Not really, but they seem to be the only kinds of conversation that you are capable of having. We only talk to you so you won't feel lonely.
(someone who refers to themselves as "we" is accusing me of being hard up for company)
-
Welcome to Religious Forums, a friendly forum to discuss all religions in a friendly surrounding.
Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:- Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
- Our modern chat room. No add-ons or extensions required, just login and start chatting!
- Access to private conversations with other members.
We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!
Faith in permanent death
- Thread starter 839311
- Start date
(someone who refers to themselves as "we" is accusing me of being hard up for company)
Good question. Both "spirits" are immaterial. The distinction is on one hand a "spirit" that is alleged and expected to be material, and on the other one that doesn't have that expectation attached to it.
Copernicus
Industrial Strength Linguist
Hmm. Perhaps you are not alone in being hard up for company. :group:
To me it is same as saying programs depend on hardware to function in a particular way. You seem to confine mind only to the part that you are conscious of. But we know that a program can run on any compatible hardware.
Your premise is wrong since for the philosophies that speak of re-birth and/or continuation of mind, the mind (manas) is not merely the waking time awareness. In contrast to philosophies that separate (created) beings from God/reality, where good or evil is attributed to external agents, in Vedanta the mind is, in reality, the creator of everything. It starts with desire and sprouts into the full manifested universe, which is the full mind.
The concepts are different.
PolyHedral
Superabacus Mystic
In that case, how is mind constructed? I am me, not any of an infinity of other people why?
Copernicus
Industrial Strength Linguist
Atanu, as always, you rely on metaphor to make an argument, but metaphors are logical fallacies. You can use them to explain concepts, but not as evidence in support of a conclusion. The one-way relationship between brain and mental function is observable fact. Partial brain damage often leads to loss of consciousness and specific mental impairments that correlate with damage to specific locations in a brain. These facts do not prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the mind ceases to exist when the brain perishes, but they do stand as very good evidence that it does.
ReligionBro
Member
Unfortunately, nobody knows if there's an afterlife or not. I really hope there is one, but I'm not convinced there definitely is one.
Last edited:
That mind/thought is is the penultimate mystery. That there is only reality, no "self" separate and distinct from it, lends your question a particular slant: why should thoughts that spring up in (the thought of) "this locality" be distinct from thoughts that spring up in (the thought of) "that locality."
Marvelous.
Songbird
She rules her life like a bird in flight
The red highlighted part is a big improvement. Wow. But you are still prone to conclude without any evidence. Correlations of brain structures with mental states do not prove causation. We have discussed this point several times. No one denies the blue highlighted part. That does not prove causation. A failure in hardware can cause a particular function to fail. But the hardware is replacebale.
I am not using metaphor as evidence but I merely showed that you are using a definition of mind which is different from that used by dharmic philosophies. [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]With your limited definition of mind as only the individual's waking consciousness, you still need to explain emergence of the brain itself. How the brain comes up? Where is its blue print?[/FONT]
Last edited:
Actually that is rehash of what Penumbra asked earlier in the thread. If only the sense of touch did not reside on skin we would have different notions of our limits. This sense of "I" in this body is artefact of functions of senses. But Man-Manas, as per eastern philosophy, is not the senses. Mind-senses themselves create the division of 'This' and 'That'. In deep sleep, the mind being inactive, the subject-object divisions vanish, though the subject exists. Mind being all pervasive is called chittakasha - the mindspace, wherein the notions "I am this here" and "I am not that" are notions of dream and waking time.
(This is of course also the question asked by dualists in Hindu school of philosophy to refute Monists, who cite the transcendental experience of samadhi as proof os single indivisble consciousness devoid of subject-object separation. And till samadhi is experienced, this, I agree, is at best a theoretical speculation. But there is approximate analogous situation of subject-object divison free consciousness in deep sleep and also preliminary subject-object division in same subject in dream).
Last edited:
Before analysing infinity of other people, it will pay to simply stick to the question "Whence I?"
Last edited:
:redcard:
Some more than others. Ever hear of the saying, 'Assumptions are the mother of all **** ups?'
Lets say your right, as I agree that this is probably the case. That doesn't mean that the part of your mind that is responsible for consciousness is annihilated out of reality. Energy cannot be created or destroyed. We are alive. We are real. That means that whatever consciousness is, it is some kind of matter/energy, that will continue to exist after you are dead. This matter/energy could become part of a new brain in the future. Hence, why I keep saying this argument isn't as strong as you think and why it doesn't address the first 4 options.
So, lets assume that options 1 and 2 are false, and lets work with options 3 and 4. Either the part of reality in which we live is an open system, or it is closed. Hence why I listed those two options, because those are the only options. One of them is correct. Which one? I have no idea, and neither do you. We don't know enough about reality to be able to say. The best our physicists can do is speculate based upon the best available information. Not that speculation is a bad thing.
