Irvine511
Blue Crack Supplier
since we seem to be a bit bogged down in Iraq and Drudge-like crime stories or tales of human weirdness, i thought it might be fun to do what FYM sometimes does best -- delve into metaphysics.
i was reading a very interesting article in Salon about the biologist Edward O. Wilson, the father (i understand) of sociobiology. at the end of a wide-ranging interview, he concludes with the following thoughts:
[q]I guess I'm asking a slightly different question of you personally. Would you like there to be evidence of God? Forget about this as a great scientific discovery. Just personally, given your background, would that be thrilling? Would that be comforting?
Well, it would certainly give you a lot of material to study and think about the rest of your time. But you didn't ask me the right question.
What's the right question?
Would I be happy if I discovered that I could go to heaven forever? And the answer is no. Consider this argument. Think about what is forever. And think about the fact that the human mind, the entire human being, is built to last a certain period of time. Our programmed hormonal systems, the way we learn, the way we settle upon beliefs, and the way we love are all temporary. Because we go through a life's cycle. Now, if we were to be plucked out at the age of 12 or 56 or whenever, and taken up and told, now you will continue your existence as you are. We're not going to blot out your memories. We're not going to diminish your desires. You will exist in a state of bliss -- whatever that is -- forever. And those who didn't make it are going to be consigned to darkness or hell. Now think, a trillion times a trillion years. Enough time for universes like this one to be born, explode, form countless star systems and planets, then fade away to entropy. You will sit there watching this happen millions and millions of times and that will just be the beginning of the eternity that you've been consigned to bliss in this existence.
This heaven would be your hell.
Yes. If we were able to evolve into something else, then maybe not. But we are not something else.
http://www.salon.com/books/int/2006/03/21/wilson/index2.html
[/q]
thoughts? reactions? i've actually thought about this -- since we can't think beyond human terms (by definition), i think he makes a great point that an eternal, unchanging, even blissful existence might, over the milennia, turn into a prison. that forever is precisely hell, at least in human conceptions of time.
that said, and keeping in mind our human limitations, what do you think the physical and spiritual experience of heaven might be like? is it light, color, sensation, revelation (of what?), love (for whom?) ... i suppose we've got to try to think outside our biological capacities, since they will be gone, and though it's impossible to do that as even the language we use is limited since it can only reference that which before we have experienced (and that words are only given meaning through their associations with and definitions by other words, hence the closed-system aspect of things), i wonder if we still can't try.
if, as Wilson argues, the experience of what would be defined as heaven might be (and, perhaps, must necessarily be) hellish when experienced in human terms, what, then, must heaven necessarily be if it is not the hell described above?
(slow work day, for a change)
i was reading a very interesting article in Salon about the biologist Edward O. Wilson, the father (i understand) of sociobiology. at the end of a wide-ranging interview, he concludes with the following thoughts:
[q]I guess I'm asking a slightly different question of you personally. Would you like there to be evidence of God? Forget about this as a great scientific discovery. Just personally, given your background, would that be thrilling? Would that be comforting?
Well, it would certainly give you a lot of material to study and think about the rest of your time. But you didn't ask me the right question.
What's the right question?
Would I be happy if I discovered that I could go to heaven forever? And the answer is no. Consider this argument. Think about what is forever. And think about the fact that the human mind, the entire human being, is built to last a certain period of time. Our programmed hormonal systems, the way we learn, the way we settle upon beliefs, and the way we love are all temporary. Because we go through a life's cycle. Now, if we were to be plucked out at the age of 12 or 56 or whenever, and taken up and told, now you will continue your existence as you are. We're not going to blot out your memories. We're not going to diminish your desires. You will exist in a state of bliss -- whatever that is -- forever. And those who didn't make it are going to be consigned to darkness or hell. Now think, a trillion times a trillion years. Enough time for universes like this one to be born, explode, form countless star systems and planets, then fade away to entropy. You will sit there watching this happen millions and millions of times and that will just be the beginning of the eternity that you've been consigned to bliss in this existence.
This heaven would be your hell.
Yes. If we were able to evolve into something else, then maybe not. But we are not something else.
http://www.salon.com/books/int/2006/03/21/wilson/index2.html
[/q]
thoughts? reactions? i've actually thought about this -- since we can't think beyond human terms (by definition), i think he makes a great point that an eternal, unchanging, even blissful existence might, over the milennia, turn into a prison. that forever is precisely hell, at least in human conceptions of time.
that said, and keeping in mind our human limitations, what do you think the physical and spiritual experience of heaven might be like? is it light, color, sensation, revelation (of what?), love (for whom?) ... i suppose we've got to try to think outside our biological capacities, since they will be gone, and though it's impossible to do that as even the language we use is limited since it can only reference that which before we have experienced (and that words are only given meaning through their associations with and definitions by other words, hence the closed-system aspect of things), i wonder if we still can't try.
if, as Wilson argues, the experience of what would be defined as heaven might be (and, perhaps, must necessarily be) hellish when experienced in human terms, what, then, must heaven necessarily be if it is not the hell described above?
(slow work day, for a change)
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