Silk Road forums
Discussion => Philosophy, Economics and Justice => Topic started by: pennyloaferz on December 23, 2012, 02:59 am
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Now I wonder from time to time. I don't believe in religion, I'm still working out I guess what I feel happens, but I want to hear from people who think life just ends and its all black. Whats like a legit reasoning and not just 'uh duh fuck you' reasoning.
I've always toyed with the idea of reincarnation, but have had a short time where I think maybe it just does end and its a lot easier to explain to ourselves that theres more past this. That its nicer to think that way or that maybe we want more. Ie After life is a coping mechanism
So people of the road give me your thoughts
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I always think of this...
You were on your way home when you died.
It was a car accident. Nothing particularly remarkable, but fatal nonetheless. You left behind a wife and 2 children. It was a painless death. the EMTs tried their best to save you, but to no avail. Your body was so utterly shattered you were better off, trust me.
And thats where you met me.
"What... what happened?" You Asked. "Where am i?"
"You died," I Said, Matter of factly. No point in mincing words.
"There was a... a truck and it was skidding..."
"Yup," I said.
"I... I died?"
"Yup. But dont feel bad about it. Everyone dies," I said
You looked around. There was nothingness. Just you and me. "What is this place?" You asked. "Is this the afterlife?"
"More or less," I said.
"Are you God?" You asked.
"Yup," I replied. "I'm God."
"My kids.. My wife," You said.
"What about them?"
"Will they be alright?"
"Thats what I like to see," I said. "You just died and your main concern is for your family. Thats good stuff right there."
You looked at me with fascination. To you, I didn't look like God. I just looked like some man. Or possibly a woman. Some vague authority figure, maybe. More of a grammar school teacher.
"Don't worry," I said. "They'll be fine. Your kids will remember you as perfect in every way. They didn't have time to grow contempt for you. Your wife will cry on the outside, but will secretly be relieved. To be fair, your marriage was falling apart. If its any consolation, she'll feel guilty for feeling relieved.
"oh," you said. "So what happens now? Do I go to heaven or hell or something?"
"Neither," I said. "You'll be reincarnated."
"Ah," you said. "So the Hindu's were right."
"All religions are right in their own way," I said. "Walk with me."
You followed along as we strode through the void. "Where are we going?"
"Nowhere in particular," I said. "Its just nice to walk while we talk."
"So whats the point, then?" You asked. "When I get reborn, I'll just be a blank slate, right? A baby. So all my experiences and everything I did in this life won't matter."
"Not so!" I said. You have within you all the knowledge and experiences of all your past lives. You just don't remember them right now."
I stopped walking and took you by the shoulders. "Your soul is more magnificent, beautiful, and gigantic than you can possibly imagine. A human mind can only contain a tiny fraction of what you are. It's like sticking your finger in a glass of water to see if its hot or cold. You put a tiny part of yourself into the vessel, and when you bring it back out, you've gained all the experiences it had.
"You've been in a human for the last 48 years, so you haven't stretched out yet and felt the rest of your immense consciousness. If we hung out here for long enough, you'd start remembering everything. But theres no point to doing that between each life."
"How many times have I been reincarnated, then?"
"oh lots. Lots and lots, and into lots of different lives." I Said. "This time around you'll be a Chinese peasant girl in 540AD."
"Wait, what?" You stammered. "You're sending me back in time?"
"well, I guess technically. Time, as you know it, only exists in your universe. Things are different where I come from."
"Where you come from?" You said.
"Oh sure," I explained. "I come from somewhere. Somewhere else. And there are others like me. I know you'll want to know what its like there, but honestly you wouldnt understand."
"Oh," You said, a little let down. "But wait. If I get reincarnated to other places in time, I could have interacted with myself at some point."
"Sure, happens all the time. And with both lives only aware of their own lifespan you don't even know its happening."
"So whats the point of it all?" You ask.
"Seriously?" I asked. "Seriously? You're asking me for the meaning of life? Isn't that a little stereotypical?"
"Well, it's a reasonable question," You persist.
I looked you in the eye. "The meaning of life, the reason I made this while universe, is for you to mature." I said.
"You mean mankind? You want us to mature?" I asked.
"No, just you. I made this whole universe for you. With each new life you grow and mature and become a larger and greater intellect."
"Just me? What about everyone else?
"There is no one else," I said. "In this universe, there's just you and me."
You stared blankly at me. "But all the people on earth..."
"All you. Different incarnations of you."
"Wait. I'm everyone!?"
"Now you're getting it," I said, with a congratulatory slap on the back.
"I'm every human being who ever lived?"
"Or who will ever live, yes." I add.
"I'm Abraham Lincoln?"
"And you're John Wilkes Booth, too," I added.
"I'm Hitler?" You said, appaled.
"And you're the millions he killed."
"I'm Jesus?"
"And you're everyone who followed him," I added.
You fell silent.
"Every time you victimized someone," I said, "you were victimizing yourself. Every act of kindness you've done, you've done to yourself. Every happy and sad moment ever experienced by any human was, or will be, experienced by you."
You thought for a long time.
"Why? You asked me. "Why do all this?"
"because someday, you will become like me. Because thats what you are. You're one of my kind. You're my child."
"Whoa," You say, incredulous. "You mean I'm God?"
"No. Not yet. You're a fetus. You're still growing. Once you've lived every human life throughout all time, you will have grown up enough to be born."
"So the whole universe," You said. "It's just.."
"An egg," I answered. "Now It's time for you to move on to your next life."
And I sent you on your way
I am with astor on this.
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astor i find myself enjoying your posts and agreeing quite often, I to am inclined to speculate it will be like before birth. but logic only goes so far.
obv no one knows :)
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Whats like a legit reasoning and not just 'uh duh fuck you' reasoning.
haha really? Ok, I'll take that as an earnest expression of curiosity, so I'll indulge.
Astor put it well, but I don't think it takes the weight of science to prove quite convincingly that doubting stories about life after death is the most reasonable way to live one's life. People mythologize about life, it's as much a part of life as eating and breathing. People mythologize about daily life (like you just *know* the girl at the coffee shop likes you because last time you went in she remembered your name), and they mythologize about the big stuff, our origin, what we are, death, etc. For a varieties of reasons, people often take one bit of mythologizing really seriously, to the point were it becomes concrete to them, becomes literally true in their eyes. There are some people who spend all their weekends in the forests of NW US, hunting Big Foot. By taking one bit of mythology seriously for long enough, Big Foot's existence has become concrete to them. Can you imagine any Chinese people spending weekends out in the mountains looking for a real life version of the dragons that feature so prominently in their classical art? The Chinese dragon is a mythical creature, as is the North American Big Foot, but it's also a much older myth, so nobody really takes it seriously anymore.
But take something like death. It's a much more significant part of life than mythical creatures. So naturally people will hold tighter to this bit of mythologizing than the other, less important bits. And hence the power of religion, as so much of it has to do with assuring people that oh no they have the correct bit of mythology, and can ensure to people that they will be all set for when they die. So they provide a service, for a price; some people take this to be a good deal. Not myself, but to each her own.
Luckily there's another option. Learn what it means to think like an Empiricist. Learn at least enough Logic to have a good working grasp of valid reasoning. Read up on your Metaphysics (analytical philosophy of course), enough to get a pretty clear sense of the Realist v Nominalist debate. And then just determine which of those two arguments best fits with your gut notion of what is true.
Otherwise all you're every going to get is other people's opinions. The above is a (greatly abbreviated) path you can follow to be able reliably to make up your mind, once and for all. I believe it's worth it just to see how that feels, but as in all things in life, YMMV.
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After you die your consciousness ceases to be and your body decay's under the ground.
Doesn't matter how special we think we are for being corporal beings that are self aware or not. Once you die, you're dead, and to make any other claim is supremely arrogant.
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I always think of this...
You were on your way home when you died.
It was a car accident. Nothing particularly remarkable, but fatal nonetheless. You left behind a wife and 2 children. It was a painless death. the EMTs tried their best to save you, but to no avail. Your body was so utterly shattered you were better off, trust me.
And thats where you met me.
"What... what happened?" You Asked. "Where am i?"
"You died," I Said, Matter of factly. No point in mincing words.
"There was a... a truck and it was skidding..."
"Yup," I said.
"I... I died?"
"Yup. But dont feel bad about it. Everyone dies," I said
You looked around. There was nothingness. Just you and me. "What is this place?" You asked. "Is this the afterlife?"
"More or less," I said.
"Are you God?" You asked.
"Yup," I replied. "I'm God."
"My kids.. My wife," You said.
"What about them?"
"Will they be alright?"
"Thats what I like to see," I said. "You just died and your main concern is for your family. Thats good stuff right there."
You looked at me with fascination. To you, I didn't look like God. I just looked like some man. Or possibly a woman. Some vague authority figure, maybe. More of a grammar school teacher.
"Don't worry," I said. "They'll be fine. Your kids will remember you as perfect in every way. They didn't have time to grow contempt for you. Your wife will cry on the outside, but will secretly be relieved. To be fair, your marriage was falling apart. If its any consolation, she'll feel guilty for feeling relieved.
"oh," you said. "So what happens now? Do I go to heaven or hell or something?"
"Neither," I said. "You'll be reincarnated."
"Ah," you said. "So the Hindu's were right."
"All religions are right in their own way," I said. "Walk with me."
You followed along as we strode through the void. "Where are we going?"
"Nowhere in particular," I said. "Its just nice to walk while we talk."
"So whats the point, then?" You asked. "When I get reborn, I'll just be a blank slate, right? A baby. So all my experiences and everything I did in this life won't matter."
"Not so!" I said. You have within you all the knowledge and experiences of all your past lives. You just don't remember them right now."
I stopped walking and took you by the shoulders. "Your soul is more magnificent, beautiful, and gigantic than you can possibly imagine. A human mind can only contain a tiny fraction of what you are. It's like sticking your finger in a glass of water to see if its hot or cold. You put a tiny part of yourself into the vessel, and when you bring it back out, you've gained all the experiences it had.
"You've been in a human for the last 48 years, so you haven't stretched out yet and felt the rest of your immense consciousness. If we hung out here for long enough, you'd start remembering everything. But theres no point to doing that between each life."
"How many times have I been reincarnated, then?"
"oh lots. Lots and lots, and into lots of different lives." I Said. "This time around you'll be a Chinese peasant girl in 540AD."
"Wait, what?" You stammered. "You're sending me back in time?"
"well, I guess technically. Time, as you know it, only exists in your universe. Things are different where I come from."
"Where you come from?" You said.
"Oh sure," I explained. "I come from somewhere. Somewhere else. And there are others like me. I know you'll want to know what its like there, but honestly you wouldnt understand."
"Oh," You said, a little let down. "But wait. If I get reincarnated to other places in time, I could have interacted with myself at some point."
"Sure, happens all the time. And with both lives only aware of their own lifespan you don't even know its happening."
"So whats the point of it all?" You ask.
"Seriously?" I asked. "Seriously? You're asking me for the meaning of life? Isn't that a little stereotypical?"
"Well, it's a reasonable question," You persist.
I looked you in the eye. "The meaning of life, the reason I made this while universe, is for you to mature." I said.
"You mean mankind? You want us to mature?" I asked.
"No, just you. I made this whole universe for you. With each new life you grow and mature and become a larger and greater intellect."
"Just me? What about everyone else?
"There is no one else," I said. "In this universe, there's just you and me."
You stared blankly at me. "But all the people on earth..."
"All you. Different incarnations of you."
"Wait. I'm everyone!?"
"Now you're getting it," I said, with a congratulatory slap on the back.
"I'm every human being who ever lived?"
"Or who will ever live, yes." I add.
"I'm Abraham Lincoln?"
"And you're John Wilkes Booth, too," I added.
"I'm Hitler?" You said, appaled.
"And you're the millions he killed."
"I'm Jesus?"
"And you're everyone who followed him," I added.
You fell silent.
"Every time you victimized someone," I said, "you were victimizing yourself. Every act of kindness you've done, you've done to yourself. Every happy and sad moment ever experienced by any human was, or will be, experienced by you."
You thought for a long time.
"Why? You asked me. "Why do all this?"
"because someday, you will become like me. Because thats what you are. You're one of my kind. You're my child."
"Whoa," You say, incredulous. "You mean I'm God?"
"No. Not yet. You're a fetus. You're still growing. Once you've lived every human life throughout all time, you will have grown up enough to be born."
"So the whole universe," You said. "It's just.."
"An egg," I answered. "Now It's time for you to move on to your next life."
And I sent you on your way
I am with astor on this.
That is beautiful. I haven't read this before. If you wrote it yourself I suggest if you aren't already you should think about dedicating more time to scribbling down your thoughts.
The reason I'm so gushy is that you've put into words what I've been thinking for many years in that our lives are grand lessons and tests. I've always been raised to treat others like they're other versions of your self experiencing
different existences. Always imagine yourself in the shoes of the person who's crossed you, loved you, hurt you. No-ones perfect, we've all done good and bad.
Hardly an hour passes when I don't in some small way think about what life is and by extension what death holds. I've considered suicide many times not because of hard times or depression but just out of pure overwhelming curiousity.
I'll never do it as there is just too much wonder to be had living. It's even possible to find wonder in hard times as well as the good. I could quote Bill Hicks here but I'll resist.
I used to believe this was it but the older I get the more I'm open to ideas.. I'll follow this thread with much interest.
Have a great Christmas all. Enjoy your loved ones.
LT
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We know how to measure brain activity because we figured out where to look for our own consciousness (not a really hard thing to do, once we wanted to, I mean it's our consciousness!). Who's to say there aren't other types of consciousness that signal differently and might not even be measurable to our perception? To assume that consciousness only arises from the brain simply because that's where we experience it seems like thinking too in the box for me. =)
The burden of proof is on the person introducing the new theory typie, so whatcha got? :)
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That is beautiful. I haven't read this before. If you wrote it yourself I suggest if you aren't already you should think about dedicating more time to scribbling down your thoughts.
The reason I'm so gushy is that you've put into words what I've been thinking for many years in that our lives are grand lessons and tests. I've always been raised to treat others like they're other versions of your self experiencing
different existences. Always imagine yourself in the shoes of the person who's crossed you, loved you, hurt you. No-ones perfect, we've all done good and bad.
Hardly an hour passes when I don't in some small way think about what life is and by extension what death holds. I've considered suicide many times not because of hard times or depression but just out of pure overwhelming curiousity.
I'll never do it as there is just too much wonder to be had living. It's even possible to find wonder in hard times as well as the good. I could quote Bill Hicks here but I'll resist.
I used to believe this was it but the older I get the more I'm open to ideas.. I'll follow this thread with much interest.
Have a great Christmas all. Enjoy your loved ones.
LT
Nah mate, not mine - found it on 4chan a few years ago.
Quite the read, wouldn't you agree. It puts some peoples opinions into perspective in a different way.
A few weeks ago on TV there was a story about a guy in America who had said while in a coma, he experienced what he thought was the afterlife?
Anyone else heard/seen this?
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I'm not saying, at this point here, that there necessarily are other types of consciousness, just not to discount the possibility on the basis that we only know ours.
I got the idea that they're more prevalent than just a universal consciousness from ant colonies and bee hives and the like. They do a fantastic job of appearing to act as one mind with physically separate parts. The queen would be the primary brain and the rest would be the body and limbs and eyes and what-not.
I confess I haven't been doing much reading on consciousness theory recently, but it seems like the most heralded theory at the moment is Baars's Global Workspace theory. Probably worth a read if you're curious where the empirical data is pointing.
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I believe there is a possibility for some form of existence after death. One of my favorite theories was that if the universe is cyclic, constantly expanding and contracting, that if I came out of one expansion I could certainly come out of others if this happens infinitely. Indeed if this happened infinitely I would believe that I will live at least my life infinitely, going from my death to nothingness, then after the universe expands time may loop and go back to my birth. This would be true in a deterministic world with a cyclic universe. In a non-deterministic world with a cyclic universe I still believe that I would go instantly from my death to my birth and relive my life, however sometimes I may live different lives and possibly even exist in forms that are different from what I currently recognize as myself, but still have a sense of being and perception but with a new ego and neural network and such. Unfortunately it seems that the majority of physicists think that we live in a universe that will expand out into heat death and that the universe and time will one day die. However I do not think anyone has proven this and I do not think anyone knows for certain, so it is unlikely but it could happen.
Another possibility for life after death in the realm of possibility is that we live somewhere in a multi layered computer simulation. I believe that this theory is taken seriously by a number of respectable researchers , and even though it may be a long shot it is still in the realm of possibility imo. If I can be programmed to exist once then I can be programmed to exist again, or the entire simulation could be run over from the start after it finishes. So long as the highest layer running the first simulation continues to support intelligent life, all sub layers can continue to exist.
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There are biological correlatives of conscious experience because the mind uses the brain as an instrument of thought. When the brain is damaged, one's mind is not able to think clearly because its instrument of thought is impaired. But mind itself is independent of the body. Mind is totally inactive. It is pure awareness. This awareness is not one's individual psyche - that of course is destroyed upon death - but the pure awareness at work in the world itself; the awareness in things, not an awareness that stands apart from them or above them. That is who we are. Death is an absurdity.
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When you die, there's nothing. We aren't any different from all the animals around us who die every minute and become a meal. Similar to what astor said, when someone is born blind they literally see nothing. Their vision isn't black, or any color as their body never had a chance to develop that sense. Once when using some DMT I hit the pipe, closed my eyes and laid down on my bed. I don't really know how to describe it but there was nothing, I was nothing... just emptiness.
How do you know that? Have you died before? We can speculate all we want but really we will never know until it happens. Religious followers and atheists alike both have a lot of theories but I never visually witnessed any scientific evidence to sate with absolute certainty one way or the other. There's a lot of difference between us and animals, I don't even know where to start with that, so I'll just move on. No need to go into an in-depth metaphysical discussion into the difference between humans, animals, plants, and minerals, but yes there is a difference.
As for death, when it happens it happens. Best advice is to make the most of it while it lasts. Stop reading Aleister Crowley's or someone else's definition on the subject and just live for the moment, because regardless of where we go or if we go anywhere, this life I DO know about and it's real and not just a theory, and when it's gone it's gone and I know I don't want to hold out for heaven or something better and then get to the end of my life and find there's nothing else.
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A few weeks ago on TV there was a story about a guy in America who had said while in a coma, he experienced what he thought was the afterlife?
Anyone else heard/seen this?
Ever done DMT? Ever been asphyxiated? Yep, that's what the "afterlife" is. NDE's prove nothing, except that the body has certain shutdown mechanisms in place, to make death easier.
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About 20 yrs ago, I was invited to a seance with my girlfriend and 2 other friends. 5 of us altogether. Thus began one of the scariest nights of my life, changed the way I thought about the whole "life after death" debate and would never do such a thing again. The 5 of us were kneeling on the floor around a glass coffee table with the Ouija Board already set up ready to go. In the middle of the board was a Glass cup, where each of us placed a couple of fingers on it all at once. My missus than began to say something along the lines of "If there are any spirits here, please give us a sign", continually repeating herself for approx 5 mins. I was now thinking to myself that this is total bullshit when all of a sudden, the glass we were all touching moved. "Fuck Me, who moved the glass", we all shouted, with each of us removing our hands from the glass simultaneously. Each of us denied moving the glass and it was decided that we would again all touch the glass and ask for a spirit to join us, still a little skeptical as to what had just happened. Again we all touched the glass and the missus began asking for a spirit to join us. Within 1 minute, the glass moved again and I was freaking out, big time. My missus said she would ask a few questions and if the glass moved to answer them, one at a time we would each remove our fingers from the glass and see if the glass would still move. After the other 4 people had removed their hands from the glass, IT WAS STILL MOVING WITH JUST MYSELF TOUCHING THE GLASS. I just couldn't believe what was happening but what ever it was, IT WAS REAL. After 75mins, this spirit managed to tell us my phone number, my full address and what car I was driving, amongst some other bits and pieces of information. HOLY FUCK, this was blowing my mind like nothing I'd done before. All I can say on this is that there is without question, SOMETHING out there beyond life as we know it. I have no idea what that "something" actually is, and won't know for sure until I die, but I believe with everything I have that our body may die here on earth, however our spirits will live on for eternity.I'm only basing this on my own personal experience but the day this happened to me was the day my life, and way of thinking, changed forever. I've been too scared to do it again and never will.
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After the other 4 people had removed their hands from the glass, IT WAS STILL MOVING WITH JUST MYSELF TOUCHING THE GLASS. I just couldn't believe what was happening but what ever it was, IT WAS REAL.
*CLEARNET LINK*
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideomotor_phenomenon
What amuses me is that there's always a logical explanation to 99% of "supernatural occurences".
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While I dont believe in an afterlife, I take some comfort in the knowledge that when I die I will be buried and therefore return to the Earth. I will be food for the worms and as gross as that sounds I take comfort in knowing that after a life full of drug use I will at least be able to give back to the Earth. As I have fed off the Earth, so the Earth shall feed off me. Sounds fair enough to me.
As far as the afterlife goes, I do think it has more to do with comforting ourselves than actually existing. But Eastern philosophy has some very interesting theories, like reincarnation, that I tend to want to believe, I just cant tell if I want to believe because Im fooling myself or because it actually sounds plausible.
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“Each night, when I go to sleep, I die. And the next morning, when I wake up, I am reborn.”
― Mahatma Gandhi
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I hope that life ends after death. Being blows donkeyballs. i mean i hate being genetically pre programmed. commands like : eat, reproduce, survive, reproduce...
being reborn as a fully free energy particle not controlled by any law in the universe would be fun. but i dont think thats gonna happen.
i hope that all the religions are wrong. i want blissful nothingness.
"When shall I be free? When I shall cease to be? No more I, but we. In perfect harmony"
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After the other 4 people had removed their hands from the glass, IT WAS STILL MOVING WITH JUST MYSELF TOUCHING THE GLASS. I just couldn't believe what was happening but what ever it was, IT WAS REAL.
*CLEARNET LINK*
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideomotor_phenomenon
What amuses me is that there's always a logical explanation to 99% of "supernatural occurences".
wat, after reading through the info. on the link you posted, I can say for sure there is no way that is what happened to me. The cup was moving all over the board, spelling out words like addresses where we were living at, with just ME touching the glass while the others were looking on. This went on for over an hour, with each of us having a go. There's something out there guys, that I'm sure of.
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Firstly, all "organized" religions are more or less scams that teach the doctrine of self-worship. Empty whitewashed tombs.
Jesus "IS" the church which worship truly happens. The church does not bring you to Jesus. Jesus chose those he forknew.
John 17:3 And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.
John 17:15 I pray not that thou should take them out of the world, but that thou should keep them from the evil.
I agree with astor he is very accurate I think. However in the nothingness all we have is "Promises", much like a child is offered something if he only does this or that by his parents so too are we only given "Promises" of an after-life eternal if only we do this or that. Like love the Lord your God with all your heart and love your fellow man as yourself. This is the law and the prophets. Organized religion, is the same system that condenmed Jesus to death, the same system that hides it's true evil behind the illusion that is "all knowing" "all good" yet it is all that is evil and bad.
The old law of giving %10 percent tithe to the church is still valid. But who is the church? Jesus states somewhere that the chruch is the poor of the world. So give your tithe to the poor.
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After the other 4 people had removed their hands from the glass, IT WAS STILL MOVING WITH JUST MYSELF TOUCHING THE GLASS. I just couldn't believe what was happening but what ever it was, IT WAS REAL.
*CLEARNET LINK*
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideomotor_phenomenon
What amuses me is that there's always a logical explanation to 99% of "supernatural occurences".
wat, after reading through the info. on the link you posted, I can say for sure there is no way that is what happened to me. The cup was moving all over the board, spelling out words like addresses where we were living at, with just ME touching the glass while the others were looking on. This went on for over an hour, with each of us having a go. There's something out there guys, that I'm sure of.
No disrespect intneded at all, i just chucked when i read your sig, "If it doesn't make sense, it's not true".
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After the other 4 people had removed their hands from the glass, IT WAS STILL MOVING WITH JUST MYSELF TOUCHING THE GLASS. I just couldn't believe what was happening but what ever it was, IT WAS REAL.
*CLEARNET LINK*
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideomotor_phenomenon
What amuses me is that there's always a logical explanation to 99% of "supernatural occurences".
wat, after reading through the info. on the link you posted, I can say for sure there is no way that is what happened to me. The cup was moving all over the board, spelling out words like addresses where we were living at, with just ME touching the glass while the others were looking on. This went on for over an hour, with each of us having a go. There's something out there guys, that I'm sure of.
No disrespect intneded at all, i just chucked when i read your sig, "If it doesn't make sense, it's not true".
That relates to things where humans are involved. What happened to me had nothing to do with a human, but something beyond what we know as life. I don't pretend to know what happened, but having experienced it first hand, I know it to be true. No disrespect taken. :)
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although I know its pretty impossible to prove, I'd like to think that there's more to it than just death because it seems rather pointless if its just all by chance we're here living out about 60=70 years. I'm not being super religious either, I just think now that I know all the possibilities the human mind is capable of, I'd like be wowed again once more
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I believe i'll simply cease to exist when i die - i'll not got to heaven, hell or anywhere else.
Perhaps i'll be in for a surprise when i die, but as it is i see no mechanism how anything of me could survive the process of death.
From a scientific standpoint i find it hard to consider that my consciousness would somehow be transferred somewhere else - there seems to be no viable mechanism that allows for that.
As for re-incarnation i have my doubts too. If this were the norm, why do i not remember any previous lives? Obviously it could be that this life is simply my first, and i will remember this one the next time around. If such is the case i'd probably log in to my existing social media accounts to announce my return, unless there is some 'rule' that dictates you can carry on some knowledge into the next life, but that knowledge cannot include login data.
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On reincarnation and memory of past lives, please see the Star Trek episode where they get caught in a time loop. Information builds up in the air over repetitions, waiting for the sensitive to pluck it out of nowhere and experience premonitions and deja vu. Eventually, the changes caused by the build-up of information cause the universe to follow a different enough path that most of the information is irrelevant and it starts again. This is just one process by which the universe follows multiple courses from every moment, if you choose to exist across several of your iterations. And figure out how.
Science hasn't discovered the mechanism for continuation of consciousness because it continues in a direction we don't perceive, along a different axis than the 4 we more directly know.
Wadozo, sounds to me like the Ideomotor phenomenon is how energies would communicate through us. The conscious doesn't know how these things work, they're too complex, but the subconscious can handle receiving the energies and transmuting them into signals you can follow, like working a ouija board. If you were just being fed things you know, it was likely energies of your own subconscious showing you the mechanism for channeling. Was there anything you had to confirm after?
Definitely wasn't the Ideomotor_phenomenon. Have read up on it and that isn't what happened to me.Once we had finished the seance, which went for almost 2 hours, I felt drained and to be honest, exhausted. The following day the missuses and I went to work as per normal, however, upon our return someone had switched on every lamp and battery powered candle we had. This happened for around 10 weeks and then suddenly just stopped. tytap, it is something I'll never forget as I was a huge skeptic prior to this incident occurring so for this to happen to me, really spooked me big time. This glass we used that moved was moving for over 1.5 hrs! It wasn't just a little movement but 90 mins of constant moving all over the Ouija board.There were 4 of us there and the glass moved for all 4 of us while we had contact with it. The spirit was a previous tenant where we were living and died in a car accident. This was spelled out on the Ouiji board with the moving glass whilst 3 of us were touching it. ???
