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Mortality

By Gregon

Another of Jason Silva’s “Shots of Awe” trippy video monologues, in this case discussing mortality and his disgust at the idea that we all must die, and the Utopian promises of transhumanism.

What do you think of his comments? Would immortality be a great thing, or would we lose something more than our life? What if spiritual traditions are right, and we have a soul that goes to a ‘better place’ after death – does physical ‘immortality’ in that case trap us in a lower world?

Would love to hear your thoughts!

Previously on TDG:

Greg
Editor
Greg is the owner-editor of The Daily Grail, as well as the author of a number of books including Stop Worrying, There Probably is an Afterlife.
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One Comment

  1. The Myth of Death
    The Toronto Globe and Mail recently posted an article proposing that the success of humanity above other creatures may rest on our denial of the finality of death. But I wonder, is it really a denial? Or an intuitive recognition of a fallacy.

    Our science tells us there is only one life, it is singular, it began a great many years ago, perhaps as much as 3.8 billion years ago, although there’s a good case for it beginning far earlier than that, and if it began more than once, all the others are conveniently not here anymore (or at least we haven’t found them). And it is a quality of that living matter thing to branch itself. it branches itself, always, every time, it never creates ‘new’ life, it only and always grows out and branches, like a cutting.

    In ‘higher-order’ creatures, living matter from one branch tangles living matter from another branch of the same stem and the two mingle and branch off into a third (or more) that we call progeny, but nothing is being ‘created’, it is still living Life every step of the way. Seeds, eggs, wombs, these are only incubators for the branching, it is all still life multiplying itself by dividing itself (with variations) exactly as a branch from a tree. The original self-organizing dynamic principle is always taking on new matter (mostly by sequestering atmospheric carbon into useful protein adjuncts to itself) so really, is taking on new matter and then setting it progenally autonomous, is that anything new to Life?

    Or just business as usual: eat, drink, be merry …

    Now consider, when we cut a branch from a rose bush and leave it in the sun, it will dry out and cease the regeneration endemic to living matter, but since there is only one source creature (multitudinously branched rose bush), is the creature now ‘dead’? Do we point at our toe-nail clippings and mourn their death? Do we promise an afterlife to the locks cut by the barber?

    And then in the larger case, the case of the so-called being, the myth of the unity of the Me, here again, science now shows us to our face that we are not Me, but a composite society of a plurality, a superorganism of a multitudinous micro biome of which, upon the branch finally drying out, a great many of these coral reef inhabitants may very well survive on (unless met with an untimely terminal event due to the death-myth zealotry of the surviving next of kin) so who, or what could be said to be ‘dead’?

    And lets not get into either the Laszlo or Penrose/Hameroff notions of the Consciousness underpinnings of this coral reef of We we might call ‘me’!

    So I have to ask: is it really a neurosis, a ‘denial’ to abandon the notion of ‘death’?

    Or is it those who fearfully cling to their Death who have subscribed to a lie?

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