Abstract
To enable control of the fear of mortality, humans have been equipped with genetic “survival gear”, instilled as a result of species evolution and making humans aware of a sense of divine. On this basis, religions have developed as memeplexes, composed of memes being “genes” of culture, in various geographical and historical environments. Religions serve for “virtual God’s stakes” helping to develop a tree of young civilization with good an evil as memetic fitness functions. However, at this development some unwanted side effects occur. Sacred texts of religions, however ambiguous because of limitations caused by ontology, semantics and context, in some aspects are convergent with scientifically grounded circumstantial evidences of Creation. Life after death can be continued by information-souls in other of the Creator’s universes.
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Notes
- 1.
Lucretius propagated Epicure’s materialistic views. If we are to believe St. Hieronymus , ill-disposed towards Lucretius because of his materialistic views, but being the only source of information on his life, this life was in the style of some present-day artistic idols: Lucretius overused “love potion” and died by his own hand poisoned at the age 44.
- 2.
Of course, this isn’t a new idea presented here for the first time. Among others, Dr. Andrew Newberg, an American neuroscientist considered a pioneer of “neurotheology ”, is of the opinion that “the human brain is a “believing machine”—and that our capacity for self-transcendence and spirituality helps drive our evolution as a species”. Newberg, A. , Waldman, M.R. (2010). How God Changes Your Brain. New York: Ballantine Books.
- 3.
The Buddhist parable from Buryatia (Siberia, Lake Baikal shore) tells that man was made not of clay but of dough, and was baked in an oven by the Spirit. The story continues that in the first approach, because the oven was too cold, the man came out of the oven white. In the second approach, the oven turned out to be too hot, and the man came out black. Only in the third approach, the oven was correctly warmed and the man came out with the proper color—not too light, not too dark.
- 4.
Before Harvey, in the sixteenth century, Spanish physician and theologian Miguel Servet tried to present the Ibn al-Nafis discovery in Europe, but together with his reformist-theological workings it was condemned by Catholics and Protestants alike, and Servet himself was arrested and burnt in Geneva as a heretic by order of Protestant governing council.
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Physical aspects of consciousness are a subject of innovative deliberations as well. Well known, however controversial, is the consciousness model developed by Sir Roger Penrose , the English mathematical physicist. In his books The Emperor’s New Mind (1989) and Shadows of the Mind (1994), a concept of “quantum consciousness” is introduced with a new approach to quantum mechanics “bridging” it with the classical one. According to this concept, the consciousness system can be deterministic without being algorithmic. The corresponding biological supposition, not confirmed experimentally, tells us that interiors of neurons could alternate between liquid and gel states. Poor squaring of the concept with brain physiology, as well as a conclusion resulting from it that the creation of artificial intelligence is impossible, has evoked criticism. In 2015, with reference to Tononi’s works, a MIT physicist Max Tegmark published his paper titled “Consciousness as a State of Matter” (arXiv:1401.1219), where consciousness is discussed just as a state of matter, named “perceptronium”, different from solids, liquids, and gases.
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A saying of Lord Kelvin : “When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind”.
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In the IIT, mathematically expressed are only requirements “that must be satisfied by any physical substrate for it to support consciousness”—Tononi explains in a later paper (Koch, C. , Tononi, G. (2017). Can We Quantify Machine Consciousness? IEEE Spectrum, 54(6). Tononi also states that every “conceivable experience” of consciousness must have the following essential properties : be intrinsic for the subject, to form structure composed of parts and relations, be integrated, be definite, and be specific for the subject.
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However in my youth, during communist times in Poland, in a students’ lampoon an ironic song was sang:
Verse
Verse Życie jest formą istnienia białka Tylko w kominie czasem coś załka … (Life is a form of proteins’ existence But sometimes something is crying in the chimney …)
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In 2014, an international team of researchers at the University of Pavia in Italy made a significant step forward. They built a device (of resonator type with laser as the light source) enabling “production” of an entangled pair of photons, just with their describing factor “red or blue”. The equipment is very efficient, and can produce millions entangled pairs of photons per second. Grassani, D. et al. (2015). Micrometer-Scale Integrated Silicon Source of Time-Energy Entangled Photons. http://dx.doi.org/10.1364/OPTICA.2.000088.