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DMT taught me that I am a big battery and one day I will just short out...
Better enjoy the ride while you're on it
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Organized religion, is the same system that condenmed Jesus to death, the same system that hides it's true evil behind the illusion that is "all knowing" "all good" yet it is all that is evil and bad.
Um, there was no Jesus, it's a myth.
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Organized religion, is the same system that condenmed Jesus to death, the same system that hides it's true evil behind the illusion that is "all knowing" "all good" yet it is all that is evil and bad.
Um, there was no Jesus, it's a myth.
Care to expand?
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Jesus was a real historic person but his teachings were misinterpreted and twisted to suit the agenda of organized religion which just like a corporation serves only the few in charge and on top of the organization.
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Jesus was a real historic person but his teachings were misinterpreted and twisted to suit the agenda of organized religion which just like a corporation serves only the few in charge and on top of the organization.
I read some pretty controversial stuff in some new books on religious history and they say the same thing. I told my friend was it at least possible that the real Christ was John the Baptist not Jesus? He laughed. It's a lot to get your head around. I'm still undecided until I see hard evidence from either the Church OR historians following the Holy Blood Holy Grail theory. (I forget exact title of book, but you know what I mean.)
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All right DiamondSky's view on Death:
Time is an illusion that only death reveals.
We measure our day to day lives in hours and minutes, months and years. It's necessary for our survival but fairly irrelevant as far as universal truths go. If you need proof of the irrelevance of time take any drug. Done. The reason I point this out is simply that to understand death one needs to understand the fact that time is something that only exists in our mind and in death it becomes completely irrelevant. I have known people on acid trips that have lived eternities and folks on MDMA that pass hours in minutes. Our perception of time is fixed firmly in our brains and when we die that functional interpretation of time dies with it.
So what do I think happens when we die? Time stops and we simply reconnect with eternity. A thought is a universe unto itself. It carries with it all the dimensions of normalcy that that our perceptions of reality share as well. A single thought is a cosmos and eternal. It spawns dimensions and creates tangible realities in which we all live. With the cessation of our perception of time death is simply the birthplace for new eternal realities which will live and die according to the rules that govern their creation. In my mind I find it entirely plausible that we are all gods and creators of our own universes. The self to which I claim identity will eventually end but the thoughts that personify me in the absence of time will will manifest as new realities no less real than the one which this body has occupied.
In my mind Christians can create their own heaven and Buddhists can find their Nirvana. Any possibility of thought can become a meaningful reality in the absence of time because time is only a limitation of human life to which death is no longer a servant.
No one knows and I least of all. I don't fancy myself a spiritual guy and honestly derive most of my feelings on death from physics and a belief that there are literally infinite universes that all hold their own realities and this one, the one we live in, is in no way special or unique but merely a part of something endlessly larger and terrifically smaller. I feel like if we could all step back a trillion light years we would still only begin to understand the fabric of existence that scales down to the smallest quanta and of which our lives and perceptions their of are not only important but essential.
Anyway, I think everyone sort of answers this question for themselves and honestly I think those answers are always right. Reality is the sum of your perception and so life the universe and everything are exactly what you imagine them to be.
Long Live the Road!
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My view is that our mind has many levels and the one level that survives death is too subtle to carry memories or a sense of self. That's why we do not remember our past lives and former selves. I can not provide proof for you on reincarnation. But I can guarantee you that the past, present and future times do not exist and the way we experience every day reality is false and misleading. If you need further information on this just ask me.
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All right DiamondSky's view on Death:
Time is an illusion that only death reveals.
We measure our day to day lives in hours and minutes, months and years. It's necessary for our survival but fairly irrelevant as far as universal truths go. If you need proof of the irrelevance of time take any drug. Done. The reason I point this out is simply that to understand death one needs to understand the fact that time is something that only exists in our mind and in death it becomes completely irrelevant.
Drugs are not required for this experience at all. All of us dream, and most of them remember a dream every now and then. The dream phases in sleep aren't more then an hour each, but sometimes we experience a dreams that spans much more time, days, weeks perhaps even months, years or decades. In any case, the perceived time elapsed in the dream can be much longer than the period you have been asleep, and you only realize this fact after awakening.
The question would be if that is in any way significant. You could watch a 2 hour movie in 20 minutes by fast-forwarding to the important bits, and then have a very decent memory of the contents of that 2 hour movie within half an hour. Obviously you would need to know where the good bits are, but when dreaming the brain processes previously collected information and skips irrelevant sections (such as periods you were asleep within the period you dream about).
This capability has nothing to do with an afterlife though - it only demonstrates that our brain is capable of condensing a long time span of information into a short version. It's like making a 2 hour movie about the life of a person in which virtually all important aspects are captured... on at least the moments that proved significant in hindsight.
Everyone is free to believe what they want, but i do not see any evidence in the feasibility of an afterlife the the fact that we can re-iterated a long time span in a short period - i see it as just being very selective in memory ;)
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The question is whether each expansion produces the same universe. We are each infinitesimally unlikely, transient combinations of atoms. The universe appears deterministic at the meso and macro scales, but we know it isn't at the quantum scale. If the evolution of the universe is dependent on tiny variations in the density of quantum particles at birth, then it is infinitesimally unlikely that the universe would evolve the same way twice. Thus in all preceding and proceeding expansions, this galaxy, much less his solar system, planet, or us, wouldn't exist.
Even if each expansion does not produce the same universe, I believe it is extremely likely that something we could describe as our selves would come out of some number of the expansions. First of all, the series of events that led up to the exact thing I call me already once came out of an expansion. This is proof that I can come out of an expansion of the universe. If the universe really did contract and expand infinitely, that would mean that there would be an infinite number of times that I could come out of the expansion of the universe. As there will be no I to be aware of all of the time that passes over expansions I do not come out of, from my perception I would never not exist as I would immediately go from nonexistence to existence again, whenever it happens that I come out of the universes expansion again. Also, if I cut off my finger I am still the same person. if my brain is rewired, I am still me up to some point. And even if there is a completely new body and mind, complete with ego and memories and opinions, I will still consider it to be 'me' so long as the I that exists separately from these things continues to perceive through the new sensory organs. I mean, a perfect clone of myself is a discrete being, so to me it quite obvious that 'I' consists of more than my memories, ego, brain wiring, body , etc. 'I' comes from the ability of a single thing to process information and interact with the world, and even a complete living copy of me will not be the same 'I' as me but rather will be its own new self.
it is infinitesimally unlikely that the universe would evolve the same way twice
Over an infinite sequence of contractions and expansions anything but the impossible could happen. It is already well established that it is possible for me to come out of the universes expansion from a singularity.
Unfortunately it seems that the majority of physicists think that we live in a universe that will expand out into heat death and that the universe and time will one day die. However I do not think anyone has proven this and I do not think anyone knows for certain, so it is unlikely but it could happen.
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Actually, the evidence, judged by the world's experts on the matter, makes that the *most likely* outcome. The fact that it isn't proven certainly doesn't make it unlikely. I think that's wishful thinking. :)
You misunderstood me, aided by the fact that I was not as clear as I should have been (my 'it' pointed to something further away than it should have). I meant that our being in a cyclic universe is unlikely, but it is not outside of the realm of possibility. Currently the worlds experts think the most likely outcome is that the universe will experience a heat death. Certainly I am inclined to believe that what they say is true, they are after all the experts. However, nobody has proven with certainty that the universe will experience heat death, or that the universe is not cyclic, and thus although with the best understanding of today it is highly unlikely, it is not totally proven as impossible. There are still unknown variables. But the knowledge we have today certainly points to heat death as the most likely outcome, and a cyclic universe as unlikely.
Nick Bostrom has the best writings on this. Definitely look him up.
Will do.
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I'm amazed that anyone who's experienced how powerfully a simple chemical can influence their own awareness could think for a second that we continue when our brains have ceased to function. Take a powerful mind altering drug. Take lots of it. Take note of how completely it alters your state of consciousness. Then ask yourself if there will be anything of "you" left after those neurons that "you're" composed of -- the ones whose function was altered when you took a drug -- die and end up as little more than a meal for some thankless bacteria.
I've met people who found it liberating to come to the conclusion that we just end when we die. I wish I did, too.
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I take the approach of Occam's Razor with an agnostic touch.
"You" are simply composed of a bunch fundamental particles, ultimately no different from any inanimate object. As SS points out above, once your brain no longer functions, the simplest explanation is that your consciousness ceases to exist.
Of course, there could always be more to life and reality than is tangibly observable (I sincerely mean that, I think there are virtually infinite conceivable and inconceivable underlying possibilities of reality that could easily be true, however, I 'choose' to believe that the simplest explanation is the most likely, and even if it isn't true, we'll probably never know whatever the "truth" actually is), so I don't think that whatever does or does not "exist" after death could ever be proven or disproven.
It does make for interesting thought and conversation tough. ;)
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I'm amazed that anyone who's experienced how powerfully a simple chemical can influence their own awareness could think for a second that we continue when our brains have ceased to function.
This view boils down to 'I am the neural network that is my brain'. I wonder how do you explain that identical twins are not the same being? They share the same genetics, their brains will be essentially identical until nurture molds them differently. There are minor differences between twins, for example they have different fingerprints due to their unique movements inside of the womb I believe, but in any case they are essentially the same thing from a physical perspective. Over time they will develop into different people as nature and nurture both share a role in determining who we are, but the original neural networks of both twins will be nearly identical. To me this indicates that our self, at its very core, is more than our brain. Certainly our ego is tied entirely to our brain. Our memories, opinions, etc...they rely entirely on the brain. But if your brain is identical to your twins brain, and you are your brain, it seems as if you are your twin. And we know that twins are separate beings, so I have trouble to believe that this is truly the case.
An even better example would be more in the realm of science fiction, but imagine that a perfect copy of you is created. Down to the smallest detail, at the point in time when this copy of you is created, it is entirely identical to you. Do you think that you and this copy of you are the same person? There are two beings that will interact with the world, two beings that will see through their own eyes, think their own thoughts. Certainly you will be extremely similar, at first you will be exactly similar and then over time you will likely drift apart due to environmental differences in your experiences....but it is apparent that you will be two different people and have two different selves despite sharing the same structure of brain, the same set of memories, etc.
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When you die, your body decomposes back to organic molecules and atoms. You're back to being building blocks. You will eventually become new building blocks for other lifeforms.
There's a little dinosaur fart in everyone of us in the form of ancient nitrogen :D
As far as I know, when you die, you die. That's it, your done. No afterlife of any kind. Live your life as you want it to be and be happy. If you aren't happy, change the way you live.
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I'm amazed that anyone who's experienced how powerfully a simple chemical can influence their own awareness could think for a second that we continue when our brains have ceased to function.
This view boils down to 'I am the neural network that is my brain'. I wonder how do you explain that identical twins are not the same being? They share the same genetics, their brains will be essentially identical until nurture molds them differently. There are minor differences between twins, for example they have different fingerprints due to their unique movements inside of the womb I believe, but in any case they are essentially the same thing from a physical perspective. Over time they will develop into different people as nature and nurture both share a role in determining who we are, but the original neural networks of both twins will be nearly identical. To me this indicates that our self, at its very core, is more than our brain. Certainly our ego is tied entirely to our brain. Our memories, opinions, etc...they rely entirely on the brain. But if your brain is identical to your twins brain, and you are your brain, it seems as if you are your twin. And we know that twins are separate beings, so I have trouble to believe that this is truly the case.
An even better example would be more in the realm of science fiction, but imagine that a perfect copy of you is created. Down to the smallest detail, at the point in time when this copy of you is created, it is entirely identical to you. Do you think that you and this copy of you are the same person? There are two beings that will interact with the world, two beings that will see through their own eyes, think their own thoughts. Certainly you will be extremely similar, at first you will be exactly similar and then over time you will likely drift apart due to environmental differences in your experiences....but it is apparent that you will be two different people and have two different selves despite sharing the same structure of brain, the same set of memories, etc.
Your thinking appears -- and please, pardon me if I'm wrong -- to be predicated on an assumption that you provide no explanation of: that there's some kind of long-distance connection between the twins' brains. Of course they aren't the same person, because their cells aren't connected to each other.
Think about something: your brain doesn't function perfectly at all times. Yet you continue to think you're "you," as do I. Infact I don't even notice, other than pondering my current thoughts and deciding that I'm more or less "coherent," or "intelligent," than usual. I assume this is due entirely to having done it thousands or millions of times and having the memories to compare to. But that doesn't mean that the loss of a single cell, or temporarily poorly functioning collections of them, makes me a different person. I don't even notice. Now how can I not notice? Because I'm the sum of all the interconnected parts of my brain, and if I lose one, I lose some piece of my consciousness but can hardly tell the difference except by comparison.
Honestly, I'm not sure why you'd think that twins with identical brains would share a consciousness when they aren't physically connected?
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Like so many others I believe that when you die, your consciousness ceases to exist. you become nothing but the memories of the loved ones who remain.
I have always wondered about how many people actually believe in the afterlife that their religion subscribes too. How many people truly believe in their god, as apposed to go with the flow of the community. Truly religious people would follow a life of fear, a life that will never match the perfect existence expected of them by their deity. (as humans we should always try to improve our lot, weather we will ever achieve 'perfection' of not)
I can understand the comfort an afterlife could afford people who are dying or who have lost some one. and in some miniscule way envy their nievaty. I however think to talk of an afterlife diminishes the importance of the now. 'This life is poo, full of pain suffering and missery, but don't worry it's all part of a bigger plan, the next life is the reward.' What we are experiencing now is the reward! We should embrace it, love it and sometimes hate it. Treat this existence as the only one and you will enjoy it more than another.
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I'm amazed that anyone who's experienced how powerfully a simple chemical can influence their own awareness could think for a second that we continue when our brains have ceased to function. Take a powerful mind altering drug. Take lots of it. Take note of how completely it alters your state of consciousness. Then ask yourself if there will be anything of "you" left after those neurons that "you're" composed of -- the ones whose function was altered when you took a drug -- die and end up as little more than a meal for some thankless bacteria.
I've met people who found it liberating to come to the conclusion that we just end when we die. I wish I did, too.
I suppose this is actually an argument against simply ceasing to exist when they die. Mind altering drugs can surely cause someone to be someone entirely different, but is most cases people return to who they were before the experience after the drug wears off.
Our identity is a combination of how our brains are wired, combined with our experiences, and to complicate matters, those interact in both directions.
When you die, both are lost. In just a few minutes of lack of oxygen to the brain much of the information within in is lost permanently. Shortly later the connections between neurons are also lost. Drugs sometimes make this quite clear, erasing short term memory due to disrupted signalling for some time, but with retention of personality since the connections can remain intact. The result of such an event is amnesia, not death.
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I'm amazed that anyone who's experienced how powerfully a simple chemical can influence their own awareness could think for a second that we continue when our brains have ceased to function. Take a powerful mind altering drug. Take lots of it. Take note of how completely it alters your state of consciousness. Then ask yourself if there will be anything of "you" left after those neurons that "you're" composed of -- the ones whose function was altered when you took a drug -- die and end up as little more than a meal for some thankless bacteria.
I've met people who found it liberating to come to the conclusion that we just end when we die. I wish I did, too.
I suppose this is actually an argument against simply ceasing to exist when they die. Mind altering drugs can surely cause someone to be someone entirely different, but is most cases people return to who they were before the experience after the drug wears off.
Our identity is a combination of how our brains are wired, combined with our experiences, and to complicate matters, those interact in both directions.
When you die, both are lost. In just a few minutes of lack of oxygen to the brain much of the information within in is lost permanently. Shortly later the connections between neurons are also lost. Drugs sometimes make this quite clear, erasing short term memory due to disrupted signalling for some time, but with retention of personality since the connections can remain intact. The result of such an event is amnesia, not death.
My response depends entirely on how you define "personality", "memory", and "someone entirely different." But honestly, I think you may have missed my point: if drugs can influence us so profoundly, then it stands to reason we exist solely because of our brains and the physical matter that composes them. Thus when this mass of cells ceases to function in any meaningful way (i.e. dies), I will cease to exist. That's what I'm getting at.
What you're saying requires that personality be understood and well defined... but it isn't. I mean, what the Hell's a personality? I can barely even define it let alone point to what causes it. And how are memories stored, accessed, and how specifically do drugs hinder their recall? Last I saw, nobody has proven their theory is the right one.
Rats that are trained to navigate a specific maze will continue to be able to navigate it no matter what portion of their brains researchers destroy after the memory is formed. Terribly cruel experiments, but they were done, so they might as well be of use: memories aren't localized. They appear to be stored in equal parts throughout the brain, and to persist even if you destroy parts of the brain; what's left to be remembered is proportional with how much of the brain has been destroyed.
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My response depends entirely on how you define "personality", "memory", and "someone entirely different." But honestly, I think you may have missed my point: if drugs can influence us so profoundly, then it stands to reason we exist solely because of our brains and the physical matter that composes them. Thus when this mass of cells ceases to function in any meaningful way (i.e. dies), I will cease to exist. That's what I'm getting at.
If drugs can influence us so profoundly, it stands to reason that our consciousness is tied to our brains as if by an umbilical cord, like a fetus in the womb, growing and maturing and preparing to be born into a wider reality.
Or, a better phrase than "it stands to reason" might be "one could assume."
Personally, I like the approach that death is the severing of the conscious umbilical and our rebirth as (possibly) purely conscious beings embarking into a wider expanse of reality. At that point, the shock could even drive us into forgetting our incubation in the womb of the brain, and everything we've learned in this life would sink into the subconscious, and our new awareness would be the next stage up.
I dunno, just throwing out ideas I consider to be as likely as us just ceasing to be altogether, considering how little we understand. Sure, we can read measurements, but that's seeing, not understanding. Just like science has been pushing forward in other areas with a hunger for numbers and equations and a disdain for the work it takes to reach insight, we need to adjust and expand how we study consciousness and its interactions with reality.
You know you said something recently that made me stop and grin like a child: there's no reason that our cause of consciousness can be the only thing that causes consciousness. In all my life, I never stopped to think about that. I mean sure... why couldn't there be thousands or millions or even more ways for something to be a conscious entity? Why must it only arise the same way ours does? Absolutely no reason at all that I can see.
Definitely gives me something more to ponder. I'll say it again my friend: I cannot prove you wrong, and I find that wonderfully amusing :)
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I'm amazed that anyone who's experienced how powerfully a simple chemical can influence their own awareness could think for a second that we continue when our brains have ceased to function.
This view boils down to 'I am the neural network that is my brain'. I wonder how do you explain that identical twins are not the same being? They share the same genetics, their brains will be essentially identical until nurture molds them differently. There are minor differences between twins, for example they have different fingerprints due to their unique movements inside of the womb I believe, but in any case they are essentially the same thing from a physical perspective. Over time they will develop into different people as nature and nurture both share a role in determining who we are, but the original neural networks of both twins will be nearly identical. To me this indicates that our self, at its very core, is more than our brain. Certainly our ego is tied entirely to our brain. Our memories, opinions, etc...they rely entirely on the brain. But if your brain is identical to your twins brain, and you are your brain, it seems as if you are your twin. And we know that twins are separate beings, so I have trouble to believe that this is truly the case.
An even better example would be more in the realm of science fiction, but imagine that a perfect copy of you is created. Down to the smallest detail, at the point in time when this copy of you is created, it is entirely identical to you. Do you think that you and this copy of you are the same person? There are two beings that will interact with the world, two beings that will see through their own eyes, think their own thoughts. Certainly you will be extremely similar, at first you will be exactly similar and then over time you will likely drift apart due to environmental differences in your experiences....but it is apparent that you will be two different people and have two different selves despite sharing the same structure of brain, the same set of memories, etc.
Your thinking appears -- and please, pardon me if I'm wrong -- to be predicated on an assumption that you provide no explanation of: that there's some kind of long-distance connection between the twins' brains. Of course they aren't the same person, because their cells aren't connected to each other.
Think about something: your brain doesn't function perfectly at all times. Yet you continue to think you're "you," as do I. Infact I don't even notice, other than pondering my current thoughts and deciding that I'm more or less "coherent," or "intelligent," than usual. I assume this is due entirely to having done it thousands or millions of times and having the memories to compare to. But that doesn't mean that the loss of a single cell, or temporarily poorly functioning collections of them, makes me a different person. I don't even notice. Now how can I not notice? Because I'm the sum of all the interconnected parts of my brain, and if I lose one, I lose some piece of my consciousness but can hardly tell the difference except by comparison.
Honestly, I'm not sure why you'd think that twins with identical brains would share a consciousness when they aren't physically connected?
I think you completely misunderstood what I said. Your original claim is that your self is entirely synonymous with your brain, and my argument was that if your self is really synonymous with your brain then you and a duplicate of you will be a single conscious being. As we can easily determine that you and your identical twin are different conscious entities, and that if a perfect copy of you is made at any given instant that it will be its own conscious entity, I think it casts some doubt on the claim that your self is entirely dependent on your brain. Sure your ego is, your memories, etc...but I think there is something else that is independent of the brain. Simply because I do not think that a perfect copy of me will really be me. If I die after the perfect copy of myself is created, I will not be seeing through the eyes of my copy. I will not be tasting through the tongue of my copy. But the brain will be the same brain, so I must at some level exist independently of my brain.
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Rats that are trained to navigate a specific maze will continue to be able to navigate it no matter what portion of their brains researchers destroy after the memory is formed. Terribly cruel experiments, but they were done, so they might as well be of use: memories aren't localized. They appear to be stored in equal parts throughout the brain, and to persist even if you destroy parts of the brain; what's left to be remembered is proportional with how much of the brain has been destroyed.
I do not believe a rat with a removed hippocampus can navigate a morris water maze.They certainly can not learn to navigate it, but it looks like retention is damaged as well:
We investigated the effects of hippocampally kindled seizures on spatial performance of rats in the Morris water maze (MWM). Seizures were elicited with stimulation of field CA1 of dorsal hippocampus 25-45 min prior to daily testing in the water maze. One group of rats was naive to the MWM (acquisition groups), while another group received pretraining in the MWM (retention groups). These groups were further subdivided into rats that experienced non-convulsive seizures prior to daily testing and rats that experienced fully generalized convulsive seizures prior to daily testing. We found that CA1 seizures significantly disrupted water maze performance during both acquisition and retention, and the effects were similar when either non-convulsive or fully generalized convulsive seizures were evoked. Our findings are consistent with previous reports suggesting that epileptiform activity in the hippocampus acutely impairs performance in tasks sensitive to spatial learning and memory deficits and suggest that both new learning and demonstration of an established place response are susceptible to such disruption.
Memory generally falls into three categories for humans anyway, verbal visual and spatial (sometimes visual and spatial are combined into visuospatial). Memories are not necessarily stored in equal parts through out the brain either, it varies widely depending on the individual and the type of memory. If you look at a picture and encode it to long term memory, you will have the vast majority of that memory encoded visually. If you read an abstract paper about something technical, you will encode the vast majority of that paper verbally. It is simply inefficient to try and recall a picture with verbal memory, just as it is essentially impossible to visually recall an abstract system without a whole lot of support from verbal memory. There are many ways to remember and process information, although some strategies are far superior to others. A human without a hippocampus cannot form spatial memories, so every time they try to solve such a maze they are starting with essentially zero knowledge of the path they have taken in previous iterations of trying to solve the maze, and zero ability to orient themselves. However, they can remember verbal information, and depending on the sort of maze they may be able to remember a series of turns and encode the solution to the maze as 'left, down, right, up, left, left' or something. Not the best strategy for solving the maze but it could work I imagine. As far as a rat goes though, I think they are totally fucked on solving a maze if their hippocampus is destroyed.
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I'm amazed that anyone who's experienced how powerfully a simple chemical can influence their own awareness could think for a second that we continue when our brains have ceased to function.
This view boils down to 'I am the neural network that is my brain'. I wonder how do you explain that identical twins are not the same being? They share the same genetics, their brains will be essentially identical until nurture molds them differently. There are minor differences between twins, for example they have different fingerprints due to their unique movements inside of the womb I believe, but in any case they are essentially the same thing from a physical perspective. Over time they will develop into different people as nature and nurture both share a role in determining who we are, but the original neural networks of both twins will be nearly identical. To me this indicates that our self, at its very core, is more than our brain. Certainly our ego is tied entirely to our brain. Our memories, opinions, etc...they rely entirely on the brain. But if your brain is identical to your twins brain, and you are your brain, it seems as if you are your twin. And we know that twins are separate beings, so I have trouble to believe that this is truly the case.
An even better example would be more in the realm of science fiction, but imagine that a perfect copy of you is created. Down to the smallest detail, at the point in time when this copy of you is created, it is entirely identical to you. Do you think that you and this copy of you are the same person? There are two beings that will interact with the world, two beings that will see through their own eyes, think their own thoughts. Certainly you will be extremely similar, at first you will be exactly similar and then over time you will likely drift apart due to environmental differences in your experiences....but it is apparent that you will be two different people and have two different selves despite sharing the same structure of brain, the same set of memories, etc.
Your thinking appears -- and please, pardon me if I'm wrong -- to be predicated on an assumption that you provide no explanation of: that there's some kind of long-distance connection between the twins' brains. Of course they aren't the same person, because their cells aren't connected to each other.
Think about something: your brain doesn't function perfectly at all times. Yet you continue to think you're "you," as do I. Infact I don't even notice, other than pondering my current thoughts and deciding that I'm more or less "coherent," or "intelligent," than usual. I assume this is due entirely to having done it thousands or millions of times and having the memories to compare to. But that doesn't mean that the loss of a single cell, or temporarily poorly functioning collections of them, makes me a different person. I don't even notice. Now how can I not notice? Because I'm the sum of all the interconnected parts of my brain, and if I lose one, I lose some piece of my consciousness but can hardly tell the difference except by comparison.
Honestly, I'm not sure why you'd think that twins with identical brains would share a consciousness when they aren't physically connected?
I think you completely misunderstood what I said. Your original claim is that your self is entirely synonymous with your brain, and my argument was that if your self is really synonymous with your brain then you and a duplicate of you will be a single conscious being. As we can easily determine that you and your identical twin are different conscious entities, and that if a perfect copy of you is made at any given instant that it will be its own conscious entity, I think it casts some doubt on the claim that your self is entirely dependent on your brain. Sure your ego is, your memories, etc...but I think there is something else that is independent of the brain. Simply because I do not think that a perfect copy of me will really be me. If I die after the perfect copy of myself is created, I will not be seeing through the eyes of my copy. I will not be tasting through the tongue of my copy. But the brain will be the same brain, so I must at some level exist independently of my brain.
I'm not sure what to say to you, in all honesty. That's exactly what I thought you were suggesting initially. Pardon me for just trying to turn it back around here, but I think perhaps it's you who's missing what I'm getting at -- now I stopped and considered what you're saying, but I still feel strongly that it's the other way around, friend. I'm not trying to be aggressive or anything here, just what I think.
If your neurons lose their connections... then you lose them as a part of your consciousness. Perhaps you're not understanding just how "hand-wavey" the one possibility I'm putting forth is: the sum of our neural connections may, for reasons totally unknown to me (well, basically totally unknown anyway), at some critical point cease to be a sum of the connections and begin to become more than their sum. Complexity theory sort of stuff on a massive scale -- along those lines.
