what happens afterwards?

Matnay wrote:

Hello Matnay,

I believe exactly the opposite is true. Consciousness is only continuous. Can you recall ever not having been conscious? Rip Van Winkle could awaken from a hundred-years of unconsciousness feeling little different than if he'd just taken a catnap. Consciousness is a continuum by nature; there are no holes in it. There never is a moment in which one is conscious of not being conscious.

Doesn't your claim that "we will always exist, spread out across an infinite array of separate universes..." spread the notion of "we" rather thin? You are not so much a being as you are a becoming. In other words, life is about change - it looks more like a serial motion-picture than it does a collection of snap-shots. The frozen instants of my life could no more constitute my immortality than could a collection of photographic portraits render me immortal.

From an objective point of view, a man is born, he lives, and then he dies. From a subjective point of view, I will never be dead. There will never be a time in which I'll think, "Wow, so this is how death feels!" To think that death must be something is equivalent to asking, "What would it feel like not to feel? Or, what would it be like not to be? Again, there are dead bodies but there are no such things as dead men. Death is not a state of being. You will die, but you'll never be dead.

Regards,
Michael

 

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Hello orthogonal,

Here's an analogy which I think will render my belief a bit clearer.

Imagine a string stretched out in front of you that represents your lifetime. Now imagine a bead that is attached to the string which represents the present. During your birth that bead would have started at the left side of the string and ended up at the right side with your death. Now imagine that this bead represents not only the present, but also your conciousness.

I think you'd say that there can only be this one bead(because there can only be one present and one version of your concious) which starts from the left and falls off the right side of the string at the end. Once the bead falls off the string it's gone forever.

I believe that there is no bead. I believe that there is just the static string. There is no moving bead of conciousness that moves along as a single continuous entity. Instead there is a seperate conciousness interwoven at each infintesimal point along that string. Every point along that string would be the present as well as a seperate conciousness.

There is no such thing as an absolute present time, which pops into existance for an instant and is gone forever in the next- although that is what our perception makes us believe. Time exists as a static whole. Therefore each instant of your life is immortal in time, even though each seperate instant of our perception along that string believes that it is in fact a "bead" getting nearer to the end of the world.

Time is an illusion and therefore so is our mortality.

 

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I find it amusing that you are asking this. I mean, if you don't know, what makes you think other people now? We can only hope and guess what is going to happen later but that is not what we should be focusing on right now in the present. you will have time to experience death some other day.

 

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You were nothing before you were born, so it is safe to assume you will be nothing when you die.

 

Well, I have an opposing view. You were everything before you were born, and to the all you will return--the One Spirit. It's your visit to earth that has limitations.

 

An all-spirit would, by its nature, have no consciousness.
A dead or comatose all-spirit?
I would call that "nothing". Whatever . . .

In all honesty, I think that all my experiences, sensations, thoughts, and observations are my Universe, and I am, by implication, a Universe of my own.

The awareness I'm feeling is a vibration along my timeline, along my Universe.

The vibration, the mechanical wave of my awareness, is often "refracted" or "diffracted" or changed in general. My awareness is certainly not consistent!
It's quite prone to change. It's my present in the time of my life!

When sensations end, and my wave reaches its crescendo and must be dispersed, my awareness will be dispelled.

However, I, my Universe, my history, my path, my possibility will always remain, and when God so chooses, the chains of the cosmos will rattle, and I will come again.

Heh . . . or so I think . . .

 

Why do you think that? The One Spirit is part of our consciousness, and I see it as being very much alive long after we've shed our Earthsuit. I would still call that the All. But not wanting to argue like WWIII going on in the religion forum, I guess it's just a matter of perception. If that is what you see, then I guess it is true for you.

 

An all-spirit must be omniscient and eternal, yes?

Omniscience and eternality equate to the inability to make decisions.
Every decision made by an omniscient and eternal being was never not already made.
One can only make a decision if it is not yet made.

Get my drift?

