what happens afterwards?

Any specific thing? Most of the things I talk about have been experianced by me when I was a child and some of the things I have been discussing with my friends and yet some of the things I've just thought about. I can't know everything about this, but I know some things and use them to find out what the other things may be.

 

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Grover wrote:

Hi Grover,

First, I don't have a proof, i.e., I haven't proved anything. What I have is an explanation; a decidedly human explanation. Furthermore, my explanation isn't taken from the standpoint of a godlike being looking down on me; it's made from the standpoint of a human looking out at the world (the only standpoint allowed us). A godlike being might laugh at the naïveté of my explanation. Perhaps, but my point is that explanations only have to satisfy the questioner. Let these imaginary gods find their own explanations - I'll be content with my human explanation. Again, in the words of John Stuart Mill:

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

Grover, if you're saying that our understanding of "the self" is the crux of the problem, then not only do I agree with you, I also congratulate you. The question of death stands or falls in how we define ourselves. And as I remarked in an earlier post, "the problem of self and personal identity is no trivial matter."

I'm currently reading, The Human Animal: Personal Identity Without Psychology, by Eric Olson. Olson makes the case that we are our biological bodies. Olson doesn't believe that removing my corpus callosum would kill me. He thinks it would merely change me such as my having a kidney removed would change me. Olson denies that teleportation is possible. He thinks that we live and die with our biological body. He makes his case with flair and the book is very well written, yet I fundamentally disagree with him. I think we talk to people, not bodies. And as Kant wrote (Vom Erkenntnisvermoegen, Vol. 2, p. 465);

"Denken ist reden mit sich selbst."
"To think is to talk to oneself."

When I think, I'm not talking to my body, but to my "self." And while the software - hardware analogy is flawed, it does provide the flavor of the situation. I also believe that teleportatation is theoretically possible. In his, Reasons and Persons, Parfit's thought-experiments include cases where the teleported person is changed in various ways. He asks how much change could we stand in teleportation before we say that death instead of teleportation has occurred. As you might expect, philosophers have offered a variety of answers to this question (closest continuer, etc.). This leads me into a point you (Grover) have made:

We mustn't confuse "rate of change" with "continuity of change." The perceived rate of change of time is variable:

For when I was a babe and wept and slept, time crept;
When I was a boy and laughed and talked, time walked;
Then when the years saw me a man, time ran,
But as I older grew, time flew.
Guy Pentreath

To say that the perception of time passing is subjective is to utter a tautology, for all perceptions are subjective. It's we who pass, not time. In another post to this forum I stressed the fact that I am not a being, but a becoming. To live at all is to continually become what one is not. Remember Hegel's comment that:

"Man is not what he is and is what he is not."

Given that life is not a being, but a becoming, how can I think that I was a one-celled egg? Since life is based on change, it's impossible to say that I, at this moment, am equivalent to any point in my past history. When I say, "I once was I child," I don't mean that I, as I am at this moment, am equivalent to anything that existed at some earlier time. What I mean is that a (roughly)continuous line can be drawn back through space and time, from my present self, back to my childhood, until one arrives at a one-celled zygote in my mother's womb. But I am not that zygote! It has long since passed into oblivion. In becoming, that zygote became something, that something became something else, ... , that eventually became me. These were gradual changes.

Now, Parfit asks us to consider how drastic of a change we could tolerate and still think of ourselves as the same person. The problem can be seen in context of the so-called Sorites Paradox (it's a problem, not a paradox). But given that I'm a becoming, rather than a being, I can experience a considerable continuous change (i.e. snot-nosed child into drooling old geezer) and yet still think of myself as having survived. Grover wrote:

I disagree. Suppose one moment you were an infant and the next moment you were an old man. Suppose all your life consisted of this random jumble of spatial or temporal moments. Such an extreme loss of continuity would result in a loss of self. Eugene Winograd, Prof. of Psychology at Emory University, wrote:

The function of memory is to provide us "...with a sense of continuity about our lives without which it would be hard to conceive of a sense of self..."