If your neurons aren't touching (twins of course don't share neuronal connections)... then according to what I'm suggesting, of course you don't share a consciousness. Twins wouldn't any more so than you and I. It's literally an identical situation in my opinion -- the similarity of their neural configuration is perhaps noteworthy because it makes them so very similar in our understanding as fellow humans, but actually it doesn't have any effect whatsoever on their independent consciousnesses (the plural sounds awfully silly, lol). They're two different beings just like you and I, just as my position would predict.
Do you see what I'm getting at? I'm not sure where else I might be explaining myself poorly, but I'll try and get the idea across further if you'd like -- they're all fun little concepts to me, so long as I'm not stuck sober at the time :)
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If your neurons lose their connections... then you lose them as a part of your consciousness. Perhaps you're not understanding just how "hand-wavey" the one possibility I'm putting forth is: the sum of our neural connections may, for reasons totally unknown to me (well, basically totally unknown anyway), at some critical point cease to be a sum of the connections and begin to become more than their sum. Complexity theory sort of stuff on a massive scale -- along those lines.
If your neurons aren't touching (twins of course don't share neuronal connections)... then according to what I'm suggesting, of course you don't share a consciousness. Twins wouldn't any more so than you and I. It's literally an identical situation in my opinion -- the similarity of their neural configuration is perhaps noteworthy because it makes them so very similar in our understanding as fellow humans, but actually it doesn't have any effect whatsoever on their independent consciousnesses (the plural sounds awfully silly, lol). They're two different beings just like you and I, just as my position would predict.
Do you see what I'm getting at? I'm not sure where else I might be explaining myself poorly, but I'll try and get the idea across further if you'd like -- they're all fun little concepts to me, so long as I'm not stuck sober at the time :)
Let me try again to explain because I also think we are still not on the same page. It seems to me that you believe that this thing we are calling the self is entirely dependent upon and indeed impossible to differentiate from a particular neural network, ie: the brain associated with the self. More concisely, you believe that you are in your entirety the systems maintained by your living brain. When your living brain dies, your self goes with it.
Now in general I strongly agree with you actually. I think when my brain dies my sense of self will entirely disintegrate, all of the memories and opinions I have will be lost, obviously all of my sensory abilities will go as well. However where I hold a different view than you is that I do not think my self in its entirety will necessarily die with my brain. I believe that if it is true that my self is perfectly synonymous with my brain, that a perfect copy of my brain would be just as much my self as my original brain is. However, as we both agree, it is obvious that this perfect copy of my brain/body will not be me. If my original body dies, I will still lose my sensory perception, I will still lose my ego, I will still experience the things that are associated with human death. My exact copy will not experience these things, it will continue to see through eyes, think thoughts, feel things, have my memories and indeed even my ego. But it will not really be me seeing those things, me feeling those things, etc. The conclusion I come to from this is that there is some small part of me that is independent of my brain, for if my self and my brain were the same thing by different names, a perfect copy of my brain would still have my 'stream of consciousness' going through it and it would not in fact be a separate entity.
Or perhaps it is the case that I am the same entity as my perfect copy, and am just completely incapable of having awareness of this. In some cases lesions of the brain can cut off communications between certain neural networks, leading to strange effects, such as the ability to see data but the inability to understand language in the perceived data due to severed communication pathways between the visual and verbal processing neural networks of the brain. Even though the language and visual data are understood separately , the lack of ability to pipe from visual to verbal can result in the inability to read what you have written, whilst maintaining the ability to write from muscle memory and to spell from verbal memory. I can somewhat imagine myself and my perfect copy sharing the same stream of consciousness and simply being incapable of recognizing it due to the lack of connection between our brains, however I am more inclined to believe that we would be two separate entities.
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put another way:
If my brain can die, and I enter into a state of non-existence / oblivion, yet a perfect copy of my brain remains alive and experiences sound and touch and thought, then clearly 'I' is not entirely equivalent to the sum of the neural networks that make up my brain; if it was then I would still be experiencing sound and touch and thought rather than oblivion.
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With this conversation of copies going on, what do you all think of Star Trek transportation? Your body is broken down and reassembled. Technically, you die and a perfect copy is made at your destination to continue your life. Is that not you? Does everyone who uses a transporter regularly die over and over, constantly replaced by something that's not them?
If a perfect copy were made of me right now, of course it would be another me. It would diverge from me-me over time, but if I make different choices I diverge from the potential me the same way. It's just a separate me, following a different course.
Even if consciousness is emergent to the point it can separate from the brain, when the copy starts up it'll generate a new consciousness exactly like mine until it diverges with experience.
In the transportation example, the original is lost so that there is only one copy of a person at a time, except for one episode where the transporter beam was split and two Will Rikers appeared - one on the ship and one on the planet below, there to be trapped for years. Yes, they diverged, but they were both indeed Will Riker - just exploring the realization of two quantum probabilities (transporter beam passing through to the ship / transporter beam reflected back to the planetary surface) in one universe. Of course that's just TV but it points out that it's really a matter of personal judgment, whether you think that you can be only one or whether you can only be you. If you can only be one, copies can't be you. If you can only be you, copies can only be you too.
LOL. Actually, that's something I've spent a surprising number of hours pondering too... there's something that strongly bothers me about the way we generally think of ourselves -- I mean the way most people, and even me or a neuroscientist or some other science-y guys, walk around thinking. There's something in particular about the quantum teleportation (stop underlining my words red, damn you, that has to be spelled right! lol) business that just doesn't sit well with me at all and I've never been able to fully understand why...
I mean... I don't even really know how to put it into words. I also haven't slept since the first post I made in this thread (cringe, ostracize me not, fair folk! I am what I am)... so it seems pretty silly to even attempt to at this point, but really, there's something deeply unsettling about the whole concept. I mean my thinking often tries to chase down what specifically the entire teleportation business unsettles me for, and I end up with my logic unraveling on me because I start questioning distance, time span, everything...
Xeno's paradoxes. I still think about those. I know the common resolution is to ignore them because calculus teaches us to calculate the finite sum of an infinitely decreasing series, but... that just doesn't resolve them. You are still passing through an infinite set of points in a *finite* amount of time. That would require infinite velocity. Which obviously is not how we move about the world. So how do I pass through the infinite set of points between myself and, say, my fridge... in a finite span of time? Calculus and its infinite series don't really explain that one away.
The only possible explanation I've ever really come to is that there *aren't* infinitely small spans of distance. There can't be, or there doesn't seem to be any resolution to Xeno's paradoxes at all even today. If the space between me and this monitor I'm staring at really is infinite, just like the points on a mathematically ideal number line, then I shouldn't ever be able to move through them. I shouldn't even be able to move at all, for Christ's sake -- not without infinite velocity or infinite time, at least.
It's something along these lines that lead me to start questioning spans of time similarly to distance. And then of course I remember that there is no absolute time, and trying to warp my concept of time into a universal anything is misguided from the very beginning. But I'm not really sure if that's... a satisfactory answer, really. I don't know. So hard to see the consequences of these theories after so long awake. Arrrgh, why must my brain fail me...!!! There's such Truth right there in front of me, if I could only just... see it...
sigh... maybe tomorrow, lol.
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Oh, nearly forgot to bring it back around: the whole lack of infinite points between spatial distances sort of suggests that we all teleport, from possible space to possible space, like marbles bouncing over fish bowls or something. We can only go from bowl to bowl, and we just pop up there after disappearing here.
So we almost teleport constantly, according to that line of thinking. Yet... doesn't that mean I'm not me, at any given second...? And then... well then what the Hell am I, and what makes me feel so -- continuous? The fact that time is precisely that, time, and I could bounce all over history and never even realize it because when I bounce back to the next moment a second from now, I'll have the perspective of it succeeding the prior second perfectly as always -- even if I was just 2000 years prior the moment before...?
Mmkay. I'm done for now.
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Yeah... even when I asked my physics professor about that, he said he didn't know. I found that odd. He seemed to know bloody everything, but it turned out he didn't really care about the actual reality of physics. Just calculating stuff using its laws. I was pretty shocked... anyway. I've never gotten a satisfactory response about the whole Planck distance bit. I still don't know what the Hell it really even means. It also bothers me quite a bit that for time and space, the numbers are so different. Why should they be...? I usually think of time as just a fourth dimension that we experience somewhat differently than the others, but more or less the same basic thing. But then the smallest distance between two discernible points should be more similar... shouldn't they?
Truthfully, I don't see the difference though. Being in one place, then spontaneously being in another place -- like quantum tunneling of electrons -- and teleporting... I mean... isn't that the definition of teleportation? What else would we be doing by spontaneously moving across a gap instantly and without passing anywhere inbetween?
As for probability space in relation to particle physics... well... now we're getting to places I just have no idea how to interpret properly. I'm still not even clear on whether it's truly observation that "collapses the wave function," or if it's simply measurement. I always thought people just misspoke when they said it's only narrowed to a single possibility when it's observed, but then one day I found an obscure reference to a quantum experiment that seemed to directly prove that it's not simply when a measurement is taken or when something interacts with the particle, but actually when it's *observed* somehow. But it was a brief reference, and I didn't really understand it very well at all... and I've never been able to find anything else about it.
I just don't know. Sometimes I wish I had been born far in the future, so I'd have answers that other people worked so hard for... and other times I think this is maybe the best possible to live one lifetime, since I'm not even really sure there's going to be much left on this planet to speak of in a couple of centuries. Height of our prosperity and all. I still want those damn answers though, either way...
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Distance and duration both have a Planck constant (1.616199(97)×10^−35 meters, 10^−43 seconds) beneath which space and time cease to mean anything, at least as we understand them. Our particles move through space in Planck units, and we fall through time in Planck units. That's a really high fps, so to speak, making it appear continuous. I wouldn't guess that we're teleporting across those distances and durations, more shifting through the most highly probable possibilities from one point to another.
It's the time and space in between where I believe free will gets a chance to assert itself. Maybe more. I'll be pondering on that over to the New Year, will write more on it in the meantime.
Oh my. I fear I must correct you, dear friend: the spans of "distance" between moments in time must necessarily appear "continuous" regardless of their minimum "length". We exist within time, not outside of it. Now I know you and everybody else who seems to feel these wonderful things on acid like to talk about the unchanging nature of... well, existence or something. Whereas I just spend the whole time crying in a corner terrified (yes, that's what tripping is like for me; it's bad... and I probably took way too much, as usual).
And I grant you, that it's possible consciousness can arise from some other foundation than our brains. And it's possible this thing you feel when you trip is real, not chemical delusion. And it's possible that when you die, you'll still exist in some shape or form. But I'm afraid it's not possible for the gaps between moments in time to have any influence whatsoever on our experience of them. They could be enormous, or minute, and we'd never know the difference. We exist only as a series of moments. How could we ever be aware of the length of time between them? By definition, we exist in the stream of these moments. You can't just step outside of this stream and look down on it -- not with the full faculties that our brains provide us, that is. Perhaps, in some way... some how. Yes. Again, I can't prove you wrong. But certainly not the way we understand existence and time as human beings. It just can't be possible. Our neurons fire in successive moments of time. Big or small, it makes no difference in the end really. Most of what I call "me" is just those neurons firing as they do successively. Now, later, tomorrow, next year -- doesn't matter how long away, if my neurons fire the same way in successive moments, it seems to be a necessity that I'll experience the same "continuous flow" of time. Even if I'm losing years inbetween and never noticing it.
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Now I wonder from time to time. I don't believe in religion, I'm still working out I guess what I feel happens, but I want to hear from people who think life just ends and its all black. Whats like a legit reasoning and not just 'uh duh fuck you' reasoning.
If it's possible to perfectly preserve a brain and artificially connect the vitals, I can't see why re-animation wouldn't be possible.
Considering that, I'm not so sure I'd place the odds on an afterlife.
As a programmer, I do have trouble grasping where the logic of how cells interact, evolution, etc. comes from. I can't help but think there's set values somewhere (possibly in another dimension) that defines how strong gravity should pull given a specific mass, just as an example.
I also think that as humans, we are still very early in understanding what makes the universe tick, so I don't claim to believe anything..."believe" is such a strong word.
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yes
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I apologize if I sound like a dick.
Enjoy your life NOW, stop waiting. Attract what you want into it and grow. Learn to love.
If you answer the simple questions like, Have I ever seen a dead person? Have I REALLY communicated with them? Are they physically here, or can they be?
The answer to all those questions is no, not to ruin on your daydreaming, but I've found that I've missed out on stuff thinking about things like this. I'm saying this because I really hope you all enjoy your life while you have it, whatever age, you all are unique and can do unique things, so fuck death forget about it and be cautious of it.
I know it is healthy to have ventured down this thought path, but the conclusion to it all is really as simple as what I said. Encompass your life in love now.
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I apologize if I sound like a dick.
Enjoy your life NOW, stop waiting. Attract what you want into it and grow. Learn to love.
If you answer the simple questions like, Have I ever seen a dead person? Have I REALLY communicated with them? Are they physically here, or can they be?
The answer to all those questions is no, not to ruin on your daydreaming, but I've found that I've missed out on stuff thinking about things like this. I'm saying this because I really hope you all enjoy your life while you have it, whatever age, you all are unique and can do unique things, so fuck death forget about it and be cautious of it.
I know it is healthy to have ventured down this thought path, but the conclusion to it all is really as simple as what I said. Encompass your life in love now.
I say this with sullen sincerity: I care more about figuring these things out than I do about anything else in life. Well... other than being rich and having a hot lover I absolutely adore. But I don't know, even those kind of depend on when you ask me -- so yeah, I guess my point stands: figuring these things out and just being lost in concepts like this *is* what life is about for me. Doesn't mean I'm not "seizing the moment," as it were.
... intermingled with reckless self destructive hedonism, naturally. I mean I do regularly use SR and everything, heh.
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The only possible explanation I've ever really come to is that there *aren't* infinitely small spans of distance.
There are not infinitely small spans of distance, the smallest possible distance is called a planck length. I believe that there is a sort of teleportation that takes place as objects move over this distance, but I am no expert on such things.
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Distance and duration both have a Planck constant (1.616199(97)×10^−35 meters, 10^−43 seconds) beneath which space and time cease to mean anything, at least as we understand them. Our particles move through space in Planck units, and we fall through time in Planck units. That's a really high fps, so to speak, making it appear continuous. I wouldn't guess that we're teleporting across those distances and durations, more shifting through the most highly probable possibilities from one point to another.
It's the time and space in between where I believe free will gets a chance to assert itself. Maybe more. I'll be pondering on that over to the New Year, will write more on it in the meantime.
Looks like someone beat me to it :).
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Distance and duration both have a Planck constant (1.616199(97)×10^−35 meters, 10^−43 seconds) beneath which space and time cease to mean anything, at least as we understand them. Our particles move through space in Planck units, and we fall through time in Planck units. That's a really high fps, so to speak, making it appear continuous. I wouldn't guess that we're teleporting across those distances and durations, more shifting through the most highly probable possibilities from one point to another.
It's the time and space in between where I believe free will gets a chance to assert itself. Maybe more. I'll be pondering on that over to the New Year, will write more on it in the meantime.
............this is why it's hard to reply in these threads. I suddenly feel academically challenged with this material. I have not even heard of a Planck. Sounds like quantum mechanics to me. (What happened to the original question on death lol)
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Life ends at death, consciousness doesn't. Ayahuasca taught me that.
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Think about the time before you were born, there's nothing there.
There's nothing you can remember. ;) Think about the time when you were 6months old, 1 year or 2 years old ? You can't ? Does that mean you weren't conscious ?
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not sure if this theory has been spoken into existence, but i personally feel that death is death. its the end of this life as you know it. but i feel that our ideas, and peoples ideas of us, will continue to live on for forever. you can kill a man but you cant kill your memory of that man you know? who knows, maybe everytime your name is mentioned, your energy arises and you get to experience life again through others. :o
wacky thought but i still feel that when others think of you, your energy is called into being for sure.
but if you can accept death in its harshest form(the discontinuation of existence), there is literally nothing to fear.
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the way i see it, matter cannot be created or destroyed; it simply changes form. who knows what form we will take after death? the possibilities are endless, so i don't bother speculating. i just enjoy the life i have while knowing it is impermanent, as all things are.
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Before the days of international shipping when cultures/societies were isolated from one another they each independently developed unique deity myths.
For example, Buddha, God, Allah, the Roman gods, the Greek gods, the Egyptian gods, the Mayan gods etc etc
That phenomenon reinforces my belief in the following saying:
"Religion is mans reaction to his fear of the unknown, science is man overcoming his fear"
There is no scientific evidence of any form of life after death, the evidence points in the opposite direction.
I believe that we, like the frog, lizard, bull or bird simply cease to exist as a conscious entity when our brains stop receiving/creating electrical signals, leaving our physical bodies as inanimate organic material that, as we know, soon afterwords 'returns to dust' so to speak.
I think it is quite arrogant of us to think we are so special that there is some God whose sole priority is to look after us little humans as apposed to say the animal kingdom or anything else.
I believe that the mistaken belief that there is a god and an afterlife has had the most destructive ramifications for mankind than any other factor, given the millions upon millions killed in the name of religion.
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I would like to believe in something like reincarnation but until something really proves me otherwise, I feel as though it the same before you were born. What about the people who literally died and came back to life via defibrillator. Did they see God or experience anything. I don't know, I don't think so.
As religion goes I guess I'll say I'm undecided.
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I believe that the time after death will be exactly like the time before I was born. No brain, no consciousness, so nothing to experience. Not even blackness. Think about the time before you were born, there's nothing there.
Word for word this is exactly what I was going to say. Even the bit about what it's like before your born. Wow...
Sometimes I like to think it's all about the indestructible soul that gets reincarnated from body to body, with only the faintest imprint of previous memories remaining. Sometimes when I meet someone I get the subtle impression they're an 'old soul', someone who maybe has wisdom beyond their years. "Have we meet before... in a previous life maybe?" And then on the other hand you have the young whippersnaps who're only on their first incarnation, the one's with no street smarts or just without any common sense. They usually end up being internet trolls, or barroom fight starters, or 'that guy', or police officers ;D.
And then sometimes I just think maybe I've taken too many drugs and should give my poor brain a rest. ::)
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I would like to believe in something like reincarnation but until something really proves me otherwise, I feel as though it the same before you were born. What about the people who literally died and came back to life via defibrillator. Did they see God or experience anything. I don't know, I don't think so.
As religion goes I guess I'll say I'm undecided.
Noone has ever been dead and alive in that order - dead denotes a permanent conditions from which you cannot come back to life. Obviously sometimes people nearly die and would have died without medical intervention very quickly, but if they someone manage to survive, the simple have not been dead at any point in time. Our definitions of 'dead' do shift with medical advances, people now survive ordeals that certainly would have resulted in death a few decades ago. This does not mean those people were dead back then, just that they were fatally injured and death could not be prevented with the technology available back then.
As for wishing: Sure, i wish that when i die i go to paradise and get 72 virgins with a cherry on top. If i believed this is what happens when one dies, i would have my fingers on the trigger of a gun pointed at my head instead of on a keyboard, and so would you.
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I do. It is logic that life ends because you just a quimical reaction....
you are the way your body moves in time and space..
if you dead, then your life ended... simple...
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It is inevitable to have any number of variations about the philosophy of death, especially when people still can't yet even find what meaning of Life is. Everyone develops his own understanding of what life is based on their own flawed understanding of world around them that is mostly vile, sinful, and corrupt.
It would seem than the only thing known is that people like to gadabout about everything yet accomplish nothing. Most poeple anyway, I like SR information except the moron disinformation agents and spammers who try to keep away interesting discussion.
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all i know is if you are using SR to acquire drugs, (shardinspector - crystal meth? LOL), then there is a part of your soul that is black (including me) that you need drugs to fill the void, and escape the reality of your consciousness. Religion does not kill people, people kill people. People use Religion for their own sick and twisted motivations. It is human nature that has caused this, there have been MORE wars than those where religion is not involved. The same counter argument can be made about science, the nuclear weapon?? Then the reply would be well its who uses it now the actual weapon, yea yea blah blah!!!!! Its the PERSON, but its easy to adjunct the blame unto someone who disagree with, or who is not like you - AKA the human element of survival. War will always be, it is a part of us. If you think I am wrong, you are either stupid or naive, or both. Of all the scientific marvels founded today, the majority of them are for military or political purposes, and the end goal to be establishing dominance globally, economically, or physically via warfare.
So to answer the question, the question is no one knows. Whether you are a religious man, or an atheist then you are full of complete bullcrap if you think you have the slightest clue as to what happens after you die. There is a reason know one has the answer to the question. All I know is if everyone believed nothing happened after you die, then this world would be a scary scary place. I myself have held back on doing some bad things, just because what if there is a Hell? Is it worth the gamble? Even if Hell does not exist, and it is untrue (which there is no way of knowing), the fact that it exists in the back of our minds provides a backbone for the advancement of civilization.
There is a reason the USA is a secular nation; however, on the the dollar bill it says In God We Trust!
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I used to believe entirely in the 'nothing once you're dead' ideal. I was a staunch atheist from an early age, in fact I remember talking with friends in primary school about how ludicrous a lot of the hymns and religious stories we were being taught seemed.
In recent years though I've started to re-think it. The main reason is the way such unrelated areas of life have increasingly similar themes on the topic:
Buddhism or religion in general/spiritualism,
Psychedelics DMT especially which relates to,
Near death experiences,
Quantum physics
I'm constantly suprised at how often stories and theories from these areas resemble each other or fit together.
Maybe DMT trips are influenced by reading other peoples reports so you get an idea in your mind beforehand I can't say (yet).
However as DMT is supposed to be released from the pineal gland as we die then Near death experiences and DMT trips must be similar. You can find some fascinating information on the clear net about Dr. Eben Alexander a well-respected neuroscientist that 'died' for 7 days due to a rare bacterial meningitis but continued to 'experience' despite his neocortex being out of action. What he describes is very similar to DMT trip reports.
Quantum physics gives the idea of multiple universes and also a possible holographic universe based on the way that electrons can communicate faster than the speed of light. This theory also has a lot of similarities with how the human brain works and how memories and other information is spread throughout different neurons in the brain rather than in one localised area. It also suggests that part of our physical dimension is an illusion in the same way that the linear nature of time is considered an illusion by some.
A lot of buddhist and other religious texts touch on some of these ideals and so do stories of high level meditation, often these can seem like psychedelic trip reports.
There is no hard proof of any of these things and I understand why people will dismiss them but I find it astonishing that people from thousands of years ago have written things that chime with new findings in physics and peoples experiences with drugs they did not have back then.
For people suggesting that consciousness is in the brain and debating teleportation what about the fact that your cells are replaced throughout your life? I remember reading that every 9 years your body is made of completely new cells but somehow you or your consciousness seems to stay untouched.
Also I read an interesting analogy about stomach bacteria as an example of how we can't even begin to concieve of a higher dimension. To the bacteria they live in a dark world where food is occasionally dropped from a hole in the sky. With no knowledge of the world outside the stomach they must make assumptions of gods and magic. How would they ever begin to conceive of a human digestive system, food consumption/preparation/production, it's impossible. So the idea is that humans in our universe are as limited in scope as the stomach bacteria so any discussion of a dimension above or beyond ours is always going to fall short.
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I believe death is just the beginning...i could of course be wrong, but yeah i dont think we die and thats it.
Maybe we astro travel through the galaxy and find a new planet in a glowing ball of energy, but all i know is after living for such a short time, there must be more...
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There is no hard proof of any of these things and I understand why people will dismiss them but I find it astonishing that people from thousands of years ago have written things that chime with new findings in physics and peoples experiences with drugs they did not have back then.
Why do you find this interesting?
Lets face it, there were a lot of people that wrote down all kinds if things. The vast majority of them would have written what now would be considered complete nonsense, but some of them would have been close to the truth. Our way of thinking just dismisses all the cases that were outright wrong, yet focus on those that approximate the true development rather closely.
Lets say we repeated this experiment, and ask a million random people to write something about how they thing the year 2100 will be like. I'd reckon 99% of these predictions would be downright wrong, 0.1 percent would be sort of close when examined in the year 2100. Perhaps 0.01% would be really close to the truth, and 0.001% would get more right then wrong.
If this were to be the case, out of that million predictions, you would have 10 that are mostly right, and disregarding statistics, those 10 people should be considered prophets that accurately predicted the 100 years of future.
Realistically this just means those 10 people guessed/tbeorized very well in hindsight. Looking at the original million of suggestions it would not be feasible to select the ones that prove true. Its just hindsight that proves people right.
Lets take this to the extreme: ask people on what date a meteorite weighing over 1 tonne will impact the earth. If we ask all 6 billion people on earth, there is a good chance of someone predicting the exact date just by guessing. In retrospect this one person would be considered a prophet, but realistically chances are such that it really could have been any random person alive today.
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There is no life after death. This is it folks. Why thats so bad I dont really get.
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There is no life after death. This is it folks. Why thats so bad I dont really get.
you say that as if you know it for a fact! we cannot see reality as it truly is unless we go beyond our limited perceptions... which is not easy.
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I think there is a lot to be said for the observation that 'when you die, you die permanently'.
Obviously we have observed people dying, and there seems to be no sound mechanism for information to be transmitted at that moment. Nor is there any evidence that information its transmitter when, for example, cremating the body, which is a process that surely destroys all information contained in the brain.
In order to have an afterlife, the information that defines who you are has to be transmitted somewhere outside the body before it is destroyed. Lacking any evidence of such a process, I support the concept that death as we define it is truly the end of our existence.
For religious people this may be something that is hard to accept. On the other hand, if you go somewhere after you die. would it not be equally feasible that you came from somewhere when you were born? And if so, you have a lifetime to find the answer to that question. Despite that, noone has been able to provide any proof of a life before life as we know it, nor for an afterlife.
As an atheist i have no problem with this observation. I actually think this scientific approach makes things much easier. I never have to wonder what will happen after i die, since i will not be around to see it, let alone experience any consequences of what i do during my lifetime manifesting after death.
I do not fear death, but i fear the proces of death in case its slow and i an aware of it. Perhaps that makes a sudden and possibly violent death a desirable thing ;)
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Wow, quite a complicated subject to discuss. As a (very liberal) but practicing Christian, I, naturally, believe in life after death, or in the case of a non-Christian, death-after-death. I have always argued that this sort of belief requires faith - faith that, for a christian, God will "remember your sins no more", and for a non christian, well, you're screwed in the worst way possible. A recent book called "Proof of Heaven" by Eben Alexander III (available on Amazon and probably a lot of other bookstores) describes how the author, a neurosurgeon at Harvard & other high-falootin' institutions contracted bacterial meningitis, which completely shut down his neocortex (the big wrinkly part of the brain that we all picture when one hears "brain". It's the part that makes us human. He describes how he has gone to Heaven, seen how there are many, manyother universes, the "multi-verse" concept physiscts (can't spell that last word, sorry) talk about. Before his experience, he, like nearly all other doctors, would simply say "Uh huh, of course..." in a dismissive mannor when their patients would speak of going to Heaven & meeting dead relatives, or even Jesus Christ. He now has the opinion (as do other scientific & medical types) that conscience is external to the brain, that the brain is like a computer terminal or CB radio (my words), and that Death is only a transition from one state (biological life) to the next state. I think it is worthy to note that he wasn't very religious at all before this happened to him. It is a book worth reading - it isn't long, less than 200 pp., and it isn't the least bit technical.
