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Death is weird - Magical Realist - May 19, 2018
The more you think about it, the weirder death becomes. I mean just imagine shooting yourself in your head. One second you are pulling the trigger, and then bam!, you are in some completely different and alien state. You wouldn't feel pain. You wouldn't even hear the gunshot. Even if there is no afterlife, still this being suddenly hurled into nonexistence full throttle is bizarre beyond belief. Were we that close to the infinite void afterall? It's as if our minds are not constructed to comprehend it. What is it? Eternal black nonbeing. Not even that. Memoryless, senseless, timeless, thoughtless blankness. And how is it that we are just turned off like some electrical hallucination of our brain? I mean our body is still there, except now it is broken and shut down. The complex world-involved embodied person we were just vanishes. Poof, as if it were little more than an ephemeral phantom. Again this is assuming there's no afterlife. If there is, then the situation is equally mysterious, albeit slightly more comprehensible. Bam! We are in some other conscious state only without our brain and body! What the hell is that? Death, no matter what it is, poses before us the deepest enigma of our lives. Why were we here at all for this brief time if only to end up totally gone forever? How we answer that question is the meaning of our lives.
RE: Death is weird - Ostronomos - May 19, 2018
(May 19, 2018 05:50 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: The more you think about it, the weirder death becomes. I mean just imagine shooting yourself in your head. One second you are pulling the trigger, and the bam!, you are in some completely different state of being.You wouldn't feel pain. You wouldn't even hear the gunshot. Even if there is no afterlife, still this being suddenly hurled into nonexistence full throttle is bizarre beyond belief. Were we that close to the infinite void afterall? It's as if our minds are not constructed to comprehend it. What is it? Eternal black nonbeing. Not even that. Memoryless, senseless, timeless, thoughtless blankness. And how is it that we are just turned off like some electrical hallucination of our brain? I mean our body is still there, except now it is broken and shut down. The complex world-involved embodied person we were just vanishes. Poof, as if it were little more than an ephemeral phantom. Again this is assuming there's no afterlife. If there is, then the situation is equally mysterious, albeit slightly more comprehensible. Bam! We are in some other conscious state only without our brain and body! What the hell is that? Death, no matter what it is, poses before us the deepest enigma of our lives. Why were we here at all for this brief time if only to end up totally gone forever? How we answer that question is the meaning of our lives.
Speaking from a purely objective standpoint, death is the permanent cessation of bodily functions. But if ultimate reality exists, then it is the end of duality and suffering as embodied consciousness. The psyche would be integral to spacetime and thus be conserved within it. It would exist as a reality generating protocomputational identity that has primary existence over the body which is merely a specific and distinct lower level object. The integrated theory of consciousness implies panpsychism. Hence my experiences have been validated by science alas. God would be apparent upon death or transformation of the observational awareness in which the body and world actually appear in.
RE: Death is weird - C C - May 19, 2018
(May 19, 2018 05:50 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: [...] What is it? Eternal black nonbeing. Not even that. Memoryless, senseless, timeless, thoughtless blankness. And how is it that we are just turned off like some electrical hallucination of our brain? I mean our body is still there, except now it is broken and shut down. The complex world-involved embodied person we were just vanishes. Poof, as if it were little more than an ephemeral phantom. Again this is assuming there's no afterlife. [...]
Dreamless sleep or coma mimics the absence of "empirical and intellectual evidence for existence" attributed to the extinction-version of death. But there's a resurrection from the dreamless-ness, where newly formed memories connect to the old ones and skip over that missing interlude of non-experience. Lose the memories, though, and Ashley psychologically transforms into Sam.
All it takes is total amnesia or lack of memory relationship to other body states (past ones at least) to reveal how any core attributes of "conscious life" are independent of the immediate person-construct riding on them. DID might demonstrate that as well (supposed different personalities sharing the same brain).
Figuratively similar to how embryos of different species can resemble each other at very early stages, there's surely some required, elemental characteristics of developmental conscious-life which substantiate a fundamental identity of being conscious. Minus the usual, immediate flavors and distinctions of specifically being Bob or Carol, a finch or a cat, etc. This idea of there being a basic, generic subjectivity (accordingly construed as distributed or universally possible) is what thought orientations like Death, Nothingness, and Subjectivity seem to rely on. There may or may not be also be a vague suggestion of that in "Amnesia and the Self That Remains When Memory Is Lost" or "The Self That's Left When Memories Fade".
When dying, one's gradual disintegration into "not even a presentation of nothingness or silence" is an opposite bookend to the gradual arising from the same "not even blankness" prior to fetal brain development (i.e., the first glimmers of consciousness for a prenatal life-form). As such, the return to it via death might be considered a potential portal to another emerging life. (Somewhat akin to Ashley becoming Sam via amnesia, though that was restricted to the same body.) No information (memory) is transmitted, thus no violations. No way for Shirley MacLaine to prove that she was an ancient Egyptian queen or whatever, or to justify her having such suppressed recollections.
However, if temporal change is an illusion at a metempirical level or even in a scientific realism context ("nows" are static differences rather than dynamic modifications which replace and obliterate each other), then such speculative transitions would serve no purpose anyway. All destinations of a generic "conscious manner of being" would be simultaneous, with memories and information processing of specific brain-states creating the internal isolation of only residing in a particular moment, place, and body -- or residing in a specific body of _X_ person or beast at _Z_ time.
Given the foggy cognition and non-linguistic thoughts of the average animal, only the human instances could usually philosophically contemplate and conceptually attribute to themselves these narrow, "special, privileged locations" for being real. (The belief that "I only exist here in Hawkville at the corner of Elm Street at 4:31 P.M" -- because that is the knowledge and awareness limit of what the pairing of that experience to an associated brain/body state will allow. The latter does not assimilate an omniscient range of information to process and produce representations from. What it knows / realizes pertains to the immediate environment.)
Quote:[...] One second you are pulling the trigger, and the bam!, you are in some completely different and alien state. You wouldn't feel pain. You wouldn't even hear the gunshot. [...] It's as if our minds are not constructed to comprehend it.
That same struggle to represent it faithfully seems the case with the "devoid of mind or mental properties", metaphysical version of the external world that speculative rationalists (of the inert, material substance tradition) typically infer. Have you ever encountered one yet that consistently treated it as being that degree of "oblivion" to itself on a full-time basis? They're like panpsychists in the closet. They routinely imagine or represent it just as the experienced world. Populating it with the same manifested phenomenal (qualitative) objects existing outside themselves from a POV, and arraying those circumstances with our cognitive distinctions as if those concepts were as valid in that non-mental territory as within our psychological activity.
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RE: Death is weird - Zinjanthropos - May 20, 2018
Is the afterlife world or any metaphysical place where one's soul can spend eternity subject to entropy? The physical universe eventually crumbles and the non physical realm acts like a life raft, is that how it works? The metaphysical world seems nothing short of perfect. The physical world seems like the worst place to put life, so why even have one? So for those who figure there's a place for them in the afterlife, there is no concern about what you may encounter?
RE: Death is weird - confused2 - May 20, 2018
There comes a time when it's best to quit and let the young get on with it. The future belongs to them just as it once did to you. Nobody wants a planet full of old people moaning about dog shit and noise late at night. If you have children tell them you love them - even if you don't. That's it. Job done. Someone else can fix the damn roof - and good luck to them.
RE: Death is weird - Zinjanthropos - May 20, 2018
(May 20, 2018 10:14 AM)confused2 Wrote: There comes a time when it's best to quit and let the young get on with it. The future belongs to them just as it once did to you. Nobody wants a planet full of old people moaning about dog shit and noise late at night. If you have children tell them you love them - even if you don't. That's it. Job done. Someone else can fix the damn roof - and good luck to them.
Ahh, you seem to be confused about my motive. Entertainment my friend, it's different for everybody. Plus I've waited so long to be an old codger and I'd hate to say it was all for nothing
RE: Death is weird - C C - May 20, 2018
(May 20, 2018 05:02 AM)Zinjanthropos Wrote: Is the afterlife world or any metaphysical place where one's soul can spend eternity subject to entropy? The physical universe eventually crumbles and the non physical realm acts like a life raft, is that how it works? The metaphysical world seems nothing short of perfect. The physical world seems like the worst place to put life, so why even have one? So for those who figure there's a place for them in the afterlife, there is no concern about what you may encounter?
Well, going all the way back to the Eleatic school, the ancient rationalists tended to view their inferred version of the external world (the so-called "real world") as static and unchanging. It was the cosmos of appearances (as manifested by experience or consciousness) that was ephemeral, unreliable, and corruptible because it was constantly changing. Even physics has to rationally abstract mathematical models (that are treated as immutable) from the empirical circumstances and thereby offer reliable principles for predicting what the perceived environment is going to do next. Just like the ancients, that abstraction then gets treated as existent in scientific realism.
Materialism is a family of metaphysical theories. This is from circa 1909, when the anti-metaphysical attitude of positivism was influential in science and philosophy (especially the flavor of it spawned by Ernst Mach). Lenin is being sarcastic, of course; he's a materialist of the Engels persuasion and the lineage which the latter is intellectually descended from.
V. I. Lenin -- Anyone in the least acquainted with philosophical literature must know that scarcely a single contemporary professor of philosophy (or of theology) can be found who is not directly or indirectly engaged in refuting materialism. They have declared materialism refuted a thousand times, yet are continuing to refute it for the thousand and first time. All our revisionists are engaged in refuting materialism, pretending, however, that actually they are only refuting the materialist Plekhanov, and not the materialist Engels, nor the materialist Feuerbach, nor the materialist views of J. Dietzgen -- and, moreover, that they are refuting materialism from the standpoint of "recent" and "modern" positivism, natural science, and so forth.
. . . I shall refer to those arguments by which materialism is being combated by . . . . Machians. I shall use this latter term throughout as a synonym for "empirio-criticist" because it is shorter and simpler and has already acquired rights of citizenship in Russian literature. That Ernst Mach is the most popular representative of empirio-criticism today is universally acknowledged in philosophical literature . . .
The materialists, we are told, recognise something unthinkable and unknowable -- "things-in-themselves" -- matter "outside of experience" and outside of our knowledge. They lapse into genuine mysticism by admitting the existence of something beyond, something transcending the bounds of "experience" and knowledge. When they say that matter, by acting upon our sense-organs, produces sensations, the materialists take as their basis the "unknown," nothingness; for do they not themselves declare our sensations to be the only source of knowledge? The materialists lapse into "Kantianism" (Plekhanov, by recognising the existence of "things-in-themselves," i.e., things outside of our consciousness); they "double" the world and preach "dualism," for the materialists hold that beyond the appearance there is the thing-in-itself; beyond the immediate sense data there is something else, some fetish, an "idol," an absolute, a source of "metaphysics," a double of religion ("holy matter," as Bazarov says). Such are the arguments levelled by the Machians against materialism, as repeated and retold in varying keys by the afore-mentioned writers. --Materialism and Empirio-Criticism
Going against the grain, I consider SR to actually be a refinement or abstract supplement to the nature of the experienced world rather than dealing with some "ultimate reality" that the perceived cosmos is taken to be either a representation of or only the result of (the latter similar to a dream being caused by the brain, but not being an attempt to represent the brain itself).
That in turn forces me to place SR in an "immanent" orientation of metaphysical practice (extended rational speculation within experience -- about its non-visible levels, sometimes tied to experiments) instead of the usually exercised "emanant" orientation (metempirical; outward). Or IOW, scientific realism forces me to introduce those very distinctions, to give it a more practical resonance. An "immanent" modification wouldn't work with "metempirics"; since the term (again) lacks the ambiguity which metaphysics has fallen into over the centuries (i.e., metempirics specifically refers to "beyond experience"). And the counterpart "emanent" adjective would be redundant if applied to it.
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RE: Death is weird - confused2 - May 20, 2018
Z Wrote:I've waited so long to be an old codger and I'd hate to say it was all for nothingPart of being an old codger is allowing a certain amount of acquired bitterness seep back into the world.
RE: Death is weird - Zinjanthropos - May 21, 2018
(May 20, 2018 05:51 PM)confused2 Wrote:Z Wrote:I've waited so long to be an old codger and I'd hate to say it was all for nothingPart of being an old codger is allowing a certain amount of acquired bitterness seep back into the world.
First I'll have to graduate to the curmudgeon level. Don't think I'm surly or bad-tempered enough to make that leap quite yet. Having too much fun.
RE: Death is weird - Ostronomos - May 22, 2018
I found this article that details one journalist's account of an after-life:
Surviving Death: An Overview of Evidence to Support an Afterlife
In her latest book, Surviving Death, journalist Leslie Kean offers a compelling overview of paranormal science. Through a surfeit of incredible evidence that ranges from three-year-old children who recount past life experiences that are later verified as accurate, to her own experiences with a trance medium who was able to conjure a physical hand while bound to a chair, Kean is able to skip right past the discussion of whether psi abilities are “real,” to a much meatier thesis: Do our souls survive death, with our personalities intact, or is consciousness merely a fabrication of the brain? It is a fascinating read, which includes Kean’s personal journey as a curious skeptic, discovering evidence highly suggestive of survival past death (i.e., feeling a hand brought forward from the afterlife), as she connects with her own brother who passed.
As a journalist, Kean—who also wrote UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record, which we interviewed her about here—is not afraid to explore phenomena currently outside of mainstream science, bringing forward evidence, rigor, and insight. Below, she explains more about what she learned exploring the other side.
https://goop.com/wellness/spirituality/surviving-death-overview-evidence-support-afterlife/