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Not only dark matter but the whole area of particle physics, with the recent affair of the Higgs boson finding, opens up new prospects. After this famous finding (on July 5, 2012) of the theoretically predicted—and fundamental particle for the so-called standard model of particle physics—a new need for investigation has appeared. Boson’s consistency with standard model predictions has been affirmed only with 30–40% probability due to present measurement uncertainties. Many physicists are of the opinion that “there must be new physics beyond the standard model”, in any case, a next-generation machine substituting the present Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland is needed. This was a subject of European Strategy for Particle Physics workshop in Krakow, Poland, on September 10–12, 2012, with the attendance of some 500 physicist from different countries (it’s worth noting that a few days after the workshop, Polish scientist Professor Agnieszka Zalewska was elected President of CERN Council, as the first woman to fill this high position).
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Later, two more sub-scales were added: enlightened vs. objective, and idealistic vs. practical.
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22,000 genes have been identified in the human genome, but the specific rolein in building and maintaining the organism so far has been recognized only for 2% of them.
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The newest discoveries in biotechnology enable the genome to be altered, practically of “any living thing”, with the use of so-called CRISPR-Cas9 technology (see Hsu, P.D. et al. (2014). Development and Applications of CRISPR-Cas9 for Genome Engineering. Cell. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2014.05.010). The technology that makes it possible to “edit” DNA consists of the use of a “molecular scissor” in the form of enzyme Cas9 for cutting targeted segments of DNA belonging to a collection of “repeated segments”—just CRISPR—Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. As result of an edition that can be composed of cutting and patching-in operations, a desirable sequence of DNA can be built. The technology is now in its research phase, but the possibility of DNA edition can bring ground-breaking changes in the Earth’s ecosystem and human civilization.
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- 38.
The English Oxford Dictionary defines meme as “an element of a culture or system of behavior passed from one individual to another by imitation or other non-genetic means”.
- 39.
http://masi.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Dawkins/viruses-of-the-mind.html, accessed November 17, 2012.
- 40.
In these discussions, the thesis on the “Lamarckian” not “Darwinian” character of cultural evolution appears. French Jean-Baptiste Lamarck , a naturalist who coined the word “biology”, published his great work “Philosophie Zoologique” in the same year, 1809, when Darwin was born, and 13 years before the birth of Mendel, the founder of genetics. Lamarck’s “prehistoric” statements pronounced that under the influence of environmental conditions individuals lose characteristics they don’t require and develop characteristics that are useful, and that individuals inherit the traits of their ancestors. So, Neo-Lamarckism finds its biological nourishment in epigenetics first of all.
- 41.
It’s interesting that the concept of a gene-like unit of replication finds new applications. Recently, the term “ludeme ” meaning “ludic meme”, game’s meme, has arisen in the field of games—particularly computer games—depiction. For example, a rule of hierarchy, as in the hierarchy of suits in card games (in Bridge: spades > hearts > diamonds > clubs) is a ludeme .
- 42.
Many applications of MA have been presented in the “Special Issue on Engineering Applications of Memetic Computing” of the IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part C, September 2012.
- 43.
Thomas Paine , a philosopher and one of Founding Fathers of the USA, wrote “It is the will of the Almighty that there should be diversity of religious opinions among us.”
- 44.
Francis Fukuyama in his book The Origins of Political Order, 2012, Profile Books, writes in the chapter “The State of Nature”: “If I believe that my tribe’s chief is just another fellow like me following his own self-interests, I may or may not decide to obey his authority. But if I believe that the chief can command the spirits of dead ancestors to reward or punish me, I will be much more likely to respect his word.”
- 45.
According to Pew research “Religion & Public Life”, 2016, the percentage of religiously unaffiliated Americans rises steadily and is now 7% greater than in 2007. Many of these “leaving religion behind” (http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/08/24/why-americas-nones-left-religion-behind/) are in opposition to organized religion in general, they don’t like the “hierarchical nature of religious groups”, are of the opinion that “religion is too much like a business” and mention clergy sexual abuse scandals as reasons for their position. Many state “I believe in God, but in my own way”. It is worth noting—after Thomas Jefferson’s Quran by A. Spellberg (2013) Knopf—that Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, rated among the Founding Fathers of the first modern democratic state, were firm followers of separation of church and the state. Jefferson considered the alliance of church and state as something corrupting to the political realm, and Madison stated that separation also “protects the garden of the church from a corrupting alliance with the wilderness of the secular world”.