Consciousness requires a present, a temporal generatrix, a slice of time, a instantaneous rope to draw the curtain of futurity from the stage of life.
Consciousness, my girl, is the adventure of ignorance. There must be an unknown, a chaotic, unseen element. There must be an unexplored territory.


The all-spirit has seen it all, done it all, been it all, and has no ignorance or adventure.

Robert Penn Warren used the analogy of a fuse leading into an explosive barrel.
He claimed knowledge was the fuse. There was a limited quantity of fuse, a finite amount of knowledge. What happens when a creature gains all knowledge, becomes God, runs out of fuse . . . ?
Well, you get my drift.

 

Hi Voltaire,

Voltaire, are you seriously saying that an idea which hasn’t yet popped into your head could not have occurred to anyone else?

Now as far as knowing is concerned, humans can be reasonably confident in making a good many predictions. I can, for example, predict that if I sever my arm with an axe then I'll experience shock followed by heapings of pain. But it's not necessary for me to chop off my arm in order to feel comfortable with this prediction. I don't have to wait until the red-stuff is gushing and the arm is lying on the floor in order to believe that it will be painful.

Could I be mistaken in this prediction? Yes, I can always be mistaken. Along with every belief I associate an approximate confidence-weighting factor, and I hold no belief with 100% certainty. Bertrand Russell remarked;

"When one admits that nothing is certain one must, I think, also admit that some things are much more nearly certain than others."

And Voltaire, I'd also like to quote a famous namesake of yours:

"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one."

The critique, that any prediction with less than 100% certainty, is worthless, simply flies in the face of my primal understanding of this world. I weigh the evidence and take my chances in life. What other possibility is there? John Stuart Mill observed:

"There is no such thing as an absolute certainty, but there is assurance sufficient for the purposes of human life."

I occasionally hear the comment that we must wait until after we've died in order to understand the mystery of death. Such comments reveal a fundamental confusion. Something is precisely what cannot subjectively happen after death. There is no post-mortem human understanding. Whatever understanding of death we humans are to have, must come whilst we live, not afterwards. Non-beings (for which there is no human subclass) are incapable of understanding their non-being.

Again, absolute certainty is neither possible nor is it required. While necessarily imperfect, my understanding of death is entirely sufficient for the purpose of my life. Again, death is not a state. We'll die, but we'll never be dead.

Regards,
Michael

 

orthogonal,
Nice quotes, I will add to my vault. I agree wholeheartedly.

 

I agree, but there's no evidence that death is the same as non-being. We know what happens to the physical, but we don't know what happens to the mental. The physical does not necessarily build the mental, and even if it does, it mustn't necessarily be required for the mental to continue existing, it may be like throwing a ball in no gravity, sure you were required to throw the ball, but then the ball will move by itself forever. Another analogy might be to create a picture, just that you created the picture doesn't mean that if you stopped existing then the picture would too.

The mental is also in a world of it's own, a mental world which exists only as a representation in the physical world.

 

Death (no such thing) does not mean non-being. We're still very much the being we were when we were clothed in our Earthsuit (body). Our mind, which is part of the whole, makes us who we are. It creates us. Disease (like mental disease or dis-ease) is shed with the body. The purity of our soul is what returns to the source. We receive our soul from the source when we acquire our Earthsuit. Everything we create in our being, a picture, a drawing, a poem, for example, never leaves the mind of the creator. The energy of these creations also return to the source for the good of the whole.

 

Cyperium wrote:

Hi Cyperium,

It's a good point, and I thank you for bringing it up. I hope you view my response as both amiable and constructive.

Do you think it a coincidence that in the 13 to 15 billion years since the Big Bang, that both your body and your mind just so happened to appear together only a few short years ago? If your mind were free to turn-up anywhere and anytime on it's own - throughout all eternity - isn't it a bit odd that it when it did finally did turn up, it did so as part of your body?

My brother recently had his first child. Now my nephew's parents only had to reproduce a biological human body, they didn't have to entice a free-floating mind "out there" to inhabit this new body. Fledgling human bodies arrive together with fledgling human minds; special orders for minds are not required.

