Is There A Heaven?
Short answer: not yet.
Long answer:
My philosophy at the moment is that if we want a "heaven", let's use science and rapidly evolving technologies to create one. I'll get more deeply into the philosophy of heaven later on, but I wanted to document this longterm goal (among many others) of the GOD framework: to transcend our bodily death with a minimum acceptability of maintaining blissful and euphoric access to choice memories and experiences.
When we die, we die. That's it. As nice as the idea of heaven or the like may sound, it simply isn't anything more than just that, an idea. When we die, anything we could perceive as pleasure is dead along with the death of our brain. When we're alive, we imagine heaven, hell, etc with relation to physical feelings of pleasure or distress, both of which are simply a function of sense data on the brain. Moments before death you may experience what seems like a heavenly experience or something akin to ingesting DMT, and while it may perceptually fade you gently into nonexistence, there is a point at which you will not exist. It may be like a black hole, where the closer you get the more time apparently slows down until it eventually is perceived to have stopped, though from the physical perspective you will eventually no longer exist in any current form.
To put my mind at ease in this pre-heaven world, I theorized an acceptable hint of immortality, using this definition of "the soul" (to be expanded upon a little further down the line): the soul of a person is the archive of information, in any tangible form, which has experienced any phase in the infinite cycle of life (||: observation -> synthesis -> presentation :||). I accept at a minimum that when death occurs, the "soul" of a person lives on in the impact they have made on the world around them at any time or scale, seen or invisible.
Let me know what you think. Is there a Heaven or similar right now or do you think we could realistically create one if not?