Why the resurrection must be true

by slimboyfat 39 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

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  slimboyfat

  Rainbow Troll, (sorry not Trout ha!)

  A song for a fellow believer in the eternal return.

  Heaven

  Everyone is trying to get to the bar.
  The name of the bar, the bar is called Heaven.
  The band in Heaven plays my favorite song.
  Thwey play it once again, they play it all night long.
  
  Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.
  Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.
  
  There is a party, everyone is there.
  Everyone will leave at exactly the same time.
  Its hard to imagine that nothing at all
  Could be so exciting, and so much fun.
  
  Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.
  Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.
  
  When this kiss is over it will start again.
  It will not be any different, it will be exactly the same.
  It's hard to imagine that nothing at all
  Could be so exciting, could be so much fun.
  
  Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.
  Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.
  

  https://youtu.be/tCs8WgPcnCU
  
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  waton

  assumption 3.

  The universe, any physical existence, is only present at any given time at that moment, on a knife edge so to speak , during it's relentless movement through time. . the knowledge, artifacts is what is carried into the future, the past existence is gone, although it leaves fossils, even the images that could be reconstructed from messages that leave earth now, the light, are only fossils. There is no reality stacked up, back to the beginning of / or in the past.

  all we see is images of the past. Imagine you could have a mirror put, always at a quarter your age in light years, and beam, reflect back your doings. You could watch yourself at half your age. but you would be only only watching your fossil.

  If our existence is the outworkings of laws, it would take an extraordinary, supernatural working to recreate any of it. even your brain-activity, if it could filtered out from all the electromagnetic stream that is travelling into the future.
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  slimboyfat

  Waton as I said to Simon above it seems to me it all comes down to information and level of detail. Imagine thousands of years ago if we told humans it was possible to calculate the position of the earth, planets and stars, thousands and millions of years in the past, or into the future, based on their current position and movement, that would seem incredble. But the advance of knowledge makes it possible. It doesn't mean current knowledge implies that all states and points of time exist together, but that the information about each stage is recoverable.

  As knowledge of the composition and laws governing the universe become ever more detailed, doesn't the ability to predict or reconstruct the exact atomic configuration of the universe at any point, past or future, become inevitable?
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  bohm

  The problem here is in step 4.

  According to chaos theory where small changes in initial configuration magnify exponentially as the system evolves. This means that you need to measure (with exponentially increasing) precision the present state of the system in order to predict it's initial configuration -- i.e. you before you died.

  At some point that precision reaches the quantum level at which point Heisenbergs uncertainty principle will mean you cannot know both the position and velocity of the particles: at that point the resurrection is impossible even if you are Laplaces demon.
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  slimboyfat

  Okay bohm so different rules apply to physics on a very small scale than apply at a large scale, meaning that exact reconstruction of position and velocity of all matter may be impossible. We can work out exact movements of stars and planets, but the exact movement of all subatomic particles in the universe is not possible, not even in theory. Is that it? If that is so I think there are philosophical issues that remain.

  First of all how close an approximation would count as a resurrection? Say the information about the past that was recoverable was enough to mean that an almost exact copy of a person could be made. All the atoms seem to be in same configuration and the being functions as we would expect an exact copy to function. Would that count as a resurrection, even if uncertainty or variation on a very small scale exists?

  If we rebuilt the Titanic for example, atom for atom as it existed before, and it sailed and functioned as the original. But there may be variation or uncertainty at an atomic or subatomic scale. Would there be a meaningful distinction or objection to considering new Titanic an equivalent to the original? Similarly if the detail of information was sufficient to make a copy of person such that it was configured, appeared and functioned as the original, would that qualify as a resurrection? In other words are we simply material, an extremely complex biological machine, or something more? If we are simply highly complex machines then a copy which is so close an approximation that it functions in a predictably similar way to the original would count as a resurrection. To argue otherwise would seem to involve arguing that we are more than our material composition or resulting functions. That there is more to reality than purely the material.
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  bohm

  lSBF: There are still two issues: Let's suppose that your grand-grand-..-grandchildren decide to resurrect you in 200 years. To do that they need to know their present state of matter to conclude what state you were in when you died so they take the entire earth apart and measure the location of all atoms in the earth. The first problem is that a lot of information is totally gone: You were cremated so most of your information about you is found in the atmosphere where it (subtly) affects how light bounces off atoms -- since that information is then sometimes found in electromagnetic radiation, and a large fraction of that radiation escapes from earth never to be seen again, that means they are fundamentally going to be missing information needed to reconstruct you (unless they can somehow travel faster than the speed of light).

  The second problem is about quantum uncertainty (as I mentioned). As time progress, small perturbations in a system are increased exponentially, meaning you need exponentially better ability to measure the present state of the system to reconstruct it's past state (to some fidelity). That exponential growth is really what's important: To even conclude that most of the atoms that make up you were together at some point (nevermind their configuration as a body --- just that you were not spread out in the atmosphere) will eventually require knowledge of all atoms at an extreme precision.

  When that precision reaches quantum level Heisenbergs uncertainty principle kicks in (remember this is saying that there is a minimal limit to how well you can know a particle's position and momentum) and so you can't perform the reconstruction, even approximately, unless you can get around quantum mechanics.
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  waton

  creating the universe in the first place would be a simple, elegant process compared to setting up the machinery to isolate and retrieve the information needed and then focus it into the future to recreate, to resurrect chosen individuals.

  It would have to be a very altruistic society to forgo the pleasures of their own present, forward looking lives, to present some forgotten ancestor with a return to a second presence.

  Think of the efforts at CERN to recreate creation on a one-off subatomic level, --just one particle, or

  the the work on abiogenesis --just one restart of microscopic size.

  Unless consciousness, information can break free from the physical, a hard sell.

  bohm. yes, what happens at the planck scale, and in the quantum world is uncontrollable, but perhaps we could just take an individual's data, at a given time and redo it, no matter what convoluted random processes let to that stage in the first place. and even then--
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  slimboyfat

  bohm according to the video above about how physical cloning is not possible, it says that an extremely close approximation is theoretically possible but that quantum mechanics prevents an exact physical clone without destroying the original in the process of retrieving the information. A resurrection does not involve replicating or destroying one original, but extrapolating from numerous points in the past to recreate a being which resembles multiple point but may not be exact to any given one.

  It also says that it is not clear that consciousness arises from processes at a quantum level. As time goes on, the closer the approximation that humans are able to create must become. The information needed will be immense, but given time and progress it becomes inevitable. You mention all sorts of complicated processes that make the information difficult to retrieve. But as long as those processes follow consistent laws which are discoverable, then no matter how long or convoluted, the information is in principle retrievable at an ordinary mechanical level. Since humans operate and function on a scale at which ordinary physics rules apply rather than quantum mechanics, the information that can be retrieved will be enough to recover what is needed to reconstruct an entity that is constituted and functions as the original.

  So the philosophical question again is whether an exact copy which has the same composition and functions the same as the original person is a resurrection of that person.
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  Finkelstein

  There is nothing like human imagination to stir up human imagination.

  That being said I've personally been resurrected myself, I'm on my third reiteration
  
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  slimboyfat

  It would have to be a very altruistic society to forgo the pleasures of their own present, forward looking lives, to present some forgotten ancestor with a return to a second presence.

  My argument is that each generation has sufficient interest in their parents and immediate relatives to insist that they are brought back when it becomes feasible to do so. When they are brought back they will feel the same about their parents and so on. "Some forgotten ancestor" doesn't enter the picture. Plus however difficult or onerous it may be to accomplish, given time and progress, you simply need to wait longer until it becomes feasible.