Well…... why? Do you know why? Might you have any possible theories or observations that can help advance this phenomenon? Well I might. Or I think I might… And chances are, you most likely might, but that's all we share so far: a big possibility… There is no absolute certainty… If you remember from our readings, my title is an original question that was asked by a German philosopher in the early 1800. And notice this same question is still being asked today, 200 years later, by scientists and philosophers alike.
I want to address this issue as my first, because this is a fundamental issue in science as well as in philosophy that we all have to agree on… As scholars and professionals in the field of psychology, there are limitations to how much information and knowledge we can acquire… Even with our advancements in science and medicine, as a human race, we still are incapable of answering the most essential and basic question of life.
In my previous paragraphs, I was addressing life and its boundless mysteries. But we are going to switch gears here and turn our attention to life's equal friend: death. The clip I want you to view below is a trailer of a documentary entitled "Transcendent Man." This film revolves around the life and ideas of a noted inventor and futurist, Ray Kurzweil.
His inventions include:
1. First scanning machine
2. Kurzweil reading machine
3. Kurzweil 1000 OCR software
4. The first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech-recognition software
5. Kurzweil 250 Music Synthesizer (which is used by music artists like Stevie Wonder)
In our textbook they mentioned some fundamental laws of science and physics. And I thought of one interesting explanation Ray Kurzweil contributed to the world of science, which is the "Law of Accelerated Returns." With this idea, he believes life as we know it will result into a phenomenon called "singularity." Human race will soon see a merging of human-machine life and existence that has the advancement to transcend biological mortality or mortality, i.e. death.
So whether or not, we are close to realizing or equipped to predicting the events of the world in the future and the mysteries of existence, these advancements we have accumulated thus far are nothing more than just reflections of who we are as people today. We may never know certainty of life and the future, but that's ok. That's what allows us the entitlement to creativity and to life in the first place…
So what do you guys think? Do you all agree that in the future we might possibly be able to transcend death? Do you think that human-machine existence will be a possibility in the future? Please express your ideas in a comment! (:
