Why assume we "go anywhere" when we die?

It's not that implausible that reincarnation exists in some form, if eternal recurrence is true. It's also possible that Closed Individualism is the wrong theory of personal identity, and that Empty Individualism and/or Open Individualism are true. The idea that death is nothingness sounds too damn good to be true.

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Question Mark said:
It's not that implausible that reincarnation exists in some form, if eternal recurrence is true. It's also possible that Closed Individualism is the wrong theory of personal identity, and that Empty Individualism and/or Open Individualism are true. The idea that death is nothingness sounds too damn good to be true.

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Good post. I think life continues for a slightly different reasoning, but very similar essentially. Your model shown supposes an individual soul which comes back? But I believe there is no such thing as a self speaking in absolute terms.

The difference I guess being that I believe it's not "your" consciousness, so it is in all things at once. And consciousness as well as all reality resides in Nothing.
 
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People fear death, well at least some people fear death. What is after death feels "mysterious" in a way I guess.
 
Madre Muerte said:
Shut up heathen
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Goddamn mobile won't let me select goddamn "Islamic Content". Fml...

Luminous47 said:
People fear death, well at least some people fear death. What is after death feels "mysterious" in a way I guess.
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Yes. I am not immune. There is a chance that I can believe something, or for something to be logical, and yet still wrong.

It is truly an irrational fear. Because there is no experience of being dead at all. So it can't possibly be a bad thing at the time no matter the case...

But I don't think there is such a thing as death. We may say, oh David died, Sarah died, whatever. But where exactly can they go when everything is fundamentally one? Nothing can leave that One.

To say David died upon clinical death is like saying "David died" if David just goes blind. What I mean is, to lose sight completely (not even see black or w.e.), one localization of consciousness in the form of seeing has ended. Eyesight has died from that perspective. David still exists. But fundamentally I believe there IS no David. So when all elements of David die, the fundamental nature of what David always was remains. It always existed, always will... Just all localizations that we conceptualize as "David" has gone.

Another more accessible example which I probably ought to have used first... David's clinical death would be like saying David has died during a general anaesthetic procedure that he wakes from. During anaesthetic his localization has ended and subjectively he is everything (which is experienced from his PoV as nothing, a time gap)... The only reason we consider it different is because firstly we are observing physical vital signs rather than the subjective nothingness from his PoV, and secondly because he "comes back".

But back from what? What exactly comes back? The concept we label David comes back and the localized experience that comes with "David", the fundamental Absolute (label it God whatever you want) never went anywhere and never does, never will, never has...

That is the theory anyway.
 
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it's just fear of the unknown. early humans may have thought 'when my friend leaves, he goes somewhere. so when he dies he must go somewhere then, too'
 
Philosophical Zombie Chad here. Sure doesn't feel not great to have no subjective experiences whatsoever.

Check this out: ooooh lookit meee, I have so much consciousness, bleh bleh bleh.... that's what you faggots sound like, I can imitate you dipshits perfectly and by definition cannot be distinguished from a sentient being. Have fun pondering whether your gay-ass personal experience survives death qualiacucks lmaooooo
 
shoplifter7 said:
it's just fear of the unknown. early humans may have thought 'when my friend leaves, he goes somewhere. so when he dies he must go somewhere then, too'
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I think partly, people cannot conceive of nothingness. On an instinctual level we think we somehow experience that infinity in literal nothingness and it's a feeling impossible to shake. I don't think that's the case as outlined, but that is really what people deep down fear.

Calandrino said:
Philosophical Zombie Chad here. Sure doesn't feel not great to have no subjective experiences whatsoever.

Check this out: ooooh lookit meee, I have so much consciousness, bleh bleh bleh.... that's what you faggots sound like, I can imitate you dipshits perfectly and by definition cannot be distinguished from a sentient being. Have fun pondering whether your gay-ass personal experience survives death qualiacucks lmaooooo
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I don't think there is any such thing as "amounts" of consciousness. That would require consciousness to be fundamentally more than a singular thing, so that each person could individually have some different amount.

Well actually the baseline is the same, we have the same "level" of consciousness as a bird or ant, only the contents of consciousness change.

I can absolutely prove this if anyone is really interested to know why that is.
 
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Maurice Caine said:
It's like ram sticks really, you turn your computer off and whatever's in it is gone. Same with you, you're gone, man. You don't even need to kick it for it to happen, Alzheimer's does the trick.
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Alzheimer's is a good example of the contents of consciousness changing dramatically although the consciousness itself remains the same and static. I would have to describe first why our consciousness is the same in nature to that of a beetle or cat etc if required.