This is a big subject to discuss, I wish I could add more to it - even this 6 pg. thread (6 pp. so far) covers a lot of good ideas. I'd give everyone +1 karma if I could...
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I think there is a lot to be said for the observation that 'when you die, you die permanently'.
Obviously we have observed people dying, and there seems to be no sound mechanism for information to be transmitted at that moment. Nor is there any evidence that information its transmitter when, for example, cremating the body, which is a process that surely destroys all information contained in the brain.
In order to have an afterlife, the information that defines who you are has to be transmitted somewhere outside the body before it is destroyed. Lacking any evidence of such a process, I support the concept that death as we define it is truly the end of our existence.
For religious people this may be something that is hard to accept. On the other hand, if you go somewhere after you die. would it not be equally feasible that you came from somewhere when you were born? And if so, you have a lifetime to find the answer to that question. Despite that, noone has been able to provide any proof of a life before life as we know it, nor for an afterlife.
As an atheist i have no problem with this observation. I actually think this scientific approach makes things much easier. I never have to wonder what will happen after i die, since i will not be around to see it, let alone experience any consequences of what i do during my lifetime manifesting after death.
I do not fear death, but i fear the proces of death in case its slow and i an aware of it. Perhaps that makes a sudden and possibly violent death a desirable thing ;)
See I make a distinction between my ego, my memories, etc , and my stream of consciousness. I am quite convinced that upon death, my memories, ego and all functions that arose from my brain will no longer exist. However, I am not convinced that there is no feasible mechanism by which a body that I control will once again arise out of the universe. For example, imagine that we are in a deterministic cyclic universe (even though we probably are not). When I die, I am gone for good. However, eventually the universe will collapse into a singularity and then it will expand again. Since it is deterministic, the expansion will happen in the same way, and thus I will once again arise out of the universe. The nth time around I will be no less in control of my mind, body etc than any of the other cycles, however as time has essentially restarted there will be none of my previous memories or my previous ego established until time cycles to the point that the memories are formed etc. This is just one of many mechanisms I can see in which I could have life after death, I do not think that this mechanism is very likely but it is just an easy example.
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I can't contemplate nothing.. Seriously. If nothing happens when you die, then the concept of life is individualistically selfish.
my bias stems from killing my ego over and over again on psychedelics. particularly mushrooms and dmt; which i suppose is a part of my self designed religion. i built a framework for the existence of my afterlife. My mind will still keep form as i WILL it into being, but the limitations of my senses will be erased, and i will integrate into the whole upon death, while still having the imprint of my soul individuality. the very fact that we experience death means something else happens after this life, we just have no idea what it is.
on a mundane scientific level we are all nothing but chemical reactions. if your eye could forever view life through the angle of a million x microscope, thing would be completely different. most people don't view life with such a microscopic perspective, nor can they see bacteria. our hearts lungs and eyes all perform a function seeming on their own. you can will you eyes to open, and lungs to stop breathing, but that will have dramatic effect. how are we to know, that the lungs are not completely self aware independent from out selves? with their own thoughts, missions, and active sense of being. they perform the same function day in and day out, just like us.. WE interpret these functions as living life, but in reality it's just a unfolding of reactions from the first initial point. upon death i think we go into our dreams, maybe materially manifest into other secondary realms, until being put together with other energies and experiencing something new.
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I suppose thats a nice thing about it all - you can believe whatever you want will happen, and no one can really prove you wrong until your actually dead, after which there seems little opportunity to argue about it :)
To me it seems the most logical conclusion that when i die, all my memories, all neural pathways that define me, and whatever else you can think of as 'me' will cease to exist pretty quickly. I don't find that something negative though. I came to be sentient being out of nowhere, and that sentience will cease to exist at some point in the future just as easily.
Most people are convinced otherwise seem unable the concept of existence for a limited amount of time, and the eventual cessation of existence that comes with that. I have no problem with the world being that way at all, though i obviously have no experience disappearing into nothingness. On the other hand we all have experienced coming to what we are today from nothingness, so what makes it that difficult to accept that the reverse process will eventually happen?
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The grim ideas that linger on my mind is that we're just here until our bodies die, then we're done. Or that our consciousness and awareness is just a line of chemical reactions, and learned abilities. I would really love to believe that once our bodies shut down, then we're given the chance to keep on going. To tell the truth, I would also love to believe that there is a god, and heavens filled with happiness and friendly ghosts. (Preferable named Casper :) .) But sadly I'm not sure that we'll ever know.
I'm really hoping that after we die, there is something different to experience.
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Like dead stuff becomes life again all the time through lifeforms so I don't believe in heaven or ghosts or reincarnation I wish my dead body would become another human or humans or some life form but as for dead i guess i would be dead as dirt and thats it im really not sure if dirt has no feelings of good or bad intuition kinda says none or very little but i think about it more and i can't tell if a tree has feelings i guess it has senses because it will grow towerd sunlight so dirt could have good or bad feelings. Like im atheist and my belief is that we were made in some explainable way like I thought of if we ever built a time machine then couldn't we create ourselves like if it could be done then wouldn't it be done course none of this should happen in the first place as far as i know.
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simple answer for the polls: yes.
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Xeno's paradoxes. I still think about those. I know the common resolution is to ignore them because calculus teaches us to calculate the finite sum of an infinitely decreasing series, but... that just doesn't resolve them. You are still passing through an infinite set of points in a *finite* amount of time. That would require infinite velocity. Which obviously is not how we move about the world. So how do I pass through the infinite set of points between myself and, say, my fridge... in a finite span of time? Calculus and its infinite series don't really explain that one away.
Convergence is how it's resolved mathematically. A sequence of real numbers converges to some particular real number, after defining the convergence and real numbers. But you have to first construct the real numbers as a set with the least upper bound property and the real numbers have to be arbitrarily small yet still nonzero. Think of convergence this way; summing up all these decreasing distances gives a finite overall distance.
But of course that's theoretical mathematics, not the real world. In physics, after a certain point your amounts fall below where you can make accurate measurements. You run into the Planck length and quantum uncertainty.
That's why Zeno's paradox has been solved mathematically, but not physically. So don't feel bad about not being able to conceptualize it in the real world. :)
The only possible explanation I've ever really come to is that there *aren't* infinitely small spans of distance. There can't be, or there doesn't seem to be any resolution to Xeno's paradoxes at all even today. If the space between me and this monitor I'm staring at really is infinite, just like the points on a mathematically ideal number line, then I shouldn't ever be able to move through them. I shouldn't even be able to move at all, for Christ's sake -- not without infinite velocity or infinite time, at least.
Well right now quantum mechanics *potentially* suggests that spacetime is discrete. IOW, there *may* be a smallest indivisible distance AND duration. So if this holds, your intuition would be on the money.
It's something along these lines that lead me to start questioning spans of time similarly to distance. And then of course I remember that there is no absolute time, and trying to warp my concept of time into a universal anything is misguided from the very beginning.
Well there's not really absolute space either. Or more accurately speaking, there's no absolute spacetime. When conceptualizing physics time shouldn't be thought of independently from space. That's why the current implication that quantum mechanics might suggest spacetime is discrete implies there might be a smallest indivisible distance AND duration of time.
As for probability space in relation to particle physics... well... now we're getting to places I just have no idea how to interpret properly. I'm still not even clear on whether it's truly observation that "collapses the wave function," or if it's simply measurement. I always thought people just misspoke when they said it's only narrowed to a single possibility when it's observed, but then one day I found an obscure reference to a quantum experiment that seemed to directly prove that it's not simply when a measurement is taken or when something interacts with the particle, but actually when it's *observed* somehow.
Yeah Schrodinger's Cat, the Quantum Zeno Effect, Wave Function Collapse and all that. Mind boggling stuff for sure. I'll just point out that the details depend on how you do the measurement, and not on whether a conscious human is doing the measuring.
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I believe there is a possibility for some form of existence after death. One of my favorite theories was that if the universe is cyclic, constantly expanding and contracting, that if I came out of one expansion I could certainly come out of others if this happens infinitely. Indeed if this happened infinitely I would believe that I will live at least my life infinitely, going from my death to nothingness, then after the universe expands time may loop and go back to my birth. This would be true in a deterministic world with a cyclic universe. In a non-deterministic world with a cyclic universe I still believe that I would go instantly from my death to my birth and relive my life, however sometimes I may live different lives and possibly even exist in forms that are different from what I currently recognize as myself, but still have a sense of being and perception but with a new ego and neural network and such. Unfortunately it seems that the majority of physicists think that we live in a universe that will expand out into heat death and that the universe and time will one day die. However I do not think anyone has proven this and I do not think anyone knows for certain, so it is unlikely but it could happen.
I thought I had read a paper about ten years ago that had proved it. Based on measurements that were taken that revealed that, instead of the stars slowing down as you would expect should the universe eventually contract upon itself before banging out again, the stars were instead gaining speed moving faster and faster away from each other. I believe that discovery is what caused the paradigm shift to where the the overwhelming scientific consensus now is that the universe keeps expanding until heat death.
Still I agree with pretty much everything else you've said regarding the likelihood of our stream of consciousness surviving after death even if our memories and personal idiosyncracies that we use to define our identity do not. I think the biggest testament as to why is perhaps the simplest; that we're inexplicably and irrefutably here and exist right now. To me it just makes far more sense that we would be conscious and sentient once again instead of dissolving into the nothingness of the ether forever because here we are. Whether that experience occurs as a human or some other life form that's even on this planet, this universe, or even this iteration of this universe is another matter entirely.
I think it's far too limiting to think that if reincarnation occurs (and by reincarnation I'm not attaching any of the moralistic karma in the Hindu-Buddhist sense but just strictly stream of consciousness surviving elsewhere) that it would necessarily involve reincarnation as another human being in this world. If the human species were wiped out by natural disasters, disease, nuclear holocaust, comet storm, or whatever then should your consciousness survive it surely won't be as a human.
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I'm not really sure how re-incarnists would handle life-extinction events. Persoanlly i do not believe in any of it, so for me its not a hard question to answer personally, but for those that do:
Say the earth would be hit by something as big as the moon at 1000 km/sec, wiping out all life on earth. Re-incarnation on the molten puddle left where the earth once was doesn't seem feasible to be. Would christians still assume everyone that dies in that instant goes to heaven or hell? Or does that also go out of the window as it would be destroyed with everything on and around earth?
I mean an event as bad as the one that split our planet in pieces and eventually resulted in the formation of the moon, not some pebble from a comet smashing onto the earths surface.
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I'm not really sure how re-incarnists would handle life-extinction events. Persoanlly i do not believe in any of it, so for me its not a hard question to answer personally, but for those that do:
Say the earth would be hit by something as big as the moon at 1000 km/sec, wiping out all life on earth. Re-incarnation on the molten puddle left where the earth once was doesn't seem feasible to be.
Yeah that is what I was getting at. The only way for reincarnationists to resolve issues like this, it would seem to me would be to believe in some variation of the quantum multiverse or see time altogether as an illusion.
Plus, when you consider the history of our species as only a few hundred thousand years old that's really NOTHING in the grand scheme of things. What about our ancestors prior to that, weren't they sentient too? It would be hard to think they weren't. If sentience isn't confined to our species, where among our evolutionary ancestral line does it end? Or does it even end? And why even stop there?
What about 55,000 years ago when a Sumatra supervolcano reduced our species down to a bottleneck of 2000 survivors? What happened to all the souls (streams of consciousnesses) then, were they just hanging out to see if our species survived and when they did, were reborn? What about our population explosion since then? Were these new souls just created from nothing? That's why it seems extremely limiting to think that if your consciousness survives death that your next incarnation would necessarily be as a human. And if that's the case, maybe we're just extremely lucky right now (or maybe not) to be manifest on top of the food chain and don't have to spend our lives worrying about being preyed upon by superior species. That's assuming of course that if your consciousness survives death you have no control over how you re-manifest your existence. But you don't even have to believe in reincarnation to contemplate that question. Why did your consciousness manifest as a homo sapien rather than some other sentient species?
KazushiS58 brought up the hilarious analogy of how stomach bacteria would have no conception of anything but food dropping from a hole in the sky so they'd have to make assumptions of god and magic as to where it came from. The gods and magic part had to have been a joke, those sorts of ideas seem to be above and beyond the scope of what stomach bacteria would be able to conceptualize. Though I understand the larger point, I think you need to first ask the question of whether bacteria is even sentient. It's a good question. Microbes are aware of their environment. We know the only sense bacteria doesn't share with humans is the ability to hear. They've got all the other bases covered. Bacteria does appear to make intelligent decisions. They can radically alter their internal genomic state to adapt to different environments. They seem to be self aware enough to recognize an invading virus as not being one of them.
But is that enough to say bacteria is self aware? Even if that awareness is composed of its sensory feelings in reacting to the environment precisely as programmed by its DNA why wouldn't it be self aware at some level? And if so, what's to prevent your consciousness from transferring into a freshly generated stomach bacterium after you die? Granted maybe the experience of life as stomach bacterium isn't nearly as unappealing as it sounds. Assuming your host doesn't starve to death you have all your needs comfortably met while you get to feed off other microorganisms dropped on top of you that are unable to survive the digestive enzymes of stomach acid. But if you say no, bacteria is not self aware, it's hard to know where to draw the line of where self awareness begins.
A computerized gadget, say using nanotechnology, could be be programmed to perform all of the functions of bacteria, but it's hard to consider it self aware, or is it?
How about a human android with advanced artificial intelligence that gives it all of our sensory perceptions and ability to make intelligent decisions based on reason and logic like us? Is it sentient? Is it self aware? Why not?
I think these are the sorts of questions - what is sentience? what is consciousness? what is awareness? What is this very concept of "qualia" as they call it in philosophy - that holds the key as to whether the soul can survive death.
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A computerized gadget, say using nanotechnology, could be be programmed to perform all of the functions of bacteria, but it's hard to consider it self aware, or is it?
How about a human android with advanced artificial intelligence that gives it all of our sensory perceptions and ability to make intelligent decisions based on reason and logic like us? Is it sentient? Is it self aware? Why not?
I think these are the sorts of questions - what is sentience? what is consciousness? what is awareness? What is this very concept of "qualia" as they call it in philosophy - that holds the key as to whether the soul can survive death.
I agree completely.
The way I see it, there are two possibilities. The first is that consciousness is a result of a form of matter or energy that we've yet had no other evidence of. It's entirely possible, but the problem with this is that it doesn't really matter what sort of energy or matter consciousness arises from really: presumably if that energy or matter changes form, our consciousness will end. Now maybe there's a kind of energy or matter that simply doesn't ever change form. Sure, it's possible... I find it unlikely, personally, but it's entirely possible. Then consciousness, in some form, would continue. But what sort of consciousness there really can be without the human brain I'm not really sure. Not much, I'd wager. And certainly not one that feels like anything, I should think. Drugs and their effects on our feelings is about all the proof for that I really need, personally.
The other possibility is that somehow, in some bizarre and almost wholly inexplicable way, extreme complexity gives rise to consciousness. This is such a vague, bizarre, ill defined concept that it's almost like saying the tooth fairy is real after all; but logically, it's the only other possibility I've ever been able to come up with. So let's say this is the case, and somehow, immense complexity and neuronal interaction gives rise to our consciousness. Then when our brain dies, we die. Period.
The second possibility has some... very... well, "uncomfortable" implications. If it's true, then apparently at some point a totally lifeless, unconscious object suddenly becomes "alive" in a way. Just add one more little connection, one more tiny little piece of complexity and BOOM, IT LIVES! ... seems kind of unlikely. Possible, but unlikely. So if that isn't the case, then all objects, all matter, everything is conscious on a tiny, imperceptible, almost meaningless scale. But that's... sort of... I mean... the CPU in my computer is conscious, just a tiny itsy-bitsy little bit? Well damn, sucks to be it I guess. So what about planets? I mean is there something to the whole "Earthmother" thing after all? The implications are just... well, if it's complexity itself and not some additional constraint, I don't care for the implications. But who gives a fuck if I care for them, really -- what's true is true. Just a personal comment.
I've always been somehow fascinated by the concept of paradox. There almost seems to be something magical about self reference. "This sentence is a lie." That isn't true. But it isn't false, either. It just... well, it's a paradox. But how can something be neither true nor false? And just what makes it neither true nor false -- it appears to be the quality of self reference. Any system that's capable of performing the equivalent of basic arithmetic, and that also allows for self reference, will always have paradoxes. Statements that can be formed using all perfectly valid rules of the system, but that the system has no answer for.
We're self aware. We can consider ourselves. Almost like... self reference. Complexity + self reference = consciousness? LOL... Fuck if I know... I'm not done pondering it yet. But I like this thread -- thought I'd ramble and maybe get some comments or something.
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I do.
Which actually is not a reason to be evil.
No one really needs an all-powerful authoritarian god to threaten you with violence to behave oneself.
Just think about this: What kind of legacy do you want to leave your children, or the children of those who matter to you?
Do you want to be remembered as a heroic champion of puppies, or a puppy-kicker?
Do you want to have awesome schools and libraries and museums named after you? Or do you want a particularly vile chemical weapon named in your honor?
Or worse, do you want to be forgotten quickly after you cease functioning?
To be forgotten after failing to achieve anything of note, of leaving any kind of lasting mark on history?
I do not believe in metaphysics or souls or anything like that, but this does not motivate me to be antisocial.
On the contrary, I have a limited span of time, and only one chance, and I ought not to waste the opportunity to do great good for those that matter to me.
Namely, you guys.
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I wish there were life after death. Would be nice.
But I believe that all of my experiences are nothing short of electrical impulses within my brain.
So when the brain ceases to function there are no more experiences. It isn't black it just isn't anything. You arent there to interpret black.
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I think the "brain is only electrical impulses, love is only serotonine, taking care of your relatives is just oxytocine etc" interpretations are incomplete, because it only answers how it's done not even what is done and most importantly why it is done?
Consider an analogy where somebody opens a piano for the first time, at first everything would be big mess. Soon he would see little hammers responding to the black and white keys, he would see piano strings vibrating and a wooden box amplifying the sound. Everything now seems clear to him, he even succeeds to produce the sound by simply raising and releasing these tiny hammers, bypassing the keys, thus rendering he's theory, that piano is just little hammers inside a box a true one.
But what conclusions can be made about the music or the function of an instrument in a society just knowing whats inside a piano? Can we say about Beethooven's music that its just a little hammers? Does these tiny little hammers move by themselves? Is there any other instruments that doesn't have hammers but can also make sound? Can MUSIC be played on any instrument, or is the definition of music that it is played on piano?
What will happen to a piano when it has broken down beyond repair and can not be used anymore? Is it sad? Why should it be? How can it be? Does music cease to exist because there is no piano anymore? It's the exact same with life, if we grow older and older there are less and less melodies suitable for this old instrument and at one point there is none that can be played all. At that point life leaves the body, music leaves the piano, every beautiful moment created every note ever played will be there, nothing is lost, nobody has died, life just needs new instruments every now and then. Peace!
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I think the "brain is only electrical impulses, love is only serotonine, taking care of your relatives is just oxytocine etc" interpretations are incomplete, because it only answers how it's done not even what is done and most importantly why it is done?
Consider an analogy where somebody opens a piano for the first time, at first everything would be big mess. Soon he would see little hammers responding to the black and white keys, he would see piano strings vibrating and a wooden box amplifying the sound. Everything now seems clear to him, he even succeeds to produce the sound by simply raising and releasing these tiny hammers, bypassing the keys, thus rendering he's theory, that piano is just little hammers inside a box a true one.
But what conclusions can be made about the music or the function of an instrument in a society just knowing whats inside a piano? Can we say about Beethooven's music that its just a little hammers? Does these tiny little hammers move by themselves? Is there any other instruments that doesn't have hammers but can also make sound? Can MUSIC be played on any instrument, or is the definition of music that it is played on piano?
What will happen to a piano when it has broken down beyond repair and can not be used anymore? Is it sad? Why should it be? How can it be? Does music cease to exist because there is no piano anymore? It's the exact same with life, if we grow older and older there are less and less melodies suitable for this old instrument and at one point there is none that can be played all. At that point life leaves the body, music leaves the piano, every beautiful moment created every note ever played will be there, nothing is lost, nobody has died, life just needs new instruments every now and then. Peace!
I really like that analogy, mad props for that.
I definitely believe there is more to existence in life. Everything in this universe is cyclical, and nothingness almost never stays that way (and may not even exist at all). Some people like to use science to "prove" that there is nothing after death, that we are all doomed to the void of nothingness. I see it differently, science and the knowledge of the universe infers something much greater than what we know, it brings me the peace of mind knowing that all that we are is all that there is, working in perfect unison for some unknown (maybe nonexistent), but much speculated purpose.
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maybe we just Don't know if there are any other experiences or times of some type of conciousness. Me Personally...
i feel as though my "Essence" just meanders around for a bit until it's called or somehow pulled
to another Life.
But Hey, i'm just High
:P
Peace,
ChemCat
8)
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I don't really want to bore you all with a huge wall of text about my philosophy, but I just want to say that I do believe life is over after death. I don't really find live to be worth anything. It is rather pointless in my opinion... And we will all be gone after we are dead... so... any questions.. just ask me with a quote:)
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I don't really want to bore you all with a huge wall of text about my philosophy, but I just want to say that I do believe life is over after death. I don't really find live to be worth anything. It is rather pointless in my opinion... And we will all be gone after we are dead... so... any questions.. just ask me with a quote:)
life would be pretty depressing if i thought this way! well, i believe everything is cyclical... including life. matter is made of energy and it cannot be created or destroyed, it can only change forms. :)
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I know I might sound like a downer, but I do believe that life just ends at death. I don't think that we reincarnate or go to heaven/hell. I think the idea of a soul is just made up by the human brain because the human brain posses the complexity to come up with such an idea.
Here's an example. Mostly everybody would agree that monkeys do not posses souls. But keep in mind humans and monkeys share 99% of the same DNA. Then what's the difference between us? Human brains are simply much larger and much more complex than monkey brains. A human is just able to come up with the idea of a soul while a monkey cannot.
This is just my personal belief though. Who knows if I'm right or wrong.
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An interesting read, thanks. Want to come back and read the rest so signing on. +1 meatgrinfer page 1. Really enjoyed that post.
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i don't believe that monkey's don't have souls, but i definitely don't believe in a human soul that goes to heaven, hell, reincarnates, or retains conciousness after death that is anything like we experience now.
i think there is a "life-force" that doesn't necessarily deviate from the laws of physics or "intervene." I would guess that plays a part with those laws in a way that ultimately has led to the organization of the universe/multi-verse and the evolution of life on this planet and most likely plenty other places out there.
i think the universe or whatever is really all out there and how it's all really made up all is in it's own way concious. i don't think life as we know it is random
leonard mlodinow concedes in War of the Worldviews:Science vs Spirituality that science cannot disprove God.
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Here's an example. Mostly everybody would agree that monkeys do not posses souls. But keep in mind humans and monkeys share 99% of the same DNA. Then what's the difference between us? Human brains are simply much larger and much more complex than monkey brains. A human is just able to come up with the idea of a soul while a monkey cannot.
Why wouldn't monkeys possess souls?
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I think the "brain is only electrical impulses, love is only serotonine, taking care of your relatives is just oxytocine etc" interpretations are incomplete, because it only answers how it's done not even what is done and most importantly why it is done?
Consider an analogy where somebody opens a piano for the first time, at first everything would be big mess. Soon he would see little hammers responding to the black and white keys, he would see piano strings vibrating and a wooden box amplifying the sound. Everything now seems clear to him, he even succeeds to produce the sound by simply raising and releasing these tiny hammers, bypassing the keys, thus rendering he's theory, that piano is just little hammers inside a box a true one.
But what conclusions can be made about the music or the function of an instrument in a society just knowing whats inside a piano? Can we say about Beethooven's music that its just a little hammers? Does these tiny little hammers move by themselves? Is there any other instruments that doesn't have hammers but can also make sound? Can MUSIC be played on any instrument, or is the definition of music that it is played on piano?
What will happen to a piano when it has broken down beyond repair and can not be used anymore? Is it sad? Why should it be? How can it be? Does music cease to exist because there is no piano anymore? It's the exact same with life, if we grow older and older there are less and less melodies suitable for this old instrument and at one point there is none that can be played all. At that point life leaves the body, music leaves the piano, every beautiful moment created every note ever played will be there, nothing is lost, nobody has died, life just needs new instruments every now and then. Peace!
So in essence, your position is that the attributes we assign to objects based on our internal comprehension of the objects, is more real than the physical matter that composes them. Yes, if that is your belief, then life after death appears to be a possibility.
I believe the opposite -- that the only thing of importance is physical matter. It comes down to this -- I do not believe that anything unreal exists. It's all matter. We may not have detected it all yet or understand it all yet, but it's all physical matter (or the equivalent energy), and things that would break laws we've never seen broken before seem extremely unlikely to me.
Life after death breaks thermodynamics and conservation of energy, unless the soul has some measurable amount of mass to it that leaves the body after death -- seems extremely unlikely. But again, by your beliefs, you're perfectly justified in your opinion.
All I'm really saying is that to me, your position looks naive and uneducated. To you, my position looks pretentious and closed-minded. It's all just a matter of perspective, really.
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So in essence, your position is that the attributes we assign to objects based on our internal comprehension of the objects, is more real than the physical matter that composes them. Yes, if that is your belief, then life after death appears to be a possibility.
I believe the opposite -- that the only thing of importance is physical matter. It comes down to this -- I do not believe that anything unreal exists. It's all matter. We may not have detected it all yet or understand it all yet, but it's all physical matter (or the equivalent energy), and things that would break laws we've never seen broken before seem extremely unlikely to me.
Life after death breaks thermodynamics and conservation of energy, unless the soul has some measurable amount of mass to it that leaves the body after death -- seems extremely unlikely. But again, by your beliefs, you're perfectly justified in your opinion.
All I'm really saying is that to me, your position looks naive and uneducated. To you, my position looks pretentious and closed-minded. It's all just a matter of perspective, really.
Thanks for the reply, the reason I made this analogy was to make it easier for people to shift their focus and thus maybe gain some insights . Identity theory (mind=brain) has been refuted in philosophy for many times on different grounds and is usually covered in your usual Philosophy of Mind 001 course. Although it is hard for me to refute it here on forums not knowing your prior history in philosophy I'd really recommend University Of Berkeley's Philosophy course podcasts on the topic (J. Searle and J. Campbell Philosophy of Mind).
But let me clarify few things which are maybe bit simpler to understand, mainly why I'm not a materialist. I don't believe in life after death because as I stated earlier I don't believe in death per se and for that matter my definition of life is radically different and is more similar to eastern mystics view of the subject.
I'm not a dualist nor do I believe in there being separate substances in this world like mind, body, soul, god etc but I don't believe in matter also. Even physicists nowadays doesn't think that "matter" is something real. When your average school teacher will talk about atoms or elementary particles he or she will talk about these notions as being comprehensible objects, physicists know that this is isn't the case.