Now, lets assume that option 3 is correct, and our part of reality is a closed system. In a system that is closed, contains a finite amount of matter, and is eternal, eventually the same scenarios repeat. Lets say this scenario, for obvious reasons. Lets say it happens a decillion (33 zeros) years from now. There is another big bang, and it happens to follow exactly the same history in every conceivable way as our history. Copernicus and 839311 are reborn - again. Every aspect of our future selves is identical, including our consciousness. Thus, we live again (disregard Penumbras arguments against this. She is crazy! :run
. Even though we experience brain death when we die and cease to exist, we are always eventually reborn. Immortality of sorts.Now, lets assume option 4 is correct, and reality is an open system. This is where things get wild. I don't know whether or not we could be reborn. This is where the hard problem of consciousness kicks in, among countless other mysteries obscuring our understanding. How much of the matter/energy that our brain is composed of needs to be reformed into the same mind in order to have the same consciousness? A quark? An atom? 100 atoms? 10% of our brain? I have no clue. I don't presume to know what I am, so I can't really say. And then there are the countless possible scenarios we could come up with dealing with what the nature of reality is and its physical effect on our part of it, ie branes, planes, multiverses, superverses, ultraverses, ultrasuperverses, strings, dimensions, etc, etc etc. Maybe its not possible. Maybe its inevitable? This option, unfortunately, is beyond my ability to justifiably consider. We have far too little information to be able to say, and there are simply far too many possibilities.
Why is that the chief reason? It doesn't seem to me to have any weight at all. I mean, why couldn't gods have a mechanism like a brain?
In the case of options 3 and 4, we know that one of them is correct. How can you say then that this speculation is unfounded?
For options 1 and 2, Id say it would be easier for you to get away with saying that, but I am still inclined to challenge you on it. Maybe some theists are right? Maybe some of them had real conversations with god-like beings. Maybe people have gone to some other plane and hung out with them. Maybe someone is Neo and is aware that this is a simulation lol. In any case, just because we havn't experienced it, doesn't mean it isn't so. I think we agree though, that many religious ideas we come across can be comfortably dismissed as impossible.
Likewise, I am inclined to say, 'I don't believe in god, because I havn't seen or talked to him. I don't believe this is a simulation, because I don't have any evidence for that. Is it possible, yes.' Is it plausible? Thats a matter of personal opinion. You can consider your own knowledge of reality and say its not plausible. I consider my own knowledge and say it is plausible.
I say your reasons for practically accepting permanent death are unfounded, you say that my reasons are unfounded for thinking that an afterlife of one type or another is likely (keep in mind your red card
). I think Ive pretty much covered my arguments. I suppose we just have to disagree... and fight to the DEATH!!! :sw:
Yes but do you honestly expect a mathematician to figure out whether or not the cosmos is infinite? Thats why its funny. I dont disagree that it has practical implications in mathematics. Im familiar with mathematical infinity and Cantors work.
Last edited:
Copernicus
Industrial Strength Linguist
What you highlighted in red is not an "improvement" but the position that I have held all along. You just seem to forget it quickly whenever I point it out to you.
Atanu, repeatedly observed correlations are evidence. If you don't believe that, then you do not understand what we mean by the word "evidence". It may be that the correlations are not causal, but they have all of the characteristics of being causal correlations. You can, of course, imagine scenarios where there is no causal connection between brain activity and mental activity, but that requires making unnecessary assumptions. Occam's Razor does not really prove a conclusion. It is only a method for judging arguments.
I know that you were trying to express a difference, but I did not really see it there. Again, I think that you are led astray be too much reliance on metaphor. You should be able to express what you want to say in plain, literal language. [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]
You are coming up with a straw man. The term "waking consciousness" is your wording attributed to me. I never said anything of the sort. I think of the "mind" as encompassing all mental activity, including that which is not necessarily the primary focus of attention. And can you explain what you mean by the "emergence of the brain"? Are you talking about its evolutionary development--why animals evolved brains? I've already discussed that with you.
:sarcastic
Look, what I meant was that if you ignore the possibilities and don't consider them, you aren't going to even have a glimpse of truth, whereas if you do consider them and come to understand the possibilities, then you are potentially/definetly staring at truth in the face, depending on whether or not you've created a complete list of the possibilities.
PolyHedral
Superabacus Mystic
From me-a-arbitrarily-short-time-ago.
May be I do not understand the difference between 'conclude' and 'do not prove beyond a doubt'. BS. Evidence of what ? Of causation? Repeated correlation between hot days and increase in ice-cream sales proves that ice-cream sales cause hot days?
OK.
OK. Remove the 'waking'. Still the consciousness you are talking about is only of your conscious moments and that does not explain how the brain itself comes about. It does not explain anything of your own development prior to your acquiring consciousness.
About Evolution, it was shown that it does not deal with origin of life.
Last edited:
Kilgore Trout
Misanthropic Humanist
What's the ultimate mystery then?
Koldo
Outstanding Member
But possibilities are just possibilities.
There is always the possibility that someday an elephant will fall from the sky while i am walking at the street and smash my body. That is possible, but if i take that into consideration i will have to live my whole inside my home. We can't possibly
D) consider every possibility as relevant.No, they aren't just possibilities. Possibilities are important. Sometimes its all we have to work with.
Not unless you move around in a heavily armored, sturdy vehicle that could withstand the impact of an elephant, or a whale for that matter. Can't be too careful.