But anyway there is an assumption that wherever we "go" is somewhere we currently aren't (as well as the idea that we exist beyond a sort of "vessel"). That is what I challenge. Very much like the dream and bed analogy I think I mentioned a few times, you can be riding a jet ski in the ocean in a dream, yet lying perfectly still in bed... Where do we truly reside? Does our fundamental nature really reside here in this universe? I would challenge that this universe is any more real than a more persistent dream with more persistent rules.

There is no doubt that we are localized in this "dream" and that altering the brain alters the content of consciousness. General anaesthetic being a dramatic example. But you could imagine that you go to sleep one night and have a 100 year long dream wherein there is matter and brains etc. And in that dream you are having, if it had rigid laws in place as does our waking reality, it could well be the case that removing a certain part of that dream-brain causes total vision loss within that dream so that you can no longer see your surroundings in that realm... These localized forms of consciousness can be wittled down and down and down until it is as basic as observer and observed (NO thought, no feeling, just white void and you). Any further and experience ceases like general anaesthetic because the appearance of duality is vital for experience to occur at the level of the self... I guess that is pretty self-evident, if there is no longer any part of you, how can what you call you have any experience?

But essentially I think we are just in another bed a layer deeper than this, a bed of nothingness. Nothingness which has to be everythingness by the fact that in nothingness there are no limits... If nothingness can ONLY be nothingness you are imposing a limit, you are making it finite, Boundary and limit does not exist here at absolute nothing. To be infinite and unlimited it must be able to be all things. Like having a magical hat you can pull unlimited things out of, eventually you pull space, time, matter, consciousness.

The idea of "nothing" is common in Eastern philosophy for sure, although a lot of times fundamental reality is described as "consciousness". I am not sure at present if that is what I think. I think consciousness may just be part of that nothing too.
 
RMQualtrough said:
Alzheimer's is a good example of the contents of consciousness changing dramatically although the consciousness itself remains the same and static. I would have to describe first why our consciousness is the same in nature to that of a beetle or cat etc if required.

But anyway there is an assumption that wherever we "go" is somewhere we currently aren't (as well as the idea that we exist beyond a sort of "vessel"). That is what I challenge. Very much like the dream and bed analogy I think I mentioned a few times, you can be riding a jet ski in the ocean in a dream, yet lying perfectly still in bed... Where do we truly reside? Does our fundamental nature really reside here in this universe? I would challenge that this universe is any more real than a more persistent dream with more persistent rules.

There is no doubt that we are localized in this "dream" and that altering the brain alters the content of consciousness. General anaesthetic being a dramatic example. But you could imagine that you go to sleep one night and have a 100 year long dream wherein there is matter and brains etc. And in that dream you are having, if it had rigid laws in place as does our waking reality, it could well be the case that removing a certain part of that dream-brain causes total vision loss within that dream so that you can no longer see your surroundings in that realm... These localized forms of consciousness can be wittled down and down and down until it is as basic as observer and observed (NO thought, no feeling, just white void and you). Any further and experience ceases like general anaesthetic because the appearance of duality is vital for experience to occur at the level of the self... I guess that is pretty self-evident, if there is no longer any part of you, how can what you call you have any experience?

But essentially I think we are just in another bed a layer deeper than this, a bed of nothingness. Nothingness which has to be everythingness by the fact that in nothingness there are no limits... If nothingness can ONLY be nothingness you are imposing a limit, you are making it finite, Boundary and limit does not exist here at absolute nothing. To be infinite and unlimited it must be able to be all things. Like having a magical hat you can pull unlimited things out of, eventually you pull space, time, matter, consciousness.

The idea of "nothing" is common in Eastern philosophy for sure, although a lot of times fundamental reality is described as "consciousness". I am not sure at present if that is what I think. I think consciousness may just be part of that nothing too.
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Man, we're only gonna solve death when we can transition our brains to synthetic ones. Then all bets are off...
 
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Maurice Caine said:
Man, we're only gonna solve death when we can transition our brains to synthetic ones. Then all bets are off...
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But how would it possible for robo-us to know if it truly is the same "us", or just a replica with all of our memories? That might be a bridge that can't be crossed.
 
RMQualtrough said:
But how would it possible for robo-us to know if it truly is the same "us", or just a replica with all of our memories? That might be a bridge that can't be crossed.
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There's some theory on how you slowly replace your neurons for fake ones or something like that, kinda like how we shed our skin. I mean, is the you from last year the same you now? I'd argue so... I think it's something similar.
 
