Hmmmmmm seems a somewhat tangled web you weave there.

John Seeker – reader

Thank you for reading 🙂 As I don’t consider myself as neither a professional writer nor a professional philosopher I admit my reasoning could be a bit tangled.

In my mind this tinsel in a tangle is pretty straightforward:

• from infinite possibilities and very low probabilities, at some random moment, live spawned as “the something” that is the true opposite of time
• we don’t know exactly what time is but we know how it works
• we don’t know exactly what life is but we know how it works
• the thing upon both time and life act on is entropy
• life lowers entropy, time increases entropy
• as a means to keep it low life devised evolution as a process of continual adjustments to life itself
• intelligence is one of the many adjustments and its use is to help life preserve local low entropy
• intelligence was the moment when life progressed from defence to offence. Intelligent creatures act upon time by making predictions
• the goal is to defeat time, which if we keep being around means we humans will get to live forever (or a very long time), because eternal (or very long) life has the advantage of better predictions (e.g. the older you are the better you know what’s gonna happen next)

What you seem to be implying is that when you reach the stage of being immortal, you would also have evolved to perfection.

John Seeker – reader

Not so. Remember evolution is a means of life to perfect itself. The goal of life is to defeat time. Therefore perfection is when you make time disappear. Living forever on the other hand is one possible outcome of evolution which make some living beings able to fight time endlessly.

Evolution will keep going as long as the universe will be made of spacetime. And it will be so because life is terribly local. Life fights time in small portions of spacetime. Life will spread no doubt, especially if we extend the span of a lifetime, but it is an infinite universe …

Therefore i believe perfection in evolution to be way beyond the extensiveness of life. Perfection is the final victory of life over time.

In other words you may be an immortal being but if you are immortal because you drink the serum of youth (which your intelligence finally found) you are far from perfect if a snake bite will still kill you. The snake bite is a statistically probable event which time will have no problem executing your life with.

Eternal life is different than living forever. It is not straightforward i know, but forever assumes the existence of time, eternity on the other hand is outside time itself. So, we could, for fun, say that perfection is eternal life, life outside time itself, a moment when either our universe will be made of lifespace instead of timespace or when we’d have gotten the means to transcend this universe altogether in some other one where there is no time at all.

Do you really think mankind can achieve that?

John Seeker – reader

Yes.

I trust mankind with such an accomplishment because it is flexible. This flexibility will help life spread, subsist, exist and thrive. Our successful secret weapon is general intelligence. The reason it will work is because it is general, it adapts effortlessly. Five hundred thousands ago we thought humans which know as many things as a twenty years old does today to be a god. Now he is an unemployed hipster.

This does not mean, of course, we also will achieve that. Just look at us. We fail to implement socially a philosophy that serves a greater goal, beyond our mere simple selves, for hundreds of thousands of years so far.

I do trust survival though. I know nothing will make humans stick together more than calamity, which are like time’s armoured battle tanks: hard to stop and catastrophic damage once they get to fire.

I do fear life’s self reference. Life doesn’t have a goal in having “humans” roaming the universe. If we bomb ourselves into oblivion or economically drive ourselves into survival, we teach the self referential system which is life that we’re not its best bet against time.

Would something perfect have any reason for existing when no further evolution was possible?

John Seeker – reader

Yes.

We currently have no reason for existing other than the meaning we create ourselves. We are meaning machines. We create meaning in order to have a reason for existing. In my opinion, which might be plain stupid, existing at a point where no evolution will be possible, but also a point where you are eternal and out of the war with time, is absolutely awesome.

If you think about it this is what Nirvana or Heaven are. Outside of time and eternal. Who doesn’t want to be there?