Life after Death? The mechanics of it?
Discussion
Prof Prolapse said:
FredClogs said:
Prof Prolapse said:
Science does not yet have all the answers, and has never claimed to, but the great mysteries of consciousness have long been answered, you just clearly don't want to believe them.
Not really, not at all. You may choose to ignore the hard problem but that's not really and answer is it?http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consc...
It's perfectly simple. Whilst there are things we don't fully understand, there is no rational reason to believe in the things we have no evidence of. I don't care who says otherwise it is a failure to exercise reason, and the most common motivation is fear.
An afterlife, soul, etc. are examples of this. There is utterly no evidence to suggest these things exists in the classic senses of each word. To make matters even more clear, there is no gap in any scientific theory big enough to allow these ridiculous ideas through. We simply do not need a soul, to have any of the ideas in modern science work, or to explain any of the observations of the world around us.
There's a neuroscientist who write popular science books by a chap called Sam Harris. He has some rather "enlightening" experiments into consciousness which demonstrate we know a lot more than you guys seem to think we do. He in fact is a practicing Buddhist (an Atheist one) and explains this far better than I could. You would do well to make him your first stop if you actually want to learn something.
Science and rationality has answered the origins of the universe (to a startling degree, a recent summary book was cited earlier), it has shown your life only has the meaning you attribute to it, it has shown you that the ideas of god, an afterlife, a soul, are all the ideas of frightened men, and it has shown you how the world will end, and how the universe will follow, in a cold dark emptiness. It is not a pleasant universe, which explains the need of these comforting ideas, but why should it be?
So big questions have been rendered small, but there is a persistent ilk who will not accept them, they refuse to accept the beauty in universe we live in and will always attempt to cease on any gaps in theories, and try and fill them with weapon's grade bulls
t. It shows an ignorance of the life's work of so many brilliant men and women, and cheapens the world we live in, to one of cheap man made magic tricks.As for your gaggle of well spoken wikipedia people, "were any of them right I would be more concerned".
FredClogs said:
I was just addressing your assertion that the "great mysteries of consciousness have been solved" they haven't to many peoples satisfaction, including Sam Harris, it's incredibly disingenuous to claim that science or philosophy have a certain and fixed opinion on these things or that there is a common understanding and proven explanation on how the human brain (or any brain) translates external stimulus into experience and how human consciousness works.
The statement was in context, I said science doesn't claim to have all the answers, and as I said above there's no mystery big enough to fit any of that bullst through.Again, I'm not quite sure what you think you're arguing.
Prof Prolapse said:
FredClogs said:
I was just addressing your assertion that the "great mysteries of consciousness have been solved" they haven't to many peoples satisfaction, including Sam Harris, it's incredibly disingenuous to claim that science or philosophy have a certain and fixed opinion on these things or that there is a common understanding and proven explanation on how the human brain (or any brain) translates external stimulus into experience and how human consciousness works.
The statement was in context, I said science doesn't claim to have all the answers, and as I said above there's no mystery big enough to fit any of that bullst through.Again, I'm not quite sure what you think you're arguing.
t? The epiphenomena that is human perception of reality is not bullst, it's all we have, it's our intellectual anchor on a sea of infinite chaos. The laws of physics are an output of human consciousness, not a physical reality. I'm keeping an open mind for two reasons.
1) Imagine that you are an average person living in 1615, only 400 years ago which is not that long in the scheme of things. The most advanced technology that you will ever have seen would be smelting metal, or possibly gunpowder. Now imagine that someone hands you a fully functioning Iphone. The device now in your hands would be totally beyond your comprehension, your only possible explaination for the moving images on the screen and the voices coming from the speaker would be some kind of magic or whitchcraft. Having no knowlage of electricity, telephony, circuitry, computers or plastics, to your 17th century mind an iphone is so far beyoned the limits of your knowlage you would not even be able to imagine the concept of it, let alone start to ponder how it came about.
Yet despite being impossible this technology now does exist and is commonplace. All the elements were in place in the 17th century for an Iphone to be a feasible thing, metal was in the ground, oil was under the sea and electrons were spinning round nuclei but we as a species had not yet developed sufficiently to unite all the elements.
2) A blink of an eye later and here we are in the 21st century when surley we know most of what there is to know? Well as far as I can tell we still know reletively nothing about the universe and its making. We think that 27% of the universe is made from dark matter which we know very little about, although we have possible seen evidence of its gravity bending light.
We also think that 68% of the universe consists of dark energy, which we know virtually nothing at all about, including wether it is even a real 'thing'.
Even of the roughly 5% of matter and energy that we think we do understand, do we really know much about it? What exactly is a 'boson' and what is it made of, and what is the thing that it is made of made of? What happened before the big bang? A multiverse? That's just a theory that people have come up with using little more than imagination.
