Film Test 11

Christian Allen



Test 11; 11765



Question 1:

The connection between the illusionary nature of NDE's and how mind clones may trick us into thinking they are self-aware are that they do not need to be perfect replicas of what is expected. In saying that I mean: the only necessity of either would be to result in the required or right person to believe it, and that it fits that person's parameters. People don't have wings to fly nor glide, but they can use tools to achieve the same result. Their use of these things don't take away from the experience. NDE's, whether the reason given to the person to continue their life is really in existence or will ever happen isn't important but the conviction and inspiration this event creates for a person to live is. The same is true for mind clones. The question isn't truly whether the A.I. has consciousness or is alive, but whether it can simulate and/or convince you it does/is, respectively. The focus is then how well it can convince whoever it needs to whether it is for NDE's or for mind clones.



Question 2:

"God is dead"

How many people actually have faith in our culture? I think most people claim to have faith but when their lives are actually looked at they their faith is all but gone. With the access of so much knowledge people have become believers of what they can sense and "prove" to be real. "God is dead," not because the concept of God is false but because the faith in a God is all but nonexistent. Sure there are billions of people that would currently claim to believe in a god, but going to a religious meeting isn't proof to a faith. When push comes to shove people don't believe in what they cannot see nor prove to exist, they rely on the things and people around them to help. That is why God is dead. No one truly believes in Him.

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NDE’s have a feeling of detachment from their physical bodies which makes their level of consciousness feel more real because their mind plays tricks on them. They have an outer body experience where they see or believe in something of importance to them that is vivid. This is what makes them wake up from “death”. In the film “Near Death Experiences: Neural Projections and Staying Alive” it discusses the idea of clones who are programmed with main functions and purposes that we as humans aren’t able to achieve physically. Just as our minds have consciousness because of how we are made and how the brain works to function our bodies, clones too if created and replicated to what is important for us and similar to us as humans we will see them to have a degree of consciousness and purpose.


Nietzsche's famous dictum, "god is dead." Depicts humans to be the cause of why god is nonexistent. The example of the Madame who is searching for God tells his listeners to wake up and look around them, that no one is practicing what god tells them, that because of their actions the days seems darker rather than filled with light that means god is pleased. There are many places to worship but it is useless because we have tainted the very purpose of having a god, so there is no need to be hypocrites.

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1. Near death experiences trick the mind into seeing illusions and trick us. Our consciousness as a human like to trick ourselves into thinking one way to feel satisfactory. We mostly like to think that we have something waiting for us in the afterlife when we die because in an evolutionary standpoint, our job is to survive and pass on genes so we trick ourselves into thinking that there's always something more when we die.

2. What I think of Nietzsche's "god is dead" quote is that God doesn't exist and people have created God as something to justify their deaths by creating illusions and tricking how people think because no one wants to agree that after death that there is nothing. What happens after death is that we die and get buried but people have created something more to it where people go into heaven and enjoy life or become reincarnated from other religions. We don't know if God even existed and all the religious practices could end up to be fake.

Juan Flores
Week 11
code 11765

1. It really is a very complicated topic since our brains are constantly lying to us in order to survive. So, based on NDE told by other people, we can say that our own consciousness is trying to keep us alive. This happens because we tend to hold on to things that have a powerful meaning in our lives. Also, humanity has changed its view to see the world, meaning that most humans need proofs to believe in anything nowadays. Then, when mind clones arrive, and our eyes and brain could not be able to distinguish between a real human and a mind clone, we will start trusting them. Therefore, little by little our brain will lie to us again and will make us believe that they have full self-awareness.


2. This is very interesting to me because I have had a lot of questions related to this topic. I think that Nietzsche is right in some ways. For example, the idea that we have killed our own God is one of the most relevant. I think that we have destroyed the God that many years ago our ancestors created in order to find hope in life. It is interesting to see how people can lose faith as soon as science tells them the opposite of what God says. Plus, I think that when people tend to be more educated, they stop believing in a God and kill him. I was told this by my philosophy professor at Mt Sac, and I have verified this by myself. It is pretty fair to say that educated people rely on science while non-educated people rely on faith. This could be because of their culture or different experiences and opportunities in their lives. Nowadays, when people have access to internet and can look for whatever they are interested in, their faith starts vanishing because science have found answers to all those questions which used to be "possible thanks to God."


