Reincarnation - Some Thoughts

[Tricky]

You could always put a clause in your will, or in your life insurance policy, a secret password or something, like maybe the equation for the Information Paradox or something, that might be fitting.

This is similar to what Harry Houdini did. He and his wife had an agreement that whoever died first would try to come back and contact the other. They had a secret "key" that would let them know it was a true return. Many tried to guess it, but they all failed. Eventually, Bess gave up, saying something to the effect of, "He really is dead."

 

[l0rca]

Could anyone tell my about Atman and Brahman? They come up a lot, but they're rarely directly discussed. It seems like an old strawman philosophy people tend to loaf everything they find uninteresting under.

 

[Oxymoron]

This is similar to what Harry Houdini did. He and his wife had an agreement that whoever died first would try to come back and contact the other. They had a secret "key" that would let them know it was a true return. Many tried to guess it, but they all failed. Eventually, Bess gave up, saying something to the effect of, "He really is dead."

The romantic in me says, oooooh, so sad. The realists says, ...duh.

I view reincarnation the same as the rest of the views on an "Afterlife".

I think they all come from an unwillingness to accept that when we die, that bit of consciousness that we view as "Us" dies also.

How can a thought die? How can our intellect die?

Well, it happens when ya quit breathing, and the blood flow stops, more or less

Of course, if your lucky, you may leave behind some traces of yourself in the form of books/pictures/memories in others...

But, your outa here!

Right. That's the logical way of looking at the whole shebang.

A few months back (7 months), I considered the possibility of a "me-ness" to be a property of fundamental matter. My idea was that fundamental matter had an identity in-itself; that while all things might be identical at its most fundamental level, there was still at least a difference of location. I considered also the idea of consciousness to be in a range, where things could be very highly conscious, and not very conscious. I did not bother to determine where we stood in this range, or where a tree might, but I speculated it had to do with the complexity and self-reference of an entity's function. In this sense, fundamental matter creates consciousness through its separation and acknowledgment of separation from the outside world -- which would mean that while consciousness might be indistinguishable between one life to the next, the consciousness has an in-itself identity which can not be duplicated.

I attributed the conglomeration of matter to the idea of particles and forces -- consciousness was only possible if there was an exchange of forces going on.

A Critical Thinking professor of mine, once stated, the grass is green only because we are told it is. It's all about perception.

Well memory is a wierd thing to begin with. Someone on the board , I think it was Mercution stated there are recent theories that meories are reconstructed and not really stored. Which would fit with many current models of how the brain works.

The wierd thing about the human brain is that it constructs almost everything to begin with, we do not directly percieve the visual field we see, our brains construct it. Especialy that part in the visual field occupied by the optic nerve.

People in head trauma situiations often have faulty memories of what happened they are 'confabulated', they may know they were on Green ST, for example but they will think they were headed to a friends house when they were actualy going home from work.

Memory is a very strange thing, it is like a bunch of associated knot strings that store multiple copies of redundant information with diffenet data stored in different ways on different strings and all the clues to different strings. For example the recall of memorised poetry. It is kind of fun to recall long passages, but since I am not trained in oral history I kind of get it in pieces and by reciting the pieces I have I can recover other pieces until I have most of the original piece.

Some of my friends misremember things from high school that they think happened, or I misremember things that i think happened in high school.

I find it interesting, when I can only recall part of a poem or snip of a play or something, but if given access to a copy, the snippet comes flooding back and I find myself very familiar with it. A good arguement for memories never being "lost", only unaccessable. With that in mind, I can read a journal entry from 5 years ago, and swear I never wrote it. Memory, that little trickster.

 

[l0rca]

A Critical Thinking professor of mine, once stated, the grass is green only because we are told it is. It's all about perception.

It's kind of ironic that a critical thinking professor would spell wisdom in a semantically fallacious way. There's nothing really valuable or deep about that statement.

