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Why I don't believe in death

Amateur philosophy to annoy a skeptic

By Nicholas PowersPublished 3 years ago 4 min read
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In my earlier years I questioned why I'm a human, but at that time I didn't take the question as something anyone could answer. More recently I probed it further and found some helpful insights. I was born in the city of Windsor Ontario which has a population of over 200 thousand at this point. Why not Toronto or somewhere more populous? I remembered from biology class a concept they use to estimate populations in a field called quadrants. That actually explains that issue quite well. I always like to start from the principle of mediocrity. In essence: if I find my self in a circumstance then why should I assume that the circumstance is common place. Across the boarder is Detroit and within a four hour drive there are numerous cities including Toronto and London. So from the perspective of a quadrant it's not so unlikely.

But then I dive deeper into the question and think about sentient matter. For one thing sentient matter is highly organized so it should make up a much smaller proportion of matter in general due to Entropy. It also helps to define sentience. Sentience is matter that maps stimulus from the environment in a continuous chain of events from computational input to output. In our brains the mechanism is changes in pressure caused by action potentials propagated by ions that cause proteins to change the permeability of neural membranes as they are pushed into or ejected from cell walls.

So how the does this anneal with the principle of mediocrity? My answer is in a satisfying way it just doesn't. If I were to ask a skeptic they would probably assert that it's similar to the Inuit who finds himself in one of the least populous communities on earth and manages to evade even the quadrant theory. They just exist where they exist and there's no reason to assert that it requires anymore explanation.

Still though.... most of our surroundings are not organized in such a way that they can produce sentience. Almost all of reality isn't doing what we do. Perhaps if we were to answer where the seat of consciousness lies we could get closer. Well, we change shape and size over the course of our lives and still we have this overlaying awareness of our own existence. We exchange material with the environment. We even have lapses in our awareness like we're able to jump points in space time. What's that about? Then it hit me. We're doing all of this with respect to a position in space. One long drawn out elaborate unfurling process all happening with respect to an unchanging position which could give our sentience a quantifiable constant that exists independent of all other cause.

There's more... why is reality asymmetric? Like... at all? It's strange. Starting from the principle that points are uniform and therefore expansion from a point should be uniform as well we're left with what feels like a daunting mystery that might mean questioning even the most fundamental of assumptions. But the truth is it's not necessary. The answer is front of us all along, and it's in information theory. Positions in space exist independent of all cause, meaning reality as an object just exists, and whatever exists is surely made of information. Which sounds unsatisfying until you realize what it can answer. It means that given this infinite generic block of information whatever it is that can be constructed, like a graphable machine, just is, and we're disjoint constructions, which we can infer given the somewhat turbulent nature of our lives.

So now I see life like I'm making friends with a body and all its interdependencies, interpersonal relationships, thoughts, feelings, creative expressions. It's not really me. It's who I am right now, but there's always more to come. An eternal cycle of rebirth where we make friends with new strangers and live out the movie of an assemblage that maps qualia onto surfaces and says farewell as it loses momentum and gives way to entropy. An ethereal decay built on a structure that consists of nothing more than moving interference patterns in a giant generic block of information. From day to day I look around and I see the earth like a gem full of wealth and experience. I see the fluidity of air, and turbulence, and asymmetry, and symmetry, all as products of fundamental laws that govern how nature can manifest.

fact or fiction
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