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    As a couple of samples out of many, try Tom Campbell's and Dean Radin's websites. Both fully- Archived Message

    Posted by Old Most Contemptible Twat on December 10, 2019, 7:38 pm, in reply to "New fiziks, eh? :-):-)"

    competent professional scientists in physics, mathematics, statistics, and other related scientific disciplines. Both of them veteran experimental researchers at the cutting edge of the new physics, with long records of well-demonstrated experimentally-derived hard evidence supporting their theses. Forty plus years of coalface experience in both cases, doing meticulously-formulated practical experimental work.

    Some of the basic concepts that they - and an increasing crowd of other, mainly younger scientists and philosophers are embracing - are:

    * Consciousness is the fundamental basis of all reality, foundationally below physics, which in turn is the foundation in modern science of all the others. "The basic stuff of the world is mind-stuff" as Eddington is said to have remarked nearly a century ago now.

    *No need to throw out all the excellent stuff that science has discovered so far; just accept that the whole story isn't clear yet. The famous 'Hard Problem' of consciousness, for example, is still to be integrated. And then there's quantum mechanics, still not integrated after nearly a century of materialist thrashing about.

    * Reality isn't composed fundamentally of a collection of tiny particles plus energy (though they're as 'real' as anything else in this physical reality). Instead, its basic material is information - handled by consciousness.

    * Physical, material reality is a virtual creation of the 'Larger Consciousness System' (which I personally shorthand as Big Mind, but which religious people would call god), in which multiple-player Individuated Units of Consciousness - IUOCs, aka in the older vocabulary 'souls' - get individually-tailored data-feeds from Big Mind, like players in a multi-player computer game, and which each of us then interprets as our surrounding physical reality - including our personal bodies.

    * Both the LCS and our personal IUOCs are outside this physical reality, but the IUOCs play in it as on a holodeck, operating our perceived physical avatars as our physical bodies, with which we come to identify strongly - but wrongly - as we grow up. We do this in repeated packets, since one lifetime isn't enough to do all the stuff we're here to do.

    * Which leads to the proposition that: Reality is teleological; aka purpose-pursuing. Our reality is not pointless, nihilistic, wholly without purpose. We come here in pursuit of a great purpose.

    I could go on, but I guess that will do to start with. Seriously, Shy, you're not going to get all this picture with just twenty minutes skimming of the odd website. Raised as we all were in the indoctrination of the world's current dominant religion - reductive, philosophically-materialist scientism - these ideas take some time to get our heads round. Also - as Tom says - none of it will ever be more than surface-level concepts in intellect until each of us has witnessed their truth by direct personal experience. For instance, I know - at gut level, not just at superficial intellectual level - that paranormal events are real, because I've witnessed, and joined in the creation of, spectacular instances personally.

    Getting hold of these ideas, just intellectually alone, takes some serious, extended study, over a period. Getting direct personal experiential knowledge of them takes even more commitment, for years. If you don't get it yet, try some extensive searching.

    Sorry I can't condense it any more than this, Shy, but as you see, it's quite a skinful to take in, innit, even just baldly, minimally stated?

    BTW, I should add that Tom C is optimistic about AI, since he suspects that when the machines are sufficiently complex, IUOCs will consent to take them up as avatars; like volunteering to be Lieutenant Data's soul... I suspect that Tom - like multitudes of others - is being a bit over-optimistic about it, since they're not factoring in the great technological simplification that's now baked into our future, as the Long Descent drags us irreversibly down-tide from our current all-time High Spring Tide of Earth-eating hitech industrial 'civilisation'. As Dr. Richard Duncan characterises it: the Single Giant Pulse Event (of industrial hitech society) in Earth's life-history.

    Doubtless, we'll continue to tinker with AI for a while longer, but as we all morph into neo-peasants, post hitech-industrialism time, such things will simply no longer be practically possible, to make or maintain. Nor will the AI machines themselves be able to maintain themselves without our help. When all the exotic materials and technologies currently available to us are gone - they're gone.

    And then, perhaps, Mr. Spock and friends will come and rescue us from the pickle into which we've got ourselves... Yeah...

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