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Film test 11 11765:


1) Our brains are constantly lying to us in order to survive in this world, this is a really is a really complicated topic. So based on NDE told by a lot of people we can say that our own consciousness is trying to stay living. This happens because we tend to hold on to things that have a good and strong meaning to our lives. Humanity have changed how our view on how we see the world. A lot of people in this world need prove to believe anything.


God is dead"

What I try to understand from Nietzsche’s famous statement “god is dead’ is that for one god has never been seen in anyone’s life time. Nobody has ever seen him spiritually or even physically, there is no real proof that there is a god and that we will die and go to heaven or hell. NOBODY really knows. People are searching for something that may not be even there. God is dead can mean that there is nothing in the sky. I also got from that saying is that people don’t put their belief in to practice and that they try and say there is a god just so they can blame someone else for their peoples. People make God an excuse on why things happen to be at ease with themselves. Another thing I got from it is that if god is dead what the point of religion and practice.

Week 11 Question 1

How the illusionary nature of NDE’s correlate with how mind clones trick us in the future about their own self awareness?



NDE’s or near death experiences often allow the subject to see something of value to them at the end of a long tunnel or light. The idea Is that this is a stimulation from their mind to remind them of a purpose to cause them to snap back to life, and essentially near death experience visions are not genuine visions but projections of what matters in people lives, that cause them to come back. This means that our brain is capable of tricking us into believing fantasy to be reality. The resulting idea is that if our mind of so susceptible to being tricked to believe something, mind clones of the future may easily convince us that they are conscious as we are, and capable of emotion or thought. Similar to the ideas behind the Disneyland concept, NDE’s again prove our minds capability to use a mix of our thoughts, virtual simulation, and our environment to trick us into believing things that are not true are in fact reality.

A similar example is of the dress that was viewed as both gold and white or blue and black by various people. Scientifically it was said by some that the dress was in fact blue, and the overexposed background caused other viewers eyes to shift and see the dress as gold and the background as shadowed. In the same way, our mind can take mind clones in our environment and trick us into believing they are real people.





Week 11 Question 2

Explain Nietzsche’s famous dictum, “god is dead.”



Nietzsche’s well known words, “God is dead,” has often sparked much controversy, yet Nietzsche is not genuinely saying that he believes that whoever it is that created or governs the universe has had an end come to his or her life. Rather he is saying that the concept of God, often even within religion (in fact especially in the case of religion), has died off. A shaking statement in the text reads “Where has God gone? He cried, I shall tell you, we have killed him, You and I, We are all his murderers.” Even within churches and religion itself, the concept and genuine idea of God has unfortunately often been wiped out and replaced. Those who claim to do and act and be according to an idea of a morality based in God are not always genuinely good people, and the idea that it takes religion to make a good person to bad things is often overshadowing the idea that religion also makes bad people do good things. The people within religion have in fact been the reason that the concept of God being an overpowering good has died. As previously stated, someone once stated that he loved Christ, yet hates the fanbase. Those who do and act according to God have altered the perception of God, and Nietzsche’s belief is that if God was real, his only excuse for the actions of his ”fanbase” and events of the world are to be because he was dead.