There is no such thing as matter, there are only experimental settings, in which, through certain manipulations, in a certain time frame, certain results are obtained. We don't discover elementary particles - we create them. No need to call it something real or something which exists independent of the observer. Different realities are being created through different points of view but nothing exists independent of observer. I'd recommend a great book http://www.plouffe.fr/simon/math/The%20Tao%20of%20Physics.pdf if anybody is interested in physics, mysticism and the relation of the two. Modern day quantum physics has rendered the atomistic views of universe obsolete and it's more and more similar to the views of eastern mystics, who basically say reality is created by the observer.
What is most important is to not stop thinking about the topics you are interested in and always dare to go deeper and further, challenging the views that got you there and always moving forward.
The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing. Socrates
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I'm not a dualist nor do I believe in there being separate substances in this world like mind, body, soul, god etc but I don't believe in matter also. Even physicists nowadays doesn't think that "matter" is something real. When your average school teacher will talk about atoms or elementary particles he or she will talk about these notions as being comprehensible objects, physicists know that this is isn't the case.
There is no such thing as matter, there are only experimental settings, in which, through certain manipulations, in a certain time frame, certain results are obtained. We don't discover elementary particles - we create them.
What? How can you say that? Explain to me how it's even possible to "not believe in matter." I really don't think physicists nowadays don't believe in matter. Matter is matter and reacts differently in different atmospheres, at different times, with different manipulations. We don't create matter, we test for it, and obviously some tests will be flawed, but we improve on those to get as "right" of an answer as we can. That's what science is.
The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing. Socrates
It really seems like you think you know a lot that you don't from reading you last two posts, so this is an extremely contradictory quote to insert.
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Your tone was kind, considering you apparently believe that I have no education in these matters -- not that one really needs a formal education to philosophize or anything, of course. Anyway, that was nice of you, if nothing else, varakann :)
I'm not in any way trying to propose some sort of duality of mind/body. That's precisely what I'm saying is incorrect. Honestly I really don't care what you call the stuff that composes us and the objects around us. Call them vibrating strings. Call them the accumulation of billions and trillions of probability spaces intersecting and collapsing to a single outcome when observed. Call it and think of it as whatever you please -- either way, it has existence and it composes ours (presumably you don't take issue with that). Whatever it is you think you and your computer screen are made up of, that's what I mean by matter.
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So in essence, your position is that the attributes we assign to objects based on our internal comprehension of the objects, is more real than the physical matter that composes them. Yes, if that is your belief, then life after death appears to be a possibility.
I believe the opposite -- that the only thing of importance is physical matter. It comes down to this -- I do not believe that anything unreal exists. It's all matter. We may not have detected it all yet or understand it all yet, but it's all physical matter (or the equivalent energy), and things that would break laws we've never seen broken before seem extremely unlikely to me.
Life after death breaks thermodynamics and conservation of energy, unless the soul has some measurable amount of mass to it that leaves the body after death -- seems extremely unlikely. But again, by your beliefs, you're perfectly justified in your opinion.
All I'm really saying is that to me, your position looks naive and uneducated. To you, my position looks pretentious and closed-minded. It's all just a matter of perspective, really.
I've been meaning to revisit this topic for awhile and you've given me a perfect segue here. It's been ages since college metaphysics, but the heart of what's being posed here is mind-body problem, a question philosophers have grappled with for ages. You and almost everyone in this thread has adopted a materialist approach, in which you believe the brain and mind are one and the same; a perspective that's most common these days among the scientific community although that might be changing ... I'll get more to that in a sec. Going off the top of my head, the initial dichotomy breaks down like this:
How do thoughts come to be?
1. Thoughts must arise from physical bodily processes. Mind and Brain are one and the same.Aristotle, Democritus, Monist View
or
2. Thoughts in the Mind are separate from physical body; Dualist view; Plato refined to Descartes (brain in a vat)
Ok SS, I'm assuming with how well you articulated the Materialist Monist perspective that you have at least some familiarity in the problems with it. ;)
So how do you resolve the inherent issues that arise with unitary materialism? Like the hard problem of consciousness?
As I touched on earlier, there's this inexplicable issue of "qualia" that can't be explained from the materialist pov. The raw sensations, or "quality" of experience. Like seeing colors, hearing music, smelling, tasting are sensations that move you to feel a certain way. These must be experienced to truly understand them. Someone colorblind could come to understand everything about colors, the wavelengths that create them, which neurons fire in response, and behaviors and emotions engendered by them but that person will still never know what it's like to really experience them in spite of knowing everything about colors. The essence of the subjective experience that lacks physical, objective analysis. Science has done a great job showing how our brain reacts to our environments in the physical world. Scientists do a good job correlating brain states with conscious states. Neuroscience is a field in its infancy, but say a hundred years, it's pretty conceivable that by then every single thought will be successfully matched and cataloged to a correlating physical brain state.
But science appears ill equipped in explaining why each of us has our own unique interpretation of objective reality that we come to define as individual identity. Going by the Materialist Monist view, brain cells produce proteins and electricity. When you connect multiple brain cells with electricity, how does it generate thought? This is where I see the limitations of materialism coming from. You provided an excellent exposition of this earlier when trying to make sense of how consciousness might arise from one tiny bit of added complexity. But purely from a materialist standpoint it just appears profoundly baffling how that could happen. Even though we already know that it does happen all the time at some point during human conception. There's got to be more to it than that to explain it, the added complexity from which consciousness emerges must be part of a far larger paradigm that our limitations in knowledge prevents us from seeing right now. ???
We know thoughts are accompanied by brain activity, meaning more electrical connections from synapses firing from certain emotions and different types of thoughts, but where do the thoughts themselves come from?
I don't mean to veer too much into phenomenology here, but it's a valid question that MM's should feel the need to answer to ... what is it that makes the mind? How do thoughts arise from chemical processes and then how do the hard physical data of objective empirical processes become subjective experiences? Because according to you they are all one and the same. If the mental IS the physical, then why is there a distinction at all between objective and subjective reality? Where do you draw the line? How do millions of separate inputs to brain sensations and memories organize into one sense of self that is "identity" and how does free will arise from that?
If everything comes down to brain activity in the physical world, it should be a deterministic one where free will does not exist. We are not accountable for our actions, it's our brain cells. But I don't think you're espousing straight determinism are you?
So after re-looking into this recently it seems like there finally is some movement on the mind-body problem beyond the dead field of philosophy into the scientific world. There is a science of "emergence" that you hit on in an earlier description, let me guess you're big on Chalmers :) , how exactly does consciousness arise from complexity?
OTOH there's a lot of resistance in the scientific community to exploring particular topics. I can understand this to some extent. Parapsychology and related fields are filled with loons, but I think the academic establishment overcompensates by refusing research grants to anything that smells like it could be likewise tarred in spite of being a perfectly legitimate question of scientific inquiry.
Like clinical death. This is defined as 1) no heartbeat 2) no breathing 3) brain stops functioning as determined by pupils no longer being reflexive. That would indicate no brain stem control. Lack of blood flow to the brain leads to cell death. So what happens to human consciousness? Because within 10 seconds of these 3 criteria happening you can no longer measure any electrical activity from the brain. So in the 10-20% of cases of those who have gone through clinical death and brought back through attempts at resuscitation, electricity doesn't return to the brain for up to an hour or two afterwards. If the brain is the mind, how could you have conscious thought processes in the form of NDEs if there is no electrical activity?
So this then begs the question, when does human consciousness end?
Because since this is the topic of this thread discussion, what I think most materialists miss is that there really shouldn't be any question as to whether consciousness survives death. It happens all the time when people are revived.
So I was intrigued to learn duelism being reconsidered (even if not quite accepted) by a small, albeit growing, number of scientists; the school of thought considering the mind as a non-material force that through focused attention can change the brain. Because again, how would you come to define whatever it is that directs the thoughts and correlating physical brain states of your mind that forms your identity? Because there appears to be much more to it than adding one more bit of complexity and BOOM consciousness. Your neurochemistry in fact seems to take direction from whatever force that essence is. As an extreme illustration, consider that method actors can actually change how neurochemistry in their brain works while immersed in character, demonstrating how radically focused attention can change the brain. Is it something in the brain that creates consciousness or something in consciousness that changes the brain?
And so this is where classical physics from the materialist pov comes up woefully short. Why would billions of interacting neurons, no matter how complex, give rise to subjective experience? Even beyond classical physics, even considering quantum mechanics into a larger theory of consciousness as some are now doing; say you incorporate randomness into it like Wave Function Collapse, and how it applies. Before there can be increase in knowledge a decision needs to be made what question needs to be asked, each collapse is preceded by a human action that is supposed to design a new increment in knowledge. That still comes up woefully short in explaining how that decision is made, even if there is quantum uncertainty involved.
I'd be shocked if there isn't a major shift by the scientific community away from strict material monism in the next 10-20 years. Not necessarily a complete paradigm change from materialism to an embrace of duelism even though this might be where things are headed, but at the minimum a shift to a different subset of monism from material monism to something like neutral or "mystical" monism. You can already see a gradual shift happening already among hearts and minds. Just 10-20 years ago the idea that mental states could affect one's biological physical states was widely scoffed at within the scientific community. Now it's almost accepted as a given.
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I love you, JP. My response is going to have to wait, I think, but I wanted to let you know -- I thoroughly enjoy your presence on the boards here :)
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I personally have had the belief for a long time that when one dies, you are reincarnated and born again with no memory of your past life. Why do you think history repeats itself so often? There are many ideas such as life ending at death or heaven, but I am not very trusting in these at present.
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Okay. Let's see if I can articulate this properly at the moment or not; my brain doesn't always do what I will it to do, after all (hah-hah, aren't I funny).
So in essence, your position is that the attributes we assign to objects based on our internal comprehension of the objects, is more real than the physical matter that composes them. Yes, if that is your belief, then life after death appears to be a possibility.
I believe the opposite -- that the only thing of importance is physical matter. It comes down to this -- I do not believe that anything unreal exists. It's all matter. We may not have detected it all yet or understand it all yet, but it's all physical matter (or the equivalent energy), and things that would break laws we've never seen broken before seem extremely unlikely to me.
Life after death breaks thermodynamics and conservation of energy, unless the soul has some measurable amount of mass to it that leaves the body after death -- seems extremely unlikely. But again, by your beliefs, you're perfectly justified in your opinion.
All I'm really saying is that to me, your position looks naive and uneducated. To you, my position looks pretentious and closed-minded. It's all just a matter of perspective, really.
I've been meaning to revisit this topic for awhile and you've given me a perfect segue here. It's been ages since college metaphysics, but the heart of what's being posed here is mind-body problem, a question philosophers have grappled with for ages. You and almost everyone in this thread has adopted a materialist approach, in which you believe the brain and mind are one and the same; a perspective that's most common these days among the scientific community although that might be changing ... I'll get more to that in a sec. Going off the top of my head, the initial dichotomy breaks down like this:
How do thoughts come to be?
1. Thoughts must arise from physical bodily processes. Mind and Brain are one and the same.Aristotle, Democritus, Monist View
or
2. Thoughts in the Mind are separate from physical body; Dualist view; Plato refined to Descartes (brain in a vat)
Ok SS, I'm assuming with how well you articulated the Materialist Monist perspective that you have at least some familiarity in the problems with it. ;)
Actually, I'm woefully uneducated with respect to that. Everything I've said is from my pondering this problem every day for... well, basically my entire life. I'm afraid I don't even know what "Materialist Monist" refers to (beyond being able to guess what the words materialist and monist mean, anyway -- I don't know the reference is my point).
So how do you resolve the inherent issues that arise with unitary materialism? Like the hard problem of consciousness?
As I touched on earlier, there's this inexplicable issue of "qualia" that can't be explained from the materialist pov. The raw sensations, or "quality" of experience. Like seeing colors, hearing music, smelling, tasting are sensations that move you to feel a certain way. These must be experienced to truly understand them. Someone colorblind could come to understand everything about colors, the wavelengths that create them, which neurons fire in response, and behaviors and emotions engendered by them but that person will still never know what it's like to really experience them in spite of knowing everything about colors. The essence of the subjective experience that lacks physical, objective analysis. Science has done a great job showing how our brain reacts to our environments in the physical world. Scientists do a good job correlating brain states with conscious states. Neuroscience is a field in its infancy, but say a hundred years, it's pretty conceivable that by then every single thought will be successfully matched and cataloged to a correlating physical brain state.
Well the answer to that is exceedingly simple, my good man: I don't have a mother fucking clue how you resolve that. By my position, we should have all the consciousness of a pebble and not be aware that we're having this "conversation." I don't know. I really don't know, and it haunts me in a very deep, troubling way. Obviously there's some fundamental assumption we intuitively make that's incorrect, because as you point out -- it doesn't quite add up. Even if you take it on faith that awareness is some sort of magical emergent property, that still leaves the matter of sensation unexplained. I find it odd that intuitively it's somehow less believable that sensation arises as an emergent property... less believable than awareness or consciousness in general, that is. There's no reason it should be, I don't know why it seems that way... I'll have to think on it. I can't tell off hand what my intuition is basing that on.
So to get back to the matter at hand, this "qualia" thing: I don't think that there is the stark separation that you assume there is between the experience and the comprehension of it (you along with most everybody else in the world). I believe that they are fundamentally the same: that you cannot have one without the other. That experiencing the "qualia" of seeing a color is an intrinsic part of understanding what a color is. I've slowly come to the conclusion over the past several years that comprehension and understanding are not the things that people think they are -- that to understand a thing, we really only need to have a mental representation that we can somehow relate to other mental representations. That these representations and neuronal structures are formed as we age and develop, and as we acquire more of them and the structures and connections between them (abstractly speaking, not physical connections) become more complex and richer, our awareness and our understanding of each grows. There is no understanding of a color without the experience of a color -- I don't think that's a meaningful concept at all, and there's nothing that really needs to be resolved about it.
I do not know what sort of abstract structure or system of mapping similarities and differences our brain uses. If I had all the answers, I'd be the richest man alive because I held the patent to every artificial brain in the millions of droids walking about the world; but regrettably, I am quite broke :P
But science appears ill equipped in explaining why each of us has our own unique interpretation of objective reality that we come to define as individual identity. Going by the Materialist Monist view, brain cells produce proteins and electricity. When you connect multiple brain cells with electricity, how does it generate thought? This is where I see the limitations of materialism coming from. You provided an excellent exposition of this earlier when trying to make sense of how consciousness might arise from one tiny bit of added complexity. But purely from a materialist standpoint it just appears profoundly baffling how that could happen. Even though we already know that it does happen all the time at some point during human conception. There's got to be more to it than that to explain it, the added complexity from which consciousness emerges must be part of a far larger paradigm that our limitations in knowledge prevents us from seeing right now. ???
We know thoughts are accompanied by brain activity, meaning more electrical connections from synapses firing from certain emotions and different types of thoughts, but where do the thoughts themselves come from?
Again, I regret that the only response I have for you is: I don't know. I understand that this sort of thing is incredibly boring or even impossible to grasp for the majority of people, but this is the sort of thing that an overwhelmingly large proportion of my existence is devoted to. This lack of even a theoretical explanation deeply troubles me. I just don't understand. Yet.
I don't mean to veer too much into phenomenology here, but it's a valid question that MM's should feel the need to answer to ... what is it that makes the mind? How do thoughts arise from chemical processes and then how do the hard physical data of objective empirical processes become subjective experiences? Because according to you they are all one and the same. If the mental IS the physical, then why is there a distinction at all between objective and subjective reality? Where do you draw the line? How do millions of separate inputs to brain sensations and memories organize into one sense of self that is "identity" and how does free will arise from that?
It's an excellent point you make, and one I'm not sure I've really considered before in this context. I have no hard answers for this, but consider if you will: removing a portion of your brain removes a portion of your consciousness, but you can't really tell that it's been removed. If you want proof that this would be the case (as you should, of course), think about the fact that your neurons are not perfect and are not firing perfectly all day every day. Certain neurons undoubtedly fail, or you have a lack of potassium or calcium and can't change the surface charge of a cell and generate an action potential (i.e. make the neuron "fire") when you were "supposed to." Or stay up for 3 days tweaking and note how you don't ever really notice it, but your brain sort of ... leaves you. Yet you're still conscious. You're still there to answer and ask questions. You're just... not "as there," as you were the first day of the run.
How can that be? How can we not notice losing pieces of ourself? Well, maybe it happens so slowly that we just don't take note, like slow cooking a lobster? I don't think that's the case though -- I think the only reason that we can notice at all is by looking in on our own brain functions and thoughts, and comparing the current ones to our memory of what the sensation of thinking was that first day. I believe it's only through comparison to experiences of times that we felt our brain was "working well," that we even notice at all that our brain functions are all fucked up and exhausted.
That's the best answer I think I'm able to give you just now. I hope it illustrates my current thinking on the matter enough for you to fill in the parts I can't quite verbalize properly.
If everything comes down to brain activity in the physical world, it should be a deterministic one where free will does not exist. We are not accountable for our actions, it's our brain cells. But I don't think you're espousing straight determinism are you?
Actually, I generally refrain from stating it because I find it's an almost impossibly unacceptable position for most people -- and there are much more important things to convince people of, and you must always choose your battles carefully and at the right time -- but yes. That is actually what I'm saying. That we don't deserve credit for our successes nor punishment for our evils. That we're slaves to our biology, and that we ultimately have no more free will than a rain drop falling from the sky. We simply twist and morph endlessly as we fall through the molecules in the air on our way to death, unable to do anything at all to change what course we take.
Please note that despite what most people immediately jump to -- that we shouldn't try and discourage evil and encourage good -- is not what I am saying, not *at all*. Obviously no one is going to argue with the fact that if you stop someone from killing another person, you've done a good thing if you don't think people should be getting slaughtered randomly. Just because your biology deterministically (and randomly at the quantum level) forced you to stop them doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. If we don't, people suffer. Suffering is bad, mm'kay.
I don't have the answers as to why it's so unbelievably, astoundingly obvious to every one of us that we do have free will. I haven't quite reconciled that gap yet, and it's definitely a big one, to be sure.
So after re-looking into this recently it seems like there finally is some movement on the mind-body problem beyond the dead field of philosophy into the scientific world. There is a science of "emergence" that you hit on in an earlier description, let me guess you're big on Chalmers :) , how exactly does consciousness arise from complexity?
The name is vaguely familiar, but I have no knowledge of him nor his work. The source for everything I said earlier is just the years I've spent pondering this gibberish when I probably should have been doing something more profitable. Arguably should have been, anyway -- who knows, maybe it'll pay off someday and it'll turn out super profitable (oh God, please make it so, hah...)
OTOH there's a lot of resistance in the scientific community to exploring particular topics. I can understand this to some extent. Parapsychology and related fields are filled with loons, but I think the academic establishment overcompensates by refusing research grants to anything that smells like it could be likewise tarred in spite of being a perfectly legitimate question of scientific inquiry.
Like clinical death. This is defined as 1) no heartbeat 2) no breathing 3) brain stops functioning as determined by pupils no longer being reflexive. That would indicate no brain stem control. Lack of blood flow to the brain leads to cell death. So what happens to human consciousness? Because within 10 seconds of these 3 criteria happening you can no longer measure any electrical activity from the brain. So in the 10-20% of cases of those who have gone through clinical death and brought back through attempts at resuscitation, electricity doesn't return to the brain for up to an hour or two afterwards. If the brain is the mind, how could you have conscious thought processes in the form of NDEs if there is no electrical activity?
So this then begs the question, when does human consciousness end?
I'm not entirely sure what your question is? I think I may not be seeing what you intended to state, but the answer to what seems to be your question is: it ends slowly, and in an infinite series of small losses. Just as is the case with Zeno's paradoxes. Just as it begins. Slowly, surely, inevitably -- idea by idea, piece by piece, as we develop a larger and larger basis for analysis of our internal representations of "qualia." In other words, as our semantic net grows -- or in your question's case, as it slowly goes dark and we simply no longer compare and contrast concepts. When there isn't a single neuron left giving rise to some small spark of consciousness -- that's when we're really dead. And we don't come back because the cells almost immediately suffer permanent, irreversible damage and never function again. If they didn't, I think we could die and come back just as easily as we sleep and wake up (though it would be very different, of course).
Because since this is the topic of this thread discussion, what I think most materialists miss is that there really shouldn't be any question as to whether consciousness survives death. It happens all the time when people are revived.
Yes, the neurons and structures and links can stop firing and get jumpstarted again as long as it's done within a certain time frame. I don't see what needs to be resolved there -- are you sure you're not tacitly making assumptions that my theory doesn't purport? We are our biology. Why would we not come back after death if our biology does? We have to, there's no alternative. There's no soul or anything else that needs to be returned or attached or anything else. It's just the cells. When they function again, we're "here" again.
So I was intrigued to learn duelism being reconsidered (even if not quite accepted) by a small, albeit growing, number of scientists; the school of thought considering the mind as a non-material force that through focused attention can change the brain. Because again, how would you come to define whatever it is that directs the thoughts and correlating physical brain states of your mind that forms your identity? Because there appears to be much more to it than adding one more bit of complexity and BOOM consciousness. Your neurochemistry in fact seems to take direction from whatever force that essence is. As an extreme illustration, consider that method actors can actually change how neurochemistry in their brain works while immersed in character, demonstrating how radically focused attention can change the brain. Is it something in the brain that creates consciousness or something in consciousness that changes the brain?
And so this is where classical physics from the materialist pov comes up woefully short. Why would billions of interacting neurons, no matter how complex, give rise to subjective experience? Even beyond classical physics, even considering quantum mechanics into a larger theory of consciousness as some are now doing; say you incorporate randomness into it like Wave Function Collapse, and how it applies. Before there can be increase in knowledge a decision needs to be made what question needs to be asked, each collapse is preceded by a human action that is supposed to design a new increment in knowledge. That still comes up woefully short in explaining how that decision is made, even if there is quantum uncertainty involved.
I'd be shocked if there isn't a major shift by the scientific community away from strict material monism in the next 10-20 years. Not necessarily a complete paradigm change from materialism to an embrace of duelism even though this might be where things are headed, but at the minimum a shift to a different subset of monism from material monism to something like neutral or "mystical" monism. You can already see a gradual shift happening already among hearts and minds. Just 10-20 years ago the idea that mental states could affect one's biological physical states was widely scoffed at within the scientific community. Now it's almost accepted as a given.
I don't believe we do change our brain's state. I think we're passive observers who think we do. But why wouldn't we think that? We arise from the biology. Assuming consciousness is a property inherent to the physiological basis of the human brain, it seems quite natural that we'd feel we're in control. A little strange and requiring some loosening of the concept of what the experience of "thinking we're exercising free will," truly is -- but still not entirely unexpected. Mistaken, but quite naturally so.
Again, I have absolutely no clue how our brains cause consciousness. But the alternative is that consciousness is somehow tied to our brain. Because if our brain goes away, people sure seem to go away along with it -- which means even if our brain *isn't* just our biology, then it's something that the physical matter of the world has absolute power over. Which makes it, in turn, nothing more than matter that's very real and very influenced by other matter. Unless of course you're saying it's only influenced one-way, and our bodies simply die when our brains do.
Again, that violates the conservation of energy. Which could be possible and which I'm willing to allow for the possibility of, but you need some pretty serious evidence to back up a claim of the only phenomenon in the known universe that creates or destroys energy.
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I think answering this question, depends on your answer to the question "What makes you, YOU?" In my opinion, it's your brain. Shove your brain in someone else's body, you're still the same. Shove someone else's brain in your body, and I don't think anyone would consider that person, to be you. And, when you die, your brain shuts off. It's game over. It stops working entirely after a matter of hours. So I guess what I'm saying is, yes. Life ends at death. At least, for me.
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After you die your consciousness ceases to be and your body decay's under the ground.
Doesn't matter how special we think we are for being corporal beings that are self aware or not. Once you die, you're dead, and to make any other claim is supremely arrogant.
To act like you know what happens after death is supremely arrogant within itself. It is all speculation. No matter who you are, what you believe, or what you've seen.
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I'm not a dualist nor do I believe in there being separate substances in this world like mind, body, soul, god etc but I don't believe in matter also. Even physicists nowadays doesn't think that "matter" is something real. When your average school teacher will talk about atoms or elementary particles he or she will talk about these notions as being comprehensible objects, physicists know that this is isn't the case.
There is no such thing as matter, there are only experimental settings, in which, through certain manipulations, in a certain time frame, certain results are obtained. We don't discover elementary particles - we create them.
What? How can you say that? Explain to me how it's even possible to "not believe in matter." I really don't think physicists nowadays don't believe in matter. Matter is matter and reacts differently in different atmospheres, at different times, with different manipulations. We don't create matter, we test for it, and obviously some tests will be flawed, but we improve on those to get as "right" of an answer as we can. That's what science is.
"When the oneness of the totality of things is not recognized, then ignorance as well as particularisation arises, and all phases of the defiled mind are thus developed...All phenomena in the world are nothing but the illusory manifestations of the mind and have no reality on their own."
-Ashvagosha
This is what I meant when I said I don't believe in matter or energy etc. It's all maya (illusion) or avidya (ignorance) as hinduists or buddhists would say. I'm a skeptic by nature and I really was into science and hoped it would eventually solve all the problems but as I ventured deeper and deeper, gained more and more knowledge I became aware that this is "science" is not very scientific at all it's still a question of faith, at very best it is some sort of proto-science that will some day lead to a more coherent knowledge or methods but right now it reminds me a alchemy and don't get me wrong alchemists played big role to the evolution of modern chemistry but they're were far from being right.
On topic: I think we should define first what do we mean by death who or what it exactly is that is dying. Because I don't think that consciousness or self can die because these mental states are not alive at first place. Life and death are notions which can be used only when describing biological entities not notions or complex metaphors as self or consciousness. Most of the paradoxes and philosophical problems are created when we are ill-using our language and thus creating lot of confusion and philosophy.
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Why do you think history repeats itself so often?
Because the common denominator in all historical periods is humans. The real question would be why would you assume that history wouldn't "repeat itself so often," considering its the same species, adapting to the same environment, with the only difference being time and some cultural details/etc.
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In history, it can be noted that the purpose of religion was to set a foundation or morals or ethics by which the blossoming societies could abide. What better of an incentive for someone to follow a set list of rules than to promise them an ETERNITY of various AWESOME THINGS. For Muslims it's the ## of however many virgins, Christians just think they're going to an eternity of fluffy clouds and everything they could ever ask for. It really is quite obvious.
The harsh reality is that religion is no more tangible than the system of government under which you currently live as you read this. Humans are animals. Very, very intelligent animals. And we are no more likely to go to any afterlife than is a dead goldfish, unfortunately. I love the idea of dying and having an entire planet to yourself to rule as god. I love the idea that we have souls that are eternal.
The only problem is that no one can prove any of this, and if people live their lives following some strict list of "no-no's" then they're going to live a horribly boring and limited life. The fact is that life really only happens once. When you die, it's gone. When you're old, you have regrets. So do drugs, have sex with that random guy/girl, enjoy "sin." But just be a good person in the meantime. Here should be the priorities, in my opinion:
1) Follow a pursuit of happiness. If that encompasses you being heavily religious, then so be it. Just don't die unhappy, if you can help it.
