Search Results for: immortality

Immortality for secularists, wherein Joe Atheist cannot die

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There’s been much news, of late, concerning the planarian worm, which is effectively immortal. Unfortunately, this version of life everlasting offers little hope to us humans.

But there’s a fix, one that doesn’t mean we have to begin reproducing asexually if we want to persist to the planarian extent. Of necessity, I’ll argue, we’re already, always and forever, living in our “afterlife.”

Having our sex and living forever too

Here’s my theory, for whatever it’s worth, and in … Read more

THE BEST OF TIMES

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Compared to 2020, all previous years, even the Disco Era, were the golden age of human existence.

Dave Barry, Washington Post

Good riddance 2020. The year from Hell, right? So everyone says. But it’s really only a matter of how you look at it. 

NY Times Andrea Chronopoulos
“What Makes You Think 2021 Will Be Better?” by Wajahat Ali

Whatever. Here’s something from a collection I call “Leary’s Laws,” call it a gloss on Dave Barry’s above comment.

Things

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Tilt! Tilt! Tilt! … Game over

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In the old days science-fiction writers didn’t have to write so fast. But now reality has taken to outrunning the imagination. By the time you finish a draft, all you’ve got is something that reads like history. 

In Leary’s terms, it’s like our whole world is on tilt. The following rap comes to us from the late 2050s.

Climate change, the Trumpster & Co., pandemics, surveillance and social control, a cultural malaise that’s a metaphysical equivalent to HIV/AIDS, and more!
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$50 expression du jour: Metathesiophobic catatonia

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many worlds 2Today we introduce another useful expression.

Metathesiophobic catatonia (n.): paralysis induced by fear of the perception that any action, including any decision, will change the future. Those of the multiversal persuasion might decribe this as inertia brought on by terror that the slightest exercise of agency will result in the agent entering an adjacent parallel universe, forever barred from the one in which the action was performed, unable to return to a world where the decision was never taken.

wrong pathAnd … Read more

Existential & neural plasticity

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helmet pink use

In the last two posts, we’ve seen how tobacco smokers and anthropogenic climate-change deniers demonstrate a similar psychology.

 

Jack Shackaway now looks at a third such group — those, including himself, who take motorcycle taxis in Bangkok. Jack offers this as a follow-up to both my “How I quit smoking” and my “Immortality for Joe Atheist” posts.

He claims the following sketch has been sitting on his computer since back in a time (or a … Read more