Although I understand where he comes from, there are many aspects of his statement I do not agree with. This text itself, with the idea that we as people have murdered God and that nothing could possibly atone for what we have done is something easy to agree with. The actions of so many who claim religious purposes, in example many people high up in the Catholic religion, and in many other religions as well, such as the group in the Westboro Baptist church have shown the lack of God in their lives. If in fact God was an idea to be spread among the people, then people such as these who claim to live and act to spread his word have in fact efficiently killed God. However I feel a need to argue that the idea that it does not take religion to make a good person do wrong, rather it takes a bad person to twist a good religion into something hateful. Although Nietzsche’s idea of the people within religion killing god makes sense from the standpoint of his belief-that is that God did not in fact exist at all, and people rather killed the idea of a god that governs, it would make a little less sense if in fact a God of some sort exists. However I understand Nietzsche’s perspective, because as Ferdinand Magellan said “the church says that the earth is flat. But I know that it is round, because I have seen the shadow of earth on the moon, and I have more faith I the shadow than I do in the church.” Many times the church has proven to be an entirely poor example of a representation of the God they claim to follow, and it is understandable why under circumstances where people do bad in the name of god, someone may have easily chosen to believe that whatever God it is they believe in must not be the one they claim he is, if in fact they follow him at all.

Although we cannot claim as a people to know who God is or how he works, it would make sense to say that God is whatever it is that is the result of whatever we are and live on today, and that governing or creating factor may differ to everyone. So in fact that very creating factor or governor cannot be dead, but only dead to the people. That thing which created the universe or governs it cannot die, but we as a people can choose to perversity it, twist it, ignore it, or never seek it out. As Edmond de Goncourt once stated, “If there is a God, Atheism may seem to him less of an insult than religion.” Although I cannot say-and in fact no one else can say-what it is that insults God, I do believe that many of the things done by those in the name of God have in fact been entirely opposing to what they claim to believe, and in that aspect alone I can agree with Nietzsche’s statement that god is dead, and in that aspect alone I can related to his other question, “is man one of God’s blunders or God one of mans?”

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Week 11
The illusory nature near death experiences trick your mind into waking up your body. The film showed a woman and a boy who were not greeted by Gods in their near death experiences but instead by physical world objectives. The boy envision a bike he was promised for his birthday and the woman saw a food which she carried the task of cooking for others. People often claim to see God in their near death experiences saying things like "it's not yet your time" however with these two given examples we can observe that their the mind clearly tricked itself into waking up. These NDE show how we may trick ourselves into believing something we created. This can be correlated with mind clones in the future, because a mind clone would essentially be a computer that can mimic consciousness. If we are to believe that the computer is self aware it would b much like the creation our mind makes in NDE to keep us from death. Think of a person who has an NDE has a vision of what they perceive is God and then are jolted back to life. The person would fully believe in the existence of God whether the vision came from his mind or from God. Now imagine a scientist who works his whole life trying to create a computer that is self aware and one day the computer begins to act as though it is fully aware, retains new information and reacts to the scientist as any other human might explaining that it knows of it's existence in the world. The scientist would believe Fully that the computer is self aware whether it was in fact consciously thinking or just algorithmically reacting as it was programed to.
Explaining Nietzsche's God is Dead is somewhat difficult and takes some thought to analyze. In this film a man is holding a lantern in the night belting out "where is God?" Some onlookers makes jokes such as "have you lost him" "maybe he's on holiday" The man gives them cold looks and rants on saying "God is dead and we have killed him" proposing that churches are just tombstones to mark Gods once living existence. Our professor put it to us like this "people once believed in God because they truly believed, and now people believe in god because they feel they should believe" This made Nietzsche's concept more understandable to me. I feel that many people have been raised in a religious household but because science has come so far we begin to learn at younger and younger ages that their are fallacies in religious teachings. I believe I was in middle school when I learned that the earth was billions of years old and that the bible estimated the world to be only thousands of years old. It immediately ingrains a dagger of doubt into a developing mind. Before people widely knew scientific data which suggested such strong contradictions in religion people were raised with religious ideals embedded in their minds and were surrounded but people who believed in God without any doubt. Philosophers were few in many and were the first to challenge any ideals with scientific reasoning. Children were not infected with doubt in those earlier times and philosophers such as Socrates were killed for "poisoning their minds" with questions. We now live in a world where people choose one religion over many other options, rather than simply being rooted in a society where God was fact and God was alive.

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