Fear of death.

sounds like you're into denying, don't pretend you're not

What I'm not OK with is pretending the unknowns somehow close, even deny a spiritual/afterlife possibility.

now what?

Jim I actually haven't watched it until right now. I think the opponent's positions throughout the debate seem to morph like liquid around the challenges of Hitchens and Harris, as apposed to the debate on this thread where the opponents of the materialist position seem to focus on holes or unknowns in our arguments that are somehow positive reinforcements of an, if nothing else, wishful preservation of their consciousness after death.

OK sure they leave it open as much as they leave open any possible scenario I feel like conjuring out of nothing.

you use a lot of loaded terms, like "wishful"

why not "hypothetical", i think the materialists get that courtesy from you

To equate its value with that of what is inferred to be the truth based on observable reality, is based only on the wish or hope that you're consciousness can float away intact from the brain from which it is not a separate entity.

your***** oops

Of course nothing can be equated sufficiently with the incredible human consciousness in our observable reality, but it seems to me wishful thinking to look at anything else in physics, where a vessel made up of parts and functioning as a single mechanism produces activity- that when completely inactive stops producing that activity, to say the brain is the one thing that does not follow these logical rules.

not if you've read about billiard balls

"Wishful" specifically because it affects us so personally and we want to keep existing, or in no way can we imagine not existing since existence and our personal perspectives are one in the same. It is natural to want to perceive the universe within our own context of self.

go on

in physics, where a vessel made up of parts and functioning as a single mechanism

LOL

actual LOLs

nobody is saying their brain lives on

just that the "sensation" of consciousness might continue

What's so funny.

The brain would have to live on to "sense" something. Consciousness is not a separate thing from the workings of the brain.

"Wishful" specifically because it affects us so personally and we want to keep existing,

appeal to motive, your honor!

it's funny because at every turn physics complicates that notion that things are made of parts

it's funny because we don't know where the parts of consciousness are, at every turn philosophy complicates that one

it's funny because it doesn't actually function as a single mechanism, brain science confirms that

it's funny because you sound like you're describing a free body diagram

it remaind me of college when i was really good at free body diagrams

in no way can we imagine not existing since existence and our personal perspectives are one in the same

This is what convinced me of life after death as a kid- just the fact that I couldn't imagine what it would be like to not exist. Of course now I'm older and I realize there are lots of times when there's nothing that it's like to be me - ie., when I'm unconscious. Still there's something weird to think about not existing ever again.

it's funny because at every turn physics complicates that notion that things are made of parts

it's funny because we don't know where the parts of consciousness are, at every turn philosophy complicates that one

it's funny because it doesn't actually function as a single mechanism, brain science confirms that

― the late great, Thursday, September 27, 2012 4:40 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'm just talking about the the things that are specifically made of parts, not all things.

Are you saying consciousness is different than brain activity, something separate?

A single mechanism in the sense that the activity is happening inside of only brain.

surely the activity is happening inside of your toys?

whoops! TOES

there is nothing, no part of me, that i can imagine persisting after the death of my body.

im sort with Unamuno on this question: life after death is essentially "unthinkable" and our only ways of thinking about it make it seem kinda sucky.

"What we really long for after death is to go on living this life, this same mortal life, but without its ills, without its tedium, and without death. Seneca, the Spaniard, gave expression to this in his Consolatio ad Marciam (xxvi.); what he desired was to live this life again: ista moliri. And what Job asked for (xix. 25-7) was to see God in the flesh, not in the spirit. And what but that is the meaning of that comic conception of eternal recurrence which issued from the tragic soul of poor Nietzsche, hungering for concrete and temporal immortality?

late great-

You're picking apart my argument and the best you can do is bring me back to a stance of "I have no idea."

