“You’re just relying on hearsay that jumping off a cliff will be dangerous.”
I can easily test that jumping of a cliff will be dangerous by a variety of methods without needing to directly injure myself. So I dont quite get your point.
Otara
How do you know any of those are accurate if you don’t try it yourself? Why believe the preponderance of evidence in one case and not in another, even though there’s some theoretical chance that reality is different than it appears through empirical testing?
Right now, the preponderance of evidence is that humans are very complex machines but that like any machine, once the power is cut there’s no there there.
Well I can throw someone else off a cliff and see what happens for a start. Theres an ability to externally test and observe that isnt possible in quite the same kind of way with the other issue.
I also ‘will’ be testing life after death as an issue whether I like it or not one day, while the other is something I dont care to test directly unless I have no choice.
Its possible I could not be injured if I jump off a cliff because Im ‘special’ or reality isnt what it seems to be but theres a whole lot at stake if it turns out Im not so I dont choose to test it directly.
Anyhoo I think this is just getting into arguing that atheism is ‘right’ which is pretty inevitable with these kinds of discussions really. I can explain why to me it seems a bit different, but I dont hold any illusions that its going to be accepted as a legitimate viewpoint.
Otara
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I can accept being agnostic about life after death - presuming that you assume an utterly non-interactive afterlife, mind you. (There is sufficient evidentiary reason to believe the dead do not ever come back in any form.)
Of course, there is also sufficient evidentiary reason to believe that we’re meat machines, which is why I myself am atheistic about life after death. It’s difficult to imagine an afterlife for meat-machines -impossible if you require continuity of existence for it to count. (We’d have to be copies with copies of our mortal brain and biochemical state duplicated or simulated into us.)
If all I had to go on was the ‘cliff’ analogy alone, though, I would be agnostic. The analogy fails because with a cliff, you can look over the edge and observe the spattered remains of those who have gone before you. With death, we cannot.
Well that is the point of the thread. Rather silly to jump in to a particular discussion which you don’t want to discuss.
I’ll just note, though, that atheism isn’t saying that something is impossible. Atheists don’t deny that something could be. They just say that there’s no evidence to support that belief. So unless you’re saying that there’s evidence that we can see right now that supports the idea of an afterlife. reincarnation, or whatever, then you’re an atheist. If you don’t think there’s any reason to believe in the afterlife, and you’re doing nothing more than admitting it’s one of the infinite possibilities existing beyond the scope of human knowledge, then that’s just being an atheist.
Yeah, it is totally presumptuous, that is what I get for not proof reading and making a blanket statement. Semi-intelligence was pretty accurate then, wasn’t it. :smack: But have you looked everywhere for an answer? Me personally, I’m still checking things out.
Well at the basic level if we are a 3D projection of a 2D universe something has to cause the projection. A hologram by itself it just data encoded, you need an outside force (light in the case or holograms as we think of them) to create the image. It could be a higher being but it could be radiation emitting from black holes.
I’ve always felt a little empty, maybe we are living in a dream and dreaming life. Or maybe i just need to get better pot. Though I am becoming partial to the idea of being part of some greater being’s credit card security system. So many different religions because every time the card gets pulled out to buy a sandwich someone who can see out of the hologram catches a glimpse of the cashier or a passerby. We pray but never hear back because who really pays attention to the hologram on your credit card.
Right - but let’s note that it’s also being an agnostic (in the classical sense), if your position is that it’s a possibility “beyond the scope of human knowledge”.
As far as I’m concerned, the classical sense of “agnostic” is a fair position to take on things, as long as it’s not a stance held as an alternative to theism or atheism. If you are agnostic, your position is either “I don’t believe because there’s no possible reason to” or “I believe despite knowing there’s no possible reason to”. (The latter is possible, if arguably silly.) If you hold the position “I refrain from taking a position, because there’s no possible reason to”, that does fall under the a- in atheism, though. If you don’t actually believe, for whatever reason, you are also an atheist, regardless of whether or not you’re agnostic about the question.
It’s a possibility beyond the scope of human knowledge that the tooth fairy and invisible pink unicorn really exist, and that if I jump off the top of the empire states building at 10pm on December 12th 2010 that I will slowly and gently drift down to land safely on my feet. That doesn’t mean I’m agnostic to those things.
The “classical sense of agnostic” does not mean what you think it means. It’s called atheism.
I think it means (or rather, classically meant) that you believe that the fact is unknowable. That’s an entirely separate question from whether the fact is true, of course, and has precisely nothing whatsoever to do with atheism.
What do you think the word means (or rather, meant)? Anything at all?
And there’s piles of evidence that if you jump, you’ll go splat - prior examples mean anything to you?
