Ravine Rantings

I was raised with the mainstream christian belief that there is an afterlife and it consists of heaven and hell. You go to heaven if you are a good, faithful christian, to hell if you are bad. Hell is usually envisioned as a fiery place, where souls burn for all of eternity. Heaven is described as a place where the streets are paved with gold. That doesn't really sound all that appealing to me. It sounds like Trump's ridiculous gold-plated penthouse in New York: cold and ostentatious. My heaven would be a place of physical comfort but also beautiful scenery, endless miles of trail, waterfalls, placid beaches, but also changeable weather. Basically it would be like natural earth but without the illness and back pain. Over time my ideas about the possibility of an afterlife have changed. For the most part, a rational world view seems inconsistent with religion, and an afterlife requires a religious universe 1 . But as I have written elsewhere , this is superficial. Rel...

Kitty liked it. So did I, except for it making me a little queasy. Sorry for the water spots. I've read Neal Stephenson since the 1990s and try never to miss a single book or article. From his earliest works in the 1980s up to present, the quality and scope of topics he covers in his work expanded ad ridiculum [Yes, I italicize fake Latin], and has reached proportions exceeded by no other author I can think of. He writes everything from alternate history, to alternate future, from cyberpunk to swords and sorcery, all in books of increasing length. His recent work, Fall or, Dodge in Hell , is one of the most thought-provoking novels I've ever read. It spans his usual speculative, near-future science fiction, and develops into a tale of fantasy. The story is about an event predicted by futurists of a time soon-to-come when artificial general intelligence will become sufficiently advanced that it will be possible to simulate a human brain in computer software. This point is referr...