If you were successful, how do you then take me in the opposite direction and convince me the shot-in-the-dark afterlife scenario is just as legitimate?

my stance is actually "i have no idea ... wait, do i have ideas?"

i feel like there are many parts of my body i could imagine existing without, least among them my head, though i can certainly imagine losing all my senses and continuing consciousness, maybe. anyway i know that is all workings of brain and not body but sometimes i feel as though there are certain perceptions, like the perception of time, space and ego that seem to be "behind" the screen of consciousness and i have come to conclusion through experiments in electroshock therapy that scramble these sensations

actually there is a missing bit there, that the workings of the brain are consciousness

this shit's been fucking with me lately. sometimes i feel like my heart is just going to stop beating for no reason, cuz why not?

ego is actually in front of consciousness, but i think space and time are behind that consciousness

anyway the egyptians thought we had seven levels of consciousness that scattered in more or less opposite directions when you died, only one was the physical remains

jordan is that a lil b line?

just got shoes! don't got feet.

Im sort with Unamuno on this question: life after death is essentially "unthinkable" and our only ways of thinking about it make it seem kinda sucky.

Well, the Christian doctrine of resurrection involves a resurrection of the body. In some way we can't understand, it will be a perfected spiritual body, but a body nonetheless. I'll admit that it still seems pretty weird if you start to think about it.

The question of what makes up consciousness is really the big Q right now. if consciousness is a physical phenominon that can be measured, it's possible that whatever arrangement of particles that creates "you" will probably occur again in a parallel universe. Or perhaps when this one collapses upon itself and starts over. And when you're dead, your mind traverses infinity years until it exists again. If it's not something that can be measured then there's a question of whether or not it really exists at all. But then, "I think, therefore I am". Maybe someday we'll grow a brain in a lab.

If we can create a super computer that can react in a human way- appear to have emotions, improvise, create ideas, a personality- at what point does that computer have a consciousness of it's own? Can that consciousness leave the computer once it is shut down forever?

wasn't kurzweil trying to upload himself into some kind of anime character?

I kind of wonder about that. For example, what if a computer like Watson could start generating novels. I'm sure there's a certain level for which it could do this sort of thing. For example, kids books are all pretty simple. Animal X is this color, does these things, and then goes to sleep. If it analyzed a million children's books, it could probably write its own. But how deep can it go? Would it be able to understand symbolism? Could it produce something like Heart of Darkness? I dunno, this is over my head.

i think you guys are mostly approaching this thing from the wrong direction. there's no reason to assume consciousness is some positive emergent phenomena when it fact it's more likely a kind of negative capability, what Sartre called "a hole in Being." you could just as well theorize it (paradoxically) as a kind of constitutive blindness that hides as much as it reveals. our nervous system, for instance, is only able to be aware of and interpret its own self-referential loops. the "outside" in this sense is forever hidden--"awareness" is the product of not seeing as much as it is seeing.

not to get all Zen on you.

Well the idea of the computer question coincides with my perspective on the brain and human consciousness, that a brain wouldn't suddenly be awarded supernatural preservation at any point in it's complexity outside of its production of activity. That our mind has become the way it has over an unthinkable amount of time but if a computer could catch up somehow or get close, when we or it is completely shut down that is it. There is no more sensation, just inanimate matter.

ryan can you expand on that a bit? do you mean that consciousness is a fundamental separation and in "knowing" we create a kind of trick reality? seems kind of uhhh gnostic or something. i like it! are there authors/thinkers out there who talk about consciousness more along these lines? xp

like consciousness is a tumor destroying a larger host body/reality...

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/1/17/DoorsofPerception.jpg/200px-DoorsofPerception.jpg

uh oh you brought up the "G" word. i wont touch that but yes you could call it a kind of "virtual" reality. i am basing a lot of this on the notational theories of George Spencer-Brown and Charles S. Peirce (or my interpretations thereof), but the essential idea is that self-organization is always a product of a separation (even a "falseness") from an environment.

"What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain" is a classic essay along these lines:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/946105/What-the-Frogs-Eye-Tells-the-Frogs-Brain-Lettvin-Maturana-McCulloch-Pitts

thanking u

if you've ever done some absent minded thing like take soup out of the microwave, then go to fridge to get some milk and leave your soup in the fridge, would you count that as being conscious? what if you spend the whole day doing stuff like that?

there's some interesting topics in psychology that touch on some of this stuff. like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_(psychology)

Interested in late great's response to the super computer scenario