 

[Oxymoron]

Ouch. I didn't say it. And I might not be doing his point justice with that summary. I'll try and locate his book to elaborate a bit. I'm pretty sure his point was to question everything we have ever been taught, and to understand that our perception of reality is simply a product of what we have be pre-conditioned to believe since birth. I'll start my search. And really, to me, 8 years ago, the idea was profound.

 

[l0rca]

It's kind of ironic that a critical thinking professor would spell wisdom in a semantically fallacious way. There's nothing really valuable or deep about that statement.

Oh, sorry, I wasn't insulting you. But the saying you recapitulated here is ironic, coming from a person who's job it is to teach critical thinking. I was only musing.

 

[Oxymoron]

No worries.

 

[Dancing David]

Could anyone tell my about Atman and Brahman? They come up a lot, but they're rarely directly discussed. It seems like an old strawman philosophy people tend to loaf everything they find uninteresting under.

Atman, the soul or spirit which is reincarnated. The essense of self, the seer behind the eyes.

 

[Dancing David]

It's kind of ironic that a critical thinking professor would spell wisdom in a semantically fallacious way. There's nothing really valuable or deep about that statement.

Isn't that the dichotomy of language and reality or what i call nihilism.

The word green is a label applied to the color we percieve as green from the sensations. The color green seems to exist on a number of levels, the area of the spectrun which is not absorbed by object we refer to as green, or the emmisions in a similar range. Then there are the perceptions created by our brains from the sensations. And then there are the communications about the sensation.

So green exists as a series of wavelenths, as a sensations, as a perceptiona nd as a lable. But green exists as a result of reality and then our interaction with it.

So green as a physical entity does not exist, it merely is what it is, the label green exists only because we use it, the sensations and perceptions exist.

So yeak, the color green doesn't exist without humans, but it doesn't exist because of words.

 

[l0rca]

Isn't that the dichotomy of language and reality or what i call nihilism.

Actually, I don't think nihilism is a strong enough philosophy to handle this dichotomy between language and reality. Perhaps you are referring to nominalism, or realism? Personally, I am a nominalist.

The word green is a label applied to the color we percieve as green from the sensations. The color green seems to exist on a number of levels, the area of the spectrun which is not absorbed by object we refer to as green, or the emmisions in a similar range. Then there are the perceptions created by our brains from the sensations. And then there are the communications about the sensation.

So green exists as a series of wavelenths, as a sensations, as a perceptiona nd as a lable. But green exists as a result of reality and then our interaction with it.

Of course. Language evolves as our perceptions of the world and our contrast of our current meaning of words is synthesized. We could say that "all along 'green' was just a feeling, and not how we defined it", but that's incorrect as well. Definitions contain both (I actually explain this in the Thought without Words thread; we refer to this as connotation and denotation), and words also contain purely abstract experiences. "Green" is also our experience with the physical processes that seeing green involves. But it seems from your post that you probably already know this.

So green as a physical entity does not exist, it merely is what it is, the label green exists only because we use it, the sensations and perceptions exist.

Sure green as a physical entity exists -- it's just not perceived correctly. Our abstract experiences are as physical as the brain and its electronic impulses are.

What's important here is to realize that "green" as a word conflates a lot of ideas together, varying parts of it we all experience as we hear the word, but a word is only as good as the person who employs and knows it. Some words are a lot more specific in their prescribed meanings, but all words have descriptive meanings too -- extra contents individuals, or groups of people append to words.

 

[Dancing David]

Actually, I don't think nihilism is a strong enough philosophy to handle this dichotomy between language and reality. Perhaps you are referring to nominalism, or realism? Personally, I am a nominalist.

I shall have to check, I view nihilism in the way that all human thoughts are equaly true and equaly false. Human ideas can only approximate reality, they can never map it exactly. So nothing in the way of thoughts, concepts, theories and words are real, they are just human approximations of the reality. All perceptions are manufactured by the brain from the sensation, so they aren't real either. Some thoughts and perception seem to have more apparent validity than others.