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Colzato, L.S. et al. (2008). Losing the Big Picture: How Religion May Control Visual Attention. http://www.wery.dds.nl/publications/Colzato_etal_2008_Religion.pdf, accessed July 10, 2012.
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Shariff, A.Z., Rhemtulla, M. (2012). Divergent Effects of Beliefs in Heaven and Hell on National Crime Rates. PLoS One, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0039048.
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My personal reflection is that both Christian crusaders and Islamic jihadists were and are motivated to kill people by expectation of reward in heaven for this, not so much by fear of hell if they give it up.
- 52.
In a book A (Brief) History of Vice: How Bad Behavior Built Civilization (Penguin PLUME, 2016) its author Robert Evans presents his thesis that vices have played an important role in shaping societies for the better. One of the examples of such influence, portrayed humorously on the front cover, is humans desire to drink and party. This desire induced early nomadic humans to search for means to get more drinks and social gathering, which led them to develop more advanced farming communities.
- 53.
The problem of the Devil can be discussed further.
- 54.
Lao Tzu. “Tao Te Ching ”. http://www.bopsecrets.org/gateway/passages/tao-te-ching.htm, accessed March 1, 2013.
- 55.
Attempts to introduce monotheism were made in potent polytheistic structures themselves—for example in Egypt by Pharaoh Echnaton—without success, however, because of the intense resistance of already established structures. It looks as if just a small ethnical group being in controversy with an established structure turned out to be a sound base for successful development of a monotheistic memeplex.
- 56.
Let’s illustrate the issue with a practical example. Ramadan is a movable, about 30-days feast, celebrated by Muslims according to the Islamic calendar. During Ramadan, fasting from dawn to sunset is obligatory. A meal before the fast, called suhoor, is consumed before dawn, and the meal that breaks the fast, called iftar, is consumed after sunset. However, in present times Muslims live, not only in their homeland but in the far North too, where nights during Ramadan can be very short for them, even sun cannot set completely.
- 57.
Jesus Christ as a prophet is mentioned in the Quran 35 times, 27 times as “Jesus” and 8 times as “Messiah”.
- 58.
Moreover, as has been discussed previously, God’s interventions into the human mind can come into being at quantum level, so can be of probabilistic not deterministic character.
- 59.
Interesting observations have been made by a survey on attitudes of members of different US faith communities to the origins of science, conducted at MIT: Lee, E. , Tegmark, M., Chita-Tegmark, M. (2013). The MIT Survey on Science, Religion and Origins: The Belief Gap. http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/survey.html. It turned out that a distinct conflict between faith and origins of science appears only with Christians. Muslims hold a variety of opinions, and do Jews, as well as the followers of other religions who haven’t such a conflict.
- 60.
This is an observation presented by a theologian Ben Witherington III in his book—popular in our times—The Gospel Code: Novel Claims About Jesus, Marz Magdalene & Da Vinci. Inter Varsity Press, 2004.
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Parole (“speech” in French) is a term introduced to linguistics with this meaning by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure .
- 63.
One mustn’t think that poetic language absolutely ignores the reality and is walled off by an insurmountable barrier from the reverse engineering efforts. One can find an example of poetic description of artifact in the poem “The Locomotive”, very popular in Poland, being a challenge for reciters, written in 1938 by the Polish poet Julian Tuwim for a children’s book. Some excerpts from the English translation on http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-locomotive/:
Verse
Verse A big locomotive has pulled into town, Heavy, humungus, with sweat rolling down, A plump jumbo olive. Huffing and puffing and panting and smelly, Fire belches forth from her fat cast iron belly. Poof, how she’s burning, Oof, how she’s boiling, Puff, how she’s churning, Huff, how she’s toiling. She’s fully exhausted and all out of breath, Yet the coalman continues to stoke her to death. … What gives you momentum to roll down the track? It’s hot steam that gives me my clickety-clack. Hot steam from the boiler through tubes to the pistons, The pistons then push at the wheels from short distance, They drive and they push, and the train starts a-swooshin’ ‘Cuz steam on the pistons keeps pushin’ and pushin’; The wheels start a rattlin’, clatterin’, chatterin’ Chug along, tug along, chug along, tug along! … .
Thus, poetic presentation of knowledge embedded in artifacts is possible. Quod Erat Demonstrandum. Oof!
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- 66.
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Taylor Kathleen , neuroscientist and the author of the book Brainwashing: The Science of Thought Control has presented this opinion during a presentation on brain research. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/31/kathleen-taylor-religious-fundamentalism-mental-illness_n_3365896.html, accessed May 31, 2013.
