for - mortality salience - immortality and the quantum field - Federico Faggin

for - mortality salience - consciousness survives the body - ancients were right, contemporary science is inconclusive - Frederico Faggin

for - Federico Faggin (FF) - analytic idealism - consciousness - Deep Humanity

summary - This is an good talk that introduces Federico Faggin's (FF) ideas about consciousness from the perspective of analytic idealism, the idea that consciousness is the most fundamental aspect of reality and that materialism is an epiphenomena of consciousness, not the other way around - Bernado Kastrup's organization, Essentia Foundation invited FF to the Netherlands to give a talking tour of his new - book "Irreducible" - https://www.collectiveinkbooks.com/essentia-books/our-books/irreducible-consciousness-life-computers-human-nature - and they visited the prestigous semiconductor design company ASML' facilities, - https://www.asml.com/en - where this insightful talk was delivered - FF reconciles scientific explanation with the hard problem of consciousness and our ordinary, everyday experience of consciousness - FF's theory offers - a good western, science-based explanatory framework that is consistent with - the experiential and theoretical framework from the east - from - Tibetan Buddhist - Zen Buddhist - Vedic - and other ancient ideas of emptiness<br /> - This framing heals the divide between science and religion that has created a meaning crisis in modernity - and by so doing, also addresses a core issue of the meaning crisis - mortality salience

for - question - what would Federic Faggin think of this? - question - multi-scale communication - question - are Tibetan Rainbow body and knowing time of death examples of multi-scale communications? question - what would Federic Faggin think of this? - He comes from an experiential perspective, not just an intellectual one.

question - what would Federic Faggin think of this? - I don't think Michael Levin provides a satisfactory answer to this and this is related to the meaning crisis modernity finds itself in - when traditional religions no longer suffice, - but there is nothing in modernity that can fill the gap yet, if mortality salience is a big issue - I don't think an intellectual answer can meet the needs of people suffering in the meaning crisis, although it is necessary, it is not sufficient - I think they are after some kind of nonverbal, nondual transformative experience

question - multi-scale communication - This is also a question about multi-scale communication - I've recently used a metaphor to compare - the unitary, monatic experience of consciousness to - an elected government - The trillions of cells "elect" consciousness" as the high level government to oversea them - but we seem to be in the situation of the government being out of touch with the citizens - At one time in our history, was it common to be able for - high level consciousness to communicate directly with - low level cells and subcellular structures? - If so, why has this practice disappeared and - how can we re-establish it?

question - Are Tibetan Rainbow body and knowing time of death examples of multi-scale communications? - In some older spiritual traditions such as found in the East, it seems deep meditative practitioners are able to achieve a degree of communications with parts of their body that is unconventional and surprising to modern researchers - For example, Tibetan meditators report of having the abiity to predict the time of their death by recognizing subtle bodily, interoceptive signals - Rare instances also occur of the Rainbow Body, when great meditators in the Dzogchen tradition whose body at time of death can disappear in a body of light

for - adjacency - Buddhist teachings - Four Noble Truths - life and death - mortality salience - terror management technique

adjacency - between - Buddhist teachings - Four Noble Truths - life and death - mortality salience - terror management technique - adjacency relationship - The Four Noble Truths are: - the recognition of inherent suffering - the cause of suffering - understanding the cause of suffering - the cessation of suffering - and are really - a way to deal with mortality salience and therefore - a terror management technique

for - mortality salience - Deep Humanity - mortality salience - Prometheus - poem - analysis - quote - mortality salience

quote - mortality salience - (see below)

• The lesson is that humans are powerful
  • precisely because they are
    • temporally-bound,
    • finite creatures.
• We are born and we die, no exceptions.
• Byron’s “Prometheus” tells us that there is a lot of power
  • in dying and, particularly,
  • in knowing that we will die.
• To face one’s mortality is “a mighty lesson”,
  • beyond the grasp of any (hypothetical) god.

for - Deep Humanity - mortality salience

• for: meme - honestly can threaten hope

• meme: honesty can threaten hope

  • a reassuring lie is often preferred to na challenging truth
  • denialism is just human nature
    • it's difficult to face the truth when the truth is so unpleasant and triggers intense fear or despair
    • mortality salience could underlay much of this

• for: symbiocene, human exceptionalism
• question
  • how do we invite them in? if they cannot represent themselves, how do we represent them?
    • does anyone know what' it's like to be a bat?
• remind ourselves of our animal nature
  • mortality salience counters human exceptionalism

• Title SOS d'un terrien en detresse
• This is a famous French song that is covered by Dimash Kudaibergen
• The original was written by Daniel Bolavoine, who tragically died in a helicopter crash as he was going to Africa to help with a development project
• Balavoine made it famous on his rock opera performance on the French "Starmania" show. There is another orchestral recording Balavoine did afterwards:
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fms-RDCURSU
  • https://youtu.be/9kZuDhuTkxE
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kZuDhuTkxE
• This video is Dimash performing the famous song for the French people. Dimash sings it with pristien vocal expression, even beyond the original
• The history of how Dimash adapted this song is shown in this youtube video, which shows his famous Chinese reality show performance
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tf_UIAOWfAU
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYPAjmWP140
  • https://youtu.be/AUARjexCTlQ
  • https://youtu.be/0vn_kI4-otQ
  • 26 min. of this concert: https://youtu.be/zmEaxCg6_8k
• The opening lyric of the song
  • why do I live, why do I die? is a perfect BEing Journey to discuss mortality salience

• quote
  • "“Pandemic or not, I will still lie awake each night with the persistent and unpleasant thoughts of my certain death, but I will choose not to smother this existential dread or anxiety. Instead, I want to explore it, befriend it. I have learned that the only way to conquer the darkness is to venture through it,”
• Author
  • Jenna Lasky

• quote
  • "For many, Covid-19 was the rude awakening that death was not a long-distance relationship so much as a close neighbor."
• Author
  • Allison Hope

• due to death of so many young people, covid has shifted mortality salience into center focus for many young people

Quote - normality is our collective, protective madness in which we repress the grim truth of the human condition.

