Posted by Roberta Grimes • December 08, 2018 • 9 Comments
Death, The Source, Understanding Reality
One astonishing byproduct of the bogus scientific theory of materialism and its correlate certainty that consciousness has to be generated by the brain is the fact that so many scientists have become obsessed with developing brain-hacks. They are certain that your brain creates “you,” even though they have no idea how that happens; so now no effort can be spared as they struggle to find the very best ways to preserve that brain-created “you” forever!
Dying people obsessed with the idea of immortality began in the sixties to have their brains frozen, but even if we can find a way to successfully defrost and reanimate those brains they still will be vulnerable and mortal. So by now those who feel truly inspired to keep our brain-created minds alive have come to focus on how we might upload our consciousness to a computer, while at the same time other scientists are trying to upload information to our living brains. Some of the hacks being seriously considered turn out to be quite literally to die for!
And of course immortal minds will need immortal bodies, so scientists are figuring out now how to hack our bodies too. Modern mainstream science is so far off the rails, so dead-ended by its adherence to the thoroughly discredited dogma of materialism, that the only hope it can think to offer to all of humankind is a possible eternity as computers in the heads of robots? Scientists call this “the mind-body problem,” and while they talk a good game, they still have made precisely zero progress on any of these fronts!
I have subscribed to Scientific American for going on two decades now. In those earlier, more hopeful days, scientists were so certain they were going to figure out how the brain creates consciousness that it seemed to be only a matter of time. As recently as a few years back, scientists still were confident that their materialist theories about the origin of consciousness absolutely had to be right. Very recently, though, these hopeful articles so full of the certainty that matter creates mind have faltered in their optimism, to be replaced in the popular scientific literature by the possibility that we may never discover the origin of consciousness unless we dare to venture beyond traditional physics and consider religious notions too. But of course we can never do that!
Close to twenty years into the twenty-first century, theories of how the brain creates consciousness seem to have reached such a fanciful level that they are mostly expounded on places like Quora, while my beloved but deluded Scientific American has reduced its ambitions to attempts at learning how to tell if a comatose patient is aware, and how we might explain the astonishing fact that some people with “acquired savant syndrome” can gain unbelievable talents overnight. What passes for exciting consciousness news in the popular science literature is just expositions of older studies that focus on parts of the brain that seem to be in some way involved in manifesting consciousness. From what I have seen, these studies are nothing more than possible evidence of how and where an eternal non-material consciousness might attach to and work with our material brains.
The century-old scientific certainty that matter is primary and consciousness is generated by our brains is on its pathetic last legs. And for everyone who cares about truth and understanding, that is wonderful news! This whole 
bogus contest between scientists and religionists is based on a fallacious assumption that goes back at least as far as Plato and Aristotle, who loosely divided all human knowledge between what is material and what is spiritual. This divide never made any more sense than it would have made to divide the study of liquids from the study of solids, but for nearly all of human history the fact that the whole idea was stupid didn’t much matter because people had so little understanding anyway.
And that division between physical and non-physical studies always was collegial and informal. But then a little over a century ago those struggling to integrate quantum mechanics into their Newtonian physics model didn’t want to have to also consider the flood of well-documented communications that were then being received through deep-trance mediums from people that we used to think were dead. So in desperation, the scientific gatekeepers of the day – the university departments and the peer-reviewed journals – turned what had for nearly two millennia been a largely theoretical division between the study of matter and the study of spirit into what became an iron wall. From then on, the study of material facts and any non-physical speculations had to be rigidly separated! And working scientists who refused to respect the wall between the two killed their own careers.
But there is just one reality. Surely that is common sense? The early-twentieth-century scientists who first dubbed materialism “the fundamental scientific dogma” could not have understood that nothing is solid, that religious dogmas are no threat to the truth, and that in fact there is a glorious greater reality based in 
consciousness of which our universe is just a part. Scientists through all of human history could not have understood any of this, but more and more working scientists are beginning to suspect it now. And they should be speaking out! But of course they have children to educate and retirements to fund. And by now there has been a century’s worth of scientific work done based on a lie, so at this point it will be hard for any respected scientist ever to point out the fact that the materialist scientific emperor is in fact buck-nekkid. Being the first respected scientist to speak the truth is going to be hard! But still, shame on every scientist at every level who suspects the truth but still lives the lie.