You wrote:

Your analogy suggests that a human body might represent the force required to put a mind into motion, and this mind will continue in motion after the body has disintegrated. I can think of another analogy where the body is the tube of toothpaste, which squeezes out the mind, and once out of the tube, the tube can be discarded. Another analogy is to think of a body as a star and the mind as the light that continues to travel outward long after the star has cooled. Indeed, we could think of any number of analogies to describe all the possibilities. Since nothing is impossible, the question is not what is possible or impossible, but given the evidence, what is probable.

But let's forget my caveat for the moment and consider your analogy. Let's say that the human body is a launching-pad for the human mind, and once set into motion the mind continues in a conscious-state no matter what my body does. In other words, once activated by my body, my consciousness is so fiercely present that nothing, not even death, can deactivate it.

So where does this fiercely ever-present consciousness go when I fall into a deep, dreamless sleep? And where does it go while I'm given a general anesthesia in the course of a surgical procedure? If this inertial consciousness is so fiercely ever present that it will survive my body being consumed by worms or flames, then how can merely falling into a sound sleep switch it off so perfectly? The fact that something as benign as an afternoon nap can so completely sever my consciousness does not exactly fill me with confidence that this consciousness is robust enough to survive my body being fed through a meat-grinder or roasted on a funeral pyre.

Your suggestion is that our body is a sort of one-way valve, one that propels our consciousness outward such that after the launching it no longer needs the body. My question then is why is my consciousness already objectively absent during periods of my life? I haven't even died yet and my consciousness is already going missing for great stretches of time!

Should we honestly expect that an un-worldly consciousness, which is entirely absent during these short periods of our living unconsciousness, somehow activates only after we've been eaten by worms or consumed by flames?

"The fact of having been born is a bad augury for immortality." George Santayana, Reason and Religion, p. 260

Best wishes,
Michael

 

We could have existed before in some other form, without any memories of it. The only requirement for existing after death is some kind of awareness and that is how I perceive the soul, the rest (memories, thoughts, sensations) is just a part of a shell that the soul needs to control the physical side.

Free floating? It doesn't exist outside our body, but outside our world, and in a way it exists inside and outside your body as well. In no particular place. It's merely focused where you are. In the middle of a infinity of middles, or it may be where it is most important for it to be...where it matters most.

 

Cyperium wrote:

Suppose it was discovered that in a few month's time the heat output of our sun will increase by a factor of ten, and that all life on this planet will subsequently be destroyed.

Suppose that right after this news is reported we're told that teleportation has been (secretly) perfected. The news report goes on to say that a nearly identical earth-like planet has been selected in another solar system to which we'll all be transported in order that we may continue our lives.

When I arrive at the designated place for my teleportation, I casually ask the technician if the teleported reproduction of me will be identical to me. He replies, "No, it won't be identical, but your teleportation will still be better than if you remained here to die." I ask, "But how much different will I be?" He types something into his computer and an image of a homely looking, obese, middle-aged woman comes up on the screen. "That's going to be me?" I ask incredulously,"but I'm a man!" It's alright, the technician says, you'll get used to being a woman. Again, you've no choice, it's go as a woman or stay here and die." I think for a moment and say, "Well I suppose I could get used to being a woman, and I'll doubtless run that nasty fat off her...I mean my...bubble-butt. In a matter of months her body will be as fit as mine is now." The technician says, "I wouldn't bet on it." I ask what he means. He says, "She won't be getting your traits and inclinations." I'm astonished and depressed at this news. It was hard enough to picture myself as a woman, but to think she...I mean I...won't have my present traits, the things that I think make me who I am, is particularly disquieting. By this time the technician is getting impatient with me. He says, "There's a line of people behind you; either get in the teleporter or get lost." I say, "Alright, I'm going," but as I enter the chamber and close the door I wonder aloud, "Well, at least she'll have my memories." I faintly hear the technician outside the door say, "No she won't." I fling open the door and loudly demand, "What do you mean? Are you saying she won't even have my memories? He growls, "No, she won't know anything about you, as you are or as you have been. But what's the matter with you anyway? We're offering you your only chance to live." I shout back, "You're offering me nothing! Replacing me with her offers her a chance to live, not me. Whether I go into your teleportation booth or not, in either case it's now clear to me that I'm going to die here on earth."