Regards,
Michael

 

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hello Michael,
I have no idea if you are agreeing with me or not- probably not however i don't get how you get so much meaning from something so vague. First of all, I am not saying anyone's ideas are dumb, ridiculous, whetever... but we are only speculating and I am apalled when people present their predictions as the absolute truth. What sets them apart from me? How come they know what will happen after death and I don't? It's just unlogical. That is why I posted my previous comment. And last of all, I would advice you to not impose your beliefs on people like if they were the "written word". Please do not be offended, I am only suggesting.

Thanks,
"Voltaire"

 

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Voltaire wrote:

Are we speaking the same language? My earlier reply to you belabored the point that human predictions are never absolutely certain. Yet you follow-up by suggesting that I've said that my explanations represent the absolute truth. Would you indicate where I've said that?

You say, "...but we are only speculating..." Can you give me an example of a rational human action that is not based upon speculation? Can you, for example, know with absolute certainty that the next airplane you'll fly in won't crash? Does the fact that you can't make predictions with absolute accuracy mean that you can't make meaningful predictions? Of course not. In my earlier reply to you, I wrote:

"...I can always be mistaken. Along with every belief I associate an approximate confidence-weighting factor, and I hold no belief with 100% certainty."

To say, "I know," never implies that I know something with 100% certainty. All human knowledge is subject to error and as such it ought to remain open for revision. Given that I've explicitly and repeatedly stated this, I'm befuddled as to how you could make a charge that I present explanations as the absolute truth.

I can't understand why you continue to ask this question. Is it so difficult for you to think that someone could know something that you don't know? To use a mathematical example, I know that Fourier transforms are a special case of Laplace transforms. Are you saying that the only way I could know this is if you also know it?

Voltaire, you remind me of the woman who called the police to break-up the fight at a boxing match. That is, you seem to misunderstand the fundamental concept of a philosophical discussion. When someone presents a philosophical idea the proper response is to critique that idea. I'm supposed to critique what you say and you're supposed to do the same for me. Despite casual appearances, the contestants in a boxing match aren't trying to murder each other. Likewise, presenting and defending one's philosophical ideas in a philosophical forum does not represent an act of tyrannical imposition - it's simply how we do things here. Instead of denying off-the-cuff what I've said could be true, you've got to actually read what I written and devise valid reasons why my ideas are flawed. It takes effort on both our parts to make a good discussion.

You don't have to ask the other person not to be offended when you disagree with them. We actually like it when others find holes in our beliefs. By providing valid refutations to my ideas you help me to improve them. The most important aspect of these discussions is that we learn something. I hope you've found this useful.

Regards,
Michael

 

Cyperium wrote:

If you read my earlier posts you’ll find that I think that persons never are, instead they become. Our memories have an integral function in this process of individual becoming. In his book, The Meaning of Mind, Thomas Szasz wrote:

”The individual who loses his memory loses his mind, his self, his personhood.”

Should you have the chance to visit the living remains of a person suffering with advanced Alzheimer’s disease you’ll better understand why memory is so important to us. Indeed, there are other neurological diseases such that those afflicted can’t remember what they were thinking only moments before. In losing our past we’re effectively denied our future. Without a memory we can neither make plans nor have aspirations. Those who suffer from this malady are forever condemned to live in the present. They are, they never become, and having been resigned to a life of being rather than becoming, they lose their personhood.

How does one adapt to a point-blank 12 gauge shotgun blast to the head? What do you think it would take to kill me? Am I like Jason the horror-show freak, who eternally springs back to life after everyone thinks they’ve finally killed him? If you think I could survive the shotgun blast, what do you think my chances are for surviving the “heat death” of the universe? You appear to be mightily impressed by our indestructibility. What has impressed me is our fragility. I’m amused when I read that someone has had a near-death experience, because I’m always in the midst of a near-death experience. In fact, we live our entire lives the same distance from death; we’re never more than a heartbeat away from it.

But we’re even less durable than our short life suggests. As I mentioned in an above post, death can only kill what life hasn’t already taken. I developed from a one-celled human zygote, but of course I’m not a one-celled zygote. That particular form of life disappeared some 46 years ago. Likewise for: the fetus, the newborn, the young child, the adolescent and the young man; they’ve all come and gone. Death could have ended any given stage in my past development. As it turned out, it wasn’t my death but my life that ended each stage. Becoming is as fatal to being as is death. What stands between me at this moment and the moment of my death is not time, but experiences and further becoming. Life is a continual process of comings and goings.

