Yes, that certainly makes sense. I think it would make sense to anyone who remembered the board. I suggest, though, that it wouldn’t be meaningful to anyone who was not familiar with the board, and therefore that the spirit of the board has some level of dependence on the existence of the board, although perhaps not as strongly as I originally suggested.
So, the obvious question is, do you think the spirit of the SDMB could survive the destruction of the board and everyone who’s ever heard of it?
No, what you’re talking about is trying to find *cites *to disprove an afterlife. And then strutting like you actually made a point.
And you do this with no evidence *for *an afterlife. Wanting it isn’t enough, you need to offer evidence or it is simply another bullshit fantasy like invisible dragons or Grape Ape.
What is a soul? Where is it in the physical body? What is it made of? What is it’s function? What does it do that the body doesn’t do?
hat is the “true soul?” What is it made of? Where is it in the body? What is it’s function? What does it do that the body can’t do? How does it encpode and store memories? If it encodes and stores memoriesm then why do our btrians have to do that as well? Can the “true soul” see and hear as well? If so, then why do we have eyes and ears?
No. It isn’t. There is no physical possibility of any such thing. This is nonsense.
Did it occur to you that maybe you were lied to?
I do, yes. I think the spirit of some neolithic explorer survives not only her death but the death of her tribe, the destruction or loss of all artifacts thereof, and the long-ago death of anyone who would ever have encountered any of them. The abstraction, in other words, exists even in the absence of someone to formulate it in any specific way. It remains true that she did exist. Much as the law of gravity would exist even in the absense of both physicists to express it and physical bodies to exemplify it.
Stretching definitions to the point that they are worthless does nothing to suggest that there is a continuance of consciousness after death.
Are you suggesting a soul or spirit is simply having existed? Kind of a shitty deal, don’t you think?
There you go, and that’s the end of it. That’s not a “mindset,” though, it’s demonstrable fact.
That’s not the definition of "consciouness.
It’s not a question of “milegae.” You are giving the word “consciousness” a false definition.
You can reject it all you want, but that rejection doesn’t amount to an actual argument against it. You might as well “reject” he notion that the earth goes around the sun or that 2+2=4.
It’s not reductionist to say that everything that exists is material. That’s a statement of irrefutable fact.
What you are describing in that case is aesthetic responses. It’s still in the brain. You are describing a chemical reaction in your brain which resuklts from the input of a particular sensory stimulus. There’s nothing magic or etheral or non-material about it. It’s chemicals and electricity.
Virtually everyone who uses the word “afterlife” means it as a survival of individual consciousness after death. That’s what we are talking about in this thread. If you don’t believe in that, then you don’t believe in an afterlife as that word pertains to this discussion.
Another nonsense word with no definition.
Only figuratively.
Only figuratively. People who actually believe in an “afterlife” do not mean it figuratively, though.
I think the word you’re looking for is “abstraction”.
Should I parse this as “Actual belief in an afterlife is defined, for all conversations and debates, as meaning life existing after life ceases to exist”?
If we agree that that’s what we’re talking about, then nope, doesn’t exist. By freaking definition, doesn’t exist. There is no A in the set of all non-A.
But I don’t agree that that’s what we’re talking about; I don’t agree that (all) people who “believe in an afterlife” (i.e., use that term to refer to something they consider a real phenomenon) are people who do NOT conceptualize it as an abstraction.
And I believe that’s the type of thing that Stoid is driving at here. It’s certainly what I was talking to in my first response above. Words do not simply “mean what they mean”.
I’m not being disingenuous; sprinked in the midst of the concrete and literal-minded people who over the centuries have believed heaven was “a place UP THERE” (points to sky), believed God was a semi-translucent bearded male fellow living in heaven and therefore also UP THERE, believed souls are gauzy-yet-invisible things that arise out of the body and go UP THERE when we die, etc etc, there have been thinking people who meant something different; their meaning was seriously intended, they considered it to be a real phenomenon, and you aren’t disagreeing with them so much as talking PAST THEM when you dismiss “afterlife” as a term that might refer to a real phenomenon simply because, when YOU imbue the term with the meaning YOU intend for it to mean, it is indeed pretty dismissible.
