gjones and JohnJoeMittler,
I was trying to clarify what Pixel was alluding to. It is not necessarily my point of view. However I'm pretty sure that view had some support from some prominent scientists at some time or another (?Minkowski). Are there any physicists out there who can shed some light on this question?
BillyJoe.
I was trying to clarify what Pixel was alluding to. It is not necessarily my point of view. However I'm pretty sure that view had some support from some prominent scientists at some time or another (?Minkowski). Are there any physicists out there who can shed some light on this question?
BillyJoe.
KelvinG
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LucyR said:
On surface, what you said seems disturbing, but I couldn't agree more.
I'm in no hurry to die, but I catch myself once in awhile saying "Ah, at least one day it will all be over."
And this is coming from a guy who's mostly happy and lives a great life.
Near death experiences are just the experiences of people who nearly died. And there are good scientific explanations for the experiences, most of which boil down to the brain being deprived of Oxygen.BillyJoe said:
I hope he has better 'evidence' than that. He said there was a "colossal amount of evidence".
Interesting Ian
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ceptimus said:
Yes that's right. It's absolutely irrelevant how good or bad we might consider it to be.
Billy Joe, does this suffice?BillyJoe said:Kelvin,
But you haven't said why.
You are mostly happy and live a great life but yet you want it all to be over one day. Why?
BillyJoe
"Interesting Ian
Philosopher
Registered: Feb 2004
Location: Stockton-on-Tees, England
Posts: 9310" (!!!)
At least one day it will all be over!
Or maybe this is what eternity is like.dann said:
No, actually, Ian is a part of my JREF experience. Unfortunately I can no longer spend the time the philosophy forum requires. Married, kids, work and all that. I don't know how Ian does it. Obviously he either has heaps of time or he thinks and types a damn sight faster then I do.
BillyJoe.
PS
Ian's registration date cannot be correct. He has been around forever.
TragicMonkey
Poisoned Waffles
I always thought the reason so many people believe in an afterlife is because it's difficult for the mind to imagine nonexistence. It's the opposite of "I think, therefore I am". To imagine the state of nonexistence, you'd have to stop thinking. But you'd still be thinking of not thinking. It's so much easier to imagine vacation resorts in the clouds. You can believe in nonexistence; it's just really tricky to imagine what it's like.
BillyJoe said:
The implication of that statement seems to be that there's some in-depth way to imagine one's own nonexistence. I don't believe that there is. Everything that you've ever experienced has been from within your consciousness as an existing being. (Before you existed you had no experience.) Even your imagining of what it's like to sleep comes from your experience.
How did you acquire an understanding of the word 'nonexistence' in the first place? Didn't it come from your having observed -- in your experience, personal and vicarious -- the disappearance of other creatures (which under certain circumstances you assume signals their nonexistence)? You've experienced in your own existing mind the phenomena that you believe mean that they have ceased to exist (just as earlier you experienced the phenomena that made you think that they existed). Imagining their nonexistence is quite different from imagining that you yourself -- the imaginer -- has ceased to exist.
The very word 'imagine' implies existence on the part of the imaginer (though not necessarily on the part of the imagined). Trying to imagine your non-existence merely takes you further away from it. Paradoxically, if it could be imagined, it would be by ceasing to imagine at all. (Maybe you imagined it last night while you were asleep.
Even then, though, you'd be an existing being "not-imagining", so the experience of non-existence would be bogus. Any experience of non-existence (that is, experience of not having experience) would have to be illusory.Speaking too implies existence on the part of the speaker, so speakers who speak about their imagining of nonexistence are compelled to speak nonsense. (Already -- just approaching the periphery -- I've been speaking mostly nonsense.) Try to avoid it if you wish, but I'll be very surprised if you succeed.
BillyJoe said:
I agree that imagining living without end is very hard, though not any harder than imagining one's own non-existence. Both in my opinion are impossible. To imagine eternity in its full scope would take...an eternity. We don't have the time.
