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By Root 446 0

isn’t fair. It isn’t fair at all. If I were you I would feel cheated and hurt; I might even be angry that I didn’t get more time with my Dad. You have every right to feel bad. If you want to cry, you should. It’s okay. It’s more than okay. It’s human. Very human. All loving, caring people grieve when those they love are gone. And all of us, every last one of us, will experience this feeling at some point in our lives. Sometimes we grieve very deeply and for a very long time. Sometimes we get over it and sometimes we do not. Mostly we get on with our lives because there is nothing else we can do. But loving, caring people continue to think about their loved ones no matter how far they have gotten on with their lives, because our lost loved ones continue to live. No one knows if they really continue to live in some other place—I suspect not—but we do know for sure, with as much certainty as any scientific theory or philosophical argument can muster, that our loved ones continue to live in our memories and in our lives. It isn’t wrong to feel sad. It is right. Self-evidently right. It means we love and can be loved. It means our loved ones continue to live because we continue to miss them. Tears of sadness are really tears of love. Why shouldn’t you cry for your Dad? He’s your Dad and you love him. Don’t let anyone try to take that away from you. The freedom to grieve and love is one of the fundamentals of being human. To try to take that freedom away on a chimera of feigned hope and promises that cannot be filled is inhuman. Celebrate your love for your Dad in every way you can. That is your right, your freedom, your humanness.

Chapter 4

WHY PEOPLE BELIEVE IN GOD

An Empirical Study on a Deep Question

The belief in God has often been advanced as not only the greatest, but the most complete of all the distinctions between man and the lower animals. It is however impossible, as we have seen, to maintain that this belief is innate or instinctive in man. On the other hand a belief in all-pervading spiritual agencies seems to be universal; and apparently follows from a considerable advance in the reasoning powers of man, and from a still greater advance in his faculties of imagination, curiosity and wonder.

—Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, Vol. II, 1871, p. 395

Several years ago I attended a most unusual conference at the Santa Monica Miramar Sheraton Hotel in Southern California, sponsored by the Extropy Institute. Founded in 1988, the “Extropians” are dedicated to studying “transhumanism and futurist philosophy; life extension, immortalism, and cryonics; smart drugs and intelligence-increase technologies; machine intelligence, personality uploading, and artificial life; nanocomputers and nanotechnology; memetics (ideas as genes); effective thinking and information filtering; self-transformative psychology; rational market-based environmentalism; and probing the ultimate limits of physics.” Limited in scope Extropians are not.

Led by Max More and Tom Morrow (not surprisingly, these are pseudonyms), the Extropians, one might reasonably assume, are a bunch of kooks on the lunatic fringe. They are not. The Extropians are on the cutting edge between science and science fiction, fact and fantasy. Conference speakers included Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) artificial intelligence guru Marvin Minsky, University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA) pathologist and aging expert Roy Walford, and University of Southern California (USC) fuzzy logic founder Bart Kosko. They presented a mix of hard, scientific facts and soft, fanciful hopes about the future. Slides illustrating data were blended with inspirational orations. After Kosko gave a fact-filled summation of the science of fuzzy logic, a gentleman named FM-2030 (his legal name) delivered a sermon that would have been the envy of Billy Graham. By the year 2030, FM explained, nation-states will be obsolete, money will be purely electronic, computers will have near-human intelligence, and it will be possible to achieve considerable life extension