Sum: Forty Tales From The Afterlives –– David Eagleman

Author: David Eagleman

Date Started: [[September 24th, 2020]]

Date Finished: [[September 26th, 2020]]

Type: Kindle

Key Takeaways:

• Most "versions" of Eagleman's afterlives seems very human centric - again, that the world revolves around humans and humans are "God's" main creation. Seems like a very Western or monotheistic mindset to go in with in the first place. I guess I'm a bit of a sceptic about the concept afterlife to
• Most "versions" of Eagleman's afterlives seems very human centric - again, that the world revolves around humans and humans are "God's" main creation. Seems like a very Western or monotheistic mindset to go in with in the first place. I guess I'm a bit of a sceptic about the concept afterlife to begin with.
• But I can't deny that I loved every moment of this book, the imagination, the eye-opening moments and the bits of wisdom that apply to this life, beyond the afterlife.
• We are conscious for sometime, and then we are.. not. We are non-existent, nor conscious enough to assess whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, either.
  • A stand I take today, is that both consciousness and non-consciousness are neutral. Everything in life is neutral if you average it out, the good and the bad, it all compounds into zero-sum. So is nothingness, so is non-consciousness or non-existence. At least in the case of being, we get blips of good and bad, which makes it more exciting (maybe )not exciting, but at least eventful). Somehow, I feel it's worth experiencing this conscious neutral for a while, before moving on to the next (possibly unknown) neutral.
• How much speculating can you do about the afterlife, or other lives, before it starts to take from the one you have now? How does knowing what happens later change the way we behave now?
• Why do humans have this huge need to give meaning to life and the things around them? Why are we searching for this all our lives in hope to find things about the universe we might not even comprehend? That, and "Being let into the secrets behind the scenes has little effect on our experience."
• [[Creators]] and their creations always have a difficult relationship, whether that's between what we make, or what our "creators" have made. It's one where we accept that our creations are bigger than us, and have "lives" of their own, or it's one of attachment, nurture and care. It doesn't do harm to believe either, does it? Should creators should be left to do just that - create, and not be consumed by observing or judging the life of the creation?

Highlights:

