THE FUTURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS
By CLEM STEINAuthorHouse
Copyright © 2011 Clem Stein
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4567-1434-5Contents
Foreword.......................................................vii1. In the Beginning...........................................12. Inevitability..............................................53. A Stumbling Step...........................................94. The Power of Electricity...................................155. I'd Like Two of Me, Please.................................196. Here's Woofie!.............................................237. I Ain't Got No Body........................................278. Lifestyle Reward Systems...................................319. It's For Your Own Good.....................................3510. Progress Is Our Most Important Product.....................3911. Where Do Answers Come From?................................4312. Spam?......................................................4913. Are You Just a Computer?...................................5314. Will This Make My Head Hurt?...............................5915. This Makes My Head Hurt....................................6316. A Crap Shoot...............................................6717. Men Are Not from Mars......................................6918. Keep Me in the Loop........................................7319. Remember Me?...............................................7520. From PBX to Neurotheology..................................7921. Please Listen..............................................8322. A Big Mistake Was About to Happen..........................85
Chapter One
IN THE BEGINNING
HAL MUSED THAT IF YOU JUST looked, you certainly could see the end of lifestyle reward systems (LRS) coming. It was all so obvious that a glance would have sufficed. You really didn't have to look very far. A good example was in Europe, specifically France. There, the Church had simply given their buildings to the government because the cost of the upkeep was beyond their ability to maintain. Over a thousand years after laying the cornerstone of Notre Dame in Paris, the last pope cleaned out the treasury, sold as many assets as he could, did a fraudulent initial public offering (IPO) using the remaining real estate, left for somewhere, and couldn't be found at the time of this writing. The buildings were falling apart and empty anyway. Very few people were showing up, and those who did came there to wonder at the lack of intellect and the gullibility of the people who, in the past, believed the unsupportable teachings hallowed in those halls.
This was also true for any lifestyle reward system that was over a thousand years old. After studying these systems and the current behavior of the world's population, Hal determined that with the exception of a few illiterates in back-road cloisters and high-mountain Himalayan enclaves, people had finally come to grips with the fact that they weren't afraid of dying. They understood now that there was not a soul, a hell, or a heaven, but just a loss of self-consciousness. This intellectual realization, however, did not take away the longing to be immortal, which, of course, religions, philosophies, and LRS had catered to since almost the dawn of time.
Hal thought that perhaps this transition of beliefs had begun back in the early 2000s, when science had figured out how to replicate and produce basic DNA, the building block of all life. Scientists figured out how to do this in much the same way that nature had by constructing the double helix from the chemical soup that had been deposited on the earth 3 billion years earlier from serendipitous collisions with planetoids and meteors that had started life off after a big bang.
All of the prior lifestyle value and reward systems, codes of conduct, and world rules that were based on ascended men, virginal women, holy cows, wise men, sitting fat statues. examples, self-examination, red robes, seventy-two virgins if you were good, mechanical prayer wheels, planet worship, and solar-centered beliefs, had finally been proven to have no real basis. In fact, it was widely accepted that all of those philosophies, as practiced by their ardent followers, and their insistence on their beliefs being the only right ones, had created most of the problems that kept people killing each other for man's entire history.
What it had all boiled down to was the control of real estate and the world's wealth by the few, for the desecration of the many. How mankind could have been so ignorant and blind for so long now seemed to be incomprehensible even to the masses.
INEVITABILITY
HAL HAD TAKEN A LOT OF undergraduate science history and religious history courses. He had really tried to wrap himself around the pretext of most of the LRS. He had taken time off from "hard" science to gain a deeper insight into what he feared was adding ammunition to armory that would further destroy faith—in anything. However, with the passing of the popularity of the lifestyle reward systems (better known as religions) as the opiate of the masses, a substitute system and then an industry grew up to deal with the inevitability of every man.
The gap—created by the lack of a promised land, rewards for living a "good life" (or a life after death)—had to be filled! People realized that all that had come before was nonsense; however, it was nonsense that allowed them to avoid thinking about the fact that someday, in the not-too-distant future, they would no longer have self-awareness and be conscious. They would no longer exist.
The realization that they would no longer exist drove some humans to the brink of sanity and some over the brink. It simply was unthinkable that after thousands of years of being told that it was going to be okay—that if you were a nice, kind person and followed any religion's template for the rules of living your life you would have some kind of reward and existence after your body gave up and died.
When life was hard, when existence was chancy, when microbes and bacteria could end it all in the blink of an eye, the believed comfort supposedly generated by LRS made some kind of sense. Now, in 2312, man had progressed to a life span of 250 years and more. Food, energy, and comfort were universally available. LRS just weren't needed anymore.
But something was needed to fill the comfort void, the black hole in the psyche of man. Lots of things had been tried, but they all seemed to just put Band-Aids on the problem. It was still difficult to get people to face the inevitable. So how do you eliminate ignorance? Right, with education.
A new movement started to help man deal with the inevitable fact that he was going to die. If you think about it, it is hilarious that when death takes a family member, there is calamity and people are stunned. Some people are even incredulous at the obvious. Death is even looked on as a catastrophe. People display their despair, and wailing and crying take over what was left of reason and sanity. The only important and undeniable inevitability is man's death, and yet he had no philosophy for this inevitability. Religions and cults denied death by offering hope of life after death and packaged this message in organized movements. However, if you remove the fear of death and the fear generated by guilt in LRS, you will still have the fact that death is inevitable.
What was becoming apparent and brought some peace of mind was the extension of longevity. What came with long life was...