2) Minimize your harm to others. Don't be naive and spiteful/negative. But try to have a light heart and not step on people's toes.
3) Do some charity occasionally, if you're capable. It goes a long way, really.
4) If you're not happy with some aspect of your life, change it. Because no one will change anything about you for you.
When death comes, and if you do these things ^ then you shouldn't have a problem, honestly. Even IF there is some deity, if you live a nice life, peaceful, caring, and just trying to stay happy, who cares whether you didn't have your nose in religious texts every waking minute of the day?
Just be a good person, and don't even bother yourself or rack your mind over the question.
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Actually, I'm woefully uneducated with respect to that. Everything I've said is from my pondering this problem every day for... well, basically my entire life. I'm afraid I don't even know what "Materialist Monist" refers to (beyond being able to guess what the words materialist and monist mean, anyway -- I don't know the reference is my point).
Ah ... brilliant autodidact bent on reinventing the wheel and more in your lifetime now are you? ;) I should've guessed.
So to get back to the matter at hand, this "qualia" thing: I don't think that there is the stark separation that you assume there is between the experience and the comprehension of it (you along with most everybody else in the world). I believe that they are fundamentally the same: that you cannot have one without the other. That experiencing the "qualia" of seeing a color is an intrinsic part of understanding what a color is. I've slowly come to the conclusion over the past several years that comprehension and understanding are not the things that people think they are -- that to understand a thing, we really only need to have a mental representation that we can somehow relate to other mental representations. That these representations and neuronal structures are formed as we age and develop, and as we acquire more of them and the structures and connections between them (abstractly speaking, not physical connections) become more complex and richer, our awareness and our understanding of each grows. There is no understanding of a color without the experience of a color -- I don't think that's a meaningful concept at all, and there's nothing that really needs to be resolved about it.
Very perceptive, there's no doubt something to your description of neural connections and pattern recognition which I read a paper in support of this a while ago I'll have to try and find. But I would dispute your blurring of the distinction between experience and comprehension because there does seem to be a subtle difference beween those two words. If tomorrow I had a stroke and suffered achromatopsia which erased my ability to perceive color, it doesn't mean I don't comprehend the colors when in fact I have firsthand experiential knowledge of it since I still have the mental representation of it in memory. The Sensation of seeing a color is the process that detects stimuli whereas comprehension/cognition is the process of knowing it. Sensations are obviously a source of knowledge in the world, but the sensation itself we have when we see a color is just that patch of color, and sensing a patch of colour is not knowledge itself and therefore IMO we cannot say that pure sensation is cognitive. Until it's processed in relation to things that are correlated with it and giving rise to images and memories after the sensation of the color is faded it can be a source for knowledge.
But I don't see how pure sensation can be cognitive until its processed mentally as a subject in relation to you in the act of seeing it, at which point it becomes a source for knowledge.
It's an excellent point you make, and one I'm not sure I've really considered before in this context. I have no hard answers for this, but consider if you will: removing a portion of your brain removes a portion of your consciousness, but you can't really tell that it's been removed. If you want proof that this would be the case (as you should, of course), think about the fact that your neurons are not perfect and are not firing perfectly all day every day. Certain neurons undoubtedly fail, or you have a lack of potassium or calcium and can't change the surface charge of a cell and generate an action potential (i.e. make the neuron "fire") when you were "supposed to." Or stay up for 3 days tweaking and note how you don't ever really notice it, but your brain sort of ... leaves you. Yet you're still conscious. You're still there to answer and ask questions. You're just... not "as there," as you were the first day of the run.
I'm not sure what you mean by the "you can't tell that it's been removed". I can definitely tell when I'm spun out from being up for 3 days. My mind is fuckin sludge and my brain is oatmeal. ;D I also remember reading an article written by someone that had had a frontal lobotomy in the sixties where he described after the op that he definitely noticed something where something was missing even if he couldn't place what. I think it would be hard not to tell that some form of sensation, perception, or cognition was no longer available to you that you previously enjoyed.
Of course I'm not saying that the brain isn't imperative to our functional operation in the physical world. Unquestionably there's no way to empirically deny it. Just that consciousness seems to demand a greater explanation than reductionist materialism.
How can that be? How can we not notice losing pieces of ourself? Well, maybe it happens so slowly that we just don't take note, like slow cooking a lobster? I don't think that's the case though -- I think the only reason that we can notice at all is by looking in on our own brain functions and thoughts, and comparing the current ones to our memory of what the sensation of thinking was that first day. I believe it's only through comparison to experiences of times that we felt our brain was "working well," that we even notice at all that our brain functions are all fucked up and exhausted.
I do notice though and find it very conspicuous. Trying to grasp at words and sentence structure that is normally readily accessible to me mentally when forming sentences. Linguistical skills from day 3 on especially begin to really become an issue. Generally my IQ drops by five points by day three and by about 15 points by day five. 20 minute tasks turn into four hour ordeals. Fuck, a simple trip to the store can turn into a saga. :-[ I call it "throttling" and have learned from experience that it's always a mistake, which is why as much fun as I'm having at the time and as tempting as it might be to smoke another bowl or hit another rail and continue on whatever tweaker project I'm working on I force myself to bed when it's time to sleep with the knowledge that I'll be far more efficient and enjoy it WAY more after resting and continuing whatever I'm working on y0h. 8)
I hope it illustrates my current thinking on the matter enough for you to fill in the parts I can't quite verbalize properly.
See what I mean? ::)
Actually, I generally refrain from stating it because I find it's an almost impossibly unacceptable position for most people -- and there are much more important things to convince people of, and you must always choose your battles carefully and at the right time -- but yes. That is actually what I'm saying. That we don't deserve credit for our successes nor punishment for our evils. That we're slaves to our biology, and that we ultimately have no more free will than a rain drop falling from the sky. We simply twist and morph endlessly as we fall through the molecules in the air on our way to death, unable to do anything at all to change what course we take.
I don't believe we do change our brain's state. I think we're passive observers who think we do. But why wouldn't we think that? We arise from the biology. Assuming consciousness is a property inherent to the physiological basis of the human brain, it seems quite natural that we'd feel we're in control. A little strange and requiring some loosening of the concept of what the experience of "thinking we're exercising free will," truly is -- but still not entirely unexpected. Mistaken, but quite naturally so.
Interesting. So how do you square your deterministic beliefs with quantum indeterminancy, or more to the point, with the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in which the more precisely the position of some particle is determined, the less precisely its momentum can be known, and vice versa? Einstein always thought of the uncertainty principle as a stopgap measure "God does not roll dice" but since his death its been discovered that it's not just the observer effect of QM but universal to everything (or everything with a wave like system, which from what we know from Einstein-Broglie that matter also is a wave, means pretty much everything) on a quantum level, making uncertainty a fundamental property of quantum systems and integral to our understanding of modern chemistry.
I guess what I'm getting at is that believing in determinism seems to me to require a leap of blind faith at odds not only with our current understanding of modern physics and chemistry but also neurophysiology and psychology including experimental evidence. Experiments, Wheeler and Zeilinger come to mind, have shown that we have a participatory role in the universe as an observer and we can indeed change the future depending on how we measure an experiment. Generally the future remains undetermined unless its been measured/observed.
I'm not saying this as a necessary advocate of "free will", a philosophically nebulous term in itself with many disagreements on what it means, but I don't see why the law of the excluded middle should apply here that requires an either or proposition; just that determinism itself seems inherently flawed.
The name is vaguely familiar, but I have no knowledge of him nor his work. The source for everything I said earlier is just the years I've spent pondering this gibberish when I probably should have been doing something more profitable. Arguably should have been, anyway -- who knows, maybe it'll pay off someday and it'll turn out super profitable (oh God, please make it so, hah...)
Ah. Well I knew your description of emergence resembled something I'd heard once. Then I remembered where and the national pride you might feel for your fellow Icelander. :)
Like clinical death. This is defined as 1) no heartbeat 2) no breathing 3) brain stops functioning as determined by pupils no longer being reflexive. That would indicate no brain stem control. Lack of blood flow to the brain leads to cell death. So what happens to human consciousness? Because within 10 seconds of these 3 criteria happening you can no longer measure any electrical activity from the brain. So in the 10-20% of cases of those who have gone through clinical death and brought back through attempts at resuscitation, electricity doesn't return to the brain for up to an hour or two afterwards. If the brain is the mind, how could you have conscious thought processes in the form of NDEs if there is no electrical activity?
So this then begs the question, when does human consciousness end?
I'm not entirely sure what your question is? I think I may not be seeing what you intended to state, but the answer to what seems to be your question is: it ends slowly, and in an infinite series of small losses. Just as is the case with Zeno's paradoxes. Just as it begins. Slowly, surely, inevitably -- idea by idea, piece by piece, as we develop a larger and larger basis for analysis of our internal representations of "qualia." In other words, as our semantic net grows -- or in your question's case, as it slowly goes dark and we simply no longer compare and contrast concepts. When there isn't a single neuron left giving rise to some small spark of consciousness -- that's when we're really dead. And we don't come back because the cells almost immediately suffer permanent, irreversible damage and never function again. If they didn't, I think we could die and come back just as easily as we sleep and wake up (though it would be very different, of course).
Yes, the neurons and structures and links can stop firing and get jumpstarted again as long as it's done within a certain time frame. I don't see what needs to be resolved there -- are you sure you're not tacitly making assumptions that my theory doesn't purport? We are our biology. Why would we not come back after death if our biology does? We have to, there's no alternative. There's no soul or anything else that needs to be returned or attached or anything else. It's just the cells. When they function again, we're "here" again.
I guess what I was trying to say is that there are correlative brain states to every thought we have. These brain states consist of electro-chemical activity. It's not just one neuron responsible for consciousness let alone a thought, but neurons strung together through an action potential. The near consensus among neural scientists is that you need an entire neural network of activity to have anything resembling a thought. You described one aspect in your description of what can happen to neurons when we don't get enough sleep and stay up for days ... they can fail; but of course it's more than just that. As a signal passes through the synapses it becomes vulnerable to amplication, distortion, elimination, colorization, etc by other chemicals introduced into the larger system by trauma, DRUGS, fatigue, DRUGS, excitation, DRUGS, design, DRUGS, etc. :o This is how we understand the brain and how it functions.
So when someone is resuscitated after having no measurable brain activity for up to an hour or two, how is it possible that they have a NDE when to even imagine it unconsciously would require some measurable electro-chemical brain activity? There would be no action potentials or neurotransmissions connecting neural nets to be subject to distortion in the first place. All the while subjects repoting NDEs that underwent clinical death report exceptional lucidity in their memory of it.
Based on the materialist empirical understanding of how the brain functions this is just not possible. This would mean that everyone that had a NDE would have be to be bullshitting through their teeth the moment they're revived which I think is highly implausible. These aren't anecdotes of NDEs from superstitious folk of western Zaire, but western societies and in some cases atheists with no expectations or beliefs in anything of that sort.
Another example is when people have irreversible dementia or severe mental illness that experience sudden lucidity before they die. They recognize family members, lose delusions, and talk coherently right before they die. Based on our understanding of their damaged brain physiology this wouldn't be possible. Not to say this ALWAYS happens with people that are irreversibly brain damaged, but are isolated incidents.
So it seems very obvious the state of our brains affects the state of our thinking, thoughts, desires, feelings ... like when tweaking out and staying up for days on end like you mention ... as it occurs in our daily lives, or at least your daily life. ;)
But maybe not in the extremes. A similar model would be in physics, where Newtonian physics makes sense for 99% of what we do in our daily lives. But it doesn't apply at the extremes when things move very fast or get very small Newtonian physics breaks down into irrelevancy. Same thing I'm trying to point out here. In extreme cases where the brain stops functioning the materialist model of how we understand the brain breaks down. Brain and mind do not seem to be the same thing in these cases.
So regarding the question of whether NDEs are real, I'd never make such a claim when there's only anecdotal evidence. But they do seem very real to the patient and that's all that really matters to illustrate the example I used above, that it violates the materialist understanding of the mind as the brain. As to why it remains confined to anecdotes, with no research to test for the validity of something that occurs with enough regularity in clinical settings to be of statistical significance, well it's impossible to get funding for anything with the slightest whiff of this stuff. Interestingly, its the institutional scientists rather than practicing physicians who are virulently dogmatic in their opposition to research in this area or anything to do with the science of consciousness really. The new age vibe has them running for the hills. :-\ But this really needs to change for the sake of scientific inquiry wherever that path might lead and it would really help for a sensible alternative model to pardon the pun, emerge.
Again, I have absolutely no clue how our brains cause consciousness. But the alternative is that consciousness is somehow tied to our brain. Because if our brain goes away, people sure seem to go away along with it -- which means even if our brain *isn't* just our biology, then it's something that the physical matter of the world has absolute power over. Which makes it, in turn, nothing more than matter that's very real and very influenced by other matter. Unless of course you're saying it's only influenced one-way, and our bodies simply die when our brains do.
Again, that violates the conservation of energy. Which could be possible and which I'm willing to allow for the possibility of, but you need some pretty serious evidence to back up a claim of the only phenomenon in the known universe that creates or destroys energy.
I don't really have an answer about the inherent contradiction between dualism and conservation of energy as I don't find any of the present arguments that attempt a refutation particularly compelling. I can only offer that the mind does have an affect on the body so what might appear an ostensible violation in appearance is not real. If we do things for reasons, our beliefs and desires cause some of our actions. And if this is all physical matter I can only refer back to how matter, regardless of its organization, can produce conscious thoughts, feelings and perceptions which materialism can't explain. :)
I will admit I'm not big into duelism either as it seems to be riddled with just as many issues if not more as material monism. The answer is very likely somewhere in between OR better yet I'm hopeful that a new Big Idea will come along that creates a new paradigm altogether and this problem can be buried once and for all. ;)
And with regards to your "consciousness is somehow tied to our brain", well isn't it? Since how we direct our attention can directly affect our neurochemistry doesn't that show that our brains can be directly affected by our consciousness?
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Why do you think history repeats itself so often?
Because the common denominator in all historical periods is humans. The real question would be why would you assume that history wouldn't "repeat itself so often," considering its the same species, adapting to the same environment, with the only difference being time and some cultural details/etc.
I would assume that history wouldn't repeat itself so often as there are records of the past and how it went wrong, from which people should learn.
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Why do you think history repeats itself so often?
Because the common denominator in all historical periods is humans. The real question would be why would you assume that history wouldn't "repeat itself so often," considering its the same species, adapting to the same environment, with the only difference being time and some cultural details/etc.
I would assume that history wouldn't repeat itself so often as there are records of the past and how it went wrong, from which people should learn.
There haven't always been records, and often the circumstances are slightly different so people's egos get in the way. Everyone thinks they are smarter than those from the past, which, you can see why as technology advances, but often they fall to the same fate. Just, my thoughts.
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Why do you think history repeats itself so often?
Because the common denominator in all historical periods is humans. The real question would be why would you assume that history wouldn't "repeat itself so often," considering its the same species, adapting to the same environment, with the only difference being time and some cultural details/etc.
I would assume that history wouldn't repeat itself so often as there are records of the past and how it went wrong, from which people should learn.
There haven't always been records, and often the circumstances are slightly different so people's egos get in the way. Everyone thinks they are smarter than those from the past, which, you can see why as technology advances, but often they fall to the same fate. Just, my thoughts.
Fair enough. People just need to be more attentive of the past.
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Why do you think history repeats itself so often?
Because the common denominator in all historical periods is humans. The real question would be why would you assume that history wouldn't "repeat itself so often," considering its the same species, adapting to the same environment, with the only difference being time and some cultural details/etc.
I would assume that history wouldn't repeat itself so often as there are records of the past and how it went wrong, from which people should learn.
There haven't always been records, and often the circumstances are slightly different so people's egos get in the way. Everyone thinks they are smarter than those from the past, which, you can see why as technology advances, but often they fall to the same fate. Just, my thoughts.
The problem is that less than 1% of the population is actually pushing humanity forward in any area and the rest are leeching onto the successes of others.
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I always think of this...
You were on your way home when you died.
It was a car accident. Nothing particularly remarkable, but fatal nonetheless. You left behind a wife and 2 children. It was a painless death. the EMTs tried their best to save you, but to no avail. Your body was so utterly shattered you were better off, trust me.
And thats where you met me.
"What... what happened?" You Asked. "Where am i?"
"You died," I Said, Matter of factly. No point in mincing words.
"There was a... a truck and it was skidding..."
"Yup," I said.
"I... I died?"
"Yup. But dont feel bad about it. Everyone dies," I said
You looked around. There was nothingness. Just you and me. "What is this place?" You asked. "Is this the afterlife?"
"More or less," I said.
"Are you God?" You asked.
"Yup," I replied. "I'm God."
"My kids.. My wife," You said.
"What about them?"
"Will they be alright?"
"Thats what I like to see," I said. "You just died and your main concern is for your family. Thats good stuff right there."
You looked at me with fascination. To you, I didn't look like God. I just looked like some man. Or possibly a woman. Some vague authority figure, maybe. More of a grammar school teacher.
"Don't worry," I said. "They'll be fine. Your kids will remember you as perfect in every way. They didn't have time to grow contempt for you. Your wife will cry on the outside, but will secretly be relieved. To be fair, your marriage was falling apart. If its any consolation, she'll feel guilty for feeling relieved.
"oh," you said. "So what happens now? Do I go to heaven or hell or something?"
"Neither," I said. "You'll be reincarnated."
"Ah," you said. "So the Hindu's were right."
"All religions are right in their own way," I said. "Walk with me."
You followed along as we strode through the void. "Where are we going?"
"Nowhere in particular," I said. "Its just nice to walk while we talk."
"So whats the point, then?" You asked. "When I get reborn, I'll just be a blank slate, right? A baby. So all my experiences and everything I did in this life won't matter."
"Not so!" I said. You have within you all the knowledge and experiences of all your past lives. You just don't remember them right now."
I stopped walking and took you by the shoulders. "Your soul is more magnificent, beautiful, and gigantic than you can possibly imagine. A human mind can only contain a tiny fraction of what you are. It's like sticking your finger in a glass of water to see if its hot or cold. You put a tiny part of yourself into the vessel, and when you bring it back out, you've gained all the experiences it had.
"You've been in a human for the last 48 years, so you haven't stretched out yet and felt the rest of your immense consciousness. If we hung out here for long enough, you'd start remembering everything. But theres no point to doing that between each life."
"How many times have I been reincarnated, then?"
"oh lots. Lots and lots, and into lots of different lives." I Said. "This time around you'll be a Chinese peasant girl in 540AD."
"Wait, what?" You stammered. "You're sending me back in time?"
"well, I guess technically. Time, as you know it, only exists in your universe. Things are different where I come from."
"Where you come from?" You said.
"Oh sure," I explained. "I come from somewhere. Somewhere else. And there are others like me. I know you'll want to know what its like there, but honestly you wouldnt understand."
"Oh," You said, a little let down. "But wait. If I get reincarnated to other places in time, I could have interacted with myself at some point."
"Sure, happens all the time. And with both lives only aware of their own lifespan you don't even know its happening."
"So whats the point of it all?" You ask.
"Seriously?" I asked. "Seriously? You're asking me for the meaning of life? Isn't that a little stereotypical?"
"Well, it's a reasonable question," You persist.
I looked you in the eye. "The meaning of life, the reason I made this while universe, is for you to mature." I said.
"You mean mankind? You want us to mature?" I asked.
"No, just you. I made this whole universe for you. With each new life you grow and mature and become a larger and greater intellect."
"Just me? What about everyone else?
"There is no one else," I said. "In this universe, there's just you and me."
You stared blankly at me. "But all the people on earth..."
"All you. Different incarnations of you."
"Wait. I'm everyone!?"
"Now you're getting it," I said, with a congratulatory slap on the back.
"I'm every human being who ever lived?"
"Or who will ever live, yes." I add.
"I'm Abraham Lincoln?"
"And you're John Wilkes Booth, too," I added.
"I'm Hitler?" You said, appaled.
"And you're the millions he killed."
"I'm Jesus?"
"And you're everyone who followed him," I added.
You fell silent.
"Every time you victimized someone," I said, "you were victimizing yourself. Every act of kindness you've done, you've done to yourself. Every happy and sad moment ever experienced by any human was, or will be, experienced by you."
You thought for a long time.
"Why? You asked me. "Why do all this?"
"because someday, you will become like me. Because thats what you are. You're one of my kind. You're my child."
"Whoa," You say, incredulous. "You mean I'm God?"
"No. Not yet. You're a fetus. You're still growing. Once you've lived every human life throughout all time, you will have grown up enough to be born."
"So the whole universe," You said. "It's just.."
"An egg," I answered. "Now It's time for you to move on to your next life."
And I sent you on your way
I am with astor on this.
+1 meat grinder, thanks for sharing :) tears of joy, must be moving that high vibrational energy around, really thanks, i love you man
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Why do you think history repeats itself so often?
Because the common denominator in all historical periods is humans. The real question would be why would you assume that history wouldn't "repeat itself so often," considering its the same species, adapting to the same environment, with the only difference being time and some cultural details/etc.
I would assume that history wouldn't repeat itself so often as there are records of the past and how it went wrong, from which people should learn.
There haven't always been records, and often the circumstances are slightly different so people's egos get in the way. Everyone thinks they are smarter than those from the past, which, you can see why as technology advances, but often they fall to the same fate. Just, my thoughts.
The problem is that less than 1% of the population is actually pushing humanity forward in any area and the rest are leeching onto the successes of others.
Very true, been meaning to ask you even though it might be pretty embarassing for me, who is your avatar of?
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Waste not your time wish thinking or wailing and bleating to an empty sky. It is due to the great, arrogant solipsism of man that we think of ourselves so superior to our fellow primates and other species. Do you want to know how much evidence we have to back up our 'faith' in a life after death....precisely none. It is simply wish thinking and arrogance in the highest degree. We should grow up and relieve ourselves of the strenuous burden of belief in an intervening supernatural deity when there is not a shred of evidence to back up our childish beliefs.
There...hope that settles it.
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That really is an interesting thread. Also the story reads very nice, too, Only one thing that bothers me is, that it is still founded upon faith(but what existance would be possible without belief?). Nevertheless i would like to state Carl Sagan, who implies we are all made of stardust. By scientific means, even though we are all very very individual, the source is the same for all. Atoms we were, atoms we are, and atoms we will be (or molecules ;)). I'd like to think very abstract about "life after death" and have you ever considered, what would be, if the point of view is simply changed. Sure, we all define life as what actually is and death as an opposite - in this dimension. Easily said, we could all be dead by now(accordingly to some kind of "counterdefinition") and will go back to life afterwards, back to the bigger picture...to the all surrounding intelligence(more like entity), the constantly but slowly moving (at least from our scale) universe. the question which will always be bothering, where is the beginning, was there a beginning, will there be an end? Philosophically seen, yes and/or no can't exist at the same time, but here they do ;) Our known chaotic kosmos is like a möbius strip for me...we will always be running on the one side of it, being unable to determine what is on the "flipside", as long we are "compressed" in the form of fellow human beings. We think, therefore we are! But what is it with all the entities we think about, everything around us, pure energy, modelled by our brains into a subconscious form...translated to our simple belief. It is like dividing by zero or adding/multiplying infinity times infinity. Every single one of us, a universe of its own. At scale even lower than nano-, pico- , femtometers, and even beyond that, we maybe would find the same we see, as we turn our heads up to the sky. Or the other way round :) Nuff' said ^^
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Waste not your time wish thinking or wailing and bleating to an empty sky. It is due to the great, arrogant solipsism of man that we think of ourselves so superior to our fellow primates and other species. Do you want to know how much evidence we have to back up our 'faith' in a life after death....precisely none. It is simply wish thinking and arrogance in the highest degree. We should grow up and relieve ourselves of the strenuous burden of belief in an intervening supernatural deity when there is not a shred of evidence to back up our childish beliefs.
There...hope that settles it.
Haha, if only that could settle it. +1, my favorite quote, that goes along with that, from Vladimir Nabokov,
"The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is headed for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour)."
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Very true, been meaning to ask you even though it might be pretty embarassing for me, who is your avatar of?
King Nebuchadnezzar II, the King of the Neo-Babylonion Empire. I am a fan of his beard and look of wisdom (his name also means "god of wisdom") in this sketching.
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Very true, been meaning to ask you even though it might be pretty embarassing for me, who is your avatar of?
King Nebuchadnezzar II, the King of the Neo-Babylonion Empire. I am a fan of his beard and look of wisdom (his name also means "god of wisdom") in this sketching.
Haha, it's a pretty awesome beard. Any cool drug reasons for choosing it? Or, just because he looks cool?
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Ah ... brilliant autodidact bent on reinventing the wheel and more in your lifetime now are you? ;) I should've guessed.
You make it sound as though it's arrogance that drives me, when really it's... necessity I suppose. It isn't that I think I'm smarter than everyone else who's ever lived or even that I just want to do it myself all alone: it's that I can't stop thinking about this shit. Not that I really want to, mind you... it's extremely difficult to find relevant literature though. I also don't read as much as I should. Too much time spent responding to brilliant shadows on illicit forums, perhaps ;)
So to get back to the matter at hand, this "qualia" thing: I don't think that there is the stark separation that you assume there is between the experience and the comprehension of it (you along with most everybody else in the world). I believe that they are fundamentally the same: that you cannot have one without the other. That experiencing the "qualia" of seeing a color is an intrinsic part of understanding what a color is. I've slowly come to the conclusion over the past several years that comprehension and understanding are not the things that people think they are -- that to understand a thing, we really only need to have a mental representation that we can somehow relate to other mental representations. That these representations and neuronal structures are formed as we age and develop, and as we acquire more of them and the structures and connections between them (abstractly speaking, not physical connections) become more complex and richer, our awareness and our understanding of each grows. There is no understanding of a color without the experience of a color -- I don't think that's a meaningful concept at all, and there's nothing that really needs to be resolved about it.
Very perceptive, there's no doubt something to your description of neural connections and pattern recognition which I read a paper in support of this a while ago I'll have to try and find. But I would dispute your blurring of the distinction between experience and comprehension because there does seem to be a subtle difference beween those two words. If tomorrow I had a stroke and suffered achromatopsia which erased my ability to perceive color, it doesn't mean I don't comprehend the colors when in fact I have firsthand experiential knowledge of it since I still have the mental representation of it in memory. The Sensation of seeing a color is the process that detects stimuli whereas comprehension/cognition is the process of knowing it. Sensations are obviously a source of knowledge in the world, but the sensation itself we have when we see a color is just that patch of color, and sensing a patch of colour is not knowledge itself and therefore IMO we cannot say that pure sensation is cognitive. Until it's processed in relation to things that are correlated with it and giving rise to images and memories after the sensation of the color is faded it can be a source for knowledge.
But I don't see how pure sensation can be cognitive until its processed mentally as a subject in relation to you in the act of seeing it, at which point it becomes a source for knowledge.
Hmm... I think I see what you're getting at... I'm not sure how to respond to that. Perhaps I'm wrong; it's rare, but I have seen it happen on occasion, hah...
I'm not sure what you mean by the "you can't tell that it's been removed". I can definitely tell when I'm spun out from being up for 3 days. My mind is fuckin sludge and my brain is oatmeal. ;D I also remember reading an article written by someone that had had a frontal lobotomy in the sixties where he described after the op that he definitely noticed something where something was missing even if he couldn't place what. I think it would be hard not to tell that some form of sensation, perception, or cognition was no longer available to you that you previously enjoyed.
