Fear of death.

I don't really agree when people say that eternal life would be a hell, that watching loved ones grow old and die and stuff would be horrible. To live an eternal existence would be transcending past time and space. You would be experience time at all levels, birth, death, and in between. It would be such an objective experience that attachment to one time or another would be impossible. Lest you be trapped in the cycle of birth and death.

As I said obviously the endless length cannot be imagined but the setting can at least be conceptualized within the context of human sensors. You only hear this, or you see that, or you think/dream this. The void of nothingness after death cannot be put in that context. We have our brains to thank for sorting all of these stimulants, when it is shut off that's it. When an engine dies in a car I don't think it is floating through eternity dreaming of open roads and tasty oil. So what if it isn't biological or as complex as us? We're all mechanical as well.

― Evan, Wednesday, July 11, 2012 11:36 AM (32 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i disagree and the reason why is, as already mentioned on this thread, sleep. i 'experience' oblivion every night. i know what it's like to close my eyes and disappear, inasmuch as that's possible to 'know.' eternity is unimaginable to me - it's not just 'a lot more of this.'

But our perception changes even during our lifetime.

But this is like equating changing the channel with shutting off the television. And even that is not apt because a turned off TV is silence and black and that can't exist either.

Mechanical creations and biological creations cannot be currently equated. There is more complexity in a single blade of grass than the world's fastest computer.

i disagree and the reason why is, as already mentioned on this thread, sleep. i 'experience' oblivion every night. i know what it's like to close my eyes and disappear, inasmuch as that's possible to 'know.' eternity is unimaginable to me - it's not just 'a lot more of this.'

― funny-skrillex-bee_132455836669.gif (s1ocki), Wednesday, July 11, 2012 12:12 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Elaborate please.

Mechanical creations and biological creations cannot be currently equated. There is more complexity in a single blade of grass than the world's fastest computer.

― Emperor Cos Dashit (Adam Bruneau), Wednesday, July 11, 2012 12:19 PM (55 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Complexity doesn't mean it should be governed differently. If a blade of grass was as complex as a billion fast computers the computers wouldn't then have a soul or other supernatural attribute. Same with a human.

Biological processes that we don't 100% understand ARE different than mechanical processes that we do. Maybe there is no "soul" but certainly consciousness and self-awareness seem to be a product of the former that we haven't yet approximated with the later. Life seems to take place within a context: genealogical heritage, environmental stimuli, ever-shifting DNA. Machines are more or less put together from disparate parts and do the same job regardless of environment or context, as long as they are functioning properly.

I'm going to stop this thought train before it derails into Kurzweilian futurist speculation.

Haha well the core of what I'm saying is that the workings of the body are attributed to the activities of the parts that manage them.

i don't think we understand mechanical processes. i don't even know how mayonaise works.

mayonaise, it's a bit like human conception, it start with an egg

Mechanical creations and biological creations cannot be currently equated. There is more complexity in a single blade of grass than the world's fastest computer.

this is one of those facts that cannot be emphasized enough these days.

how much of that complexity is junk though? also, the information required to reproduce the grass isn't that much I bet.

is that why we can't make one

believe me, solar panel manufacturers would be racing to the patent office if they could figure out how to make a leaf or a blade of grass

But grass can make one!

i think there is some degree of misunderstanding of infinity on this thread, people keep comparing it to things that are "infinitely long" which isn't really the definition of infinity

also evan i'm not trying to be mean here but you're sliding into pseudo-scientific popular science babble that makes about as much sense to me as the afterlife

if a blade of grass were as "complex" as a supercomputer ... what does that even mean?

i disagree and the reason why is, as already mentioned on this thread, sleep. i 'experience' oblivion every night. i know what it's like to close my eyes and disappear, inasmuch as that's possible to 'know.' eternity is unimaginable to me - it's not just 'a lot more of this.'

― funny-skrillex-bee_132455836669.gif (s1ocki), Wednesday, July 11, 2012 12:12 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Elaborate please.

― Evan, Wednesday, July 11, 2012 12:20 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i could elaborate "forever" (LOL) but, basically, it's harder for me to imagine endless existence as it is to imagine everything just stopping.

monsanto messes about with grass on their computers all the time, and are probably using the spare cycles on their supercomputers to play quake or something.

Mechanical creations and biological creations cannot be currently equated. There is more complexity in a single blade of grass than the world's fastest computer.

this is one of those facts that cannot be emphasized enough these days.

Please define "complexity" and explain how you are measuring it.

t's harder for me to imagine endless existence as it is to imagine everything just stopping.

but ... you experience both?

if that's true, which i'm not sure of, that doesn't make them equally easy to imagine!

Heres the thing. People that believe in any form of afterlife really want it to be true. If they didn't want it to be true so badly, they wouldn't focus on unknowns as somehow justifications for a specific conclusion that ignores the laws that govern everything else in the universe as we know it. Your brain creates and holds your thoughts, emotions, etc. When that stops working, all of that ceases. That is the core of how any other functional physical object works. Inanimate matter is all that is left. The only existence we know is the existence we've experienced. We naturally imagine death as part of the journey rather than absolute inhalation of all thought, because we can't comprehend that at all. We can merely acknowledge it and be frightened at it's apocalyptic inevitability. The active information in our brain isn't going to continue in some form intact to roam the universe in any way anyone believes in a spiritual sense simply because we hope it and we can't visualize any alternative.

Sorry if I'm going in circles at this point.

