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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?'"
You are confusing "atheist" and "nihilist". An atheist can believe in reincarnation or rebirth and something like an immortal soul without problem. It is just this bizarre "God" notion that atheists have trouble with. Nihilist on th other side truly believe there is nothing of any worth in life.
Your mistake is understandable. One of the many ways religions try to scam people into believing is by telling them that atheists are nihilists.
Now, I just hope solipsism does not have it right, because them I am responsible for this whole mess...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
You assume consciousness is an emergent property of the brain.
You're assuming that you're not in the matrix. You're assuming that the flying spaghetti monster doesn't exist. I don't care what absurd things you can come up with; I'll stick to reality.
This is actually a rather strong indicator that either the brain is far more than a "computer" or that intelligence and consciousness are not generated solely/fully by the brain.
No, it's an indicator that it's a different kind of computer than we know how to make at this present point in time.