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duckmaster posted:
Lasted until the end of his time. Objectively, his brain no longer exists, it's literally impossible that he's still experiencing anything. Stephen Hawking would agree with me on this I'm pretty sure.
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Aug 27, 2014 02:45
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Nathilus posted:If you get to the better and weirder parts of the Ender saga, it posits a thing the characters name an "auia", a nondimensional string that affords matter its self-organizing nature. These strings attach themselves to the most complex thing that the individual string can keep together, from subatomic particles on up to sentient life forms, and for the latter, the auia can be considered to be the deepest self, beyond thought and memory and all that good stuff. This is one example of what a "soul" could be. I mean yeah this is a sci fi book we're talking about, fictional and totally batshit besides, but it serves to illustrate the possibility that we are completely misunderstanding the nature of reality in very fundamental ways. I've often though it was kind of cool that, if the hypothetical soul (or it's effective equivalent) really exists, then "we" as in our fundamental identities are actually space symbiotes that have latched on to some tribe of grubby apes. They give us interface to the material world and we offer them an intellectual edge over other animals.
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Aug 27, 2014 02:48
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Aggressive pricing posted:Scientology is stupid. You are not a thetan. Agreed. But I mean, pretty much any concept of body/soul duality essentially puts human consciousness into the form of an either interplanetary or extra dimensional symbiote. Even if souls come from Heaven, Heaven as it's been described is still basically an alt universe/higher dimension.
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Aug 29, 2014 12:44
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Hot Dog Day #82 posted:My hope is that over an eternity of strange eons this universe or another will eventually form again and, given enough infinities of collapsing and reforming, history will eventually follow the path that it did here and the circumstances will occur for something with our particular brain chemistry/consciousnesses to pop up again! As far as you know, that's already happened hundreds of times.
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Aug 31, 2014 05:07
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I generally have a pretty atheistic approach to the afterlife. I have a tenuous belief in Reincarnation because, out of all the afterlife scenarios, it's the only one even remotely testable (have ten thousand people memorize a unique serial number on their deathbed, with instructions to produce the number in a certain way when they arrive in their next body. If even one person born after the death of the owner of that serial number comes forward, you just proved the reincarnation of identity after death). I believe that, if there is reincarnation, it is a natural phenomenon that exists without guidance. Humans are probably only reincarnated into other humans, and the distribution of souls is random. Being a natural phenomenon, it's not perfect, and could be responsible at least in part for certain types of body dysmorphia. I don't yet have a solid theory that accounts for an increase in human population. It's possible that souls also reproduce somehow, and that new souls are constantly being generated. It's also possible that there is an absolute limit to the number of souls in the universe, and that, after a certain point, an increasing number of humans will be born as sociopaths.
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Sep 2, 2014 17:21
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Well argued. As it is right now, we can only intuit that there is a part of us that exists beyond the physical, and its ability to survive the death of the body is pure speculation. I still hold out hope that the soul and the afterlife are measurable phenomena that will become accessible to science, given a sufficient level of knowledge.
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Sep 3, 2014 03:21
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Tautologicus posted:Why? What would that do for you. What would anything do for anyone? Why not just ask every scientist that question?
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Sep 3, 2014 12:21
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Tautologicus posted:I dunno, I just don't seem to care what scientists do. It doesn't affect my life if they think they learned something about the afterlife. I think only personal knowledge helps when it comes to existential questions, verificationism is for those who want to be led to water and then told to drink it. I think that's a somewhat unimaginative approach. There are more implications for the scientific verification of an Afterlife than mere existential comfort. For instance: Heaven, as it is popularly percieved, would have to exist in a continuum with radically different laws of thermodynamics in order to truly be permanent and eternal. Imagine if those properties could be harnessed. You could preserve food indefinitely simply by sending it to Heaven. Reincarnation seems to involve superluminal information transfer. FTL travel, antigravity, information storage, optics. All these fields and more would be transformed forever by the definitive proof of any one of a number of afterlife scenarios.
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Sep 3, 2014 18:37
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Tautologicus posted:So you want to mine heaven too. Or you want other people to do it for you. Or is this a roundabout way of saying you find it improbable or something. The former, if "mining heaven" is interpreted broadly to mean "find practical applications for a significant body of heretofore untapped knowledge."
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Sep 3, 2014 19:32
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Tautologicus posted:If the practical application of heaven to you is to make your life here more physically comfortable, then I think you're missing the whole idea of what heaven is supposed to be. It is entirely beyond this world. It has nothing to do with this world even. Nothing in this world would matter in heaven, nothing at all. Heaven is past knowledge, even. Firstly, the axiom that Heaven is entirely beyond this world is provably false. It obviously interacts with our world on some level because in even the MOST aloof interpretation of heaven there is still information flow between the two continuums in the form of souls. That means what happens on Earth do affect Heaven, which means that, given the proper knowledge base, events on earth can be manipulated to produce deliberate effects in Heaven. Secondly, if Heaven is real, then missing the point of it or not won't affect its ultimate role in my life after death. In the meantime, applying the knowledge gleaned from studying whatever continuum Heaven allegedly occupies can bring great material benefits. Improving one's situation in the material world is pretty much the only thing to do at what is, at best, a pit stop on the road of eternity.
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Sep 3, 2014 20:04
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Sheep-Goats posted:tissue. I'm a paramedic and have people back from not having a heartbeat or any activity, from being clinically dead, multiple times. Anecdotal evidence hardly constitutes definitive proof one way or the other. I'm skeptical about any afterlife claim, but I'm not about to to dismiss the idea of some kind of survival of the identity after death out of hand. Purely materialistic models of consciousness never quite seem to satisfy. Once, a friend related to me the story of his "clinically dead" experience, where he claimed to have felt trapped in an infinite blackness, severed from all sensation or even the memory of sensation, or even the memory of who he was, yet his definitive consciousness persisted.
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Sep 3, 2014 20:22
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Aggressive pricing posted:But you are willing to accept it, with even less evidence than annecdotal. Assuming all the people who have actually claimed to have been in the afterlife or recieved messages from it are either crazy or scam artists, as has invariably been the case. There's plenty of anecdotal evidence in favor of reincarnation. Researchers gathering stories from children around the world who, by all accounts, know things they couldn't possibly know, even when one accounts for subconscious information absorption and leading questions from the interviewers. The only reason why I'm not totally convinced by those accounts is the allegations of poor scientific methods by the researchers and a lack of peer-review.
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Sep 4, 2014 01:27
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Aggressive pricing posted:I guess there is a lot of anecdotal evidence, there's also tons of annecdotal evidence of the Lock Ness monster, ghosts, and alien abduction. Not all annecdotal evidence is equal, I'd much rather trust the opinions of people with nothing to gain from lying than the ones who are being put on tv for saying what the news/documentary people want to hear. 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, but, as I said, the criticism of his work is enough for me to withhold judgement until further evidence in one direction or another is presented.
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Sep 4, 2014 02:03
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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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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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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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