Of course I'm not saying that the brain isn't imperative to our functional operation in the physical world. Unquestionably there's no way to empirically deny it. Just that consciousness seems to demand a greater explanation than reductionist materialism.
Maybe I stated it too strongly -- you're describing exactly what I'm talking about, I think. Noticing that something's missing. Missing as opposed to what...? A memory? A comparison to prior experiences? A fleeting, vague sense that there was at one point "something more?" That's what I'm saying seems to me to be the result of introspective comparison. Judging current performance and subjective awareness by comparing it to prior states. But you can't actually say "the portion of my brain that tweaking for 3 days has impaired is my ventral striatum," or some gibberish (anatomy was never my strong suit). Unless of course you determine that by deduction, obviously. What I'm saying is that it's only by contrasting possibilities that we seem to have a gauge of our performance, not actual awareness of it beyond our comparisons.
Which in my mind is why the lobotomy fellow felt that were was "something missing," but had no clue what. He couldn't really put his finger on it, just a vague comparison that he had something then that he doesn't now (or didn't later -- whatever).
Actually, I generally refrain from stating it because I find it's an almost impossibly unacceptable position for most people -- and there are much more important things to convince people of, and you must always choose your battles carefully and at the right time -- but yes. That is actually what I'm saying. That we don't deserve credit for our successes nor punishment for our evils. That we're slaves to our biology, and that we ultimately have no more free will than a rain drop falling from the sky. We simply twist and morph endlessly as we fall through the molecules in the air on our way to death, unable to do anything at all to change what course we take.
I don't believe we do change our brain's state. I think we're passive observers who think we do. But why wouldn't we think that? We arise from the biology. Assuming consciousness is a property inherent to the physiological basis of the human brain, it seems quite natural that we'd feel we're in control. A little strange and requiring some loosening of the concept of what the experience of "thinking we're exercising free will," truly is -- but still not entirely unexpected. Mistaken, but quite naturally so.
Interesting. So how do you square your deterministic beliefs with quantum indeterminancy, or more to the point, with the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in which the more precisely the position of some particle is determined, the less precisely its momentum can be known, and vice versa? Einstein always thought of the uncertainty principle as a stopgap measure "God does not roll dice" but since his death its been discovered that it's not just the observer effect of QM but universal to everything (or everything with a wave like system, which from what we know from Einstein-Broglie that matter also is a wave, means pretty much everything) on a quantum level, making uncertainty a fundamental property of quantum systems and integral to our understanding of modern chemistry.
I guess what I'm getting at is that believing in determinism seems to me to require a leap of blind faith at odds not only with our current understanding of modern physics and chemistry but also neurophysiology and psychology including experimental evidence. Experiments, Wheeler and Zeilinger come to mind, have shown that we have a participatory role in the universe as an observer and we can indeed change the future depending on how we measure an experiment. Generally the future remains undetermined unless its been measured/observed.
I'm not saying this as a necessary advocate of "free will", a philosophically nebulous term in itself with many disagreements on what it means, but I don't see why the law of the excluded middle should apply here that requires an either or proposition; just that determinism itself seems inherently flawed.
I'm not saying I'm a strict determinist. That's ludicrous in the face of modern physics. I'm saying that quantum indeterminacy does not change the implications of determinism in general. So we'll never know where a particle is until it's actually there in the moment -- it's still going to deterministically influence things once it's actually there. ... that's a terrible way of putting it... nothing else is coming to mind though. I'm just saying I don't believe it's possible for us to "will" the world into obeying our thoughts through sheer discipline or something, and if my mind is indeed caused by my physiology, and I cannot simply "will" my physiology to change... I must therefore be a complete slave to my physiology no matter what my perception of it is. I certainly think I'm pressing these keys right now, but logically it must be that I'm not willfully doing it -- it just feels that way. That's all I was getting at.
I guess what I was trying to say is that there are correlative brain states to every thought we have. These brain states consist of electro-chemical activity. It's not just one neuron responsible for consciousness let alone a thought, but neurons strung together through an action potential. The near consensus among neural scientists is that you need an entire neural network of activity to have anything resembling a thought. You described one aspect in your description of what can happen to neurons when we don't get enough sleep and stay up for days ... they can fail; but of course it's more than just that. As a signal passes through the synapses it becomes vulnerable to amplication, distortion, elimination, colorization, etc by other chemicals introduced into the larger system by trauma, DRUGS, fatigue, DRUGS, excitation, DRUGS, design, DRUGS, etc. :o This is how we understand the brain and how it functions.
So when someone is resuscitated after having no measurable brain activity for up to an hour or two, how is it possible that they have a NDE when to even imagine it unconsciously would require some measurable electro-chemical brain activity? There would be no action potentials or neurotransmissions connecting neural nets to be subject to distortion in the first place. All the while subjects repoting NDEs that underwent clinical death report exceptional lucidity in their memory of it.
Based on the materialist empirical understanding of how the brain functions this is just not possible. This would mean that everyone that had a NDE would have be to be bullshitting through their teeth the moment they're revived which I think is highly implausible. These aren't anecdotes of NDEs from superstitious folk of western Zaire, but western societies and in some cases atheists with no expectations or beliefs in anything of that sort.
Maybe the problem is you aren't allowing enough distortion between what we perceive and what is...? I think it's perfectly believable that the brain, when suffering catastrophic damage and probably unimaginable levels of fear, would end up with an extremely flawed perception of what actually happened. I'm saying I believe it's entirely possible that whatever happens while the brain dies could be interpreted at a later time as a near death experience, when really, there was nothing that happened at all.
I'm saying I don't believe in hour long near death experiences, only that people can remember them happening when they didn't. The human memory is terribly malleable; that seems a lot more likely to me than the brain being active while there's no activity within it.
Another example is when people have irreversible dementia or severe mental illness that experience sudden lucidity before they die. They recognize family members, lose delusions, and talk coherently right before they die. Based on our understanding of their damaged brain physiology this wouldn't be possible. Not to say this ALWAYS happens with people that are irreversibly brain damaged, but are isolated incidents.
Unless this happens every single time or a statistically significant portion of times, I don't think it's evidence of anything but them having gotten lucky and their brain having a "good 5 minutes," before death. I don't really know, I've never heard of this phenomenon.
Again, I have absolutely no clue how our brains cause consciousness. But the alternative is that consciousness is somehow tied to our brain. Because if our brain goes away, people sure seem to go away along with it -- which means even if our brain *isn't* just our biology, then it's something that the physical matter of the world has absolute power over. Which makes it, in turn, nothing more than matter that's very real and very influenced by other matter. Unless of course you're saying it's only influenced one-way, and our bodies simply die when our brains do.
Again, that violates the conservation of energy. Which could be possible and which I'm willing to allow for the possibility of, but you need some pretty serious evidence to back up a claim of the only phenomenon in the known universe that creates or destroys energy.
I don't really have an answer about the inherent contradiction between dualism and conservation of energy as I don't find any of the present arguments that attempt a refutation particularly compelling. I can only offer that the mind does have an affect on the body so what might appear an ostensible violation in appearance is not real. If we do things for reasons, our beliefs and desires cause some of our actions. And if this is all physical matter I can only refer back to how matter, regardless of its organization, can produce conscious thoughts, feelings and perceptions which materialism can't explain. :)
No, certainly doesn't explain it in our current understanding of it. But what exactly does explain it? Nothing that I'm aware of, personally.
I will admit I'm not big into duelism either as it seems to be riddled with just as many issues if not more as material monism. The answer is very likely somewhere in between OR better yet I'm hopeful that a new Big Idea will come along that creates a new paradigm altogether and this problem can be buried once and for all. ;)
And with regards to your "consciousness is somehow tied to our brain", well isn't it? Since how we direct our attention can directly affect our neurochemistry doesn't that show that our brains can be directly affected by our consciousness?
Sorry, I was trying to lead you along a line of thought that supports my position. Obviously I did a poor job. What I'm saying is that if whatever our consciousness is composed of is influenced by physical matter, then it seems to be very much the same as physical matter -- which means the soul is either not influenced by the physical world *at all*, and therefore cannot possibly have anything to do with our consciousness (since if the brain dies, we seem to -- so it's influenced by matter), or it's just a funny kind of matter that isn't really "spiritual" or "metaphysical" in nature at all. That was my point.
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Very true, been meaning to ask you even though it might be pretty embarassing for me, who is your avatar of?
King Nebuchadnezzar II, the King of the Neo-Babylonion Empire. I am a fan of his beard and look of wisdom (his name also means "god of wisdom") in this sketching.
Haha, it's a pretty awesome beard. Any cool drug reasons for choosing it? Or, just because he looks cool?
Well, it was originally just because I liked the look, but I after having it for a while I met him after smoking DMT and that was that.
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You make it sound as though it's arrogance that drives me, when really it's... necessity I suppose. It isn't that I think I'm smarter than everyone else who's ever lived or even that I just want to do it myself all alone: it's that I can't stop thinking about this shit. Not that I really want to, mind you... it's extremely difficult to find relevant literature though. I also don't read as much as I should. Too much time spent responding to brilliant shadows on illicit forums, perhaps ;)
Ok. Sorry for the lag. I meant that only as a compliment but obviously I did a shitty job ensuring it appeared confined to one. Impressive you arrived at the hard problem of consciousness thinking through the reasoning of reductionist materialism on your own, seeing as how that's the irresolvable issue the field of philosophy arrived at too when confronting material monist tangent of the mind-body problem. That's all I meant to say there. :) BUt not only has the problem baffled philosophers but of the top 125 open questions posed by the top peer reviewed academic journal in the world: Science, the mind-body problem ranked the second most troubling to scientists. (incidentally "what is the universe made of?" ranked first) Science posed the question as what is the biological basis of consciousness?
So there are tons of schools of thought resulting from tangents of materialism. But philosophy only takes you to the conceptual realm. It's from there that we expect scientists to make contributions in the empirical realm. Scientists have produced some theories of consciousness over the last 30 years that I've been reading through:
Let's see Crick and Koch proposed certain 35-75 Hz neural oscillations in cerebral cortex are the biological basis of consciousness and the claustrum may be responsible for the unified nature of conscious experience.
Edelman and Tononi proposed whatever the fuck this is supposed to mean: “a group of neurons can contribute directly to conscious experience only if it is part of a distributed functional cluster that, through reentrant interactions in the thalamocortical system, achieves high integration in hundreds of milliseconds.”
Baars proposed consciousness arises from the contents of a global workspace, a sort of blackboard by which various unconscious processors communicate information to the rest of the system.
Hameroff and Penrose proposed that quantum coherence and quantum-gravity-induced collapses of wave functions are essential for consciousness. Fascinating theory by the way.
Stapp proposed that the brain evolves a superposition of action templates, and the collapse of this superposition gives rise to conscious experience.
But these theories are total distractions because they don't even address the question, the essence of qualia. How does a cluster of red sensing neurons give rise to the subjective feel of redness for instance? If scientists can't even answer this fundamental question then how do they hope to answer how the brain gives rise to the entire stream of consciousness?
Now get this, because scientists are in the embarrassing position of having to explain how in studying consciousness why they can't seem to come up with a scientific theory of consciousness they've actually come up with responses to this question of which there are 3 competing responses (nicknames mine):
1) The Copout response (Pinker,McGinn): Although consciousness arises naturally from brain activity, humans lack the cognitive capacity required to formulate a theory. And actually I gotta share this quote with you since it hilariously mimics how you answered this question. When Pinker was asked how consciousness arises from materialist systems he says:
"Beats the heck out of me. I have some prejudices, but no idea of
how to begin to look for a defensible answer. And neither does
anyone else. The computational theory of mind offers no insight;
neither does any finding in neuroscience, once you clear up the usual
confusion of sentience with access and self-knowledge."
2) The "work hard and we'll succeed" response: We must keep experimenting until we find the empirical fact that leads to a theoretical breakthrough. This seems to be the least worst and most widely adopted scientist response.
3) The "Deny there was ever a question" response (Churchland, Dennett, Chomsky): There is no fucking mind-body problem because there is no mind to reduce to body and no body to which mind can be reduced.
So I don't know about you but I find the ways the scientific community has reacted in its response to why they can't answer the hard problem of consciousness rather entertaining even while woefully inadequate. ;)
Maybe I stated it too strongly -- you're describing exactly what I'm talking about, I think. Noticing that something's missing. Missing as opposed to what...? A memory? A comparison to prior experiences? A fleeting, vague sense that there was at one point "something more?" That's what I'm saying seems to me to be the result of introspective comparison. Judging current performance and subjective awareness by comparing it to prior states. But you can't actually say "the portion of my brain that tweaking for 3 days has impaired is my ventral striatum," or some gibberish (anatomy was never my strong suit). Unless of course you determine that by deduction, obviously. What I'm saying is that it's only by contrasting possibilities that we seem to have a gauge of our performance, not actual awareness of it beyond our comparisons.
Ok. You're right, I think we're saying the same thing here.
I'm not saying I'm a strict determinist. That's ludicrous in the face of modern physics. I'm saying that quantum indeterminacy does not change the implications of determinism in general. So we'll never know where a particle is until it's actually there in the moment -- it's still going to deterministically influence things once it's actually there. ... that's a terrible way of putting it... nothing else is coming to mind though. I'm just saying I don't believe it's possible for us to "will" the world into obeying our thoughts through sheer discipline or something, and if my mind is indeed caused by my physiology, and I cannot simply "will" my physiology to change... I must therefore be a complete slave to my physiology no matter what my perception of it is. I certainly think I'm pressing these keys right now, but logically it must be that I'm not willfully doing it -- it just feels that way. That's all I was getting at.
Hm. I think you'll have to explain that one for me. To me, determinism seems very rigid and it's hard for me to see how one might not be a 'strict' determinist yet still call themselves a determinist. The question of determinism seems to me to boil down to whether life on earth was predetermined at the the moment of big bang or not. Back when the physical universe was perceived as governed strictly by Newtonian physics the rationale of determism had a very seductive appeal. But these days its more appropriately a question left to quantum physics. Until we find the way to measure the velocity and position of a particle at the same time then QM shows there's randomness involved in our world coming into its state of being and our existence. How does your determinism fit within this paragon or does it?
Maybe the problem is you aren't allowing enough distortion between what we perceive and what is...? I think it's perfectly believable that the brain, when suffering catastrophic damage and probably unimaginable levels of fear, would end up with an extremely flawed perception of what actually happened. I'm saying I believe it's entirely possible that whatever happens while the brain dies could be interpreted at a later time as a near death experience, when really, there was nothing that happened at all.
I guess I wasn't clear as to what I've been trying to say. What I was trying to point out is, how is it that these distortions that are supposed to occur to the electro-chemical connections between neurons that goes on that neural scientists think is necessary for us to even have thoughts, how do these distortions happen to these neural connections when there are no electro-chemical connections detected going on in the brain at all?
I'm saying I don't believe in hour long near death experiences, only that people can remember them happening when they didn't. The human memory is terribly malleable; that seems a lot more likely to me than the brain being active while there's no activity within it.
I did a poor job of explaining what I meant. Let me try again. When I spoke of the hour long NDE I wasn't speaking from the subject's conception of time. I'm talking about empirical reality where subjects can be clinically dead for hours. How is it that a subject can be clinically dead for hours with no measurable brain activity, be revived, and have a NDE when in order to imagine anything they would need to have electro-chemical connections going on in the brain? That's fundamentally what I find baffling before even getting into whether what they saw was real or hallucinatory fiction. In order to 'see' anything they had to have measurable brain activity and they didn't.
But since I'm on the subject, there are famous cases of NDEs where the subject was clinically dead for hours that were able to recollect exactly what happened and it was independently corroborated by medical staff on hand:
http://www.salon.com/2012/04/21/near_death_explained/
I'm a natural skeptic and like I was saying before I have a hard time accepting anecdotal evidence as a substitute to a clinical setting with rigorous methodology to provide some empirical reproduction in a controlled environment. But that article does bring up some compelling questions from famous and well documented cases that challenge the reductionist materialist worldview. It's also true that these aren't the sort of events you could manufacture in a clincal setting and easily reproducible for study. You can't go around bringing people to clinical death and reviving them to see if they have a NDE and whether they can corroborate what went on, so you sometimes have to take anecdotal evidence as it comes and judge each case by its merits and problems.
Another example is when people have irreversible dementia or severe mental illness that experience sudden lucidity before they die. They recognize family members, lose delusions, and talk coherently right before they die. Based on our understanding of their damaged brain physiology this wouldn't be possible. Not to say this ALWAYS happens with people that are irreversibly brain damaged, but are isolated incidents.
Unless this happens every single time or a statistically significant portion of times, I don't think it's evidence of anything but them having gotten lucky and their brain having a "good 5 minutes," before death. I don't really know, I've never heard of this phenomenon.
I agree that by itself it seems like nothing more than an anomaly even if inexplicable by medical science at this time. But added as another piece of unexplained phenomena that often occurs with those close to death, like this article on lucid dreaming days or weeks before dying it starts becoming more interesting:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2005/07/24/a-dream-before-dying.html
Bulkeley's accounts as a hospice caregiver are hardly unique, as this phenomenon is very common among the profession spanning cultures and have been noted throughout history.
Sorry, I was trying to lead you along a line of thought that supports my position. Obviously I did a poor job. What I'm saying is that if whatever our consciousness is composed of is influenced by physical matter, then it seems to be very much the same as physical matter -- which means the soul is either not influenced by the physical world *at all*, and therefore cannot possibly have anything to do with our consciousness (since if the brain dies, we seem to -- so it's influenced by matter), or it's just a funny kind of matter that isn't really "spiritual" or "metaphysical" in nature at all. That was my point.
I think I see what you're saying here. You're coming from the perspective of a strict monist.
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I always think of this...
You were on your way home when you died.
It was a car accident. Nothing particularly remarkable, but fatal nonetheless. You left behind a wife and 2 children. It was a painless death. the EMTs tried their best to save you, but to no avail. Your body was so utterly shattered you were better off, trust me.
And thats where you met me.
"What... what happened?" You Asked. "Where am i?"
"You died," I Said, Matter of factly. No point in mincing words.
"There was a... a truck and it was skidding..."
"Yup," I said.
"I... I died?"
"Yup. But dont feel bad about it. Everyone dies," I said
You looked around. There was nothingness. Just you and me. "What is this place?" You asked. "Is this the afterlife?"
"More or less," I said.
"Are you God?" You asked.
"Yup," I replied. "I'm God."
"My kids.. My wife," You said.
"What about them?"
"Will they be alright?"
"Thats what I like to see," I said. "You just died and your main concern is for your family. Thats good stuff right there."
You looked at me with fascination. To you, I didn't look like God. I just looked like some man. Or possibly a woman. Some vague authority figure, maybe. More of a grammar school teacher.
"Don't worry," I said. "They'll be fine. Your kids will remember you as perfect in every way. They didn't have time to grow contempt for you. Your wife will cry on the outside, but will secretly be relieved. To be fair, your marriage was falling apart. If its any consolation, she'll feel guilty for feeling relieved.
"oh," you said. "So what happens now? Do I go to heaven or hell or something?"
"Neither," I said. "You'll be reincarnated."
"Ah," you said. "So the Hindu's were right."
"All religions are right in their own way," I said. "Walk with me."
You followed along as we strode through the void. "Where are we going?"
"Nowhere in particular," I said. "Its just nice to walk while we talk."
"So whats the point, then?" You asked. "When I get reborn, I'll just be a blank slate, right? A baby. So all my experiences and everything I did in this life won't matter."
"Not so!" I said. You have within you all the knowledge and experiences of all your past lives. You just don't remember them right now."
I stopped walking and took you by the shoulders. "Your soul is more magnificent, beautiful, and gigantic than you can possibly imagine. A human mind can only contain a tiny fraction of what you are. It's like sticking your finger in a glass of water to see if its hot or cold. You put a tiny part of yourself into the vessel, and when you bring it back out, you've gained all the experiences it had.
"You've been in a human for the last 48 years, so you haven't stretched out yet and felt the rest of your immense consciousness. If we hung out here for long enough, you'd start remembering everything. But theres no point to doing that between each life."
"How many times have I been reincarnated, then?"
"oh lots. Lots and lots, and into lots of different lives." I Said. "This time around you'll be a Chinese peasant girl in 540AD."
"Wait, what?" You stammered. "You're sending me back in time?"
"well, I guess technically. Time, as you know it, only exists in your universe. Things are different where I come from."
"Where you come from?" You said.
"Oh sure," I explained. "I come from somewhere. Somewhere else. And there are others like me. I know you'll want to know what its like there, but honestly you wouldnt understand."
"Oh," You said, a little let down. "But wait. If I get reincarnated to other places in time, I could have interacted with myself at some point."
"Sure, happens all the time. And with both lives only aware of their own lifespan you don't even know its happening."
"So whats the point of it all?" You ask.
"Seriously?" I asked. "Seriously? You're asking me for the meaning of life? Isn't that a little stereotypical?"
"Well, it's a reasonable question," You persist.
I looked you in the eye. "The meaning of life, the reason I made this while universe, is for you to mature." I said.
"You mean mankind? You want us to mature?" I asked.
"No, just you. I made this whole universe for you. With each new life you grow and mature and become a larger and greater intellect."
"Just me? What about everyone else?
"There is no one else," I said. "In this universe, there's just you and me."
You stared blankly at me. "But all the people on earth..."
"All you. Different incarnations of you."
"Wait. I'm everyone!?"
"Now you're getting it," I said, with a congratulatory slap on the back.
"I'm every human being who ever lived?"
"Or who will ever live, yes." I add.
"I'm Abraham Lincoln?"
"And you're John Wilkes Booth, too," I added.
"I'm Hitler?" You said, appaled.
"And you're the millions he killed."
"I'm Jesus?"
"And you're everyone who followed him," I added.
You fell silent.
"Every time you victimized someone," I said, "you were victimizing yourself. Every act of kindness you've done, you've done to yourself. Every happy and sad moment ever experienced by any human was, or will be, experienced by you."
You thought for a long time.
"Why? You asked me. "Why do all this?"
"because someday, you will become like me. Because thats what you are. You're one of my kind. You're my child."
"Whoa," You say, incredulous. "You mean I'm God?"
"No. Not yet. You're a fetus. You're still growing. Once you've lived every human life throughout all time, you will have grown up enough to be born."
"So the whole universe," You said. "It's just.."
"An egg," I answered. "Now It's time for you to move on to your next life."
And I sent you on your way
I am with astor on this.
I admit that I haven't read the rest of the thread yet, so my apologies if someone already addressed what I'm about to say. I have read this story before, and the more and more I think about it, the more terrified I am of the possibility that it is true. After first reading this story, your initial reaction is "Wow, that's beautiful." But holy shit it is frightening, isn't it? Let me tell you something: You do not want to live the lives of every human being that ever existed. Because 99.99% of every life that ever lived has been shitty and difficult, going back about 200,000 years based on anatomy, and 50,000 based on behavior. Let's assume the best case scenario: Human lives are counted as starting 50,000 years ago when they began exhibiting behavioral modernity. You now have to live at least 50,000 years of human lives, most of them filled with pain and misery. And it's not 50,000 years of course, because each year is actually multiplied by the population at that time. That length of time is incomprehensible. This scenario also assumes two things: First, the human race must eventually die out, otherwise you would never "mature" because you could never live every life ever lived if they went on forever. Second, and even more terrifying, there is no free will. You already know what happened in the past, and it's not like you can change it. At one point you will be Jesus, and nothing you do will stop men from driving nails into your hands and leaving you to slowly decompose until you die. Think of all the pain in the history of mankind. I believe that it far outweighs the happiness and joy, especially before civilizations even existed yet. So while I appreciate the thought of this story, and I always do live my life as if everyone is exactly like me and should be treated as such, I hope to god that it is not the truth of the afterlife. This story to me sounds like a perfect description of Hell: an eternity of suffering, with some happiness thrown in to remind you that it is indeed suffering.
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Now that I've actually read through the thread, I can make a proper response to the question. I'm going to preface this by saying that I don't intend to offend anyone personally, or to just knock down anyone's views. This is been quite an interesting read, and each post made me think really hard. Great thread.
Anyways, I am a bit troubled to see some people claiming that they know the afterlife is real because of experiences they have had with drugs. We know that drugs are mind-altering substances. In no way do your experiences on them represent any kind of reality. That is the point of some drugs, to escape reality. So if you're making reality-based judgments after taking a reality-altering substance, you are obviously going to come to some poor conclusions. Once after taking 350 mics of LSD, I saw a friend of mine step out of my closet and say hello, even though that friend wasn't anywhere near my room. I don't take this to mean that my friend is secretly living in my closet, it means that the LSD distorted what was happening and made me hallucinate. If we're going to talk about what happens after death, we should talk about what we know based on conscious reality. This is naturally going to be hard to do, because death is dealing with a reality in which consciousness may no longer exist. So how can we talk about it given that we can't possibly know what it is like? Well, we can talk about other dimensions even without knowing what they are like because we can make some logical deductions based on reasoning and observation. The same goes for talking about an "afterlife" if one even exists. We can't possibly say for sure what will happen, we will have to remain agnostic, but we can at least discuss it.
So as for my personal feelings... I admit that I am really conflicted about this whole issue. The skeptical side of me says that death is the end of consciousness. Our brain contains our identity, so how can our identity continue after the brain dies? Ellis D brought up chimpanzees, and this is a great point. Surely chimpanzees have identities as well, although they may not be as complex and clearly defined as humans. So do you believe that chimpanzees also have an afterlife? Is it the same as humans? And if so, at what point in lower mental complexity does an animal/living organism lose the ability to experience an afterlife? Spiders don't really have identities at all. They barely even have consciousnesses. They can't experience pain. They are almost like machines which react to a given stimulus without thought or reflection. Surely they don't have an afterlife. But where along the line of complexity does one acquire this experience? It's a difficult question that you kind of have to answer if you want to claim that consciousness continues after death. Christianity contends that humans are special because we have souls, but most people that have posted here are not Christian, so your philosophy requires its own solution to this problem.
But that's just my skeptical side. There is another part of me that wonders about certain things... I will warn you that the following is pure conjecture, and I don't claim to have any scientific evidence to back it up. I have just pieced this together based on my own thoughts about the nature of consciousness and dimensionality.
You can imagine the development of the consciousness as a maturation through the different dimensions. It begins before conception even happens, kind of. This is the first dimension. There isn't any actual consciousness yet because it is just a straight line, it has no depth or even length. But it is there ready to exist, as long as a sperm and egg meet. This is the most difficult dimension to imagine. I'm not saying that there is a consciousness floating around waiting to attach itself to a sperm and egg. I mean that the individual sperm and egg before they meet are that consciousness. This is why it's the first dimension, there is no connection, as in the first dimension there is no connection of points, just a single point.
Next is the second dimension. This happens after the sperm and the egg meet. Now, the consciousness actually begins to develop. It is still not really there yet because no one would say that a developing fetus is conscious, but the connection has happened. You can now think of it in terms of the second dimension, where two separate points have lines that meet. The sperm and the egg meet, and now the consciousness exists as a sort of second dimensional object, at least that's how I imagine it.