// - This article provides an intersectional study of: - climate change, - collective action research - terror management theory / mortality salience - it explains the beneficial impacts of non-rational relational ontology and recommends the use of ritual practices based on this as a way to promote pro-environmental behavior

//

• key observation
• key insight

// in other words - mortality salience alone is counter-productive - it triggers psychological defense strategies. - it must be accompanied by expressions of gratitude to be effective and transformative

!- similiar to : Mortality Salience - grieving of the loss of a loved one - grieving the future loss of one's own life - Ernest Becker is relevant - Denial of Death, Death Terror !- aligned : Deep Humanity

Socrates confrontation of death without fear is an example of how to live authentically with death, without the need for immortality projects.

Yes, long overdue!

Coming to terms with potential near term extinction of our species, and many others along with it, is a macro-level reflection of the personal and inescapable, existential crisis that all human, and other living beings have to contend with, our own personal, individual mortality. Our personal death can also be interpreted as an extinction event - all appearances are extinguished.

The self-created eco-crisis, with accelerating degradation of nature cannot help but touch a nerve because it is now becoming a daily reminder of our collective vulnerability, Mortality salience of this scale can create enormous amounts of anxiety. We can no longer hide from our mortality when the news is blaring large scale changes every few weeks. It leaves us feeling helpless...just like we are at the time of our own personal death.

In a world that is in denial of death, as pointed out by Ernest Becker in his 1973 Pulitzer-prize winning book of the same title, the signs of a climate system and biosphere in collapse is a frightening reminder of our own death.

Straying from the natural wonderment each human being is born with, we already condition ourselves to live with an existential dread as Becker pointed out:

"Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly rot and disappear forever."

Beckerian writer Glenn Hughes explores a way to authentically confront this dread, citing Socrates as an example. Three paragraphs from Hughes article point this out, citing Socrates as exemplary:

"Now Becker doesn’t always emphasize this second possibility of authentic faith. One can get the impression from much of his work that any affirmation of enduring meaning is simply a denial of death and the embrace of a lie. But I believe the view expressed in the fifth chapter of The Denial of Death is his more nuanced and genuine position. And I think it will be worthwhile to develop his idea of a courageous breaking away from culturally-supported immortality systems by looking back in history to a character who many people have thought of as an epitome of a self-realized person, someone who neither accepts his culture’s standardized hero-systems, nor fears death: the philosopher Socrates."

"Death is a mystery. Maybe it is annihilation. One simply can’t know otherwise. Socrates is psychologically open to his physical death and possible utter annihilation. But still this does not unnerve him. And if we pursue the question: why not?–we do not have to look far in Plato’s portrait of Socrates for some answers. Plato understood, and captured in his Dialogues, a crucial element in the shaping of Socrates’ character: his willingness to let the fact of death fully penetrate his consciousness. This experience of being fully open to death is so important to Socrates that he makes a point of using it to define his way of life, the life of a philosophos–a “lover of wisdom.” " "So we have come to the crucial point. The Socratic catharsis is a matter of letting death penetrate the self. It is the acceptance of the perishing of everything that will perish. In this acceptance a person imaginatively experiences the death of the body and the possibility of complete annihilation. This is “to ‘taste” death with the lips of your living body [so] that you … know emotionally that you are a creature who will die; “it is the passage into nothing” in which “a corner is turned within one.” And it is this very experience, and no other, that enables a person to act with genuine moral freedom and autonomy, guided by morals and not just attraction and impulses."

https://ernestbecker.org/lecture-6-denial/

Mortality salience for the masses - operationalizing terror management theory (TMT) and Deep Humanity BEing Journeys that take individuals to explore the depths of their humanity to make sense of the times we are in will play a critical role in contextualizing fear of death triggered by unstable circumstances and ameliorating these fears with the wisdom that comes from a living comprehension of the sacredness of our life and eventual death.

This is a profound observation that shows how our collective species death over deep history shapes the universe. From a first person experience of reality, however, does it makes us feel that the universe is intimate? The universe is a grand dance and we are part of that dance. Ernest Becker's Mortality Salience looms large. How do we feel meaningful in the face of our mortality? How do we alleviate the perennial meaning crisis?

Schindler, S., Reinhardt, N., & Reinhard, M.-A. (2020). Defending one’s worldviews under mortality salience – Testing the validity of an established idea. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/7bxcs

Golec, A., Bierwiaczonek, K., Baran, T., Hase, A., & Keenan, O. (2020). Sexual Prejudice and Concerns of National Survival in Poland during the COVID-19 Pandemic [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/jsuyg

Haaf, J. M., Hoogeveen, S., Berkhout, S., Gronau, Q. F., & Wagenmakers, E. (2020, April 14). A Bayesian Multiverse Analysis of Many Labs 4: Quantifying the Evidence against Mortality Salience. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/cb9er