Your brain creates and holds your thoughts, emotions, etc. When that stops working, all of that ceases. That is the core of how any other functional physical object works.

what does this mean?

if a blade of grass were as "complex" as a supercomputer ... what does that even mean?

― the late great, Wednesday, July 11, 2012 3:11 PM (38 minutes ago)

That varying degrees of complexity don't justify something like "magic" out of the more complex of the two.

Your brain creates and holds your thoughts, emotions, etc. When that stops working, all of that ceases. That is the core of how any other functional physical object works.

what does this mean?

― the late great, Wednesday, July 11, 2012 3:51 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That when something becomes inactive, the activity it created while working is longer continues either.

whoa... ***while working no longer continues either****

see this is what i'm saying about circularity

"when something becomes inactive, the activity no longer continues"

this is a syllogism

It's just something that is obvious but spiritual people will at least say humans are the exception when it comes to the mind.

Materialists can think that humans are the exception as well. Materially, the post or pre-death experience (if it exists) is invalid because it does not match the perfection of the human life.

if a blade of grass were as "complex" as a supercomputer ... what does that even mean?

― the late great, Wednesday, July 11, 2012 3:11 PM (38 minutes ago)

That varying degrees of complexity don't justify something like "magic" out of the more complex of the two.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Besides, the spiritual experience is a Grace that is given to us, devoid of any of the effort that the word "magic" usually entails.

computers are a kind of magic in the 'word made action' sense. rewriting the 'code' of a blade of grass actualizes a similar magic process.

ok guys.

for one thing, "consciousness" is not a _thing_. it is a series of parallel and overlapping processes--many of which are preconscious. if you begin to remove parts of a person's brain, their consciousness and bodily functioning will begin to change. if you remove enough parts, one can easily imagine that the "self" begins to break apart and eventually disappear.

second, our brain is ever-chaning--cells die, cells are born, synapses emerge and disappear. there is no "one" consciousness that we are granted at birth and that stays with us until death. the idea of an unchanging or at least integral self is one of the products of consciousness. see first note.

there is no such thing as a platonic -- that is, ideal, unperturbed and unchanging -- self or consciousness that will be restored to us when we die.

to imagine the survival of human personality after death in some form is to imagine another plane of existence in which some version of our consciousness (from when? the moment of death? several years before that? at birth?) is recreated in some other plane.

the only way i can even imagine this is if you take an awesome (and rather silly IMO) leap of faith and imagine that existence as we know it--including all of our findings about evolution, the human mind and body etc.--is some kind of fantasy projection, and that our "real selves," which bear some relation to our "selves" as we experience them in this plane of existence, are intact in some other plane. and that upon death we make some sort of quantum leap to this other plane with little interruption.

if you want to believe that, i guess i have little interest in preventing you. but it has no relationship to anything we experience or know in this world and, as evan as pointed out, it's a rather human-centric conception that mostly--to my mind--reveals our own vanity.

i feel like a lot of people on this thread could stand to read some contemporary neuroscience.

you know i follow your first, second, third there but i don't see how the part that begins "to imagine" follows from there

i mean you'd have to consciously will away everything that we know about this world in order to sustain a fantasy of the survival of some integral human consciousness apart from the processes that make it possible to exist.

what processes are those, exactly?

anyway on the philosophy of consciousness side i'm familiar with dennett, hofstader, searle, smullyan, smolensky, nagel, nozick, minsky and lieberman

none of them are not exactly what i'd call contemporary but i don't think they're outdated yet. what am i missing?

No need to live a fantasy live to imagine survival. You just have to have a different definition of survival.

second, our brain is ever-chaning--cells die, cells are born, synapses emerge and disappear. there is no "one" consciousness that we are granted at birth and that stays with us until death. the idea of an unchanging or at least integral self is one of the products of consciousness. see first note.

I brought this up way earlier, how all the cells in our body are completely replaced every 7-10 years, and I looked it up and it seems that most of the cells in the brain are the same throughout your life. Except the ones that form new memories. Which kinda supports consciousness creating matter but also that the reality we experience IS determined by the physical brain that stays with us.

that the reality we experience IS determined by the physical brain that stays with us.

hm i'm not sure that last bit follows

you say "determined" but i'm not sure how you could call that "determined"

Structured?

Organized by?

"connected" maybe

but "determined" has that "deterministic" thing to it

like what would you call a scab?

that's like saying your skateboarding accident was determined by your scab

LOL wut

well i mean sure the brain forms new cells as it has experiences, so obviously the "shape" of the brain or whatever you want to call it (the particular macro-micro workings of which are completely obscure btw, else we would certainly have functioning a.i. by now) is related to experience

but i don't see how it follows then that experience is reducible to those cells?

Well that is sort of just accepted common sense, however baseless.

like i guess what i'm saying is that we still don't even really have evidence of "consciousness" that's deducible from biology. and we don't have anything in our biology that suggests to us the necessity of art or language. we don't have an organ that other animals don't, and in fact, there's really nothing about our organs that we could point at, and say, hey, if you were missing that gene or that cell or that organ, you wouldn't have art or language or whatever (much to the dismay of the intelligent design crowd)

so i'm wondering if we can't decisively point toward consciousness or language on a scientific, material level, the same way we can't decisively point toward time or soul, you guys ready to also deny your experience of consciousness, language or time?

like i guess what i'm getting at is if you really think *SCIENTISTS* (other than richard dawkins) spend a lot of their time telling other people their relationship to immanence is irrational and then producing heaps of *SCIENCE* to win the argument

like people keep saying infinity and eternity as if these are basic commonsense concepts well understood and characterized by science