Next of course is the dimension that we all know and love, the third dimension. The consciousness has developed through the second dimension as the fetus has developed, and at some hard to determine point, the consciousness is fully developed as a third dimensional thing. It also exists in a third dimensional body, and this is where get all our conscious experiences from. But as the consciousness had to develop through the first and second dimensions, so it has to develop through the third dimension. This happens while you are an infant. Your brain grows, and with it your consciousness. This is why you have few, if any, memories of yourself as an infant. Your consciousness wasn't fully developed enough yet to record the world around you, and store those observations for later. Of course as you grow, your memories and thought processes grow stronger and stronger. You gain the ability to speak, and do complex processes like math, and eventually you gain the ability to reflect. You know that voice inside your head that sometimes talks when you're alone, or zoning out from boredom? Even that voice has to develop at some point, since I don't believe infants have this voice. In fact, when I think of my earliest memories, I don't think of myself as thinking about anything in particular. I just am, and all my thoughts are about what's happening. I can't pinpoint exactly when that voice develops, but it does. And when you grow into adulthood, your consciousness does not stop developing. They say that every 5 years approximately, you are almost a completely different person than you were, just based on your refined beliefs and opinions and attitudes. This goes on for some time. You never stop developing as a person, and our concept of what makes a person is fully dependent on consciousness. So the fact is that as you age, your consciousness is evolving.
Now let me talk a bit about the fourth dimension. The fourth dimension, in case you don't know, is time. Whatever dimension some given creature exists in, that creature can feel the presence and passage of the dimension above it. So if you were a second-dimensional conscious being, you would feel the passage of depth all around you, even as you only saw things as length and width. This is impossible to conceive of, but it's true. Just as we feel the passage of time above us. Our consciousness feels the passage of time, and it develops with the passage of time. So I can't help but wonder if, just as the consciousness went from the first to the second dimension, and from the second to the third, maybe it then continues on to develop into the fourth. This afterlife wouldn't be a Heaven or a Hell. In the fourth dimension, our consciousnesses would likely forget everything that happened in the third dimension, just as we don't think about what our consciousnesses were like prior to birth. What we would experience is difficult to comprehend, but I think you can somewhat conceive of it. We would be able to observe any point in time, because now we are able to be part of that time line rather than just feel its presence. We can't alter the time line, we can just observe it at any given point, just as we are able to observe depth at any given point if we look at an object from different angles. As fourth dimensional consciousnesses, we would also be twisting and turning through the fifth dimension, which is the dimension at which you can observe alternate timelines. That last point is inconsequential, I just find it interesting.
So for me, this is the afterlife. Our consciousnesses leave the third dimension and instead persist in the fourth dimension, where again it will develop, until I suppose it would ultimately reach the fifth dimension and onwards. As far as I know, there is a maximum of 10 or 11 dimensions. That maximum dimension is what we conceive of as God. One day, an infinite length of time from now, our consciousnesses will reach the 11th dimension and become one with God if you want to think of it that way. I've always felt that pantheism is the best religious belief out there. It is the idea that the universe as we know it is itself God, and that we should revere nature and it's amazing constructs. I wholeheartedly agree. Our consciousnesses are part with nature, they are one with nature, but we can only experience nature through the third dimension, at least currently. There's something known as the Great Paradox: We have unlimited consciousnesses and imaginations, but we are trapped in the body of a dying animal. But this consciousness is unlimited. You can imagine any possible thing, as long as it conceivably exists in the third dimension. We can even think about what it would be like ("qualia") to be a creature in a higher dimension, but we can't actually imagine that creature. But who's to say that one day we don't ourselves become that creature? In the 4th dimension, we would not have 3-dimensional bodies. We would exist as pure consciousnesses that can look through the vast line of time, and looking throughout the entire history of the universe would help our consciousnesses develop, just as our observations of the third dimension we live in help our current consciousnesses develop. And some long time after that, we could observe different versions of our universe. I'm actually unsure if we would be able to remember our time spent in the third dimension, I don't have an answer for that, and this is all theoretical anyways. I don't claim to know everything, nor can I prove this, it's just a hunch I have.
So in a way, that cool little story posted at the beginning of this thread is somewhat similar to what I believe. The difference is that I don't think we live the life of every human who ever existed; but after death, we will be able to observe every thing that ever existed in the history of the universe at any given point in time, humans included. Maybe there are even 4th dimensional civilizations built by these consciousnesses, who knows. Putting my skeptical nature aside, it seems to me that our consciousnesses are much, much bigger than our human bodies, and even our primitive human mind. Our consciousnesses are capable of anything, but they are distracted by common human needs like eating and using the bathroom and the desire for sex. In the 4th dimension, these distractions wouldn't exist (although other distractions may exist, and I am not able to comment on what these may be, since I do not know). Our consciousness simply leaves our fragile third dimension and moves on into the fourth dimension, where it would keep developing into the 5th and 6th and so on dimensions, until we finally reach that maximum dimension some time in the future. Calling it a time in the future isn't really appropriate because time as we know it wouldn't exist, but you get my point.
Feel free to comment, critique, etc. on this post. I am open to alternate interpretations of the points I have made, or reasons why my points do not work. Discussing this type of thing, in my opinion, is the most liberating activity for the consciousness.
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There's a lot of good thoughts in your post, divinechemicals. I'd like to point that out, because I'm probably going to sound overly negative and I don't mean to really. Just a few things that come to mind.
I believe they say you're a totally different person every 7 years specifically because every cell in your body has divided and is a different one than it was 7 years prior. This doesn't happen all at once of course, but that's the idea I believe. Has nothing to do with opinions or anything like that.
I believe your conception of dimension is... not, the same as the word is generally defined. A sperm or an egg is a four dimensional object. It cannot exist in fewer dimensions (though oddly all the information that would be needed to recreate the object does exist in one less dimension, but that's another matter entirely). So it's kind of... contradictory to say that it exists in two dimensions, or that a consciousness does or something. It's a four dimensional object, so... I don't -- well, you see my point hopefully.
In one dimension whether or not an object could "meet itself," is kind of unanswerable in my mind. It depends entirely on your definition of "meet itself." I mean, a mathematical point is a dimensionless, idealized object. There could be two in the same exact spot (even though by the definition it's dimensionless and has no existence at all, but just ignoring that). Wouldn't that mean they were touching? And making up an object? And therefore... meeting itself, even in one dimension? Well, whatever. Whether this happens or not in our physical world I don't really know. I'm not sure if Planck's distance refers to a limitation of measurement or an actual minimum discrete distance, but it's relevant depending on what the basis of it is (which again I'm not sure of).
Honestly I think words are given too much weight in people's minds. Much more than they really should be. It's the definition of words, not even the words composing the definitions, but rather the concepts underlying the words that matter. When you say "dimension," you don't seem to be talking about the same concept of a "dimension," that I am. You seem to be talking about... well, something different. So there's really no argument to be made against you, since I'm not really sure even how you're conceptualizing "dimension"; it seems like there must be a better way of conveying your meaning than that word though? Because the usual definition of it leads you to contradict yourself, I think.
I'm also not sure if existing in more dimensions than four would have any influence whatsoever on "qualia." Fuck, I can't even decide what "qualia" really is, let alone what would change it... though it's a fascinating point. I'll have to think on that some... interesting how thinking of things under different circumstances can help one refine understanding. Personally I think that suggests some pretty strong evidence for understanding being little more than concepts related to other concepts, but we see what we want to see in the end.
Again, lots of good thoughts in your post. I don't mean to pick on you or anything.
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So there are tons of schools of thought resulting from tangents of materialism. But philosophy only takes you to the conceptual realm. It's from there that we expect scientists to make contributions in the empirical realm. Scientists have produced some theories of consciousness over the last 30 years that I've been reading through:
Let's see Crick and Koch proposed certain 35-75 Hz neural oscillations in cerebral cortex are the biological basis of consciousness and the claustrum may be responsible for the unified nature of conscious experience.
Edelman and Tononi proposed whatever the fuck this is supposed to mean: “a group of neurons can contribute directly to conscious experience only if it is part of a distributed functional cluster that, through reentrant interactions in the thalamocortical system, achieves high integration in hundreds of milliseconds.”
Baars proposed consciousness arises from the contents of a global workspace, a sort of blackboard by which various unconscious processors communicate information to the rest of the system.
Hameroff and Penrose proposed that quantum coherence and quantum-gravity-induced collapses of wave functions are essential for consciousness. Fascinating theory by the way.
Stapp proposed that the brain evolves a superposition of action templates, and the collapse of this superposition gives rise to conscious experience.
But these theories are total distractions because they don't even address the question, the essence of qualia. How does a cluster of red sensing neurons give rise to the subjective feel of redness for instance? If scientists can't even answer this fundamental question then how do they hope to answer how the brain gives rise to the entire stream of consciousness?
Thank you for sharing your knowledge; I'm sure you know how difficult a really spot-on condensing of information can be to find and how valuable it often is. I appreciate your time :) I did actually know about Penrose's theory already, and I agree, it really is a fascinating thought. It's my understanding that the structures he describes exist in all cells though, and that at least as presented it would mean that our entire bodies cause consciousness -- which of course has some bizarre problems that don't fit with reality as we know it.
Now get this, because scientists are in the embarrassing position of having to explain how in studying consciousness why they can't seem to come up with a scientific theory of consciousness they've actually come up with responses to this question of which there are 3 competing responses (nicknames mine):
1) The Copout response (Pinker,McGinn): Although consciousness arises naturally from brain activity, humans lack the cognitive capacity required to formulate a theory. And actually I gotta share this quote with you since it hilariously mimics how you answered this question. When Pinker was asked how consciousness arises from materialist systems he says:
"Beats the heck out of me. I have some prejudices, but no idea of
how to begin to look for a defensible answer. And neither does
anyone else. The computational theory of mind offers no insight;
neither does any finding in neuroscience, once you clear up the usual
confusion of sentience with access and self-knowledge."
2) The "work hard and we'll succeed" response: We must keep experimenting until we find the empirical fact that leads to a theoretical breakthrough. This seems to be the least worst and most widely adopted scientist response.
3) The "Deny there was ever a question" response (Churchland, Dennett, Chomsky): There is no fucking mind-body problem because there is no mind to reduce to body and no body to which mind can be reduced.
So I don't know about you but I find the ways the scientific community has reacted in its response to why they can't answer the hard problem of consciousness rather entertaining even while woefully inadequate. ;)
Yeah, that is amusing. It's nice to be reminiscent of Pinker. I don't know a great deal about him, but I know a little and if I'm going to be reminding people of somebody, he seems like a good person to bring to mind :)
I'm not saying I'm a strict determinist. That's ludicrous in the face of modern physics. I'm saying that quantum indeterminacy does not change the implications of determinism in general. So we'll never know where a particle is until it's actually there in the moment -- it's still going to deterministically influence things once it's actually there. ... that's a terrible way of putting it... nothing else is coming to mind though. I'm just saying I don't believe it's possible for us to "will" the world into obeying our thoughts through sheer discipline or something, and if my mind is indeed caused by my physiology, and I cannot simply "will" my physiology to change... I must therefore be a complete slave to my physiology no matter what my perception of it is. I certainly think I'm pressing these keys right now, but logically it must be that I'm not willfully doing it -- it just feels that way. That's all I was getting at.
Hm. I think you'll have to explain that one for me. To me, determinism seems very rigid and it's hard for me to see how one might not be a 'strict' determinist yet still call themselves a determinist. The question of determinism seems to me to boil down to whether life on earth was predetermined at the the moment of big bang or not. Back when the physical universe was perceived as governed strictly by Newtonian physics the rationale of determism had a very seductive appeal. But these days its more appropriately a question left to quantum physics. Until we find the way to measure the velocity and position of a particle at the same time then QM shows there's randomness involved in our world coming into its state of being and our existence. How does your determinism fit within this paragon or does it?
So here we run into a problem. I may not even be using the word "determinist" correctly. Let me look it up... er, yes, I'm using it correctly after all. I'm not sure what you're asking then, actually? I don't think it boils down to that at all really. I think it boils down to whether or not you have "faith" (pardon the word, lol) in physical laws & behavior as we've come to expect them? I mean... maybe the problem here is that I don't have any classical education in the way of quantum physics? Because I don't see how it has any influence on determinism at all -- I mean so what if this is one possible world out of an innumerable number that could have been... it still obeys physicality, right? So what if the particle went through slit A or slit B or both -- when it happens to be "decided" or "observed" or whatever the fuck happens when you "collapse the wave function," it's still going to determine absolutely what reality is. The fact that it's truly random doesn't change that?
Maybe the problem is you aren't allowing enough distortion between what we perceive and what is...? I think it's perfectly believable that the brain, when suffering catastrophic damage and probably unimaginable levels of fear, would end up with an extremely flawed perception of what actually happened. I'm saying I believe it's entirely possible that whatever happens while the brain dies could be interpreted at a later time as a near death experience, when really, there was nothing that happened at all.
I guess I wasn't clear as to what I've been trying to say. What I was trying to point out is, how is it that these distortions that are supposed to occur to the electro-chemical connections between neurons that goes on that neural scientists think is necessary for us to even have thoughts, how do these distortions happen to these neural connections when there are no electro-chemical connections detected going on in the brain at all?
So, my perception of memory is foggy. It's somehow stored in the structure of the human brain, which is modified and refined and all of that as we live and go through the day and whatnot. Chemicals alter it, experiences alter it, etc., etc.. I have no idea whatsoever how we access it, but I do know that it appears to be widespread and non-localized. Removing a portion of rat's brains doesn't remove ALL the memory of how to get to the end of a maze. No matter what part of the rat's brain they destroy first, there doesn't appear to be any single location for the memory of how to run the maze. The more of the brain they destroy, the more of the memory is gone and the more unsure the mouse appears -- but they always run the maze better than they should if they have no memory of it at all. I think the experiments are terribly cruel and probably shouldn't be allowed, but they exist. I choose to learn from them, that's all.
So given the incredible state of the brain at the time of death, it doesn't seem contradictory to me that upon "waking up" from death, a person's brain could interpret whatever happened prior to death and/or during death as a funky, totally whacked out memory of what happened. I don't know, that's how I explain near death experiences anyway. I'm very open to more likely explanations.
I'm saying I don't believe in hour long near death experiences, only that people can remember them happening when they didn't. The human memory is terribly malleable; that seems a lot more likely to me than the brain being active while there's no activity within it.
I did a poor job of explaining what I meant. Let me try again. When I spoke of the hour long NDE I wasn't speaking from the subject's conception of time. I'm talking about empirical reality where subjects can be clinically dead for hours. How is it that a subject can be clinically dead for hours with no measurable brain activity, be revived, and have a NDE when in order to imagine anything they would need to have electro-chemical connections going on in the brain? That's fundamentally what I find baffling before even getting into whether what they saw was real or hallucinatory fiction. In order to 'see' anything they had to have measurable brain activity and they didn't.
Same thing as above: I don't see the contradiction in perceiving an event that ended in seconds (death of the brain) as having continued for hours, given the circumstances and the extreme states that come about when instinctively attempting to avoid death (chemical release, etc.).
I think I see what you're saying here. You're coming from the perspective of a strict monist.
You know it's funny, I've thought this way for so goddamn long that I'm not even sure what initially made me come to my core conclusions. I think lack of evidence, mostly. I can remember sitting there writing in my journal about this when I was a kid... how I felt like there was so much more to this world than I could see... but that I could find absolutely no evidence of it whatsoever, and so it must be an illusion. Bizarre to think about how much of my life hinged on that one perception, and how I'd probably be running around taking acid thinking I saw God if I hadn't decided that.
Weird...
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SS: Good response, and I'll respond to it when I have time. In the mean time, I highly recommend this Youtube video (clearnet warning): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gg85IH3vghA
It is a movie called "Imagining the 10 Dimensions." The uploader also has it spread out as individual videos if you're more interested in watching it a little at a time, since the whole video is an hour and 45 minutes. This video will explain the concepts I'm talking about when I say "dimension." I keep forgetting that most people don't understand what I mean when I use the term, so I have to use this video as a reference point. I'm not talking about other dimensions as in other realities or universes; I'm talking about a set of dimensions (10 specifically), each one emerging from and influencing the last. It's a really great video series, and I highly recommend you check it out. Smoking a bowl before/while watching is a plus ;D
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After you die your consciousness ceases to be and your body decay's under the ground.
Doesn't matter how special we think we are for being corporal beings that are self aware or not. Once you die, you're dead, and to make any other claim is supremely arrogant.
+1
;D
I couldn't stop laughing at this.
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I always think of this...
You were on your way home when you died.
It was a car accident. Nothing particularly remarkable, but fatal nonetheless. You left behind a wife and 2 children. It was a painless death. the EMTs tried their best to save you, but to no avail. Your body was so utterly shattered you were better off, trust me.
And thats where you met me.
"What... what happened?" You Asked. "Where am i?"
"You died," I Said, Matter of factly. No point in mincing words.
"There was a... a truck and it was skidding..."
"Yup," I said.
"I... I died?"
"Yup. But dont feel bad about it. Everyone dies," I said
You looked around. There was nothingness. Just you and me. "What is this place?" You asked. "Is this the afterlife?"
"More or less," I said.
"Are you God?" You asked.
"Yup," I replied. "I'm God."
"My kids.. My wife," You said.
"What about them?"
"Will they be alright?"
"Thats what I like to see," I said. "You just died and your main concern is for your family. Thats good stuff right there."
You looked at me with fascination. To you, I didn't look like God. I just looked like some man. Or possibly a woman. Some vague authority figure, maybe. More of a grammar school teacher.
"Don't worry," I said. "They'll be fine. Your kids will remember you as perfect in every way. They didn't have time to grow contempt for you. Your wife will cry on the outside, but will secretly be relieved. To be fair, your marriage was falling apart. If its any consolation, she'll feel guilty for feeling relieved.
"oh," you said. "So what happens now? Do I go to heaven or hell or something?"
"Neither," I said. "You'll be reincarnated."
"Ah," you said. "So the Hindu's were right."
"All religions are right in their own way," I said. "Walk with me."
You followed along as we strode through the void. "Where are we going?"
"Nowhere in particular," I said. "Its just nice to walk while we talk."
"So whats the point, then?" You asked. "When I get reborn, I'll just be a blank slate, right? A baby. So all my experiences and everything I did in this life won't matter."
"Not so!" I said. You have within you all the knowledge and experiences of all your past lives. You just don't remember them right now."
I stopped walking and took you by the shoulders. "Your soul is more magnificent, beautiful, and gigantic than you can possibly imagine. A human mind can only contain a tiny fraction of what you are. It's like sticking your finger in a glass of water to see if its hot or cold. You put a tiny part of yourself into the vessel, and when you bring it back out, you've gained all the experiences it had.
"You've been in a human for the last 48 years, so you haven't stretched out yet and felt the rest of your immense consciousness. If we hung out here for long enough, you'd start remembering everything. But theres no point to doing that between each life."
"How many times have I been reincarnated, then?"
"oh lots. Lots and lots, and into lots of different lives." I Said. "This time around you'll be a Chinese peasant girl in 540AD."
"Wait, what?" You stammered. "You're sending me back in time?"
"well, I guess technically. Time, as you know it, only exists in your universe. Things are different where I come from."
"Where you come from?" You said.
"Oh sure," I explained. "I come from somewhere. Somewhere else. And there are others like me. I know you'll want to know what its like there, but honestly you wouldnt understand."
"Oh," You said, a little let down. "But wait. If I get reincarnated to other places in time, I could have interacted with myself at some point."
"Sure, happens all the time. And with both lives only aware of their own lifespan you don't even know its happening."
"So whats the point of it all?" You ask.
"Seriously?" I asked. "Seriously? You're asking me for the meaning of life? Isn't that a little stereotypical?"
"Well, it's a reasonable question," You persist.
I looked you in the eye. "The meaning of life, the reason I made this while universe, is for you to mature." I said.
"You mean mankind? You want us to mature?" I asked.
"No, just you. I made this whole universe for you. With each new life you grow and mature and become a larger and greater intellect."
"Just me? What about everyone else?
"There is no one else," I said. "In this universe, there's just you and me."
You stared blankly at me. "But all the people on earth..."
"All you. Different incarnations of you."
"Wait. I'm everyone!?"
"Now you're getting it," I said, with a congratulatory slap on the back.
"I'm every human being who ever lived?"
"Or who will ever live, yes." I add.
"I'm Abraham Lincoln?"
"And you're John Wilkes Booth, too," I added.
"I'm Hitler?" You said, appaled.
"And you're the millions he killed."
"I'm Jesus?"
"And you're everyone who followed him," I added.
You fell silent.
"Every time you victimized someone," I said, "you were victimizing yourself. Every act of kindness you've done, you've done to yourself. Every happy and sad moment ever experienced by any human was, or will be, experienced by you."
You thought for a long time.
"Why? You asked me. "Why do all this?"
"because someday, you will become like me. Because thats what you are. You're one of my kind. You're my child."
"Whoa," You say, incredulous. "You mean I'm God?"
"No. Not yet. You're a fetus. You're still growing. Once you've lived every human life throughout all time, you will have grown up enough to be born."
"So the whole universe," You said. "It's just.."
"An egg," I answered. "Now It's time for you to move on to your next life."
And I sent you on your way
I am with astor on this.
The Egg by Andy Weir :)
Personally I love this short story and I believe something very similar to this myself. The answer to you questioning your exsistence and life after death lies in psychedelics like DMT, LSD etc. Now I know what you're thinking.....Drug use isnt going to give you any answers but for me personally it has made me believe that there is so much more after we die and all we are is a minute piece of an ultimate conciousness in a human body..Sometimes these type of drugs leave you asking more questions than finding answers and they dont usually directly answer any questions like the meaning of life an anything but they can sure as hell bring you to the realisation that death is not the end.. excuse my bad spelling btw after all it is sunday morning :)
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..Also I would just like to point out I havent read this whole thread just the first page as I am about to go to work. I will update again later :))
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I was a firm a believer that life simply ended at death.
Now after some crazy life experiences I've changed my mind.
Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. That's science. Now, I can't believe that after we die, all that life energy disappears. It has to go somewhere... something has to happen. It doesn't make sense to me otherwise...
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I admit that I haven't read the rest of the thread yet, so my apologies if someone already addressed what I'm about to say. I have read this story before, and the more and more I think about it, the more terrified I am of the possibility that it is true. After first reading this story, your initial reaction is "Wow, that's beautiful." But holy shit it is frightening, isn't it? Let me tell you something: You do not want to live the lives of every human being that ever existed. Because 99.99% of every life that ever lived has been shitty and difficult, going back about 200,000 years based on anatomy, and 50,000 based on behavior. Let's assume the best case scenario: Human lives are counted as starting 50,000 years ago when they began exhibiting behavioral modernity. You now have to live at least 50,000 years of human lives, most of them filled with pain and misery. And it's not 50,000 years of course, because each year is actually multiplied by the population at that time. That length of time is incomprehensible. This scenario also assumes two things: First, the human race must eventually die out, otherwise you would never "mature" because you could never live every life ever lived if they went on forever. Second, and even more terrifying, there is no free will. You already know what happened in the past, and it's not like you can change it. At one point you will be Jesus, and nothing you do will stop men from driving nails into your hands and leaving you to slowly decompose until you die. Think of all the pain in the history of mankind. I believe that it far outweighs the happiness and joy, especially before civilizations even existed yet. So while I appreciate the thought of this story, and I always do live my life as if everyone is exactly like me and should be treated as such, I hope to god that it is not the truth of the afterlife. This story to me sounds like a perfect description of Hell: an eternity of suffering, with some happiness thrown in to remind you that it is indeed suffering.
It absolutely is frightening. That was my first gut reaction when I read that as well.
When I was really young, like 5 or 6, I rationalized to myself that this outcome had to be true for life to be at all 'fair'. That we had to come back as every person that had or ever will live. But I can't imagine that was a very original thought. Little kids tend to be really obsessed over the concept of 'fairness' until you hit that coming of age when you come to grips that life is just not fucking fair. And in that sense I'm exceptionally grateful because there doesn't seem to be any good reason why I have so much while it seems like 99% of the rest of the world's population has so little.
And yeah, reflecting on it more now with the maturity and intelligence that comes with age, far from being 'fair' that outcome seems just totally fucked up. Sure we'd be dipped in the river of forgetfulness between lives, but still. That is a lot of suffering and misery. Not only that, but there would seem to me to be a lot of fucking redundancy of learning the same lessons over and over again. Because as long as we're assuming there is some higher order to the universe that we're not aware of like reincarnation, I don't think it's asking too much to hope for a higher order that doesn't force you to live in a preordained and an almost perpetual painful and miserable existence in which you really have no way to affect the outcome.
And what if you got to come back as a Buddha that achieved nirvana and was therefore able to escape the eternal cycle of reincarnation and instead became one with Brahma? ;D Or would that inevitably only happen at the very end of the sequence?
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Me - IMO when biological activity ends and you cease to be.
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I for one have trouble believing that when you die you simply cease to exist forever. That seems almost as unlikely to me as the idea of a christian god who is going to send me to hell for eating meat on fridays during lent. Idk for sure what happens to you when you die, but the most likely guess for me would be getting reincarnated as another human, or even an animal. For us, most humans that livd thousands of years ago had really shitty lives, but that is only when we compare it to our lives today in the present. I'm sure in two thousand years when we have no disease, illness, or violence, robot sex slaves and machines that do all of our bidding, we will look back at our time and say "boy, those guys had it rough". The AVERAGE person living back during the time of christ had a worse life than we did, but probably didn't realize it because he had nothing to compare it to. People back then were able to appreciate the little things in life, because that was all they had. We are much too soft in this day and age. Thats just my opinion anyway. Maybe I just refuse to believe that nothing happens when you die because it is too depressing a thought for me. I don't know. It'd be cool if there was a universal paradise that we all went to when we died regardless of how good we were. One can only hope...
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In short... YES!
The fact that I could take a chunk out of your brain and turn you into a vegetable, then when the whole thing shuts down you'll rise from your lifeless corpse with all your critical faculties in tact and meet the dog you had when you were 9 or Grandma and Grandfather or your going to spend an eternity in some sort of DMT void is as unscientific as it is ludicrous.
We are here for a short time and remember, the GODS envy US, because we're mortal, meaning any moment could be our last. Making every moment that much more magical and every meal that much tastier. Enjoy it while it lasts, we aren't here for long and our job is to live life in as ironic and curious way as possible and try not to unnecessarily harm any of our fellow creatures before we depart.
At the end of the day, let's say for sake of argument their is an afterlife, eventually you'll get used to it and you'll get fucking bored anyway so don't despair and enjoy your time while you're here because stars had to die for you to exist, so thank your lucky stars!
- JWM 8)
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In short... YES!
...the GODS envy US, because we're mortal...
- JWM 8)
What poetic bullshit. There are no gods. There is no god. We will soon be immortal--those with resources. Once we map and replicate the human brain, we can then move onto transferring our "mind"--like an image on a hard drive--to computers or to other bodies or to cybernetic organisms. It was once science fiction, but so was splitting the atom or traveling into space.
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Once we map and replicate the human brain, we can then move onto transferring our "mind"--like an image on a hard drive--to computers or to other bodies or to cybernetic organisms.
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Yeah..
Good luck with that.