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- 70.
It’s worth noting that from the hypotheses on creatio continua with the use of intelligent tools by a Creator, and on the memetic character of the cultural evolution of humanity, means that not only sacred texts of religions but also other cultural artifacts—including texts—can be inspired by God.
- 71.
Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster: http://www.venganza.org/.
- 72.
Obviously assessment and gradation of good and evil in religions isn’t so unambiguous and simple as in the case of temperature. The story of “Pilate’s Wife’s Dream” can be an example. In the Gospel of Matthew, there is a statement that Claudia Procula, the wife of Pontius Pilate , had a dream about Jesus Christ’s crucifixion and that she tried to persuade her husband not to condemn Jesus to death. There are two contradictory explanations of this dream in Christianity . One of them states that God sent her the dream, so the dream is evaluated as “good”, and Claudia Procula is considered a saint in Eastern Orthodox churches. The other explanation states that the dream was dictated by the Devil in an effort to prevent the salvation that was going to result from Christ’s crucifixion, so the dream is evaluated as “evil”.
- 73.
It happens that this symbolization is figurative. In Buddhism, a devil-like figure is Mara, which can have the form of a beautiful woman who, in legend, tempted Gautama Buddha. There are plenty of devil figures in different folklores. In Polish folklore, we have a brigade of devils coming from Slavic mythology: Boruta, Czart, Dusiołek, Kozyra, Licho, Rokita and the German-rooted Count Manteufel, traveling with a black carriage harnessed with four black horses and abducting people to hell.
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US 2010/0049076A1 Retrieving mental images of faces from the human brain.
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http://brain.utah.edu/research/greger/communication-prosthesis.php, accessed May 13, 2013.
- 77.
FMRI scanners were designed in the 1990s to diagnose brain diseases. At present, they are eagerly used in “neuromarketing” to help marketers learn how the public responds to their products by observing how a volunteer’s brain reacts to messages and images, particularly to commercial TV ads.
- 78.
Nishimoto, S. et al. (2011). Reconstructing Visual Experiences from Brain Activity Evoked by Natural Movies. Current Biology, 21(19).
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A collection of clips reconstructed from brain activity can be seen at http://www.livescience.com/16175-movies-mind.html, accessed May 20, 2013.
- 80.
Veritas Scientific Corporation. http://www.veritasscientific.com/, accessed May 25, 2013.
- 81.
Technology “opposite” with respect to the brain reading appears also, namely a possibility to operate computer by thinking. New computer game “Awakening”, in which players use headsets equipped with electrodes that recorded their EEG (electroencephalographic) signals, enables them to affect the game’s virtual reality only by thinking because neural signals are translated into game commands (Strickland, E. (2018). Mind Games. IEEE Spectrum 1/2018). By means of computers equipped with sensors and effectors it’ll be possible to affect this way material reality as well.
- 82.
Cloud computing gives new possibilities for this. As Arizona State University’s Professor G. Pascal Zachary states in his essay “Remembrance of Everything Past” (IEE Spectrum, July 2013. http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/embedded-systems/remembrance-of-everything-past), “every idea, memory, and feeling—the recorded consciousness of a single lifetime—will be stored in the cloud”. So—Professor Zachary continues—“even after you die, your digital files would confer a new kind of immortality that others could inherit, permitting them to traverse the associative trails that made up your life’s work”.
- 83.
Pope Francis said—but in a private meeting not in a formal interview—that the souls of sinners simply vanished after death, and were not subject to an eternity of punishment: “There is no hell, there is the disappearance of sinful souls.” O’Connor, T. (2018). Does Hell Exist? Pope Francis Says No in New Interview That Could Change Catholic Church Forever. http://www.newsweek.com/does-hell-exist-pope-francis-says-no-interview-could-change-catholic-church-866010?utm_source=yahoo&utm_medium=yahoo_news&utm_campaign=rss&utm_content=/rss/yahoous/news.
- 84.
It happened on November 26, 2014. The occurrence evoked many comments and theological interpretations, among them a remark that Pope Francis had spoken casually, not making doctrinal statement, and quoting one of his predecessors—Pope Paul VI .
- 85.