• In this afterlife, all the moments that share a quality are grouped together.
  • "In this part of the afterlife, you imagine something analogous to your Earthly life, and the thought is blissful: a life where episodes are split into tiny swallowable pieces, where one experiences the joy of jumping from one event to the next like a child hopping from spot to spot on the burning sand."
• God understands the complexities of the afterlife. "She sits on the edge of her bed and weeps at night because the only thing everyone can agree on is that they're all in Hell."
• "The missing crowds make you lonely. You begin to complain about all the people you could be meeting. But no one listens or sympathizes with you, because this is precisely what you chose when you were alive."
• "Your concern about human affairs begins to slip away, your cynicism about human behavior melts, and even your human way of thinking begins to drift away from you."
  • "You cannot appreciate the destination without knowing the starting point; you cannot revel in the simplicity unless you remember the alternatives."
  • "You realize that the next time you return here, with your thick horse brain, you won't have the capacity to ask to be a human again. You won't understand what a human is. Your choice to slide down the intelligence ladder is irreversible. And just before you lose your final human faculties, you painfully ponder what magnificent extraterrestrial creature, enthralled with the idea of finding a simpler life, chose in the last round to become a human."
• #meaning varies with spatial scale. So we have concluded that communicating with her is not impossible, but pointless.
• "And God consoles Himself with the thought that all creation necessarily ends in this: Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought."
• This appears to be a time-sharing plan devised by some efficient deity; in this way, we're not all populating the Earth at the same time.
  • Answers, or more questions, to some questions I've always had about how everyone can share the afterlife, and how immortality would drain the Earth's resources. [[Homo Deus - Yuval Harari]]
• "There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time."
  • And that is the curse of the room: since we live in the heads of those who remember us, we lose control of our lives and become who they want us to be.
• "They don't guess that our main priority is to answer these questions for ourselves. They don't guess that we are unable, and that we build machines of increasing sophistication to address our own mysteries."
  • To build a machine smarter than you, it has to be more complex than you - and the ability to understand the machine begins to slip away.
  • What is "answer"?
• "Everything that creates itself upon the backs of smaller scales will by those same scales be consumed."
• "When we're forced to leave by the wearing out of those delicate little bodies, it is not uncommon to see us lying prostrate in the breeze of solar winds, tolls in hand, looking out into the cosmos, wet-eyed, searching for meaninglessness" #meaning
• "It is not the brave who can handle the big face, it is the brave who can handle its absence."
• "One of His best gifts - the ability to have faith in an unseen hereafter - has backfired."
• "Much of your existence took place in the eyes, ears and fingertips of others. And now that you've left the Earth, you are stored in the scattered heads around the globe."
  • You were much better at seeing the truth about others than you ever were at seeing yourself. So you navigated your life with the help of others who held up mirrors for you. People praised your good qualities and criticized your bad habits, and these perspectives - often surprising to you - helped you to guide your life.
  • "Here in this purgatory, all the people with whom you've ever come in contact are gathered. The scattered bits of you are collected, pooled and unified. The mirrors are held up in front of you. Without the benefit of filtration, you see yourself clearly for the first time. And that is what finally kills you."
• "Over the millennia, God has grown bitter. Nothing continues to satisfy. Time drowns Him. He envies man his brief twinkling of a life and those He dislikes are condemned to suffer immortality with him."
• "The end of death is the death of motivation. Too much life, it turns out, is the opiate of the masses. There is a noticeable decline in accomplishment. People take more naps. There is no great rush."
• "It's simply that He doesn't know we exist. He is unaware of us because he is of the wrong spatial scale - he is the size of a bacterium. He is not something outside and above us, but on the surface and in the cells of us."
  • "They look to God for answers. God attributes these events to statistical fluctuations over which he has no control and no understanding."
• "You could blow their cover, but the Directors are confident that you won't; they know you will sink to any depth of infidelity to preserve the lie for your eventual return to it."
• By the time we die, and our death switch is triggered, there will be nothing left but a sophisticated network of transactions with no one to read them: a society of emails, zipping back and forth under silent satellites orbiting a soundless planet.
  • So an afterlife doesn't exist for us per se, but instead an afterlife occurs for that which exists between us.
  • And we are quite satisfied with this arrangement, because reminiscing about our glory days of existence is perhaps all that would have happened in the afterlife anyway.
• Your Creators are talented at just that: creation - but they're not involved with the observation and judgment of our actions, as we had previously supposed them to be. The Creators watch none of the details as our lives unfold. They could not care less.
  • "It feels so much like the real thing that in the afterlife you only rarely wonder whether you've lived all this before, haunted occasionally by deja vu, holding a book in your hand and not knowing whether this is the first time or a replay from aeons past."
• "They come to understand with awe, the complexity of the compound identity that existed on Earth. The conclude with a shudder that the Earthly you is utterly lost, unpreserved in the after life. You were all these ages, they concede, and you were none."
  • "Beyond the name, the yous have little else in common."
• When you die, you are grieved by all the atoms of which you were composed. They hung together for years, whether in sheets of skin or communities of spleen. With your death they do not die. Instead, they part ways, moving off in their separate directions, mourning the loss of a special time they shared together, haunted by the feeling that they were once playing parts in something larger than themselves, something that had its own life, something they can hardly put a finger on.
• It is the interaction within this substantial administration that determines the random walk of the world: everything interesting happens at the borders between domains of power.
  • There is bitter competition among the gods. Jealous rivalries abound because the stakes are so low; the gods are not large and powerful and they know it. So they try their best to stand out and to be heard.
  • Among all the creatures of creation, the gods favor us: we are the only ones who can empathize with their problems.
• The human race is a gargantuan network of signals passed from node to node; a calculation of celestial significance running on the vast grid of the human substrate.
  • Love was not specified in the design of your brain; it is merely endearing [[Algorithms]] the freeload on the leftover processing cycles. ([[Made You Think - Homo Deus]])
  • Genes unwrap, proteins blossom, synapses rearrange. All this is well below your awareness - you are merely carrying the brain-box with no acquaintance with what happens inside it.
• Here, in the afterlife, everything exists in all possible states at once, even states that are mutually exclusive. You can enjoy all the possibilities at once, living multiple lives in parallel.
  • The dangers of "having the cake and eating it too" - the reason we are forced to make decisions, and the reason everything in life revolves around choices.
  • "You are simultaneously engaged in her conversation and thinking about something else; she both gives herself to you and does not give herself to you; you find her objectionable and you deeply love her; she worships you and wonders what she might have missed with someone else. “Thank you,” you tell the angel. “This I'm used to.”
• It feels to you that we're connected by a larger whole, but you're mistaken. We're connected by a smaller particle. Every atom in your body is the same quark in different places at the same moment in time. Our little quark sweeps like a frenetic four-dimensional phosphor gun.
  • Here it takes its time, catching its breath. It will wait several thousand millennia until it regains the stamina and optimism to try again. So there is no afterlife, but instead a long intermission: all of us exist inside the memory of the particle; like a fertilized egg waiting to unpack.
• Everyone is knocking over dominos willy-nilly; no one knows where it leads.
  • Although we credit God with designing man, it turns out He's not sufficiently skilled to have done so. In point of fact, He unintentionally knocked over the first domino
• Loyals have an imperturbable capacity to hold the beliefs with which they arrived, a deep reluctance to consider evidence that separates them from their lifelong context. #religion
  • So she finds herself unappreciated and lonely, wandering in solitude among the infinite cloudscapes of non-believing believers.
• [[Dataism]] But we also come to understand that the network of numbers is so dense that it transcends simple notions of cause and effect. We become open to the wisdom of the flow of the patterns.
  • The secret codes of life - whether presented as a gift or a burden - go totally unappreciated.
  • You think: this is totally deterministic, is love simply an operation of math?
  • The Rewarders originally thought to offer it as a gift, but the Punishers quickly decided they could leverage it as a kind of affliction, drying up life's pleasures by revealing their bloodlessly mechanical nature.
  • The Rewarder and the Punisher skulk off, struggling to understand why knowing the code behind the wine does not diminish its pleasure on your tongue, why knowing the incapability of heartache does not reduce its sting, why glimpsing the mechanics of love does not alter its intoxicating appeal.
    • Being let into the secrets behind the scenes has little effect on our experience.
• The more you fall short of your potential, the more of these annoying selves you are forced to deal with.
• The reunion is warm and heartening for a while, but it isn't long before the begin to miss their freedom. In the form of a human, we are the moment of least facility for the atoms, and in this form, they find themselves longing to ascend mountains, wander the seas and conquer the air, seeking to recapture the limitlessness they once knew.
• You discover that your memory has spent a lifetime manufacturing small myths to keep your life consistent with who you thought you were. You have committed to a coherent narrative, misremembering the details and decisions and the sequence of events. On the way back, the cloth of that story unravels. Reversing through the corridors of your life, you are battered and bruised in the collisions between reminiscence and reality. By the time you enter the womb again, you understand as little about yourself as you did your first time here.
  • [[experiencing self vs the narrating self]]
• How does [[The Denial of Death]] play into all of this?