Cyperium, you say, "We could have existed before in some other form, without any memories of it." My reply is that regardless of the fact that humans existed before me and will continue to exist after me, like the fat woman in my story, none of them are me. Consciousness itself, in some form, will outlive my specific instance of consciousness, but the limit of my particular instance of consciousness occurs with my death. Of course, if you expand the notion of who you are to include flowers, stones, and other people, then it might make sense to say you will survive your death. John Clarke, in his "Mysticism and the Paradox of Survival," asked:

"...how can an individual person pass through the needle eye of death and yet still sensibly be called the same person, or even a person at all?"

However, I deny that in death I will pass through anything. My death represents the limit of me. To imagine that death changes me into something radically different, distorts the notion of who I am so much, that the notion of "I" becomes meaningless. Suppose a physician sat you down and told you that fifty thousand people will die today here on earth. You reply, "Yea, people die every day, what of it?" He says, "Well, today you're going to be one of those people." Would you still say, "Yea, so people die every day, what of it?"

Religions, for example, profit greatly in telling us what we want to hear; what we have a natural predisposition to believe. The ability to look death in the eye for what it is rather than what we want it to be, is not for those "faint-of-heart." Having said that, I do take some comfort in knowing that I will die, but I'll never be dead. Thomas Nagel put it this way:

"The only reason to fear our death is if we survive it."

So, it's lucky for us that none of us will survive our own death. Aside from the matter of surviving our own death, the vast majority of us won't even survive our own life. In life, we continually pass away in the process of becoming. Death cannot take from me what life has already taken.

BTW, an excellent book on this subject is Derek Parfit's, Reasons and Person. It's heavy going at times, but that's to be expected; the problem of self and personal identity is no trivial matter.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/t...f=sr_1_2/104-2083062-2779155?v=glance&s=books

Michael

 

Medicine Woman wrote:

Hello Medicine Woman,
I agree with your observation about the religious forum. I also find repugnant all that shouting past each other; wherein they generate more heat than light. The validity of their beliefs depend, in part, on the number of believers conscripted to worship at their chosen altar. Religion begins with a vision of the "Truth." The task of the theologian is to either discover or invent support for this "Truth." I think they've gotten it backwards.

In this forum, we're supposed to understand that truth isn't arrived at democratically. We know that millions of people might fervently believe an idea to the point that they're willing to martyr their lives for the sake of it, and yet this idea can be entirely mistaken, crazy, or even horrible. I've previously made the point in this forum that philosophers generally would rather have a careful critique of their ideas than a careless affirmation of them. As for myself, I'm delighted when someone unearths a real flaw in my thinking; they give me an opportunity to improve upon my ideas. Philosophy begins not with truth but with mystery. Our aim is to reduce this mystery, not wallow in it. Truth is not what's given at the beginning; it's something we seek. Nietzsche remarked:

"Mystical explanations are considered deep. The truth is that they are not even superficial."

Medicine Woman, it's not going to come as a surprise to you that I disagree with most of what you've written. I'm not saying that you're wrong; just that I disagree with you. Another difference between a philosophy vs. a religion forum is that here we're both on the same team. We're both looking for answers and we see debate not as a weapon with which to attack each other, but as a tool with which to prod each other into exploring aspects that we might have otherwise missed. If someone says that you are flat-out wrong, what they're really saying is that they have neither the imagination nor the patience to try to understand how your point of view might be right. The shame of this is that we often can learn the most from those who think the least like we do. In other words, I can probably learn quite a lot from you even as I do my best to refute every point you've made.

