Slowvehicle
Membership Drive , Co-Ordinator,, Russell's Antin
Whatwhatwhat?!?
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[Merged] Immortality & Bayesian Statistics
- Thread starter Jabba
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Whatwhatwhat?!?
Akhenaten
Heretic Pharaoh
Slowvehicle
Membership Drive , Co-Ordinator,, Russell's Antin
Loss Leader
I would save the receptionist., Moderator
Do you even try to understand what people say? Have you just reached the point in your life when you only care about hearing your own voice? People have posted long, cogent answers to this at least fifty times and probably far more than a hundred. The self/mental/consciousness is the physical brain in process. The VW speeding along at 50 mph is not in any way different from the physical VW. It is the car in process.
Akhenaten
Heretic Pharaoh
Slowvehicle
Membership Drive , Co-Ordinator,, Russell's Antin
Akhenaten
Heretic Pharaoh
In reality, yes.
If the concept of an infinite pool of potential selves where everyone springs from nothing was true, however, nobody at all would be related.
Jabba,
I will reiterate a prior question by others here:
Is there anything anyone here might post, any reference you might be given, or or anyone you might email and question, that would cause you to change any part of your "proof" or theory?
I will reiterate a prior question by others here:
Is there anything anyone here might post, any reference you might be given, or or anyone you might email and question, that would cause you to change any part of your "proof" or theory?
Yul did do a lot of roles requiring him to bear his chest, didn't he? A lot like Captain Kirk, although the former had a better effect on my wife. Perhaps William Shatner is immortal, but sadly, Yul was not.
pakeha
Penultimate Amazing
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PixyMisa
Persnickety Insect
Slowvehicle
Membership Drive , Co-Ordinator,, Russell's Antin
Good Evening, Mr. Savage!
FWIW, this would be a lovely place for you to address the issue about whihc many posters have asked you: If the "mental" processes of the brain are not simply activities of a specific brain under specific conditions, why is it that physical trauma to the brain affects the "mental" processes? Not only that, specific kinds of trauma produce specific kinds of effects. Why do you, personally, suppose this is?
What do you suppose might encourage you to answer this, or any of the similar, questions that have been posed to you?
I'll never understand what mileage people get out of separating the neurological functioning of the brain and mystical woo-woo "Sense of Self" (which seems to be nothing more then the new way to say "Soul") or any of the other dozen doublespeak terms for the same concept.
Other then the obvious explanation of "That's where the Woo goes" of course.
Thinking, including our own internal perception of reality, just is what the brain does. Just like pumping blood is what the heart does. There's no mystery here.
Other then the obvious explanation of "That's where the Woo goes" of course.
Thinking, including our own internal perception of reality, just is what the brain does. Just like pumping blood is what the heart does. There's no mystery here.
Mojo
Mostly harmless
They can kid themselves that their "Sense of Self" will continue after their brain inevitably ceases to function.
dlorde
Philosopher
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Nuh-huh - I'm taking my sense of self with me when I go...
Akhenaten
Heretic Pharaoh
Apparently all of the tens of billions before you made the same decision and so we're left with not a trace of their immortal selves.
It's almost as if they no longer exist.
It's almost as if they no longer exist.
It is interesting to me that Jabba is not happy with the most popular Western religious myth, that his "self" is not physical but will transfer to a perfect place, heaven, when he dies. Not true in my opinion, but popular. Instead, "he" wants to keep coming back to Earth again and again: not with his memories or knowledge, or experience, or things, but as some undefined "thing" called "self."
I found this in the Language Awards thread, and thought it might be helpful to Jabba.
reverebison: hello. I'm sure you are sincere in your enthusiasm for this realisation that the universe is a whole of which we are parts. No one disputes that we are made of the stuff of the universe.
But the repetition of that single idea at great length does nothing to develop any of your further assertions, which if I may say are rather uninspired and materialistic failures of imagination and of education.
Take the hilited part of this assertion you've made: Current evidential research has shown that our sense of "self" is an illusion. The key bit of data was the discovery that when the research subject decided to move their hand, the signal along the nerves from the brain to the hand started to flow a very short fraction of a second before the subject made the decision to move the hand.
So now we have a new view of our "self" as being a fiction presented after all the subsystems of the body-mind have done their work. It's a summation and a mere passenger in the process of the living entity that each biological creature is.
So, your mind is a fiction, an informational construct which has no physical avatar, but merely a bunch of physical processes that generate the illusion that your ego is an actor and a substance.
So, the idea of your mind as something through which energy flows is as materialistic and false as to say that you have a soul like a handkerchief folded in your breast pocket.
The notion that "consciousness" is an energy that flows through your "mind" is an unsophisticated metaphor that fails at every point. In fact, consciousness is the temporary sense of awareness that the brain generates through physical processes (chemistry and physics), and as such is synonymous with mind.
If you really followed Watts, you would let go of this primitive idea that your mind is a thing which exists in any real way. It's a temporary and dynamic consequence of unfolding processes in the brain.
Grasp that, and you are truly free.
Best wishes to you in your journey towards enlightenment and truth.
(Hint: real science, as opposed to half-baked quantum poetry, will help you get a grip.)
PS You might want to have a read of this recent thread, http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=275899 where this understanding of our minds as illusionary fictions created by the brain is discussed: it might help you exercise a new point of view.
Akhenaten
Heretic Pharaoh
I'm torn between thinking that this is because he understands that the first explicit mention of such things as heaven will immediately relegate his entire premise to the realm of religious flummery and thinking that he considers himself so special that nobody before him has ever considered immortality in the way in which he does.
I don't know that he's even thought the whole thing through as far as that.
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