Ask A Genius 814: A Small Library of Religious Beliefs of the World
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/11/14
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I’m going to leave this one to you.
Rick Rosner: Alright. So in your nicely appointed apartment you’ve assembled a small library of the religious beliefs of the world and I guess philosophical beliefs because you’re very interested in those belief systems and in the people who have those beliefs, right?
Jacobsen: Yes.
Rosner: All right. So I was thinking about, I’m trying to write this novel about a character who is at the forefront of brain replication technology, including developing the technology to replicate your brain to the point that you can keep on living and thinking after you’re dead that you can duplicate your brain’s function outside of your brain. And this guy is thinking it seems like it works to a certain extent. But I really hope we’re not just the fucking Egyptians with mummy technology all over again which goes to a lot of people believe in science now, and a lot of people would argue that science isn’t a belief system, it’s the truth. But even if it is the truth, it’s a fucking belief system; the belief that if you test reality through experimentation and observation to see what comports with reality, then that’s what you should believe in, that’s still a fucking belief system, even though it happens to be a very effective belief system.
And we’ve touched on this before, that we can’t imagine anything that goes beyond science. You look at everything else at that people believed historically that it’s all turned out to be supplanted by other belief systems that seem to make more sense. So just using history, you’d kind of have to think that something will supplant science. But then people who believe in science will be like “How?” science is you look for the truth, you find it through experiment and then you verify it and all that. Yes, science will probably be supplanted, but it might be supplanted by big data science that comes up with shit that doesn’t even fit in human heads, analysis that just requires so much information processing power plus data that it would almost seem like magic to humans. So, I mean, science will be supplanted or at least science will change just like everything else. Every other previous belief system has been supplanted, though not exactly like every other belief system because at least we’ve been trying to squeeze out the nonsense. So that’s thing one.
Thing two is even believing in our own continuity from moment to moment, day after day, is a belief system, the one we’ve evolved to have. We live in our bodies and in our minds and the path of least mental resistance is to think that the amount of information that we carryover ourselves, our personalities, that we carry through life, that this is a fine way of doing things is, you could call it an evolved belief system that’s culturally reinforced, that we tell each other we’re the same person throughout life. We have one name; we have the same property day after day, the same relationships. Everything reinforces that we’re the same person though if you look at us informationally, we’re the fucking ship the completely different ship after ten years because all the pieces eventually get replaced except it’s worse than that.
It’s just that, like, when we lose so much information over our lives and we tend to think that the information we lose is kind of trivial bullshit, that if it were important, we’d remember it. But how would we fucking know because we’ve forgotten it. Everybody’s had the experience of suddenly remembering something they hadn’t remembered in ten or 15 years. It’s like “Whoa, that’s really something interesting that I didn’t even remember I knew.” And you think that maybe that would have been handier within memory and it wouldn’t have taken this chance event to remind me of something that was kind of a big deal when it initially happened. We believe we’re resurrected on a daily basis when we wake up. And that’s fine, because not believing that would be a big pain in the ass. But it’s a belief system and the system what we’re believing in is far from perfect. And that is caused for optimism in developing the technology to resurrect ourselves, to be able to think outside our brains because if we could put up with the shittiness of our brains and all that we don’t recall, and our limitations of thought, we might be able to put up with the limitations of the technology we developed.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
In-Sight Publishing 