What is life?

[Fred Henderson]

My favorite definition -- Life is what you think about all day.

[Pargat Perrer]

My favorite definition -- Life is what you think about all day.

A famous celebrity had these things to say about life:

• Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering - and it's all over much too soon. ...
• I am not afraid of death, I just don't want to be there when it happens.

and the best one of all....

“In my next life I want to live my life backwards. You start out dead and get that out of the way. Then you wake up in an old people's home feeling better every day. You get kicked out for being too healthy, go collect your pension, and then when you start work, you get a gold watch and a party on your first day. You work for 40 years until you're young enough to enjoy your retirement. You party, drink alcohol, and are generally promiscuous, then you are ready for high school. You then go to primary school, you become a kid, you play. You have no responsibilities, you become a baby until you are born. And then you spend your last 9 months floating in luxurious spa-like conditions with central heating and room service on tap, larger quarters every day and then Voila! You finish off as an orgasm!”

[Bob Armstrong]

Good one Pargat!

[Fred Henderson]

<snip>

In my next life ...

<snip>

You only get one life.

[Pargat Perrer]

You only get one life.

Ok, Debbie Downer! LOL

But there is no scientific evidence that we only get one life, so it is just your opinion.

[Bob Armstrong]

Lotta people in India - many think we get many lives!

[Bob Armstrong]

[Fred Henderson]

But there is no scientific evidence that we only get one life, <snip>

Prove it.

LOL


edit:

1. Obviously everybody gets one life.
2. There is absolutely no scientific evidence of a second life, nor any subsequent lives.

That's as close as I can get to making my case.

Here's a very interesting and well written article on the definition of life.

Life (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

[Dilip Panjwani]

Looking into the physiology of perception, memory, thought & emotions, there appears to be just one conclusion one can reasonably draw about the nature of consciousness: it is an inherent property of the electromagnetic waves of the brain. The notion of 'I'ness (of one being a living individual) comes from the constant and persistent consciousness of the perceptions of one's body & memories. When we use one of our five senses to perceive other things, the electromagnetic waves arising from that sensation add up with the basic electromagnetic waves denoting the 'I' (most likely coming from our reticular activating neurons), and then the consciousness becomes 'I see', 'I touch', 'I hear', etc..
So what about life after death? Well the widely accepted quantum phenomenon of 'entanglement' leads to the possibility that another identical self always exists, and one of the properties of entanglement is that as one of the entangled systems disintegrates, the other becomes stronger. As ancient Indian philosophy, well articulated by Deepak Chopra, says that after death, our consciousness mingles with universal consciousness, it could be happening because the entangled electromagnetic waves of our consciousness after death are no longer bounded by the skull, but mingle with all the non-bounded electromagnetic waves in the universe....O what a powerful and blissful sensation that must be....!!

[Fred Henderson]

Looking into the physiology of perception, memory, thought & emotions, there appears to be just one conclusion one can reasonably draw about the nature of consciousness: it is an inherent property of the electromagnetic waves of the brain. The notion of 'I'ness (of one being a living individual) comes from the constant and persistent consciousness of the perceptions of one's body & memories. When we use one of our five senses to perceive other things, the electromagnetic waves arising from that sensation add up with the basic electromagnetic waves denoting the 'I' (most likely coming from our reticular activating neurons), and then the consciousness becomes 'I see', 'I touch', 'I hear', etc..
So what about life after death? Well the widely accepted quantum phenomenon of 'entanglement' leads to the possibility that another identical self always exists, and one of the properties of entanglement is that as one of the entangled systems disintegrates, the other becomes stronger. As ancient Indian philosophy, well articulated by Deepak Chopra, says that after death, our consciousness mingles with universal consciousness, it could be happening because the entangled electromagnetic waves of our consciousness after death are no longer bounded by the skull, but mingle with all the non-bounded electromagnetic waves in the universe....O what a powerful and blissful sensation that must be....!!

Thanks for a well considered and thoughtful post, But please, Deepak Chopra? You put him up against all that medical science has to say? And what is this "widely accepted quantum phenomenon of "entanglement" that you speak of? The one that allows our individual conciousness to mingle with the "universal conciusness". Widely accepted by whom? You got a link to help me understand?

