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I want to hear about a guy who gets a psychic reading about all his past reincarnations and they end up saying "oh, looks like you've just been a string of dumb assholes. yep, assholes all the way down. who knew". Or a guy who's just been janitors except for one time he died while taking a dump. And he went to the psychic to find out just how great he was. Like, what if most of us are just chumps? Not me though, I'm reincarnated royalty
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Sep 4, 2014 02:47
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Applewhite posted:Fair enough. I think that Ian Stevenson demonstrated a little more scientific rigor than the average UFO abductee looking for his fifteen minutes of fame Having just read the wikipedia entry on his case studies, it really doesn't look like he did. This guy believed that some birthmarks, defects, and illnesses come from past lives, even though he acknowledged genetics caused the same things. And not that I have anything against drug use, but this guy took mescaline and acid and thought that seeing crazy poo poo meant somthing other than he took a bunch of halucinogens.  +  = 
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Sep 4, 2014 03:04
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When I examine myself, I can't see anything that isn't either a) subject to change, b) a product of my being in the world, or c) both. My name, my appearance, my memories, my biography, my relationships, my body, all of these are always changing and are all products of the world that I exist within. None of those are static and written-in-stone, and none of those exist independently. What am I without a name, my memories, my inclinations, my relationships? Those are what define me. Take those things away, one by one, and eventually there's nothing. There is no eternal unchanging identity in the center of my being; I am an aggregate of constantly-changing things. And each of these things are themselves always changing, and are more like events than objects. Take my physical body, for instance. Its a mass of cells that are always dying, dividing, switching genes on and off. Each cell is made up of proteins and other organic molecules that are moving about, doing things. None of these things are actually things, they're more like verbs than nouns. My mind also isn't a thing; its the state of my subjective experience in a given moment, and it changes with time. Sometimes I'm pissed, sometimes I'm happy, sometimes I'm turned on, sometimes I'm bored. My opinions change, my memories fade and I form new ones. Nothing sticks. But yet I have this internal narrative that I am an individual, discrete being that is separate from the world, rather than being a part of it and a product of it. I don't truly know what we experience after death, but I find it difficult to imagine that we simply continue indefinitely in Heaven. We're always changing, and in time everything that we are in this moment will be gone. There is no eternal self to continue. I think beliefs in afterlives, at least in the sense of Heaven, Hell, whatever, are just fictions to maintain the ego, the feeling of individual and separate existence. Same goes for reincarnation.
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Sep 4, 2014 04:51
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I think that we're very complex patterns that figured out how to recognize and name ourselves and all sorts of abstract concepts, and then gained the complexity to send arguments about Heaven across the planet we live on. I think the universe is mechanical and separating consciousness from matter is a silly, abstract concept of human invention. There's nothing special about human brains beyond how their matter is arranged and how they respond to electrical impulses. There are no souls or immortal life because life is a particular arrangement of dust and slime. People act like life is something holy and special, that it's clearly distinct from unliving things, but there are countless lifeforms right here on Earth that are just intermediate states between rocks and us - like, at what point is life too simple to have a soul? If you can reincarnate as a midge, can you reincarnate as a microbe? And if not, why? Humans start off as tiny eggs that split until they're much bigger and more complex. Humans are also essentially enormous hives of different lifeforms - can you come back as gut flora living in some other human's intestines, and does their karma then rub off on you? Can you reincarnate as algae? If we built a robotic fly that behaves and lives exactly like a real fly, could you conceivably reincarnate into that? I'm not ruling out there being poo poo we can't comprehend in some unreachable higher dimensions - maybe aliens are looking at me post right now going "ha ha what a moron" while eating popcorn made of all my old pets' souls - but there's no reason beyond intellectual curiosity to even think about that stuff. Life and the universe as we know it scientifically is crazy and unknown enough as it is. And I don't think viewing life as purely mechanical makes it less beautiful or less meaningful at all; I think it's healthy to be able to accept your life as worth living even completely bereft of any spirituality whatsoever. I'd certainly like to think that my consciousness will live on eternally and I'll have the opportunity to one day figure out all the mysteries that will probably plague me for the rest of this Earthly life. Like what the deal with there being more matter than antimatter is. My personal belief about the Universe is that at some point it'll shrink back up into a Big Bang and do things over with a slightly different outcome, again and again, and eventually all the possibilities are exhausted and things start over. So parallel universes exist, but are separated from us by time. But we'll just have to wait and see.