Suppose someone tries to make a picture from the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. A picture almost immediately begins to come together, but looking at it they think, "That's not what the picture is supposed to look like." So, they toss it out and continue trying to make a picture with the remaining pieces. They eventually give up, exclaiming, "There aren't enough pieces here to form a picture!"

We have enough pieces to form a picture of death, or nonbeing, but that picture frightens most people so much that they quickly discard it. François de La Rochefoucauld wrote:

"La mort et le soleil ne peuvent se regarder fixement."
"Neither death nor the sun can be looked at with a steady eye."

Instead of abandoning the scary picture of death, I forced myself to continue fitting pieces into the picture. It's my opinion that the picture becomes rather benign as more pieces are added. But even if the picture had became progressively more horrible, I'd still prefer the horrible picture to a comforting myth or a convenient fairy-tale. The earliest occasions of recorded storytelling had to do with myth-spinning for the purpose of denying death. The Epic of Gilgamesh, dating from 2700 BC, and written by the oldest known human author was just such a tale.

If you've ever lost a loved-one to death you'll discover the most powerful longing that a human can experience; the urge to deny death, to see it not as an end but as a portal to something else; usually something better. You might discover what prompted Shin-eqi-unninni and his scribes to chisel the narrative of Gilgamesh into stone. Who of us can face the lifeless body of a loved-one without that powerful longing - that death should not be the end - come creeping over them? We have a built-in tendency to disallow explanations that don't provide for an afterlife; a quasi-reflexive rejection of death as death. Sydney Harris cautions:

"We believe what we want to believe, what we like to believe, what suits our prejudices and fuels our passions."

To this I would add, "...and soothes our fears." Albert Camus correctly defined an intellectual as "...someone
whose mind watches itself." An intellectual attempts to keep an account of his or her natural predispositions. Francis Bacon similarly advised:

"...let every student of nature take this as a rule, that whatever his mind seizes and dwells upon with peculiar satisfaction is to be held in suspicion..."

The fact that humans experience this deep longing - to think of death as something other than death - ought to make us particularly wary as we approach the subject. Otherwise, our explanations end up confirming what we want to believe rather than what we ought to believe.

If a sealed boxcar in which I'm riding is headed to Auschwitz then I want to know it. If another passenger cries out when he happens to see a sign labeled "Auschwitz" pointing in the direction that we're headed, some of the passengers will surely insist that the sign has been turned-round, that it's been put there by mistake, or that the directions on the signs in this country have the opposite meaning from those that we're used to. Others will claim that we don't have the information sufficient to form any opinion whatsoever, concerning our destination. Here's what I'd say; "Given the fact that we're riding in a sealed boxcar (rather than, say, The Orient Express), and given that the signs indicate that we're headed towards Auschwitz, then I will take as my living hypothesis (as terrible as it is) that we're probably heading towards Auschwitz. Yes, it is possible that we might switch tracks at the last moment and end up not in Auschwitz, but in Disneyland, but I try to structure my life in accordance with what is probable, and not with what is merely possible.

I said earlier that this business is not for the "faint-of-heart." I'd think that nearly any student of human behavior would agree with me. For example, I regularly speak to a woman who is approaching her own death. She's confided in me her great comfort in knowing that she'll soon be reunited in Heaven with her long-since departed pet dog. Do you think I reply, "Um...well you've gotten it all wrong. Death isn't a reunification, it's a limit." Of course not. I say, "That's nice," and I let it go. But I've made the assumption that participants in this forum prefer to believe, not what he or she wants to believe, but what he or she ought to believe.

It’s odd that you say “nothing is easy” in a discussion about death, when death is so easy. No one can screw up their dying so badly that they actually fail to die. We can accept our death as gently as a falling autumn leaf, or we can, as Dylan Thomas urged,

Do not go gentle into that good night
Rage, rage, against the dying of the light

We die in either case.

If there's nothing after death, then there's nothing to fear from it. I enjoy an unusual abundance of wealth, health, peace, love and happiness in my life. I live at the top of a very brutish “food chain.” Almost any form of life that I might reassume would be worse than the life I already enjoy. Despite the fact that I “hit the jackpot” with my present life I very much doubt that I would be so lucky a second time around.

