University Receives $5 Million Grant To Study Immortality

Hugh Pickens writes "Humans have pondered their mortality for millennia. Now the University of California at Riverside reports that it has received a $5 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation that will fund research on aspects of immortality, including near-death experiences and the impact of belief in an afterlife on human behavior. 'People have been thinking about immortality throughout history. We have a deep human need to figure out what happens to us after death,' says John Martin Fischer, the principal investigator of The Immortality Project. 'No one has taken a comprehensive and sustained look at immortality that brings together the science, theology and philosophy.' Fischer says he going to investigate two different kinds of immortality. One is the possibility of living forever without dying. The main questions there are whether it's technologically plausible or feasible for us, either by biological enhancement such as those described by Ray Kurzweil, or by some combination of biological enhancement and uploading our minds onto computers in the future. Second would be to investigate the full range of questions about Judeo, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, and other Asian religions' conceptions of the afterlife to see if they're theologically and philosophically consistent. 'We'll look at near death experiences both in western cultures and throughout the world and really look at what they're all about and ask the question — do they indicate something about an afterlife or are they kind of just illusions that we're hardwired into?'"

Comments

Re:Please consider Mitt Romney

[gagol]

They should call George Noory from Coast to Coast AM. He talk about it quite often on the air.

Re:Bad analogy.

[gweihir]

I never used "souls" as a fact, just as an argumentation aid. Your reasoning is circular. The "soul" concept was used to point that out. Obviously that attempt did not work.

But I am quitting the discussion now. The religious nuts have started moderating (happens at around this time, repeatable) and my scores are already going like crazy from 5 to 0 and back in a couple of minutes. Last time it took me 3 days to get back to "excellent".