So to sum up I believe that it is still possible (in fact likely) that there are things out there in the cosmos which are totally beyoned our comprhension or imagineation. Whether these include a god and an afterlife I don't know, but I think that it would be pretentious to rule anything out until our understanding reaches a far higher level than it is today. Sadly I suspect that will take at least another 400 years.
1) Imagine that you are an average person living in 1615, only 400 years ago which is not that long in the scheme of things. The most advanced technology that you will ever have seen would be smelting metal, or possibly gunpowder. Now imagine that someone hands you a fully functioning Iphone. The device now in your hands would be totally beyond your comprehension, your only possible explaination for the moving images on the screen and the voices coming from the speaker would be some kind of magic or whitchcraft. Having no knowlage of electricity, telephony, circuitry, computers or plastics, to your 17th century mind an iphone is so far beyoned the limits of your knowlage you would not even be able to imagine the concept of it, let alone start to ponder how it came about.
Yet despite being impossible this technology now does exist and is commonplace. All the elements were in place in the 17th century for an Iphone to be a feasible thing, metal was in the ground, oil was under the sea and electrons were spinning round nuclei but we as a species had not yet developed sufficiently to unite all the elements.
2) A blink of an eye later and here we are in the 21st century when surley we know most of what there is to know? Well as far as I can tell we still know reletively nothing about the universe and its making. We think that 27% of the universe is made from dark matter which we know very little about, although we have possible seen evidence of its gravity bending light.
We also think that 68% of the universe consists of dark energy, which we know virtually nothing at all about, including wether it is even a real 'thing'.
Even of the roughly 5% of matter and energy that we think we do understand, do we really know much about it? What exactly is a 'boson' and what is it made of, and what is the thing that it is made of made of? What happened before the big bang? A multiverse? That's just a theory that people have come up with using little more than imagination.
So to sum up I believe that it is still possible (in fact likely) that there are things out there in the cosmos which are totally beyoned our comprhension or imagineation. Whether these include a god and an afterlife I don't know, but I think that it would be pretentious to rule anything out until our understanding reaches a far higher level than it is today. Sadly I suspect that will take at least another 400 years.
FredClogs said:
What bullst? The epiphenomena that is human perception of reality is not bullst, it's all we have, it's our intellectual anchor on a sea of infinite chaos. The laws of physics are an output of human consciousness, not a physical reality.
Are you going to continue to argue with yourself? I've never disputed we have perception, or consciousness, although I suspect your definition is entirely more magical than mine based on your flamboyant use of language so far. It's just sensor inputs being made sense of. It's a fantastic process but let's try and speak in plain English here for us simple scientists.t? The epiphenomena that is human perception of reality is not bullst, it's all we have, it's our intellectual anchor on a sea of infinite chaos. The laws of physics are an output of human consciousness, not a physical reality. Laws of physics are an output of human consciousness? Of course they're not, we may have given them a name but if we didn't have humans to perceive, gravity would still exist, the universal constants would remain the same. Reality does not give two f
ks what self congratulatory philosophers think. "If a tree falls in the woods does it make a sound? Yes. Of course it f
king does you idiot."heyhomes said:
I'm keeping an open mind for two reasons.
1) Imagine that you are an average person living in 1615, only 400 years ago which is not that long in the scheme of things. The most advanced technology that you will ever have seen would be smelting metal, or possibly gunpowder. Now imagine that someone hands you a fully functioning Iphone. The device now in your hands would be totally beyond your comprehension, your only possible explaination for the moving images on the screen and the voices coming from the speaker would be some kind of magic or whitchcraft. Having no knowlage of electricity, telephony, circuitry, computers or plastics, to your 17th century mind an iphone is so far beyoned the limits of your knowlage you would not even be able to imagine the concept of it, let alone start to ponder how it came about.
Yet despite being impossible this technology now does exist and is commonplace. All the elements were in place in the 17th century for an Iphone to be a feasible thing, metal was in the ground, oil was under the sea and electrons were spinning round nuclei but we as a species had not yet developed sufficiently to unite all the elements.
2) A blink of an eye later and here we are in the 21st century when surley we know most of what there is to know? Well as far as I can tell we still know reletively nothing about the universe and its making. We think that 27% of the universe is made from dark matter which we know very little about, although we have possible seen evidence of its gravity bending light.
We also think that 68% of the universe consists of dark energy, which we know virtually nothing at all about, including wether it is even a real 'thing'.
Even of the roughly 5% of matter and energy that we think we do understand, do we really know much about it? What exactly is a 'boson' and what is it made of, and what is the thing that it is made of made of? What happened before the big bang? A multiverse? That's just a theory that people have come up with using little more than imagination.
