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It's one of those days when work just seems futile... Sitting here in 20th Century Music Literature, waiting for a paper on Claude Debussy to come tripping out of my fingers... no. It's not due for another week. But I hate to waste a whole period. Less grumpiness is physically apparent, but it's still uncomfortable to sing and I'm having trouble focusing my eyes. I'm hungry. So I will indulge in a philosophical discussion of my theory of conservation of consciousness
There's a law of conservation of matter, a law of conservation of mass. Nothing can be created or destroyed, similar to energy; it can merely be converted to an unusable form. The world is a closed system, mostly. However, I hypothesize that a similar law applies to the amount of consciousness or sentience on the planet. No consciousness or life can really be created or destroyed, merely converted to a form we don't recognize, or transported elsewhere, or dissipated, like heat. The number of humans is not the same as it used to be, by any stretch of the imagination, and all that extra sentience must have come from somewhere else, maybe the afterlife, of which we know little. This means that there is now less sentience elsewhere, having come here. Not knowing the amount of sentience in the universe/multiverse, and not being able to estimate accurately (just as I can't guess the total amount of mass in the universe), I don't know if our population explosion has decimated the amount of life on some other planet or merely siphoned off an infinitestimal bit from the rest of the (nearly infinite) cosmos. I also don't know if there is a distinction between human and nonhuman sentience, which might have separate afterlives or might not (the analogy of planting a field of wheat (the universe) and expecting only one to grow (the earth) is by now well established). If human and nonhuman sentience are separate ideas and have separate afterlives (can't be traded for each other in the conservation), then that points to the possibility that there are other humans elsehwere in the universe. What an interesting thought.
There's a law of conservation of matter, a law of conservation of mass. Nothing can be created or destroyed, similar to energy; it can merely be converted to an unusable form. The world is a closed system, mostly. However, I hypothesize that a similar law applies to the amount of consciousness or sentience on the planet. No consciousness or life can really be created or destroyed, merely converted to a form we don't recognize, or transported elsewhere, or dissipated, like heat. The number of humans is not the same as it used to be, by any stretch of the imagination, and all that extra sentience must have come from somewhere else, maybe the afterlife, of which we know little. This means that there is now less sentience elsewhere, having come here. Not knowing the amount of sentience in the universe/multiverse, and not being able to estimate accurately (just as I can't guess the total amount of mass in the universe), I don't know if our population explosion has decimated the amount of life on some other planet or merely siphoned off an infinitestimal bit from the rest of the (nearly infinite) cosmos. I also don't know if there is a distinction between human and nonhuman sentience, which might have separate afterlives or might not (the analogy of planting a field of wheat (the universe) and expecting only one to grow (the earth) is by now well established). If human and nonhuman sentience are separate ideas and have separate afterlives (can't be traded for each other in the conservation), then that points to the possibility that there are other humans elsehwere in the universe. What an interesting thought.
From: (Anonymous)
Interesting thought...