Reply With Quote
It has been said by physicists that information never disappears. Meaning that at some point, some vast supercomputer could conceivedly recreate us out of back-calculating the atoms in the universe.
HA!
See you in a few trillion biyatches.
The second part of the results analysis will focus on what people reported they believe about the soul, what they believe happens after we die, and what causes people to question their belief in God. Somehow, in my mind, these three questions were all related intuitively, and I think people's responses demonstrate that they're related for other people as well.
Of the 147 participants, 98 people (67%) believe in a soul, while 28 people (19%) say they are unsure and 20 people (14%) say they definitively do not believe in the concept of a soul. 1 person abstained from this question.
However, on the question of what happens after we die, with 144 people responding to this question, only 41 people (28%) said that they think the soul lives on after us, and 18 people (13%) believe in reincarnation. Only 12 people (8%) believe in Heaven and , and 40 people (23%) think that when we’re dead, we’re just dead. 18 people said they don’t know what happens after we die and wouldn’t speculate.
As far as the details of what people believe about the soul, only 73 (50%) respondents chose to answer this question. As this was the only question on the survey without a multiple choice option, one can posit that the lower response rate here is simply a matter of people not wanting to take the time.
Utilizing a phenomenological research method of looking for common words and themes amongst the 73 responses to the question about what people believed about the soul, I came up with six themes for the responses.
1. “Essence”: 8 people used the world “essence” to decribe the soul. These responses were fairly similar to one another: “The soul is the essence, the spirit, that is inside each of us” or “the soul is a person’s essence.” Generally speaking, these people tended to think that the soul is the essence of a human being.
2. “Energy”: 8 people used the word “energy” to describe the soul. Some people said that the soul was “spiritual energy” while another said it was “animating energy.” Another person noted the endless nature of “energy” as a scientific property and intepreted the soul as a sort of eternal energy. Several of these people were also coded under the “eternal” theme.
3. “Eternal”: 17 people had some concept of eternalness in their definition of the soul. As noted above, some said that “energy cannot be destroyed, and the soul is energy” while others simply said that the soul “lives on” or “goes on and on.” One person’s response was coded on three themes as s/he wrote: “It’s the essence of God inside us and is eternal as much as God is.”
4. “God”: 11 people referenced God (or in one case “divine”, in another “Heaven”) in their definition of the soul. Several people said the soul was the “part of God that I am” or “spark of G-d.” Others connected the soul with some sort of afterlife judgement, as in “That our soul is preserved after we die and we are ultimately judged by G-d” or “the soul lives on after death, and is reunited with G-d.” Another response chose to connect the soul with the other end of the life cycle, sayin “we were spiritually born before we were born in the flesh. That we existed in Heaven.”
5. “Universal”: 7 people said the soul was universal. Some people simply said that what they believed about the soul was that “everyone has one” while others connected the concept of the soul to a kind of universal soul, as in “I believe in a universal soul that our souls return to when we die.”
6. Scientific definitions: These collection of 8 responses includes references to “recycling” and attempts to understand the cycle in neurological, biological terms. Two people specifically referenced “recycling” to try and explain their concept of the soul, while another person got more philosophical, saying “the soul is where free will comes from.” Another person said the soul is simply “an ac ulation of thoughts, feelings, knowledge” while someone else said “there is no separation between body and soul. Soul=neuroactivities.” Another person said “there is something, most likely a mix of chemical reactions and electricity that makes us who we are” and another person wrote that the soul is “an emergent property of the complex physical brain, it dies when the body dies.”
101 people (69%) said that they question the existence of God, while 45 people (31%) said they never question God’s existence. 1 person skipped this question. On the next question, however, only 35 people said they never question the existence of God, but 8 people abstained from the question. Of the reasons why people listed for questioning “the lack of definitive proof” got the most votes, with 64 people (25%) citing it as a reason. “Catastrophic events in the world” came in second, with 50 people (20%) saying this was a reason for their questioning. 43 people (17%) said “contradictions in religious texts” was a reason for them, and 36 (14%) people said “catastrophic events in my own life.”
It has been said by physicists that information never disappears. Meaning that at some point, some vast supercomputer could conceivedly recreate us out of back-calculating the atoms in the universe.
HA!
See you in a few trillion biyatches.
"We should avoid the false dualism that separates the soul from the body. The soul is not simply within the body, hidden somewhere within its recesses. The truth is rather the converse. Your body is in the soul, and the soul suffuses you completely." --John O'Donohue
Not according to physicists whose work I've read. The gravity of a black hole is theorized to be strong enough to destroy all information that ever gets sucked into it, which is why we could know nothing of a time we could conceive of as "before" the big bang if we accept that the big bang was an outward explosion of a singularity. We could also know nothing about the history and decisions of the vast amounts of matter that has already gone into black holes. No supercomputer could recreate us because our existence is shaped by locally random processes. Einstein was wrong; God, whatever you want to call it, whether it's the man in the sky the physical laws of the universe, does play dice.
Any computer that could even try to attempt to create a universe under our same laws would still be dependent on our universe to supply the random processes (such as radioactive decay) that could conceivably be used to allow it to generate random processes. There is no way to generate randomness mathematically, which is why hardware that does things like measuring movements of electrons is used instead of algorithms when a computer wants to generate a number of some type of random distribution. If our universe dies, the computer can no longer play dice, and hence could never recreate anything under our laws.
I thought information theory posited that there was a finite amount of information? Even if the Black Hole 'destroyed' information, I would assume that new information would be generated elsewhere. Again, I'm a bit rusty on this.
I think that information theory will get a whole lot better once we make some breakthroughs on quantum physics. The more we define something, the less opportunity it has to become something else, it seems. Strange. We get more information/detail about the possible item, but then reduce the chances of it being something else (which, I assume, is the 'other info' floating around out there.)
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Posting Permissions