Things do exist but there is the dichotomy between reality and our communication about it.

 

[Beerina]

Sartre did point out that thoughts, i.e. perceptions, were real objects, and were directly experienced -- your perception of the chair was definitely real, even if the chair "out there" was not necessarily.

And that thoughts may be equally true or false in some methods of analysis does not mean they are necessarily so in actuality. Thoughts are of two types: perceptions, and mental models of reality. The preception, as discussed above, is itself quite real and not a chimera of anything since you experience it directly.

The other thoughts are just theories, mental models of reality. Like any model, their mapping to "out there" is simple presumption, if borne of experience because "it works". Like any theory, it makes predictions that you can test. I see a wall there -- I build a mental model of a 3D space with a wall in front of me. I reason that if I run into the wall, I will smash my nose. I test this theory, and crack! My nose starts bleeding.

In this way you can build confidence in your mental model -- your theory.


And then there's mathematical theories, which can be proven, although how they map into a reality of atoms as an iron clad, non-violatable thing, I don't know. We know, for example, that there is no highest prime number. Therefore we could predict that if the entire universe were converted into a giant, if still finite, computational device to find prime numbers, that it would eventually fill up all its available memory with its ever-growing list of prime numbers. No possibility of failure with this "theory".

 

[Dancing David]

Sartre did point out that thoughts, i.e. perceptions, were real objects, and were directly experienced -- your perception of the chair was definitely real, even if the chair "out there" was not necessarily.

And that thoughts may be equally true or false in some methods of analysis does not mean they are necessarily so in actuality. Thoughts are of two types: perceptions, and mental models of reality. The preception, as discussed above, is itself quite real and not a chimera of anything since you experience it directly.

Well that is not exactly true, we do sense what exterior things influence the receptors.

But the brain manufacturers the perception from the sensation, and it is a physical process. I fully believe that, yet there are some strange things the brain does, the fovea is a very small area of the visual field and it is where we sense color(other than the black and white). Our brain paints in the colors for much of our visual field and so most of our visual field is in color, even though we only sense a small portion of it.

Even stranger is the 'blind spot' where the optic nerve runs through the retina and there are no receptors there, it is about the size of your fist when your hold it out at arms lenth. Look at a visual field with one eye closed, especialy some repetitive pattern, do you see the blind spot. No, because your brain manufacturs the visual field there.

The other thoughts are just theories, mental models of reality. Like any model, their mapping to "out there" is simple presumption, if borne of experience because "it works". Like any theory, it makes predictions that you can test. I see a wall there -- I build a mental model of a 3D space with a wall in front of me. I reason that if I run into the wall, I will smash my nose. I test this theory, and crack! My nose starts bleeding.

In this way you can build confidence in your mental model -- your theory.

I agree fully, I refer to it as the validity of the model, gravitation appears to be matched very well by our current model. The law of gravity does not exist, it describes the observations very accurately however.

I am not an imaterialist, I do believe that reality appears to exist. I just think we should doubt most things without validation.

And then there's mathematical theories, which can be proven, although how they map into a reality of atoms as an iron clad, non-violatable thing, I don't know. We know, for example, that there is no highest prime number. Therefore we could predict that if the entire universe were converted into a giant, if still finite, computational device to find prime numbers, that it would eventually fill up all its available memory with its ever-growing list of prime numbers. No possibility of failure with this "theory".

I understand that as a materialist I just came to the conclusion that most human thought is illusiory, it can be valid or not.

And this is the R&P forum.

 

[l0rca]

Human ideas can only approximate reality, they can never map it exactly. So nothing in the way of thoughts, concepts, theories and words are real, they are just human approximations of the reality. All perceptions are manufactured by the brain from the sensation, so they aren't real either. Some thoughts and perception seem to have more apparent validity than others.

Nihilism states that semiosis (linguistic representation of phenomenon) will never be able to appropriately define reality. Realism states that it one day might.

I too consider myself a nihilist.