All those brain-hacks meant to give us eternal physical life are laughable. It isn’t only that they turn working scientists into the equivalent of tribal primitives trying to figure out how to hack a radio so it will produce the voice of Frank Sinatra, but eternity is our birthright. It is the essence of who we are! Every human mind is inextricably part of the Mind that continuously manifests this universe, safely beyond the matter-related illusions of time and space and therefore eternal by definition. Please pause for a moment and savor that fact. You never began, you never will end, and eternal is the essence of who you are!
Still, working scientists and clueless others continue to double down on silliness. The author of The DaVinci Code imagines that we will create and worship an artificial God. As we become ever better at detecting the fact that awareness persists after physical death, there also are people who wallow in the horror of imagining that human awareness must be trapped for long enough for the dying to be driven mad as they contemplate their imminent demise. Efforts even are being made to program computers to teach themselves to play chess in order to awaken in machines some of what might look like aspects of the mind, specifically intuition and creativity. According to those carrying on these studies, “With the advent of powerful machine learning techniques we’ve seen that the scales have started to tip and now we have computer algorithms that are able to do these very human-like activities really well.” To what purpose this is being done is difficult to say, since conscious awareness is the source of intuition and creativity, and not a product of it. Even the most creative and intuitive machine cannot go from learning how to develop hunches to ultimately becoming self-aware!
So the beat goes on. But fortunately, those that we used to think were dead are working intensively now to invent such strong and incontrovertible methods of communication between their world and ours that soon scientists will be shamed into venturing into the study of what is not physical. And as the great physicist and polymath Nikola Tesla said, “The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.”
Hi Roberta,
I try to hold off questions to see what is on orhers’ minds, but last night I read a recent article by Ram Dass , based on his experiences with Hindu gurus, in which he noted that — I am paraphrasing– everyone wants to be seeking God but no one is prepared to find God. More or less something like that. Anyway, I have been wondering why, in different but similar words to Ram Dass’ statement, western thought seems so far from this notion of us as eternal beings who were never born and will never die. To drop another name, Depak Chopra says this as well. But in the west, we are very much hung up on beginnings and endings.
It seems that while both religious and scientific inquiry is based on a methodology of tracing everything to it’s beginning as a way to analyze it, we will always be seeking and never finding.
Western thought is focused on a primal place and time, rather than the phenomenon of consciousness and experience. So if in some weird scientific breakthrough we can create a sentient robot that seems close enough to turning on with human behavior, I suppose we’ll be satisfied that we have “hacked” God.
PS-That is, providing the AI can play chess.😉
Your point about what people in various cultures can accept is a good one. It is why I think it’s essential that we teach death and the afterlife first of all, and also the reason why (I believe) I am being led now to teach the Gospel words rather than busily making up my own course in spirituality. (I couldn’t do better than Jesus, but I am human after all!)
As for your theoretical sentient robot, if a sentient (or even sentient-seeming) robot ever happens, those stuck in mainstream science’s materialism dogma will declare a roaring victory! But in reality they will have achieved nothing, as you can see as you think more about it. The sentience they have created – if indeed it is sentience – still will not be consciousness as human beings experience consciousness. Your saying this has made me realize that their real problem is that they cannot create life, nor do they even really know how to define it (they can’t define consciousness either), and without life it seems very likely that even consciousness probably cannot be conscious, can it? Or self-replicating? Or really much of anything?
For example, it seems certain now that, far from being just an artifact of the human brain, consciousness is all that exists. When I first realized this had to be true, I was stuck for a time with the troubling sense that almost certainly everything that consciousness creates must on some level also be conscious. Oy! Have you ever felt the need to treat rocks respectfully and to very politely open and close doors? But eventually I came to see that “conscious” and “aware” are two very different kettles of petunias! I no longer think that a rock is aware, but I realize that what we experience as awareness is a subset or a product of consciousness, and almost certainly it would therefore require consciousness as an essential precursor.