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The fact that I am able to take in and engage with my environment from a unique perspective that only I have, and can even leave the corporeal realm if I get knocked unconscious, go to sleep, take hallucinatory substances, or even die and be revived, seem to imply that there's something about consciousness that isn't a simple component of the environment. My brain's electrical impulses creating my id, ego, superego, and phaneron, do not account for why "I" am here to observe all of this. A being could go about its entire life interacting with its environment, without ever needing a "helmsman", in a first-person perspective. Every last one of us could have been NPCs, to a very much identical end result. There is a component to consciousness that cannot be rationalized, measured, or logic'd away, something beyond the mere interactions and understanding of our environment that we all know is there, but can't even put into proper terms. The term consciousness itself doesn't even do a good job of explaining it. You can call it a soul, but a soul in the conventional sense implies being a part of your experiences, and I'm not sure if that's 100% true, either. I find it hard to believe that a mass of biological material moving around and spreading fluids all over the planet needs to be convinced that its experiences are important in order for it to keep doing its job. We have something rocks, dirt, water, air, and space don't have. The fact that all that shit came together and produced me, may very well be true, but I don't think I am purely material, because it isn't logical for me to be able to experience my existence on so disturbingly deep a level, given just our material makeup. For that reason, I have some faith in the concept of "soul", even though the concept itself isn't articulated well.

I don't have an answer for you, but I have a lot of fucking questions regarding the subject that there are no words for. There are real, rock solid, mental blockades in place keeping us from understanding exactly what consciousness is. It is an observable individually subjective phenomenon, but outside of that information, we have no measuring stick for it at all.
 
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RMQualtrough said:
If all of reality is fundamentally one thing, then where "else" is there to go?
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Have we condensed all of reality into one interpretation of quantum physics yet? Some of them are fantastical and yet a valid hypothesis for how the system is working because of how few of the facts we truly have about our world. The sky is not the firmament, the earth is not flat, and reality is not just what we immediately see. Dark matter and Dark Energy exist, and we cannot properly categorize them because of our lack of knowledge.

The answer is "I don't know" and a lot of the time "I'm afraid of death, so maybe.." but the answer is unknown and that is the only thing I can rationally tell you. Except maybe more about the questioners and the nature of psychology, obviously that is strongly related because of the unknown variables in life and our need to answer them anyway.
 
Haim Arlosoroff said:
Have we condensed all of reality into one interpretation of quantum physics yet? Some of them are fantastical and yet a valid hypothesis for how the system is working because of how few of the facts we truly have about our world. The sky is not the firmament, the earth is not flat, and reality is not just what we immediately see. Dark matter and Dark Energy exist, and we cannot properly categorize them because of our lack of knowledge.

The answer is "I don't know" and a lot of the time "I'm afraid of death, so maybe.." but the answer is unknown and that is the only thing I can rationally tell you. Except maybe more about the questioners and the nature of psychology, obviously that is strongly related because of the unknown variables in life and our need to answer them anyway.
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I read someone say a paper was published very recently stating dark matter doesn't exist. I have not Googled it myself so might be BS.
 
Basically all of human culture has developed to cope with fear of death. That includes religion.
 
RMQualtrough said:
I read someone say a paper was published very recently stating dark matter doesn't exist. I have not Googled it myself so might be BS.
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No it doesn't exist, what exists is that the arms of spiral galaxies rotate around their galactic center and the luminosity of a spiral galaxy decreases as one goes from the center to the outskirts. So if luminous mass were all the matter, then we can model the galaxy as a point mass in the center and test masses orbiting around it, similar to the Solar System. From Kepler's Second Law, it is expected that the rotational velocities would decrease with distance from the center, similar to the Solar System. Fundamentally what exists is that this is not observed. Instead, the galaxy rotation curve remains flat as distance from the center increases. So, knowing little about gravity, we say there must be additional matter there to account for the rotational energy. However because we cannot see it, we called it 'Dark Matter'.

Honestly its just a theory, I was referencing that we cannot account for how the universe works at very large or very small levels. Its wild how little we know about the human brain, the cosmos, and the fundamental forces and energy which make those up. And Yet, we ask the big questions and expect to receive a meaningful answer which isn't just some kind of metaphysical woo-woo. We cannot even put the questions into the right box of brain, cosmos, or quantum yet. We look to our brain to tell us about the smallest fundamentals, we look to the smallest fundamentals to tell us about the universe (dark matter and energy), and we look to the universe to tell us about our brain when it dies.
 
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