Saturday, October 9, 2021

Enchanted Fruitbat


Somebody unknown to me on Reddit, who calls himself Enchanted Fruitbat, posted the following, which I´ve excerpted, with apologies to said fruitbat!

"On long enough time scales (such as a googolplex years), entropy is less omnipotent than it first appears - thermal fluctuations permit arbitrarily large violations of the (purely statistical) second law of thermodynamics. In a naturalistic universe, with an infinite future, anything that possibly could happen almost surely eventually will, even the resurrection of the dead, repeated an infinite number of times, in every possible way, in an essentially arbitrary order.

I think an afterlife is almost inevitable either way. The only question is whether the universe ultimately makes sense (because God is in charge) or if it is an infinite absurdity. We must hope for the former, in which the afterlife is one of justice and mercy and truth and goodness and beauty, not for the later in which we are all damned to the never-ending hell of random chance resurrections."

"I wasn't actually talking about quantum mechanics, only classical statistical mechanics. You don't need quantum mechanics to get "given enough time, anything that can possibly happen almost surely eventually will" – Poincaré recurrence (of the universe) and Boltzmann brains don't depend on quantum theory. Quantum theory just adds more ways in which things could happen.

Is the spontaneous resurrection of the dead "possible"? Well, if humans are just matter which is arranged in a certain way – even a dynamical system of matter in which life and consciousness requires matter to be constantly changing in certain ways–why is a spontaneous return to the state of life, even in continuity with one's mental state immediately prior to death, impossible? Any arrangement of matter, no matter how exquisitely particular, could be revisited eventually given enough time.

I don't think this will actually happen–because God will not allow it, because humans are more than just arrangements of matter. But, if one were to believe that there is no God, and that humans are just matter, then yes I believe an afterlife is very likely – but unlike the Christian afterlife which is run by a good and just God, it will be an absurd hell governed by random chance alone. Atheists think they will slip away into sweet oblivion; but, if materialist atheism is true (and thank God it is false), our fate is not sweet oblivion, but an eternity of madness."

It´s on this link.

Should we strive for Universal Resurrection?


1 comment:

  1. "With strange eons, even death may die", or something like that in Lovecrafts words.

    ReplyDelete