to conjoin with its peers, so to speak. If this is our destiny, it also makes the Big Bang seem unlikely. Light spectrography suggests so too.
Creationists need to consider that TIME need exist only as a dimension of this, our own little universe. And, increasingly, the concept of a Great Puppeteer out there is evidentially and logically unlikely. A more likely explanation is that early man was intuitively aware of the drive for evolution but could express this only in terms of religion. I regard creationists as representatives of our primitive past, lingering on futilely into the future. They will die out, but only kicking and screaming to the end.
I also regard the WEF disciples as their mirror opposites... primitive hangovers intuiting future human evolution in terms of their own primitve grasp of life function. They see themselves as Gods, re-arranging the planet; having control over life and death; each individual nurturing the suspicion that he or she is actually God. Yep, they are barking mad.
Should we focus on out evolutionary future? Hell no. We are just messing about in our little universal crucible and we will advance as opportunity and resources permit. In the meantime, we should dump the idea of gods and leaders and just establish a series of democratic meritocracies, and accord with informed consensus, and enjoy the ride.
Speaking of physicalists, "...multiverse might instead, or also, consist of universes with entirely different laws of physics..."
What about universes which are not physical? If souls and imagination exist then might some universes exist which have a fundamental level that is something other than physical? Or no fundamamental level at all. If so, the space of existence would be exponentially larger even than you describe. Right?
So you're saying there's a chance I can romance a green woman? Kek.
Well, from an evolutionary standpoint, if we go beyond Neodarwinian orthodoxy, reincarnation does makes sense. Going to heaven and slack for eternity, however, does not, and neither does simply waiting till we, our civilization, and our planet just disappear without a trace.
Wow, this perambulation into the intricacies of immortality and time-travel, and so much more beyond my comprehension, has certainly opened new vistas of consideration that my small small world and life-experience may be....just may be a lot deeper and far-flung than my imagination can comprehend. I'll be paying much closer attention to my dreamworld from now on.
w0w, Prof JC, manyThanks ! Here's some grist for your MDin the CD mill-
'Aerial Ships, Nuclear Weaponry & Infinite Universes in the Sanskrit Texts
VIMANAS is India’s ancient relationship with UFOs & ETs. The Sanskrit word VIMANA is defined as 'measuring out, traversing; a car or chariot of the gods, any mythical self-moving aerial car.' The ancient Sanskrit texts are full of references to these flying VIMANAS. The famous book VAIMANIKA SHASTRA, which was sold as a Sanskrit text on spaceship aeronautics, was channeled in 1918-23.
However, there are numerous examples of aerial ships in the great Sanskrit epic, The MAHABHARATA:
… they again took to their city and employing their…wizardry flew up to the sky, city and all…their celestial, divinely effulgent, airborne city, which could move about at will. Now it would go underground, then hover high in the sky, go diagonally with speed, or submerge in the ocean.
On this sun-like, divine, wonder-working chariot [Arjuna] flew joyously upward, while becoming invisible to the mortals who walked on earth, he saw wondrous airborne chariots by the thousands.
Evidence of nuclear bombs is found in a passage from The Mahabharata: At the Time of the Great Dissolution of the Universe - Excerpts from the Mahabharata :..And there rise in the sky deep masses of clouds, looking like herds of elephants and decked with wreaths of lightning that are wonderful to behold...'
ancient-origins.net /myths-legends-opinion/aerial-ships-nuclear-weaponry-infinite-universes-sanskrit-texts-00390
'The Mahabharata, also known as the great epic of the Bharata Dynasty, is divided into two books of more than 100,000 verses, each containing two lines or couplets totaling more than 1.8 million words. It is roughly 10 times as long as "The Illiad," one of the most notable Western epic poems.'
learnreligions.com/the-story-of-the-mahabharata-1770167
Hey John, thanks for the shoutout here, I’m glad you found that piece interesting.
As to the number of galaxies in the observable universe, the key here is *observable*. We don't really have any reason to believe that the "universe is round" or topologically closed. Far from it - if anything, some of the weirdness the JWST is seeing indicate there might be some kind of hyperbolic geometry going on at extremely large scales.
Which means that, as time advances, what we should see are more and more galaxies "peeling away" and condensing from the cosmic microwave background horizon as that horizon recedes from us at the speed of light. No reason that it works out to a finite extent at all.