So the mandatory line to making a really sentient robot is consciousness -> life -> awareness, it seems to me. From everything that is currently known, it really cannot be otherwise. So if you want to make matter self-aware, you will have to BEGIN with discovering and learning to use and control the very consciousness that they are so frustrated by now that they are trying to make a sentient robot rather than having to face the music on consciousness. They are going at their silly project precisely bass-ackwards!
Hi Roberta,
There is so much to contemplate in this entry! Someday the history of the present materialist delusion will be written and people of that day will marvel at the inability of otherwise intelligent persons to miss obvious truths. We feel the same way about the ignorance of previous eras. I know Big Government and Big Corporate money is deeply involved and scientists are entrenched in that system. They are also entrenched in a system of mutual recognition that bestows prestige and self-respect for being tough minded materialists, for NOT being silly and weak-minded gullible folk. The power of social psychological factors is really immense. I will probably never see that history written in my life time but I would be fascinated to read it.
Harlan
I agree, Harlan! The question is, of course, what it will take to force physicists to begin to look at the evidence for the greater reality, and here we think that the only thing that will do it will be for excellent electronic communication to be developed between this level of reality and those that we used to think were dead. When everyone has an app (or something) that will let them ring up dead great-aunt Mildred whenever they like, then scientists stuck in materialism are going to look ridiculous!
Yes exactly, Roberta,
Ultimately changes of this scale in a culture are going to come up from the bottom and not from the top down. That’s how great cultural changes come about. Or they begin with marginal groups and spread so that former powers-that-be become marginalized and obsolete. With the Internet and the like,in today’s world, I’m sure there will come a moment when the high priests of science are simply ignored and bypassed by the mass of people. They bring It upon themselves ultimately. And you have said this yourself in your books, that we can all access information about the great mediums of the past or PSY research anyway. The days of the professional expert may be numbered. For good or ill most people don’t believe them anyway.
Harlan
You know, Harlan, I fought for a long time the notion that this had to be a bottom-up opening of our culture to basic truths. But dear God, that means so much more work for US! We’ve got to reach out and talk with so many people individually. Dear God, can’t You please just, maybe, put a little something in the drinking water?
But I have come to realize – as you say – that every genuine revolution is a product of the masses revolting against the elite, and those elite always realize a new truth only after they do a lot of kicking and screaming! But those that we used to think were dead are a great deal wiser than I am, and they are working zealously now on developing some electronic communication alternatives. When this change happens, I think it will be immediate! Like, one day around this time of year in some future year still almost nobody knows the truth. And by the same time in the following year, not only will everyone know the truth, but they will also feel certain that it has always been common knowledge!
What an exciting time this is to be alive…
Dear Roberta,
I hope such a technology appears soon.
The experts published papers proving we could never fly heavier than air craft, or go faster than 20 mph etc. etc. So much for the experts. I like to speculate on what the impact of virtual certainty of life after death would be. The effect would be immense. So much of religion would be obsolete and pointless for most people, so much of the fear mongering around disease, death and dying would likely vanish. And there is big money in all that. And that’s only the beginning.
I believe it was Ernest Becker who wrote a book on the denial of death and how intricately that denial was woven into all our culture and institutions. There may be a deeply unconscious resistance to having that fear removed.
As a sociologist I would find it quite fascinating to observe such fundamental social change take place. It wouldn’t occur however without some serious disruption and pain. I think it would be difficult for some entrenched interests to adjust to what is really such very good news because they have so much invested in the fear and denial of death.
It would lead to a transformed humanity without doubt, one we can hardly imagine at present. As a human being All I can say is “whooppeee!” I would love to be on that ride! I hope I live to see it!
Harlan
Dear Harlan, those of us who have been working to bring this knowledge to the world like to speculate, too, about how the world would be impacted by it! Most of our visions are positive, though, since we imagine that mainstream science and mainstream Christianity (other religions too) will shrivel like so many spent balloons and then humbly some of their leaders will begin to study and accept the truth, and the light of God will dawn over all the world. Happy stuff to contemplate, indeed!
But now you have me focusing on all the entrenched interests that would want to fight this greatest of all possible news. You make a very good point! Hmm… I’ve got to think about this….