[Dilip Panjwani]

Ignore Dr. Deepak Chopra, an accomplished physician who also has a deep understanding of ancient Indian philosophy, if you wish. My conclusions are based purely on my decades of learning neuro-science in Medical School and then continuing on out of sheer curiosity, and are totally in keeping with what the leading experts tell us about the neuroscience of perception, thoughts, memories and emotions. The prevailing view of those neuroscientists who dare to venture into the realm of consciousness is that consciousness is something that rides along with whatever is happening in the human brain physically and physiologically, without controlling anything that we do, and the electromagnetic activity arising out of brain function (not its synaptic activity) does not control what the brain does either... Current 'best-opinion' of philosophers-cum-scientists who are working in Universities around the globe on the 'hard' problem of consciousness is that it is an 'emergent' phenomenon, and that is exactly what summation & linkage of individual electronic brain waves is...
If you wish to know about the physics of entanglement (Einstein was so baffled by it that he called it 'spooky' action at a distance) in detail, you will need to learn it from a quantum physicist...

[Pargat Perrer]

Prove it.

LOL


edit:

1. Obviously everybody gets one life.
2. There is absolutely no scientific evidence of a second life, nor any subsequent lives.

That's as close as I can get to making my case.

Here's a very interesting and well written article on the definition of life.

Life (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

You are in error. There is scientific evidence for reincarnation.

https://uvamagazine.org/articles/the..._reincarnation

Also Fred, there is another thing to consider.

Suppose it is true that the universe was born in a Big Bang, and will eons in the future start shrinking and implode and then recreate itself again in a constantly repeating cycle. It that were the case, WHICH WE CANNOT DISPROVE, then humanity would likely arise again, and who is to say that you and i would not be recreated again and get to live a whole new life ... maybe not as the individual we are now, but as the same conscious soul. Where does our consciousness come from? Perhaps it is eternal and can reincarnate in subsequent universes, if not again and again in this particular cycle of the universe.

[Sid Belzberg]

Ignore Dr. Deepak Chopra, an accomplished physician who also has a deep understanding of ancient Indian philosophy, if you wish. My conclusions are based purely on my decades of learning neuro-science in Medical School and then continuing on out of sheer curiosity, and are totally in keeping with what the leading experts tell us about the neuroscience of perception, thoughts, memories and emotions. The prevailing view of those neuroscientists who dare to venture into the realm of consciousness is that consciousness is something that rides along with whatever is happening in the human brain physically and physiologically, without controlling anything that we do, and the electromagnetic activity arising out of brain function (not its synaptic activity) does not control what the brain does either... Current 'best-opinion' of philosophers-cum-scientists who are working in Universities around the globe on the 'hard' problem of consciousness is that it is an 'emergent' phenomenon, and that is exactly what summation & linkage of individual electronic brain waves is...
If you wish to know about the physics of entanglement (Einstein was so baffled by it that he called it 'spooky' action at a distance) in detail, you will need to learn it from a quantum physicist...

Dr. Roger Penrose, an acclaimed physicist, and Dr. Stuart Hameroff, an anesthesiologist and psychologist, have proposed a theory known as Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch-OR). In this theory, they propose that consciousness arises from quantum computations occurring within the brain's neurons, specifically in structures called microtubules.

Microtubules are protein structures that are part of the cell's cytoskeleton. Penrose and Hameroff suggest that these microtubules are capable of quantum computations. When these computations reach a certain level, they collapse, or reduce, and this reduction is what we experience as consciousness.

Importantly, the theory suggests that these quantum computations are not just random events, but are "orchestrated" by the biological processes of the brain (hence the name "Orchestrated Objective Reduction").


Consciousness in the universe: a review of the 'Orch OR' theory

Stuart Hameroff¹, Roger Penrose²

Abstract

The nature of consciousness, the mechanism by which it occurs in the brain, and its ultimate place in the universe are unknown. We proposed in the mid 1990's that consciousness depends on biologically 'orchestrated' coherent quantum processes in collections of microtubules within brain neurons, that these quantum processes correlate with, and regulate, neuronal synaptic and membrane activity, and that the continuous Schrödinger evolution of each such process terminates in accordance with the specific Diósi-Penrose (DP) scheme of 'objective reduction' ('OR') of the quantum state. This orchestrated OR activity ('Orch OR') is taken to result in moments of conscious awareness and/or choice. The DP form of OR is related to the fundamentals of quantum mechanics and space-time geometry, so Orch OR suggests that there is a connection between the brain's biomolecular processes and the basic structure of the universe. Here we review Orch OR in light of criticisms and developments in quantum biology, neuroscience, physics and cosmology. We also introduce a novel suggestion of 'beat frequencies' of faster microtubule vibrations as a possible source of the observed electro-encephalographic ('EEG') correlates of consciousness. We conclude that consciousness plays an intrinsic role in the universe.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24070914/

[Neil Frarey]

What is life?

For now ... mostly Carbon.

Silicon ... is on the rise.

[Bob Armstrong]

With AI, man is creating a new co-species.

Bob A