So to sum up I believe that it is still possible (in fact likely) that there are things out there in the cosmos which are totally beyoned our comprhension or imagineation. Whether these include a god and an afterlife I don't know, but I think that it would be pretentious to rule anything out until our understanding reaches a far higher level than it is today. Sadly I suspect that will take at least another 400 years.
I can't resist responding to this but I'll keep it brief.1) Imagine that you are an average person living in 1615, only 400 years ago which is not that long in the scheme of things. The most advanced technology that you will ever have seen would be smelting metal, or possibly gunpowder. Now imagine that someone hands you a fully functioning Iphone. The device now in your hands would be totally beyond your comprehension, your only possible explaination for the moving images on the screen and the voices coming from the speaker would be some kind of magic or whitchcraft. Having no knowlage of electricity, telephony, circuitry, computers or plastics, to your 17th century mind an iphone is so far beyoned the limits of your knowlage you would not even be able to imagine the concept of it, let alone start to ponder how it came about.
Yet despite being impossible this technology now does exist and is commonplace. All the elements were in place in the 17th century for an Iphone to be a feasible thing, metal was in the ground, oil was under the sea and electrons were spinning round nuclei but we as a species had not yet developed sufficiently to unite all the elements.
2) A blink of an eye later and here we are in the 21st century when surley we know most of what there is to know? Well as far as I can tell we still know reletively nothing about the universe and its making. We think that 27% of the universe is made from dark matter which we know very little about, although we have possible seen evidence of its gravity bending light.
We also think that 68% of the universe consists of dark energy, which we know virtually nothing at all about, including wether it is even a real 'thing'.
Even of the roughly 5% of matter and energy that we think we do understand, do we really know much about it? What exactly is a 'boson' and what is it made of, and what is the thing that it is made of made of? What happened before the big bang? A multiverse? That's just a theory that people have come up with using little more than imagination.
So to sum up I believe that it is still possible (in fact likely) that there are things out there in the cosmos which are totally beyoned our comprhension or imagineation. Whether these include a god and an afterlife I don't know, but I think that it would be pretentious to rule anything out until our understanding reaches a far higher level than it is today. Sadly I suspect that will take at least another 400 years.
Firstly, "keeping an open mind", does not negate the need to see evidence. That would be keeping your mind so open your brain falls out.
I would say that you rather obviously know very little about the universe and it's making, but the scientific community actually has a very good idea. The knowledge to which you claim is esoteric has existed in some instance for 15 or 20 years in the scientific domain.
In fact one of many many books containing the answers to almost all of your questions about the origin of the universe to a greater or less extent is found at the beginning of this thread.
Or you can think it's still a mystery. Your choice.
Oh and it's about 70% dark matter/energy.
Edited by Prof Prolapse on Friday 15th May 11:08
FredClogs said:
The laws of physics are an output of human consciousness, not a physical reality.
The movement of the planets followed the same laws of physics before humans were around, and will do long after we've gone. How can that be if they are not a reality, but just a construct of human consciousness?Prof Prolapse said:
"If a tree falls in the woods does it make a sound? Yes. Of course it fking does you idiot."
This reminds me of the well proven maxim - If a man says something and his wife is not around to hear him is he still wrong? Of course he is.king does you idiot."Anyway you fail to understand, "sound" is a epiphenomenon of human consciousness, of course a falling tree will always create disturbances in air pressure and waves of compressed air moving at varying rates and frequencies which create phenomenon and stimulus on any receptors they happen to pass - but the "sound of a falling tree" only happens in the human brain - infact it only happens in my human brain as far as I know in the way that I can identify, what happens in your brain is as alien to my experience as what happens at the never reaches of the universe. This is not a failure of language or a semantic trip wire, it's very important to understand.
And further more, the reaction of my experience of the physical world (i.e me running from sound of falling tree) creates my universal human agency, from where we can revisit Sam Harris and ideas of free will if you like, talk about the possibility of MWI and the sheer unknowable nature of physical processes, but please don't disregard thought and the substance of reality for simply observing and counting the stuff of reality - science was never thus when performed by real scientists.
TwigtheWonderkid said:
FredClogs said:
The laws of physics are an output of human consciousness, not a physical reality.
The movement of the planets followed the same laws of physics before humans were around, and will do long after we've gone. How can that be if they are not a reality, but just a construct of human consciousness?FredClogs said:
TwigtheWonderkid said:
FredClogs said:
The laws of physics are an output of human consciousness, not a physical reality.
The movement of the planets followed the same laws of physics before humans were around, and will do long after we've gone. How can that be if they are not a reality, but just a construct of human consciousness?I think!
FredClogs said:
Anyway you fail to understand, "sound" is a epiphenomenon of human consciousness, ...
I'd hazard a guess he does understand 'sound', but your description seems to be tailoring a definition to fit a particular purpose of argument.A sound meter would record the falling tree and send the signal electronically to a PC on the other side of the world whereby it could be recorded on a graph for example.