I do agree with you that whether or not we ever "get it right," we'll all die just the same. Our living thoughts can't affect our postmortem future (I think we have no such future), but it very much affects how we live our lives; and that matters a great deal. Thus, the time we spend sorting out what life and death really amount to isn't merely a worthwhile pursuit, it is a noble pursuit. The best part of what we are comes to the fore when we look up to a starlit night sky and wonder where we fit in - or better yet, when we catch our own eyes in a mirror and feel a shiver at what we behold.

Now, I'd like to address your comments about the "One Spirit." Imagine your "spirit," "soul," (or whatever words people choose to describe their vague notion of being-after-being) as having been returned to the bosom of the great undifferentiated "One." Imagine moving through this undifferentiated world as if moving through an indistinct fog. Imagine that you have no body; you are somehow part of this fog. What would you be aware of? Fog. If you dreamed, what would you dream of? Fog. If you had visions of sublime beauty, what form would this beauty take? Fog. But wouldn't your vision of ugliness also be this same fog? Yes, in fact, all you would know is fog. Since everywhere looks the same, there is no telling one place from another. You couldn't interact with other such spirits because they are already part of you; all part of this same "One." Sartre wrote, "An emotion is the transformation of the world." But in this foggy world of Oneness, you couldn't have an emotion for the simple reason that nothing you thought or did could change the world. Where there is only Oneness, there can be no otherness. If all I could think of is this single state of fog, then the consciousness of a simple domestic thermostat would be more complex than my own. Indeed, nothing at all could happen in this world of the One. There is no time without differentiated change; instead, there is timelessness. Eliot Deutsch wrote:

"Augustine, Boethius, and Aquinas believed that immortality does not imply endless temporal duration, rather, it implies timelessness. But a timeless being will not be me. A timeless being could not deliberate or reflect since these mental acts take time, i.e., they require that the agent have temporal extension. Nor could a timeless being anticipate or intend, since these activities require that the agent have temporal position relative to what is anticipated or intended. Nor could a timeless being remember, since such a being cannot have a past."

Whatever consciousness that might exist in a singularity would be singularly primitive. The notion that a bland world of uniform Oneness could be thought of as qualitatively more advanced than our present world of endless diversity is to my mind, quite backwards. Imagine our present world; a world of: Monet paintings, Bach's Keyboard Inventions, toothless little boys and toothless old men, a hummingbird flittering at a flower, the dusty book found in an ancient library of effervescent poetry written by a long gone, but once youthful poet - imagine all this along with every other differentiated thing one finds in this lovely world of ours cast into a gargantuan blender and spun-round and chopped-up until not even the constituent atoms resemble each other. If this blender could homogenize not only everything inside it, but itself as well, then what remains is what you've spoken of as "The One," and what I've spoken of in my analogy as "The Fog."

I make a gift of my portion of "The One" to any of you who desire it. I want nothing to do with it. I love this world, both rose and thorn. The least of my rough-and-tumble little loves in this imperfect world far outshine any quality of symmetrical perfection found in your totality of Oneness.

In a full heart there is room for everything
In an empty heart there is room for nothing
Antonio Porchia

Best wishes,
Michael

 

So you think you are your memories? You get new memories every day, that changes you but it doesn't change your awareness, you are still you no matter what memories you have, you change physically as you grow up, but you are still you. Everything about you change except one thing and that's your awareness, you are still in your body not in anyone elses.

We are very adaptable, if you get in a new kind of environment (even if everything about you change) then you'll adapt to it, cause you have to. You did when you were born and grew up. So why won't you later? As long as you are aware, sure you won't remember who you were (unless something is stored somehow in the soul - which you probably don't believe in) but still, you might not be conscious of who you are but at least you are.

But you don't know what death is! Not for those "faint-of-heart"? Nothing is easy, everything is equally hard.

What is the reason to fear our death if we survive it? How did you come to the conclusion that it's lucky that none of us will survive our own death? Did you just take his word for it?