No, I meant “figurative.” When you used that phrase, “spirit of the board,” you were being figurative.
No, it’s defined as an individual consciousness continuing to exist after the destruction of the physical brain. Obviously, it makes no sense to say that “life” can continue after death. That’s a contradiction in terms.
Great. So we’re agreed. There is no such thing as an afterlife.
Those people (if they exist) can change the definition all they want, but this thread has been about the possibility of a continuing individual consciousness after brain death.
No, she’s talking about magic, invisible fairy spirits called “souls” that live in some kind of giant Avatar type bush under the ground or something. She isn’t altering the definitions of “life” and “spirit” to basically deprive them of any substantive meaning.
The word means what it means, dude. If you agree that there is no continuing individual consciousness after the death of the physical brain,m then you agree that there is no afterlife. I have no particular interest in other definitions.
Oh?
Nothing is an irrefutable fact. At best there are compelling observations and conclusions that are difficult to argue with. Everything perceived is perceived from a perspective; all meaning is meaning to a subject; objectivity is not an attainable condition.
Nothing material may exist, actually, except as a manifestation of interaction. Materiality is not the bedrock of reality you seem to think it is. Bricks mountains and you are composed of interactiong molecules composed of interacting atoms composed of interacting quarks composed ultimately of energy states that have a tendency to exist and whose existence is constitutes of relationships themselves rather than particles doing interacting. Particles are not primary after all, interactivity is.
Causality and determinism do not occupy the privileged position you’d like to grant them either. In the history of spacetime no event has occurred except as an artificially and cognitively imposed distinction between one aspect and another aspect of the single event that started occurring roughly 12 billion years ago and which is still occurring and of which you and I are a part. And that event cannot be explained with reference to causal determinism. It makes more sense to say “It is all here because it could be” or even “It is all here because it chose to be” than to say “Something caused it”. There were no prior events.
You appear to like a concrete world, a world with stark contrasts between what is so and what it not so, a world in which certainty can be possessed. Be that as it may, I don’t think you are in one.
A characteristic, incidentally, which you share in common with the literal-minded theological believers you stand in such vehement opposition to.
That would mean I have asserted that an afterlife exists. I haven’t. I haven’t even asserted that I believe an afterlife exists. That’s just the way multiple people have responded.
Yep.
Sure it is. This kind objection is always a favorite refuge of woo believers, but for all practical purpose, we can say that some things are irrefutable facts. In this case, it’s not even about empirical assumptions, but simple definitions. Anythinh which exists, by definition, exists materially. If it doesn’t exist materially, it doesn’t exist.
All of those things are material. Quarks are material. Energy is material. Quantum particles are material.
I haven’t said anything about causality and determinism.
I would prefer a magical world actually, but as it stands, it’s a fact that the universe obeys physical laws, and that those laws do not permit consciousness to exist after the death of the brain.
I didn’t want to go there…that’s just asking for some knees to jerk so hard they are likely to break some noses…
Nice try, but a big swing and a whiff. Religious believers believe. Their “certainty” is based on no actual evidence. I have no religious beliefs. I’m only “certain” about provable facts. I know, I know, you want to deny that there are provable facts. The first and last refuge of true believers.
The attempt to declare that critical thinkers are exactly the same as religious believers is always amusing to me. It’s so desperate.
consciousness: an emergent property of the cosmos.
You haven’t asserted it, but you for some reason give it special likelihood, ignoring that Grape Ape, Godzilla and Papa-fucking-Smurf are all as likely. In point of fact, they are more likely, because they at least are material and don’t require as much bullshit magic to exist.
Why aren’t you open minded to vampires? You giving special position to an afterlife while discounting other magical drivel means you aren’t as open-minded as you think you are.