What kind of immortality would you rather come true?

This is such a difficult question for me to answer. I was raised with a Christian upbringing, in the Baptist and later non-denomination church. One thing that never sat well with me, how eternity in heaven was described as living in a place where we give glory to God for the rest of eternity. For some reason, even though I considered myself a Christian, the description given to me by Sunday school teachers was depressing. It left me feeling dark. In my imagination I saw cities and streets of gold, with people hanging out it golden churches doing nothing but praying. Literally, that's what I saw from their descriptions, lol! It actually sounded boring. It sounded incredibly limited, short-sighted, precisely what a human would say to describe a state that we can't really physically grasp the concept of.

I thought to myself, I would rather my "spirit", my conscience be able to travel the multiverse. If I had the ability to go any where in this form, I'd do precisely that, just keep traveling and seeing everything I could until I could figure out what the next step is. If I had the option for reincarnation, perhaps I'd come right back in, here or some other dimension, whatever looks interesting. I'd want to be able to hold on to my previous memories throughout all previous lives though. Without that, would I really be who I am as I came back? With no reference to who I've been, would I really be living forever or just constantly coming back as something completely different? In a sense, without the ability to carry on a memory, the previous conscience would essentially "die" as a new one is "born".

If you go by what the Hindus believe, the entire universe is like a rubber band. We see the universe as rapidly expanding because we're still in that part of the cycle where the "band" is stretching. At a certain point, it'll start to contract, eventually back to a pin point, where it will go critical and explode all over again. Add in the possibility of multiverses, and overlapping universes, and the theory of a "rubber banding" universe might start to take form. Who knows? That's the limit of my bandwidth at the moment, lol!

 

That first part is a very dualist viewpoint - two separate wordls, world of "spirit" and world of "matter" and appropriate brain structure being a sort of a medium through which they interact? Not a bad idea as it sort of explains things like brain damage and mechanical manipulation of personality and behavior by interfering with brain structure.

As for the looping universe thing, iirc it used to be a quite popular theory though:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_universe
current observations would indicate that everything keeps getting further away from everything else at an increasing velocity. Which leads to "end of the era of starlight", essentially everything is eventually really far away and all the stars burn out and all the matter that can form new stars will have formed those stars and also died, a process that takes quite some time. Eventually even the 'smoldering' stars will cool down until they emit almost no radiation. everything just freezes. Further into future, everything will slowly simply decay into radiation as the very atoms slowly decay and break apart.

Eventually there will be but radiation spread so thinly across such vast regions that it could start resembling a singularity as there would be no sense of relative distances etc, everything would eventually behave the same as if they were all clumped together incredibly densely.

Or maybe a new universe or more will spontaneously emerge somewhere within our universe and start to expand at speed of light.

 

Did someone say immortality?

 

Chappie movie spoiler.

Spoiler

in the movie chappie they explore the immortality through transfer of concoiusness to a robot brain / hard drive

 

Spoiler: Spoiler

Which would be a dangerous proposition given that your neurons make up your person and consciousness and they persist for the duration of your life. Those unlucky will experience decay of neurons that results to gradual destruction of their person.

Imho, transfer to robotic brain could go either way, but it would be likely that unless the original subject remained unharmed that he could die, that instance of his consciousness would end.

Since it's theoretically possibly to do the transfer without harming the original subject (although this could be technically impossible) this would mean that the original subject needn't perish as there was no natural law that required it. Thus any kind of destruction of the original neurons would terminate the subject, no matter how perfect digital analogy was created later, during or previously.

 

this argument should probably be placed in spoiler tags, it gives away -far- to much plot through context.

 

Spoiler: Spoiler

Done

 

danke XD

 

http://www.lunarbaboon.com/comics/immortality.html