By Inverse
“Our experimental goal is akin to finding a way to talk with an astronaut who is on another world.”
Read on www.inverse.com
CLEAR ALL
The ability to control our dreams is a skill that more of us are seeking to acquire for sheer pleasure. But if taken seriously, scientists believe it could unlock new secrets of the mind.
Taken for granted in Western culture for more than a hundred years, the dualistic view of the universe—the split between mind and matter, body and spirit, faith and reason, essentially between science and spirituality—is now being fundamentally questioned by Western science and religion alike.
One of the most famous expressions of the concept of non-duality, the Heart Sutra is but one example of an idea that humans have alternately embraced and dismissed for millennia. What is non-duality, then, and why do we find it both unsettling and desirable?
It may be that the best way to understand the world is not through science or spirituality alone – but through an approach which combines them both.
How did we get here? Where are we going? How will we get there? As individuals and on the societal level, these questions are at the heart of the human condition. The answers can provide a road map for how we live our lives.
It may be some way off, but mind uploading, the digital duplication of your mental essence, could expand human experience into a virtual afterlife.
Theories of consciousness come from religion, from philosophy, from cognitive science, but not so much from evolutionary biology.
You are who you are because of your environment. What happens in a virtual world in an environment created by another mind?
The question is no longer whether quantum theory is correct, but what it means.
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Forget what you know or what you think you know about consciousness.