An animal near to the falling tree would react to the sound if viewed through a telescope, even though the human observer would not yet receive the sound via distance and the speed of sound in air.
(Just to equally pick away at your definition of it being a 'human consciousness' requirement)
Keep to the ever increasing bounds of science and things stay rational.
Leaves in the air and on the ground would rustle and vibrate in the displaced air and ground vibrations caused by the falling tree.
The tree still does everything it would have done had we been there to observe it. If it is argued that the sound is not the waves in the air vibrating at a particular frequency, but instead is a construct built in the mind of a creature blessed with working ears, then I would argue that no tree has ever made a sound.
The tree still does everything it would have done had we been there to observe it. If it is argued that the sound is not the waves in the air vibrating at a particular frequency, but instead is a construct built in the mind of a creature blessed with working ears, then I would argue that no tree has ever made a sound.
Hi Pistom,
Consciousness is the so-called "hard problem" of philosophy because it is apparently unexplainable in terms of matter and yet through it comes the only knowledge of the world I can have, in a way everything for us depends on it.
However, on an Aristotelian / Scholastic reading, consciousness is material because matter is inherently teleological. When it takes on a substantial form as a human being with a mind, the mind has thoughts that are about something, a first-person experience, etc.
So consciousness is material, but not in the way a contemporary "materialist" would accept, which is why a popular option (Dennett, Churchland, Rosenberg) is to say there is no such thing. To me that sounds implausible.
It's not consciousness per se that means something of us survives death, it's the intellect, because that carries out processes that are immaterial, as per arguments for the immateriality of thought or for the impossibility of a physical system having inherent syntax or semantics, whereas minds capable of complex language do.
Alock, the argument by Ross about immaterial aspects of thought is not about things being definitive.
( slightly O/T of original post: I am happy to accept that the laws of physics are complete and unchanging, which is what I take definitive to mean. But what is a law? Does it have causal power or is it merely descriptive? Descriptive of what? The origin of law talk in eg. Newton is infused with theology - laws were God's way of structuring the universe; now the God talk is abandoned; what accounts for the laws now? Etc.)
Ross's argument is that no single case of a physical system can be with certainty of the form it appears to be - for example, for any apparent adding a computer does, it could be in fact running an algorithm for adding for all numbers in its first billion years of existence, then giving the answer 42 for every subsequent input. The point being that physical systems are always undetermined, and in this example, we could never know otherwise, the machine's lifespan being shorter than the algorithm that isn't in fact adding.
Formal thinking is never like this. When I square a number, I am really carrying out the algorithm n x n= n squared every time, running a pure form, you could say. If I wasn't, then truth and validity would not be available as tools of thinking or of science or maths. Denying thought can have this determinate content makes logic or maths unknowable.
Thus formal thinking is not a wholly physical process.
Is that any clearer?
Consciousness is the so-called "hard problem" of philosophy because it is apparently unexplainable in terms of matter and yet through it comes the only knowledge of the world I can have, in a way everything for us depends on it.
However, on an Aristotelian / Scholastic reading, consciousness is material because matter is inherently teleological. When it takes on a substantial form as a human being with a mind, the mind has thoughts that are about something, a first-person experience, etc.
So consciousness is material, but not in the way a contemporary "materialist" would accept, which is why a popular option (Dennett, Churchland, Rosenberg) is to say there is no such thing. To me that sounds implausible.
It's not consciousness per se that means something of us survives death, it's the intellect, because that carries out processes that are immaterial, as per arguments for the immateriality of thought or for the impossibility of a physical system having inherent syntax or semantics, whereas minds capable of complex language do.
Alock, the argument by Ross about immaterial aspects of thought is not about things being definitive.
( slightly O/T of original post: I am happy to accept that the laws of physics are complete and unchanging, which is what I take definitive to mean. But what is a law? Does it have causal power or is it merely descriptive? Descriptive of what? The origin of law talk in eg. Newton is infused with theology - laws were God's way of structuring the universe; now the God talk is abandoned; what accounts for the laws now? Etc.)
Ross's argument is that no single case of a physical system can be with certainty of the form it appears to be - for example, for any apparent adding a computer does, it could be in fact running an algorithm for adding for all numbers in its first billion years of existence, then giving the answer 42 for every subsequent input. The point being that physical systems are always undetermined, and in this example, we could never know otherwise, the machine's lifespan being shorter than the algorithm that isn't in fact adding.
Formal thinking is never like this. When I square a number, I am really carrying out the algorithm n x n= n squared every time, running a pure form, you could say. If I wasn't, then truth and validity would not be available as tools of thinking or of science or maths. Denying thought can have this determinate content makes logic or maths unknowable.
Thus formal thinking is not a wholly physical process.
Is that any clearer?
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