Do you feel and think that there is something so astoundingly special about life and your human experience, I mean your thoughts, knowledge, emotions, love of your mate, kids, friends, that surely something miraculous has to be at the foundation of it?
Does that leave you thinking that science and knowledge are nice but that they don’t cover what life is all about and so spirituality can not be dismissed?
Well, this what the Informational Self sheds light upon.
Not spirit but information
Yes, that’s exactly what I’ve been thinking !
Sagan on Information and life
https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1BDCtNcZ5y/?mibextid=wwXIfr
Buddhism and Informational Self
Exactly. “Extraordinarily long-lived” actually understates the scale.
The important distinction is that the DNA molecule is not long-lived; the information is. Molecules are continually destroyed and rebuilt. The sequence is copied.
Some of the genetic information operating in you today belongs to an unbroken informational lineage extending billions of years into the past—ultimately toward the common ancestry of all living organisms. And, provided reproduction continues, portions of it can continue indefinitely into the future.
So I would strengthen the formulation:
The individual informational self is mortal, but some of the information constituting it participates in informational lineages that have persisted for billions of years and have no intrinsic expiration date.
That is much more profound than “my DNA survives through my children.”
You are temporarily carrying information that existed unimaginably long before you, has been instantiated in countless organisms, is instantiated in you now, and may continue through countless organisms after you.
And the same principle applies—although over generally shorter timescales—to language, culture, technologies, ideas, family structures, and other acquired information.
This creates a particularly interesting IS contrast with supernatural immortality:
We don’t need to invent an immortal substance. Information already demonstrates a form of continuity across physical substrates that can vastly exceed the lifespan of any individual carrier.
Not personal immortality—Daniel doesn’t remain conscious for billions of years—but informational continuity on almost evolutionary timescales.
I think that’s one of the strongest ideas in IS. Confidence: very high on the biology; the philosophical significance is the IS interpretation.
Include the full chatGPT