Everything has a purpose, every part exists for a reason, if not the system would fail, everything is dependent on everything else, you can say that there exists atoms, tables, chairs but you are allways looking at something from the "outside" you never see the truth within. Can you look at me and see what's happening inside? No you can't, you can't see the reality of me. The same way you can't see the reality of the true nature of existance. You are judging what's inside the house by looking at the house from the outside. I believe that when you die, you look at the house from the inside (but then the outside becomes less clear instead), to see everything you have to be everything.

I believe that each person has a task to do, and when he has done his task, then he is moved up one level and can see more (also he can see what effect his task had, and why it was so important). I believe that's how we developed, in the brain are different levels, each level are reality (the same reality), but each level see reality in it's own way, and dependent on how you see reality in each level, you do different tasks. It's like a riddle, you have to figure out what to do.

Ok, this long it's all in our head, we are developing the "tools" to handle reality, for example, at one level, you are taught that sugar is good for you and that you should drink water. Also you are taught to not drink too much and not eat too much, but not too little either, you are taught to stay alive. Asking questions and reasoning about things are another thing that happens in these levels, for example:

On each level are people that you trust that talkes to you:

P1 "I like cheesecake"
P2 "I wonder why is it called cheesecake?"
P1 "I don't think it tastes like cheese..."
P2 "I don't either, it doesn't taste much at all..."
P1 "And the consistency is like....hmmm..."
P2 "Ice cream?"
P1 "Well, sorta, like pancakes....maybe"
P2 "Yeah, I know what you mean."

When both persons agree then you reached a conclusion, you have passed on the message (remember that I'm still talking about what's going on in the head). This is felt like a "feeling" of cheesecake in the aware level (the level where you are).

Nothing can be known without dealing with these issues, every person is dependent on other persons to know things, otherwize we won't know anything.

It's not that hard really, do what you feel like, be honest to yourself and others and everything will work out perfectly, I think that is true at all levels. But at a certain level, we fail to be honest, since it's not only in your head anymore it's outside also, cause it really isn't any difference, reality is just another level, another part of our development. Wonder what comes next.

Each personality look the same or look as you associate them, but based on what "room" they are in, they wonder about different things, like the room where they wonder about things like cheesecake, food, physical characteristics.
Every room has it's own feeling, and you discuss different things based on that feeling, it's the atmosphere of the room, and the atmosphere of the room is dependent on what you say, when you talk about one thing then the atmosphere changes to what you are talking about, that makes the subject interesting, cause every person in the room feels the atmosphere (I've seen that this is often true in reality as well) and they know that they are talking about the same thing when the atmosphere is enhanced, this is also true in reality (for those that can feel the atmosphere).

There is no limit to what we can know about things and inner reality, it depends on what room you are in, and what room you are most interested in. There are another room (which I remember from being a child) where they talk about philosophical things, what happens after death, what is the true nature of reality and so on, this room (as everyone else) must have it's purpose as well.

There is another room as well, the "magic room", where everything feels magical and you can do anything, I've wondered about the purpose of that room as well. It's probably since you have to have some kind of relaxation.

The thing is that I feel that reality must have a purpose as well (as anything else you've experianced), we got to find that purpose, since I believe it is important for us.

Maybe the purpose is not to know the purpose though...

 

why how do you know?

 

Orthogonal, the problem with your whole proof is that you accept as a given that the self isn't an illusion. In your teleportation example you are suddenly transformed into a totally different person, but that exact thing happens to everyone. If as a child you could see a fifty year old version of yourself you would insist that it is not you, and you'd be right. Just because one change occurs suddenly and another gradually doesn't change anything. Since the self doesn't exist the question becomes what is there that can actually die?

 

Invisibleone,

I don't know if anyone has mentioned this yet(I think orthogonal might have), but look into something called 'eternal recurrence'. Just type it into google. It might answer some of your questions.

EDIT:: I should add that you don't have to agree with it. Just think about the concept..