Michael > November 20th, 2022, 09:31 PM
Quote:Author Greg Bear has passed away, reports his wife Astrid. The 71-year-old novelist underwent surgery earlier in the month, and following the successful process, doctors discovered he’d had a stroke from clots that had been building in his body since surgery he had in 2014. He remained unconscious until November 18, at which point Astrid said she chose to follow his advance directive and end life support, and he passed two hours later.
LazarusLong > December 11th, 2022, 06:36 PM
Michael > December 12th, 2022, 03:34 PM
Quote:There have been many cases where people, animals, and certainly microbes have been thought to be dead only to return to life. Microbes and some insects can be frozen and then brought back. Cryogenics aside, human beings can survive for a short time while being effectively “dead”.
All of these are examples of revival. That is, something alive has had its vital functions slowed or stopped to near nothing, and then it is reanimated to life.
Resurrection, however, is very different. A being that is resurrected is not reanimated or revived. It is dead, decomposed or disassembled, and then reassembled and reanimated.
The Greek word for this is anastasis and the authors of the New Testament of the Bible were very careful to use this word when referring to the resurrection of Jesus. Indeed, anastasis has come to mean this specifically and in the Gospel of John (11:25–26), just before raising Lazarus, Jesus says he is the anastasis, the resurrection.
The New Testament authors’ descriptions of the resurrection (and for the raising of Lazarus) are careful to assure the readers that this person was, as Dickens said of Marley in A Christmas Carol, “dead as a doornail”. From talking about Lazarus’s body’s smell to the piercing of Jesus’s side to the way that his wrappings were somehow carefully removed (as if his body just vanished from under them) despite their being strips of cloth covered in scented oils. No chance that they could just be revived.
Anastasis is important to Christians theologically because resurrection is part of the promise God made through Christ, for all to receive new bodies, not just to continue on in some spirit form, not just to be revived, but to be reconstructed in a new creation. It was also a common belief among the Jews at the time known as the Pharisees who appear frequently in the Bible as Jesus’s verbal sparing partners.
Resurrection is the only true immortality because, while revival can prolong life, it can never prevent the possibility that the body will simply be destroyed one day. All medical breakthroughs are designed to prolong life or revive the dead, but no medicine has ever been able to resurrect anything alive. Clone yes, rebuild from scratch molecule by molecule, no.
One mechanism for resurrection might be to “download” and “backup” one’s mind into a computer. With the mind intact, the body can be regrown from DNA or a new body, perhaps artificial, supplied. This approach assumes that downloading or backing up the mind is even possible and that this would actually be a continuance of one’s life and not a mere copying, a destruction of one life and a beginning of another.
Another possibility is perhaps more intriguing and that is the promise of teleportation via quantum scrambling. Recent experiments with the transmission of information through quantum scrambling have shown how quantum bits can be completely scrambled and then reconstructed at some later time, effectively teleporting the original bits. Since this is a form of quantum teleportation, the transmission of a particle state to another one with the destruction of the original, it is also a form of resurrection if the reconstruction occurs at a time later than the destruction as with scrambling.
Now, this leads into a philosophical paradox. If somebody made an exact duplicate of me in every way, that duplicate would not be me because I would go on being me. On the other hand, if I were destroyed and an exact duplicate made, would I be the new person? Probably not though you would have no way of knowing.