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Sep 4, 2014 05:44
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The fact that we do have a continuity of consciousness, in defiance of the fact that the actual material of our brain performs calculations in discreet packets suggests to me that there is some consistent entity that survives the timeless void between though pulses. Otherwise, we could just destroy our brain and build a new, perfectly identical one and there should be no reason why our "consciousness" wouldn't make the leap from one to the other. Obviously that wouldn't happen, so why does it happen when our mind is effectively destroyed and created anew twenty times a second? Edit: another thing that bugs me is how we can remember past events on command. All our memories exist in our brain simultaneously. If our consciousness were only meat, wouldn't we experience all our memories at all times? Applewhite fucked around with this message at 14:04 on Sep 4, 2014 |
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Sep 4, 2014 14:02
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Applewhite posted:Otherwise, we could just destroy our brain and build a new, perfectly identical one and there should be no reason why our "consciousness" wouldn't make the leap from one to the other. Obviously that wouldn't happen, so why does it happen when our mind is effectively destroyed and created anew twenty times a second? I wouldn't say that there's any 'obviously' about it. Just your gut feeling. Personally, I believe our mind is destroyed and reformed twenty times a second. Like Blue Star said about verbs and nouns - conciousness is a process, not a thing. Imagine a flipbook image, but complex enough to encode a mind. But in the end, both of us are just guessing based on what 'feels' right; we aren't neuroscientists. We're fish speculating about life outside the pond. If there are higher dimensions and souls and things that science can't touch, then what on earth are the chances that they just happen to align with any of our gut feelings?
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Sep 4, 2014 14:30
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Strategic Tea posted:I wouldn't say that there's any 'obviously' about it. Just your gut feeling. If someone made an atomic duplicate of my brain without destroying my original brain, I wouldn't suddenly start experiencing life in two different bodies. I'd still be in my body and I'd be able to observe another individual that believes he is me (or vice versa). If my consciousness wouldn't jump into the new brain without the original being destroyed, I see no reason why destroying it would make a difference.
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Sep 4, 2014 15:21
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Neuroscientists don't know anything more about life than the rest of us, and never will, it will always be an individual dilemma until the end of time. Don't put them above you, waiting for their discoveries to put your life into focus.
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Sep 4, 2014 17:04
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Applewhite posted:If someone made an atomic duplicate of my brain without destroying my original brain, I wouldn't suddenly start experiencing life in two different bodies. I'd still be in my body and I'd be able to observe another individual that believes he is me (or vice versa). If my consciousness wouldn't jump into the new brain without the original being destroyed, I see no reason why destroying it would make a difference. Two beings would go forward with separate experiences. They'd diverge immediately, but they'd have been the same person. Destroying the original would arguably be murder. Same as duplicating a flipbook - the animation is exactly the same, though, after the divergence, new pages that are filled in will always be at least slightly different. Tautologicus posted:Neuroscientists don't know anything more about life than the rest of us, and never will, it will always be an individual dilemma until the end of time. Don't put them above you, waiting for their discoveries to put your life into focus. Not necessarily. If/when we have a full understanding of the brain's physical functioning, we'll either know where consciousness comes from, or find noting and know that it must come from somewhere else. Also I wouldn't say it's demeaning to be flesh and bone that an expert 'above me' can study. If anything, it's demeaning to look at the amazing things evolution has produced and act as if it's not good enough. I do agree though that we shouldn't let ~the nature of consciousness~, whether hanging on scientific discoveries or waiting for religious meaning, direct our lives. You can view a star as a god, then view it 2000 years later as ball of fusion. It's still the same star.
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Sep 4, 2014 17:32
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I wonder if one day we could keep someone "alive" by hooking his brain to an energy source and study it. What if we could create a brain artificialy? That could tell us a bit about the human nature
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Sep 4, 2014 18:16
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Strategic Tea posted:Two beings would go forward with separate experiences. They'd diverge immediately, but they'd have been the same person. Destroying the original would arguably be murder. Same as duplicating a flipbook - the animation is exactly the same, though, after the divergence, new pages that are filled in will always be at least slightly different. You could call it the same person at the moment of creation before experience and the vagaries of neurochemistry cause the two individuals to diverge, but the point is that the double is NOT you. There is something that keeps our consciousness seemingly contiguous while it is in fact not. Now it could just be an illusion generated by the brain itself, but still if a perfect copy is made you don't get to see out of its eyes. That tells us that "me" is more than just a particular configuration of meat, and consciousness is somehow rooted in more ways that just that basic meat level.
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Sep 4, 2014 23:06
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Applewhite posted:If someone made an atomic duplicate of my brain without destroying my original brain, I wouldn't suddenly start experiencing life in two different bodies. I'd still be in my body and I'd be able to observe another individual that believes he is me (or vice versa). If my consciousness wouldn't jump into the new brain without the original being destroyed, I see no reason why destroying it would make a difference. You say you wouldn't suddenly start experiencing life in two different bodies, but who is you? If you made a complete and perfect duplicate of yourself, right down to the configurations of tissue in your brain, arguably neither of the two versions of your body is more you than the other, both people would claim to be you, both people would act, feel, and experience as you experience. The entity inhabiting the duplicate body might very well say that their conciousness jumped from the old body to the new one, leaving behind a perfect copy. So from your perspective here in the past before the split, which one will be you? If it's the one inhabiting the original body, that seems to strongly suggest that your identity as a person is entirely a function of the matter in your head, as a complete copy of you which is in all other senses identical would only not be you for the fact that it does not contain the particular material that makes up your body as it exists in the second before replication. If both will be you, then arguably from the moment of duplication you will actually experience life in two different bodies, just in a way different from how any other being has experienced life before, in that the thing that is you would now be two independently sentient entities. You could also argue that neither is you, because the you that is here in the past will not exist in the future, and a creature which has the experience of being you will instead be the one that goes through the split.