The promise and expectation of life after death, not only idle existence after death, makes a great difference. A kind of after-death existence of the human mind, a recorded Φ-consciousness, will be probably attainable as a result of the development of brain reading technology. The problem was dwelt on by science-fiction writers, who didn’t present such prolonged existence as a cheerful prospect for the afflicted person, but rather as a torture. However, the possibilities of artificial continuation of life after death were presented at the Global Future 2045 World Congress, New York, 2013. Russian multi-millionaire Dmitry Itskov announced a project with the aim of creating by 2035 the technologies that “will enable an individual’s consciousness to be uploaded to a non-biological host, which would ultimately enable humans to live forever”.
- 86.
Scientific research related to life after death is still being developed. For example, since 2013 a five-million “Immortality Project” has been conducted at the University of California at Riverside. http://www.sptimmortalityproject.com/.
- 87.
Das, R.S. (2013). How the Higgs Boson Might Spell Doom for the Universe. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-the-higgs-boson-might-spell-doom-for-the-universe, accessed July 2013. Instability of our Universe is to result from the discovered boson mass (equals 126 GeV) at which only local, not global minimal possible energy state is achieved, so only local not global stability is ensured.
- 88.
An illustrative anecdote on the results of such ignorance, taken from Hugh Lofting children’s books about adventures of Doctor Dolittle, is the following. A King of an exotic tribe had paid the Queen an official visit and observed that people on the streets of London threw letters into curious boxes marked with a royal emblem. He obtained an explanation that letters from such “mailbox” landed in homes of people for across the whole Kingdom. Ending his visit, the King asked for such mailbox and obtained it as a gift from the Queen. After returning to his tribe, the King commanded that the mailbox should be hung on a stake in his capital, and explained its use to his people. A lot of letters were thrown into mailbox and people patiently expected results. But, after a time, a cow passing close to the mailbox broke it with her horn and it turned out that all letters were still in the box. Thus, the King concluded that the Queen’s magic doesn’t work in his Kingdom.
- 89.
But results don’t come easy. Since the 1990s, astronomers in the Parkes observatory in Australia, have picked up mysterious radio signals, called “perytons” that could even be of “extragalactic origin”. After 17 years, the mystery was solved in prosaic way—peytrons “can be generated at 1.4 GHz when a microwave oven door is opened prematurely and the telescope is at an appropriate relative angle” as a recent scientific report “Identifying the source of perytons at the Parkes radio telescope”, arXiv:1504.02165v1 [astro-ph.IM], April 9, 2015, states.
- 90.
The Extraterrestrial is My Brother. (2008). L’Osservatore Romano, May 14. http://padrefunes.blogspot.com/, accessed July 2013. In 2014, a book written by an American astronomer, David A. Weintraub , dedicated just to this problem and titled “Religions and Extraterrestrial Life” was published by Springer. The author reports, among other things, that in Mormonism and Seventh-Day Adventism the existence of extraterrestrials is promulgated, and Buddhism assumes that reincarnation can take place anywhere in the Universe.
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Gannon, M. (2013). 60 Billion Alien Planets Could Support Life, Study Suggests. http://www.space.com/21800-alien-planets-60-billion-habitable-exoplanets.html, accessed July 2013.
- 92.
The Polish sci-fi writer Stanislaw Lem , in his book The Star Diaries, wrote about some possible cases of the strangeness of extraterrestrialss—somewhat tongue in cheek. The idea is that somewhere in the Universe a five-sexual species of rational beings (with sexes named: dada, mama, gaga, fafa, haha) has come into being. Of course, completing a family able to give birth to offspring is a quite complicated undertaking indeed. And the curse of this civilization, present in real life and depicted in art, is the “Foursome Drama”, that is, the situation of lack of the fifth sexual element when there are four of them with desire to give new birth.
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Tipler, F.J. (1994). The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead. New York: Doubleday.
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A Nobelist, Polish poet Czesław Miłosz was inspired by the book and wrote a poem entitled “After Enduring”.
- 95.
Similarly, as in the case of the previously mentioned problem of distinction between the Creator and His tools (footnote 46), the problem of distinction between the Creator and His work can have different philosophical paradox-sensitive interpretations. Let’s look at the case of limb regeneration by some animals—is a tail regenerated by lizard a lizard’s product or part of the lizard? The answer is both of them, as likely as not.
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Kaczmarczyk, A. (2018). Supposition Four on Religion. In: Creation Hypothesis in the Anthropocene Epoch. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93879-0_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93879-0_5
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Publisher Name: Palgrave Pivot, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-93878-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-93879-0
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