
Big Bang and Relative Immortality : Seminal Essays on the Creation of the Universe and the Advent of Biological Immortality.
Title:
Big Bang and Relative Immortality : Seminal Essays on the Creation of the Universe and the Advent of Biological Immortality.
Author:
Sisti, Sebastian.
ISBN:
9780875866086
Personal Author:
Edition:
1st ed.
Physical Description:
1 online resource (79 pages)
Contents:
Chapter 1. Big Bangism -- The Ancient Greek Philosophers -- Teetering on a Two-Legged Stool -- The Second Law Denies the First Law -- Running Down of Universe Implies a Perfect State of Beginning -- Expansion and Contraction Does Not Deny First Law -- What Nothing Means, Or Should Mean -- The Folly of a Protogenesis -- Conversion and Timing Factors -- No Parts, Only Wholes -- If It's Finite, It Has an Edge -- The Necessity of a Void -- Protogenesis Within a Void -- Plucking a Point from a Line -- The Impenetrability of Fused Entities -- Motion as the Fourth Dimension -- The Alternatives to Motion as the Fourth Dimension -- Newton's Concept -- The Alternative of Force Particles -- Impenetrability Works Two Ways -- Structuring the Folly of Protogenesis -- Fusing the Conversion and the Timing Factors -- Why Something Cannot Become Something Else -- The Universe Always Was and Always Will Be -- Chapter 2. Walking through Infinity -- Emergence Implies a Context within which to Emerge -- An Infinitely Dormant Void? -- The Problem Is the Presumption of a Beginning -- The Void Must Be Infinite -- Is the Void Chock Full of Energy? -- Filling in the Spaces -- Like a Flotilla of Eddington Balloons Popping All Over the Place -- Chapter 3. Falling Trees -- Absolute Idealism -- Subjective Idealism -- God as the Ever-Present Perceiver -- The Presumption of a Self -- A Self Is Not Revealed in Experience -- Meditation Does Not Reveal a Self -- God as a Mathematician -- Buddha the Materialist -- Plato's Old Souls -- The Probable Origin of Belief in Souls -- God Would Have Known that Something Cannot Become Something Else -- The Interaction of Soul and Cell -- No Immortality in the Old Testament -- Berkeley's Folly -- Chapter 4. The Improbable Being of God -- Jehovah as God -- Jehovah's Continuous Being -- A Crazy Idea -- No Beginnings -- A Divine Existence?.
Absolute Idealism -- To Be Divine Is To Be Immortal -- A Savagely Cruel God -- Did Genesis Create Jehovah in Our Image? -- Whom Can We Blame for Our Mortality? -- The Redeemer -- Chapter 5. Progressive Evolution -- Natural Selection -- Good Mutations -- Lamarck's Theory -- The "Invisible Hand" -- Modern Theory of Natural Selection -- Best Genes -- Progressive Evolution -- Devolution -- Static Evolution -- Genetic Determinism -- Biological Immortality -- Extended Life Spans -- Nature Does Not Leap -- Lucy -- This Cycle of Evolution Still Incomplete -- Evidence of Evolutionary Immortality -- Chapter 6. Relative Immortality -- All Living Things Are Headed for Immortality -- The Sound of Our Atoms -- The Hayflick Limit -- Henrietta's Cells -- The Discovery of Telomeres -- The Evolution of Telomeres -- Continuous Things Are Compulsively Continuous -- Let Us Not Forget the Naysayers -- Relative Immortality: A Reasonable Expectation -- 25,000 Years -- With Malice Aforethought -- A Sin Against DNA? -- The Sinful Option of Suicide -- Teen-Age Violence -- Mister and Ms. Wonderful -- Freedom from Death -- Resistance of the Religious Right -- Chapter 7. Thou Shalt Not Kill -- The Ultimate Deterrent to Killing -- Abandoning the Death Sentence -- Electing a Praetorian Guard -- The Futility of Utopias in Death Cultures -- An International Prison on Antarctica -- The Problem of Adultery -- When Crime Will Disappear -- The Special Problem of the Genetically Deformed -- The Problem of Derring-Do -- The Need for Maximum Safety in Travel -- Accountability for Travel Accidents -- Why the Need to Hurry? -- Immortality Will Not Justify Indolence -- The Replacement of Death with Boredom -- Upgrading Incentives for Degrading Labor -- Who Can Afford Social Security? -- A Progressive Tax on the Rich -- A Retroactive Tax on the Rich and High-Wage Earners.
A Progressive Tax That Would Wipe Out the National Debt Would Be a Wash -- The Threat to the Oligarchy -- Like It or Not, The Rich Will Share Immortality with the World -- A Tentative Blueprint for the Future -- The Universal Human Goal -- A Committee to Appoint the Supremes -- The Praetorian Guard -- Chapter 8. The Three Compulsions (Contributions to a Theory of Quantum Psychology) -- Chapter 8. The Three Compulsions -- Is Greed the Ultimate Emotion? -- The Greediest S.O.B. Outside of the Sea -- Synthesis of Protein, Not the Result of Adaptation -- Overreaching Behavior Is Inborn -- Aggression Must Be Tamed -- The Ancient Egyptians Lived the Ethical Life -- Taming the Lions and Eagles Among Us -- The New Lion Tamers: A Praetorian Guard -- Taming the American Oligarchy -- How the Oligarchy Works -- Is Market Exploitation of the Chinese Aggrandizement? -- Desire and Ambition versus Greed -- David and Bathsheba -- Money Is Rarely a Motive in Rape -- Does Greed Also Motivate Murder For Revenge? -- The Compulsion to Reproduce -- The Evidence of Evolution -- Chapter 9. Atoms Think (Contribution to a Theory of Quantum Psychology ) -- Little By Little, We Learn What the Brain Has Known for Millennia -- Why Is Nature So Slow? -- Bad Luck Separates the Losers from the Winners -- Elephants Bellow for Justice. Why Punish Them for Eve? -- Why Teenagers Think They're Immortal -- The Making of a Daredevil -- Making Up for Lost Time -- Look At All We've Created -- Trusting the Unconscious -- The Atom Is an Extraordinary Thinking Machine -- Hunches Are the Mothers of Ideas -- Until the Great Day Arrives, Reproduce Yourself -- The Unconscious Gives Us Love and Creativity -- Death No Longer the Only Winner.
Abstract:
This series of brief and sparkling philosophical essays explores the Principle of Continuity as it impacts discussions of the Big Bang and the expansion of the universe, God, infinity, biological immortality and evolution. From Ancient Greece to the frontiers of modern science, some egregious blunders have been made in both philosophy and in theoretical physics. The old theory of Continuous Creation was blown up by the Big Bang theory, but the author shows that this is just another ontological quagmire that conflicts with the First Law of Thermodynamics (conservation)-and common sense. Surveying scientific principles, he discerns where they can and cannot illuminate our understanding.
Local Note:
Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2017. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.
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