Attempting to do so, though, at least has this advantage over imagining our nonexistence. We can imagine some of eternity. Imagining living forever is just a continuation of what we already do -- live and imagine experiences. The scope alone is beyond us. Contrast that with imagining that we don't exist. That requires imagining something that we've never experienced to any degree at all. In short, what we have here are two impossibilities -- one we can't finish and the other we can't start.
gjones2 said:
There is a big difference. Whether it's hard to imagine living for eternity or not living, it is hard to imagine the possibility of eternal life, but it is not hard at all to imagine the possibility of not living. After all, we didn't exist most of the time!
Interesting Ian
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Pólux said:
What do you mean we didn't exist most of the time? You mean we didn't exist before conception? Please enlighten me; how do you know this? Or are you just making it up because it fits in with materialism?
And I find no difficulty whatsoever in the possibility of eternal life. I think you mix up eternity with an infinite duration in time.
Interesting Ian said:
From a purely evidential point of view, and from our current understanding of biology and neurology, there appears to be no evidence of a persons exsitent before the development of their brain, or after it has ceased functioning. There is still debate over whether conciousness (self-knowledge of existence) is an emergent property of the brain, or that it is specifically modelled.
I accept that this is a materialist answer.
If you have any evidence or arguments demonstrating the contrary, please provide us with them. Your personal revelations wouldn't really constitute evidence in the sense most of us here would accept, but might provide a useful insight anyway.
Humans perceive the passage of time in one direction. It's inherent to our nature. If you don't consider eternity to be infinite duration (for example, you could mean existing outside time altogether) then how could we experience such a thing and remain ourselves
Interesting Ian said:
I don't care what it "fits" - it is all that appears to be. I won't claim to know this (or anything) with 100% certainty, but I do say that it is a reasonable assumption. Legato put the reasons very well. I will only add that it is those who suggest we DID exist before conception who have some explaining to do.
That's perfectly fine. I knew it wouldn't be the same for everybody. Some people find no difficulty in the possibility that woman was created from man's rib.
Stitch
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Interesting Ian said:
The Quality of the evidence is pretty important IMHO, there becomes a point where the Quality of the evidence is so poor or so tenuous that it can no longer be considered evidence. Otherwise, everything is evidence for anything and vice versa so that everything exists and yet nothing exists and everything in between.
I would like to see your exact view on NDE and the After Life as from what people have posted (on your behalf) we seem to currently have a Hypothesis and not a "proof"
Interesting Ian said:
I think we are all happy that there is the "possibility" of eternal life, it is just that many belive there is not yet the evidence to provide a compelling case to support the hypothesis that there "is" and afterlife. Should new evidence be presented that makes a compelling case, I think most non-believers would be big enough to change their beliefs.
Sadly some people are not prepared to move an inch despite having no credible or testable evidence to support their position or claim.
Pólux said:
You use the word 'imagine' with these possibilities, but I believe that what you're really doing is making inferences based on patterns that you've observed in phenomena. The word 'imagine' is sometimes used that way -- to mean think about -- but that's a different sense from picturing oneself having the experience. You say that you didn't exist most of the time. That can be inferred from what you've learned about the world and the way other creatures (phenomena in your eyes, except insofar as you infer that they are like you) seem to appear and disappear. There's a major difference, though, between changes in phenomena and the non-existence of you yourself, the one perceiving the phenomena. You have absolutely no experience of your own non-existence on which to base imaginings.
On the other hand it's not hard to imagine continuing to live. It's merely the scope of that life -- its going on forever -- that's the problem. Actually our minds can't imagine anything of great scope -- space going on forever, or space eventually ending (there being a place beyond which there is no place), or what appears to be empty space eventually "curving" back towards us -- none of this can be clearly conceived. Parts of such ideas do fit into our minds, but we can't imagine the whole thing clearly. At least I can't.
If the mind developed through natural selection, its apparent inadequacy for this kind of conception isn't so surprising. The perceptions that most affect survival -- fruit growing on a tree, a potential mate, a leopard approaching -- all have moderate size. Even the sun, moon, and constellations aren't perceived in their true dimensions but as objects similar to the rest. There was no evolutionary advantage in being able to perceive clearly, or accurately think about, anything either extremely small or extremely large (for example, objects and events on a subatomic scale or in the farthest extremes of space). It's no coincidence, in my opinion, that scientific theories that attempt to describe them seem so paradoxical. Our minds aren't "fit" to deal with anything that goes beyond the kinds of experience that produced them.