Belief in spirituality, but uncertain of which religion is accurate, if any.
Bah! That’s at best the newfangled definition* - which I thought was fairly explicitly not the subject of this thread.
If you have “belief in spirituality”, that’s theism. Not atheism.
- Though really, the newfangled definition is “anyone who hasn’t picked a camp - a religion or atheism”. It includes those you have described, and also anybody who doesn’t believe in anything spiritual but refuses to self-identify as atheists, perhaps because they don’t know that not all atheists aren’t “hard atheists” (or “assholish pushy rude atheists”). Because, truly, the newfangled definitions are based on 90% of people not having any damn clue what anybody means when they use any of the words.
I gave a definition of agnosticism. Of course the definition of agnosticism doesn’t mean the same as atheism.
Huh? Folks around here always said that atheism was only about God, period, not about any other aspect of spirituality.
I mean, if nothing else, I’d feel a little funny calling a Buddhist a “theist,” by my definition thereof.
Feel free to make up your mind anytime you like.
I gave a definition of agnosticism. The thing you were calling agnosticism was atheism.
Well, there are gods and there are Gods. Lots of people think that “atheist” means “atheistic about the Christian God” (if not “atheistic about the Christian God as I personally understand my sect to envision him.”) Of course that isn’t true - if atheism was about the Christian God, then hindus would be atheist.
I do admit that I was a bit generous in assuming that “spirituality” included belief in “some god” - I’d suspect the majority of people would read it that way but there’s a little leeway for somebody to believe in spirits that they don’t call gods, or whatever. Your typical american atheist is, of course, atheistic towards spirituality as well, but it would be possible of course to believe in some form of spirituality and yet not believe in some specific god or higher force.
No, it wasn’t. The thing I call agnosticism is independent from (but compatible with) atheism, being a belief about knowability rather than a belief about the separate subject of truth.
I’ve several times described myself as being both agnostic and atheistic regarding things. That should be a clue that they ain’t the same, at least not the way I’m using the terms.
(To further clarify - there’s a difference between “I don’t know” and “It can’t be known.” Only the latter is agnosticism (under the classic definition). Most atheists acknowledge that they don’t actually know there is no god, but they don’t consider it unknowable (should a god decide to actually show itself) and thus aren’t agnostics.)
Actually, we essentially can, with brain damage. We can see that when part of the brain dies, part of the person dies; it’s straightforward extrapolation that if all of the brain dies the whole person dies. The folk who believe in an afterlife are the equivalent of someone who looks over the edge of the cliff and claims that the splattered corpses are just optical illusions. Or that the falling bodies are secretly switched with fakes before hitting, without anyone noticing.
Nonsense. If I was some extrauniversal entity , able to percieve and comprehend the entire contents of the universe from my external perspective (despite being unable or unwilling or uninterested in interacting with it), there is nothing stopping me from observing your physical state and making a precise copy of it, down to every particle and velocity, in some other arena with similar enough laws of physics (perhaps even the reality in which I myself existed). You, Der Trihs, being aware of the meat-machine nature of humans will of course agree that whether or not that person is you or not, they’ll certainly think they’re you, and thus will be able to effectively carry forth your existence into an “afterlife” (a life after your death).
If I’m “outside of time”, I don’t even need a good memory to do this; I can just look at the you that existed an instant before impact and copy that you. (Being outside of time of course muddles the whole ‘after’ aspect of ‘afterlife’, but I’m sure the new you wouldn’t mind that much - you’d probably be happy enough not to have become hamburger. Or at least not to remember it happening.)
Of course, there is zippo, squat, nada, none, no way whatsoever reason to believe this is actually going to happen…but there’s no way to know it’s not going to happen. Hence, one may be agnostic about whether it may occur, despite brain damage and meat machines and all that evidence.
(Of course, we can be atheistic about this scenario too, if I may bastardize the word as I demonstrably do to refer to belief in things other than gods… -and you may be both atheistic and agnostic about it at the same time.)
Not necessarily. They may very well consider themselves to be a copy.
In that case, the result is definitely not you. It would at the least have to include the death experience, or it would be a copy that diverged from the original shortly before death.
And what about non-instantaneous deaths; when do you choose the moment of copying ? Or about people who suffer brain damage, live thirty more years and then die; is a copy of the long-destroyed portion of themselves shoved into their mind ? If someone suffers total amnesia does the afterlife have two copies of them, or does the old and new them get mashed together like it or not ?
In fact, your idea pretty much falls under my examples of “the equivalent of someone who looks over the edge of the cliff and claims that the splattered corpses are just optical illusions. Or that the falling bodies are secretly switched with fakes before hitting, without anyone noticing.” So it wasn’t “nonsense”.