Today, though, I didn’t really like his post. I felt like he needed more concrete examples. It felt too abstract to me.

About two-thirds of the way down the post, though, part of a paragraph jumped out at me. It’s about the debates we often have with each other, often online, that don’t get anywhere. I could empathize with his thoughts here, and I learned something:

“You may have noticed that in these debates, we don’t want the other person to make a good point, even if conceding it could leave us with a more intelligent stance than we had before. Instead we want them to make dumb points that make ours sound good. We want them to be wrong more than we want to learn anything.” -David Cain

I’m fascinated by death: what it means to die, what happens afterward, what we do on the way there. Most people think it’s kind of morbid. I try to just think it’s weird.

On the way to death, though, for most of us, is the process of getting older. A lot of what we learn as we get older could also be categorized as what we learn as we approach death. Call me morbid or call me weird, but I think it’s worth consideration. Time Goes By collects a lot of that info and shares it in one place.

What would you want your last meal to be? What would you include? And what would you like to drink with it?

I thought I might be a Questioner when she first described the tendencies (beginning at 22:20). When she went into more detail, though, yeah, I’m definitely further in the Rebel category.

See what I mean.

I think, like the article argues, that it will be difficult to determine a fine line of consciousness, but I do think creating something we call consciousness will become possible at some point.

Will it be the same as human consciousness? I don’t know. I think that would take more than brain power. I think it would also mean creating the rest of the human body and experience in order for the consciousness to sit in it and experience life the way we do. That seems like a stretch.

What’s interesting to me about all this, though, is the idea of consciousness apart from a physical body. I liked the discussion about what it would mean to be conscious in different places. Could we say we’d really “uploaded” our consciousness if we were able to put it into a computer in multiple different places?

And what about God? Is God like that? God seems like a consciousness without a body. We might be getting closer to understanding what that really means.

Updates: Check some of the comments on the article…

• Bob: “The conflict here arises because of thinking of it in the wrong terms: instead of ‘transfer’ or ‘upload,’ a better analogy is ‘forking’…”
• gemli: “One intriguing idea is that we might replace small parts of our brain with surrogate electronic components that would integrate into the whole over time, without our being aware that a change had occurred. After enough such replacements, the brain would be completely electronic without our being aware that anything had changed…”

Followed shortly by this one, by the same researcher/story teller (although they may have been given in reverse order originally).

“We cannot selectively numb the dark emotions. When we numb vulnerability and fear and shame of not being good enough, we by default numb joy.” -Brene Brown

How do we view struggle, and how do we act on it in practice, as opposed to the lip service we all can easily pay it?