This essay is a bit of an antidote to an attitude that I've encountered in too many other places: A sort of "closed worldview": The world can only ever be this way, this old, this big, the only things that concern mankind or ever should concern mankind are these things, etc. As a kid I had people literally tell me that the stars simply do not concern mankind, they are superfluous, they might as well be lights in the sky. The only thing we should ever do is wait for the world to end. For the religious, it was some biblical apocalypse, for the leftists it was eco-doom. To even imagine anything diverging from "the worldview" was at best woefully childish self-indulgence, and at worst sinful.
There is a hell of a lot of "elsewhere" out there.
These ideas are interesting, but there are things about it that bug me:
If any particular track of conscious experiences "out there" in Platonic space are as real as any other, then why do we experience what we do? Why am I me and not someone else? Why do my experiences follow some internally and externally consistent arc? (Why experience a world at all? Why not some jumbled up random mess?) How do you put a measure over this space?
One thing I don't think too many people realize about interstellar communications is that, unless you have nigh arbitrary energy to spend, it is necessarily a directional affair. That we don't see anyone sending us signals probably doesn't indicate anything other than that we aren't on anyones "point-to" list.
If earthlike worlds are extremely common, there may be even less of a reason to send signals to any particular place until you are sure there is someone there listening. Or you have a spare hundred million years of radio/laser time to burn or something.
It was mentioned earlier in the thread, 'why have we not received signals from alien cultures', and the potentially scary reasons. My theory is called 'galactic mouse utopia'
At first technological advancement is purely beneficial, it makes life easier without interfering with biological imperatives. Eventually the pace quickens, in our case when european men began the industrial revolution and onwards, however the sentient life-form cannot keep up with unrelenting technological advancement and the drastic social changes... or rather adapt to it. A very slow process vs the tech rush. Despite living in a vastly different world to a few decades ago we are still hunter gatherers at heart, with a mentality from 30,000 years ago.
Tech becomes a yolk around the neck, denying us from indulging in our biological imperatives (war, tribalism, etc). This leads to insanity and suicidal impulses... modern european civilization being a good example. We end up in our version of mouse utopia, committing suicide by technology. Europeans, with their vast nuclear stockpiles, could easily see this world to the grave. Why not they have already lost the plot, pushing the button will become ever more tempting... I wonder if this has already happened to countless other civilizations around the galaxy, suicide by technology.
The moon as the realm of the dead does strike me as well supported by the deeper mythological substata of our minds. The Moon Godess Artemis-Hekate-Selene, or Freya/Idun does rule not only the living sublunary creatures but also the souls of the dead ancestor spirits. Our lives replenishing the cup of the Gods, the eternal apple of youth of the Gods which passes from God to God with each new full moon. The Gods eating the apple one at a time. Reincarnation being the millstone around our neck, for ever drowning us in the river of time, again and again.
Til we break free from our bonds, escape the clutching embrace of the lady of the night, the Mara/Mare and find our true Soul in Sol.
This is the foundational layer of our myths, so now we only need to grasp that which is further down, below even this darkened cave and into the foundational rock itself.
We need more light.
Thought provoking as always. Reminiscent of Camille Flammarion's theories about interstellar transmigration (but with the added bonus of vampire moons). A few scattered thoughts:
One thing that has always occurred to me when pondering the notion of reincarnation is that no one I've run across has proposed a compelling model for an economy of souls. The generation of new discrete bodies is the unpredictable result of agents/souls acting in spacetime. In the case of bodies whose actions we might consider to be animated by souls (i.e. those beings equipped with organic structures capable of demonstrating agency/intentionality), new body generation is the result of a cocktail of choices and forces, expressed across a given span of time. Bodies are likewise destroyed by choice and force (whether entropic or violent), and also cannot be predicted with precision.
As a result, an economy of souls that supports reincarnation would need to either be in closed system equilibrium (with an omnipotent Cupid and/or Grim Reaper ruthlessly policing transmigrations via pinpopint sex magic and/or herd culling), or it must account for the production of new souls to inhabit new flesh when the universe is in a “flesh boom” period (and perhaps the destruction of souls to account for recessions, although this may result in those disembodied “roaming spirits” many human cultures have recognized).
Since the former solution seems so bug-shagging insane it might make the hoariest of utilitarian-determinists blush. we are thrust back into the problem of how souls are created (or perhaps pro-or-multi-created). But I think there may be a model that accommodates both the reincarnation model and the life/afterlife concept. I just haven't come up with the right words for it yet, heh.