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Sep 4, 2014 23:13
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There's room for all kind of wiggling but that poster was obviously talking about consciousness. Your consciousness IS you in a way that's deeper or at least different than thought and memory. You can LOSE most of your memory and ability to reason but still be left with the sense that you are the same person as you were the day before.
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Sep 4, 2014 23:17
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Nathilus posted:There's room for all kind of wiggling but that poster was obviously talking about consciousness. Your consciousness IS you in a way that's deeper or at least different than thought and memory. You can LOSE most of your memory and ability to reason but still be left with the sense that you are the same person as you were the day before. I know he's talking about consciousness, but if this hypothetical procedure he describes was done while the subject was conscious, both of the resulting entities would experience a continuity of consciousness, both would claim to be the subject, and the one in the new body would quite plausibly describe the experience as their consciousness leaping from one body to another. In fact what I find interesting about Applewhite's view on this is that while I completely agree with his assessment of the question of identity in respect of this duplicate body problem, my view derives from the position that identity and consciousness are non-transferrable emergent properties of your brain. I find it interesting that he feels that souls (by which I mean identities which exist independent of physical bodies) may exist, while feeling that it is "obvious" that if you built a perfect copy of a person it wouldn't hold that soul. If I were to accept as given the idea that identity exists independent of the brain matter it resides in, it doesn't seem obvious to me at all that said identity would not transfer into another identical body by preference in the event its original body was destroyed, and it doesn't seem obvious to me at all that said identity would be indivisable, indeed nothing at all would seem obvious to me about such a thing's properties. In fact, if we further accepted as given that such identities were capable of reincarnation, it seems perfectly plausible that if you made a perfect copy of the identity's former body, it would reincarnate in that body by preference. EDIT: I mean, to take your example of looking out the other copy's eyes, that's part of why I'd say that conciousness is the function of the brain, the reason you can't see out the copy's eyes is because they aren't literally wired up to the brain you reside in. In fact, if you were to duplicate a person and both duplicates now could see out of both pairs of eyes at the same time, I'd consider that absolutely foolproof evidence that identity was not a function of the body alone, because there would be a single entity operating both bodies at the same time. Reveilled fucked around with this message at 00:24 on Sep 5, 2014 |
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Sep 5, 2014 00:08
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Reveilled posted:EDIT: I mean, to take your example of looking out the other copy's eyes, that's part of why I'd say that conciousness is the function of the brain, the reason you can't see out the copy's eyes is because they aren't literally wired up to the brain you reside in. In fact, if you were to duplicate a person and both duplicates now could see out of both pairs of eyes at the same time, I'd consider that absolutely foolproof evidence that identity was not a function of the body alone, because there would be a single entity operating both bodies at the same time. The reverse can also be true: if it is uniformly impossible to make the same configuration of matter behave in the same way without divergence because of "consciousness", it might imply that what we're talking about is intrinsic on different level than the purely physical one.
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Sep 5, 2014 00:48
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Nathilus posted:The reverse can also be true: if it is uniformly impossible to make the same configuration of matter behave in the same way without divergence because of "consciousness", it might imply that what we're talking about is intrinsic on different level than the purely physical one. That's certainly possible, but I don't think it would be a provable assertion even if we had a magic person duplicator, it would be next to impossible to ensure that both copies then had identical experiences from that point, and even were it so, I doubt we could rule out that the differences in behaviour might be a function of some random error in the configuration or function of the physical brain. I mean, to be clear, I don't think it's by any means impossible that there's something more to identity than it being an emergent property of our incomprehensably complicated neural net, what I find most interesting about the discussion here is that while the contention that identity is non-transferrable and cannot exist in two places at once seems to me to be a perfectly natural conclusion to come to starting from the position that identity is indivisible from the physical brain, to others it seems to be suggestive of the exact opposite, which to me seems strange, as if I could see out of the eyes of another organic body as if it was my own, or if I could transfer my existence into another body, I would consider either of these things absolute proof that my identity could exist independent of my body.
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Sep 5, 2014 01:28
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Good post. Well-reasoned and polite. We basically agree. If we differ at all it's in that I am extremely suspicious of so-called rationality forming its own tautologies. The takeaway thought I'd like people to have from these posts is that a questioning nature is more dependable than a carelessly assured one.
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Sep 5, 2014 07:09
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Nathilus posted:Good post. Well-reasoned and polite. We basically agree. If we differ at all it's in that I am extremely suspicious of so-called rationality forming its own tautologies. The takeaway thought I'd like people to have from these posts is that a questioning nature is more dependable than a carelessly assured one. Agreed. It's not a good idea to base one's life choices around the assumption of any particular afterlife. If anything, we should all behave as if there is definitely no afterlife, to maximize our engagement with the here and now. (By extension, I'd also argue that ethical behavior should be formulated based on the assumption that there is no God, even if you believe there is one.)
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Sep 5, 2014 14:20
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