“Purpose” and “reason” are human inventions. If by “system” you mean the world, then I’m here to tell you that worlds neither fail nor succeed. Humans fail or succeed by the standards they set for themselves but worlds have no standard by which they measure themselves. Wittgenstein said that if a lion could speak then we couldn't understand it. Here, I disagree with Wittgenstein but agree with Daniel Dennett when he says that if a lion could speak we could understand it, but then it couldn't tell us what it's like to be a lion.

If the deepest questions asked by humans are to be answered at all, they'll have to be answered by humans. I look at death from the only standpoint available to me; a human standpoint. Human answers only have to explain things in imperfect, human terms. Any reasonable human explanation automatically allow for the possibility of revision. An explanation of something only has to show that it's not surprising. I'm far more surprised by the fact that I am alive at this moment, than I'm surprised that I once was not and soon will not be alive. Life, rather than death, is the larger mystery.

Regards,
Michael

 

lol! so you are arguing for the sake of arguing?! hmm.. how funny.
anyway, I guess I come off as a very lame person but I was educated to be polite and I don't see why it is necessary to be rude in a discussion. i don't even get what your point is. You picked the wrong person to mess with and since you don't mind people blowing you off I just want to tell you that I don't find your comments all that interesting thus I don't read them. get it? well, that's all.

-Voltaire

 

Of course memories are important for us, so I'll agree on that, but still they are without memories, thus being is not in memories.

You imagined that death would change you into something radically different (I guess you mean from body to soul) and because of that the notion of "I" becomes meaningless...from what I understand because you don't recognize yourself anymore.

You said : ("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.")

So I'm not saying that you will somehow adapt so that you won't die anymore from the bullet. I'm saying that after death, whatever environment you come to, whatever shape you are in, you will adapt to it simply because you have to even if you have forgotten who you were in life, there's something unique about you that will allways make you recognize yourself...who you are in the most basic form.

If there's nothing after death then for what reason are we living? To be happy? What is happiness in itself? What is it that makes the feeling of happiness? We are happy only to be sad later, cause if we weren't sad later, then we wouldn't know what happiness is, if we make one feeling weak, then every feeling get's weaker. Is there such a thing as true happiness? Happiness without the contrast of sadness?

You say that you have a unusual amount of wealth, health and so on, that helps you on your way. But as the bible say, a day of sickness and a life of happiness is forgotten. Or are you one of the lucky few that are happy that you were happy? "I'm sad now, but at least I were happy yesterday...", isn't it so, that the fact that you were happy yesterday strengthen the feeling of sadness today (if you are sad today, that is)?

Happiness gives hope though, "I were happy yesterday, so I'll be happy another day".

Are they? Everything has it's purpose, it's just that we fail to see the purpose in the larger picture. When it comes to the quantum size then there is a purpose to everything. Take away one part, and the rest fails. Everything has a relation to everything else. Purpose is merely that the part has a "job" to do for the whole. Everything has some kind of purpose, the photon carries energy from atom to atom, without any of these parts, we wouldn't exist, the universe wouldn't exist. Sure many parts are "at the wrong places", where the job that the part is supposed to do can't be done. That however doesn't mean that the part didn't have purpose, it had purpose, it just wasn't at the right place to carry on the job. It may be that the parts have infinite purpose though, that wherever the part might be it's able to carry on it's purpose in some way or another (to be of some help), or maybe somethings purpose changes due to environment.

I think the lion could tell us what it's like to be a lion. I believe that the lion tells itself how it is to be a lion all the time and I believe that we tell ourselfs what it's like to be a human all the time too.

I agree, it would be nice to have a language with only one meaning, and that is what you meant.

I know that it was a time when I didn't exist and I know that there is a time when I won't exist. But neither of these times concern me, what concerns me is what happens in existance, whether it is "life" or not.

 

From the perspective of the cosmos, we were never born, thus we can never die. There is only a reshuffling of atoms. No one is ever concious of death. Being unconcious, we could recieve no answers. We are machines, constantly re-using parts from other machines, the only thing that persists is a transitory pattern.
You might as well ask:
Where does your fist go when you open your hand?

 

awesome post.

 

I agree, this was awsome! Voltaire, I really miss your posts on the religion forum. Spidergoat, your awesome post would work well on the religion forum, too.