Fear of death.

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

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.

this is a good one here, where a truth (that consciousness is a series of parallel and overlapping processes) becomes an excuse for a handy overlapping of ideas

by the same argument, removing their ears would change their memories of music?

if you begin to remove parts of a person's heart, 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.

you mean like oliver sacks though, right?

Well, the ancient Egyptians didn't think the brain was important at all in the journey to the afterlife, that's why they removed it (with a hook, through the nose).

incredibly, you could take a hook through the nose and out the top of the skull and still recognize faces, yet people w/ a tiny defect (less than 1%) at the bottom of brain can't recognize faces or ever learn to, they have to rely on recognizing noses, hair color and eye color

you could also die

BUT STILL

i wonder how it feels to be highly conscious of other people's noses and if that enhanced consciousness continues into the afterlife

by the same argument, removing their ears would change their memories of music?

― the late great, Thursday, July 12, 2012 12:04 AM (45 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Parts of the brain was specified...

And I'm not saying eternity is a commonsense concept. What do you imagine it to be?

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

i think you are really placing more weight on contemporary neuroscience than it can bear.

'In 2004, eight neuroscientists felt it was too soon for a definition. They wrote an apology in "Human Brain Function":
'We have no idea how consciousness emerges from the physical activity of the brain and we do not know whether consciousness can emerge from non-biological systems, such as computers... At this point the reader will expect to find a careful and precise definition of consciousness. You will be disappointed. Consciousness has not yet become a scientific term that can be defined in this way.'

also tlg otm.

Would you say consciousness at least is a product of the brain, and that it cannot exist actively in a complete form somehow removed from the brain (as if it were a single entity) or with the brain non-functioning?

I would say consciousness as we know it is at least a product of some kind of complex material system, etc etc. But if you want to say that consciousness is an emergent property of complex systems, and not somehow part of the intrisic nature of matter itself, then I'm not buying it. Maybe rocks really are conscious to some infinitesimal degree.

This has informed my thinking an awful lot recently (and yes that's my comment near the bottom)

http://guidetoreality.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/quotes-on-key-mindbody-insight.html

xpost

If consciousness is constituted from a bunch of different overlapping processes then maybe it could stay intact if those processes were moved piecemeal into some other non-brain substance.

And even if it didn't stay fully intact - if you lost all of your memories or lost your sense of self - we might still want to say that the consciousness has, in some minimal sense, "survived."

Yeah, but the question of "will we be able to simulate the human consciousness in a machine, like simulating a snes on a modern PC?" is still a level closer to earth to the idea of the consciousness continuing sans all current input (and output (and hardware))

if you define consciousness as awareness, and accept that awareness is the modeling of another state, then you kind of do need at least an initial input, but once you have it, you could create a very simple system that could be said to be conscious.

is ilx conscious

it's pretty self-conscious, i've noticed.