Tonight I am leading a seminar on
Eagleman's book. I found it devilishly hard to keep the stories straight,
so I made the following list of chapters and their ideas and a few possible avenues for our discussion. The first statement, I think therefore SUM, is not part of the book, but is a notion that "I think" is in play throughout the book.
I think therefore SUM
1 Sum: 14 minutes of pure joy? In a whole lifetime?
2. Egalitaire: Do we really want true equality?
3. Circle of Friends: How having friends can make us lonely?
4. Descent of Species: What is it like to be a horse?
5. Giantess: Meaning depends on scale
6. Mary: Has Dr. God lost control of his creation
7. The Cast: You never catch up with your dreaming
8. Metamorphosis: When your name is spoken for the last time
9. Missing: God is a couple in need of marriage counseling
10. Spirals: Do you have answer?
11. Scales: Man, a cancerous growth in the divine being
12. Adhesion: Can we quantify relationships?
13. Angst: A quest for meaninglessness
14. Oz: Who is brave enough to see the face behind the face?
15. Great Expectations: Will an exact replica of your brain reproduce what it like to be you?
16. Mirrors: What finally kills you
17. Perpetuity: Only the good die, the rest of us live on in perpetuity
18. The Unnatural: A cure for death
19. Distance: God keeps his distance from us for our own benefit – otherwise . . . .
20. Reins: God’s obsolescence
21. Microbe: God is unaware of our existence.
22. Absence: New religious wars
23. Will-o’-the-Wisp: Blessed ignorance of the future
24. Incentive: The best actors play the role of the uninitiated beneficiary
25. Death Switch: Virtual life after life
26. Encore: Am I a simulation?
27. Prism: Self Reunions
28. Ineffable: emergent afterlives
29. Pantheon: The gods love us because we are as self-involved as they are
30. Impulse: an anomalous algorithm
31. Quantum: all possibilities exist at once sort of like when . . . . . .
32. Conservation: A tale told by a lonely quark
33. Narcissus: A device that only takes pictures of itself
34. Seed: Accidents happen all the time
35. Graveyard of the Gods: a fellowship of abandonment
36. Apostasy: a heaven of unbelieving believers
37. Blueprints: Knowledge never substitutes for experience
38. Subjunctive: your would haves, should have beens come back to haunt you
39. Search: The atoms that once were me search for meaning in limitlessness
40. Reversal: Living your life backwards undermines the narrative of your life
Notes:
Do not these stories lead to the conclusion we are already dead?
Is eternal boredom worse than death?
It’s not so great to be God.
Consciousness is a narrative.
All reality is virtual.
Don’t we know that there is no afterlife, all other alternatives being (just) stories?
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