No, you’re not getting what I’m saying.
My whole argument has as a premise that there is no afterlife.
That’s what my argument says.
This argument isn’t about the afterlife; as stated above, one premise is that there is no afterlife. You’re not getting it.
OK, well, if that’s the case, you might want to edit the part about waking up after you die, because it sound suspiciously like an afterlife. But it’s your thread, you can play word games if you like.
Well…uh… :smack:
Hm…
Weird thing these memories be… 
I suspect I do, it just seems to me to be a rather arbitrary view of things. Care to elaborate on what you think I’m not getting?
My current synopsis would be: That which is true in life remains true for all non-life, rather like whatever is in Libya remains true no matter what is elsewhere on Earth other than Libya.
My point is that, just across the border from Libya is just as much non-Libya as anything else in the world.
I’m not trying to avoid it.
So this is about semantics now? Look, I get it. There is, as far as I can see, no problem with the sentence “President Lincoln isn’t worried about terrorism.” There IS a President Lincoln in the sense that matters, which is that there was such a person who existed in the past and is not alive anymore. That is the point of the sentence- to express the fact, in an odd and perhaps humorous way, that he is not alive to worry about it. He has no worries about anything and lacks the ability to worry about anything because he is not around in the present. His consciousness does not exist anymore, we’re agreed about that. The statement can still be made because it’s about the existence of a person, not the existence of his awareness. I’m getting the impression you’ve taken a sentence that’s always delivered offhand seriously, and not only did you take it seriously, you took it to be a statement of philosophy or something with serious implications.
I think you’ve got the impression that your point is more complex than it is. You were the one who started this with the “we wake up crying” thing; I said consciousness is in the brain. Thus it’s clear that consciousness ends with death. You can still refer to a person in the past tense.
Yes, the fact that I am dead now doesn’t mean I’ve always been dead. This is not deep, it’s just a statement of the obvious.
I’m sorry to say this, but this is complete gibberish. There’s really no other way to respond. A lot of people took the time to politely tell you what’s wrong with your “theory”, and you just came back and said they don’t understand you. But honestly, there’s nothing to understand - you are spouting utter hogwash. The phrase “wake up” makes absolutely no sense in the context in which you are trying to use it.
It wouldn’t bug me so much, but you appear to be using this warped fantasy of yours to make some sort of pronouncement about what atheists do or do not believe. This thread is a disaster area. Just give it up, already. :rolleyes:
It’s not a word game. It’s a phrase intended to spark an intuition about how death relates to space-time.
Now I’m not getting it.
It’s not about sledgehammer arguments meant to crush the opponent–I’m right, you’re wrong–I’m pursuing a particular insight metaphorically and at the same time criticizing certain metaphors or story lines that atheists employ.
If you want to say, “Literally, that’s hogwash,” then you’re right. This is a debate that requires not an adversarial approach, but a cooperative one.
Uglybeech got what I was saying, so I consider the thread a success. Too bad for you if your thinking is so rigid that you can’t approach the topic from the right perspective.
Yes, that is indeed a big part of it. I’d say the other insight is that, as several posters have agreed, that our existence within our own region of space-time is eternal.
Sometimes the obvious is also enlightening.
But then, Ugly says “Anybody that talks with me about this think’s I’m a nut. I’ll stipulate that.”
He also stated clearly that the part he agreed with you about was that atheists think they’ll experience the “nothing” after death, and not your central point (whatever that is).
What you’re doing, is blathering.
(directed at the op)
Oh thank goodness… I’ve given myself headaches trying to figure out what’s going on here. No flaming intended, but I wondered if everybody was getting this and I was the only one who could hardly make head or tail of it. It’s only gotten weirder as it’s gone on.
They all think I’m mad, but I’m not mad I tell you. It’s all of those fools who are blind. BLIND. BLIND!!!.
I’m a she.
Anyway, for whatever my opinion is worth I want to say: you guys, I promise you you do NOT get it. You’re right, I don’t agree with Aeschines on about 1/2 of his argument, but I agree with him on the more important, nonspeculative, part of his argument and I have to take his side because I think we UNDERSTAND each other more or less. I’ll pick mutual understanding over mutual agreement any day.
p.s. I take full responsibility for not expressing myself well. But I’m tapped out on explaining why it’s not kosher to switch frames of reference right now.
There are seceral cases from India, where people have reported memories of past lives. These have been verified (in some cases). Why (if one is re-incarnated) does the soul forget the memory of past lives?
I would think that remembering (and not repeating) the mistakes made in past lives would be quite an advantage!
Here’s a sentence that might require a little elaboration…
I just don’t see why this has to be so complicated. We come from fertilized eggs. As we develop, our brains become more and more complex. At a certain point, we are complex enough to begin to make sense of our jumble of memories and images, and we become self-aware. As we grow and age, our memories give us a persistent sense of self, and our thinking brains collect more information, store it, process it, and add to our collection of memories that we call ‘me’. One day, the process will stop, our physical brains will die, and all that we collected in our minds will be gone. There is no mystical connection to anyone else, no thread of existence that causes us to ‘wake up crying’. We simply cease to be.
The reason we have so much trouble comprehending this is because we cannot conceive of not existing - it’s outside our experience and senses. Just like we can’t conceive of what’s ‘outside the universe’. We have no way to measure it or know it, and it’s outside the realm of science and reason. Thus we invent gods and new age philosophy and ghosts and spirits and all the rest of the comforting little tales we tell ourselves to help us deal with the knowledge that one day we will no longer exist.
The way I see it, I never existed 42 years ago, and I didn’t care. I didn’t wander some shapeless void in agony since the creation of the universe - I simply didn’t exist. My memories and thoughts and all the rest that make me ‘me’ had not been created. At some time in the hopefully distant future, I will be gone. And I won’t care, because I won’t exist.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. I’m down with that.
There are, however, interesting questions in all of this. For example, if some supercomputer in the future creates artificial memories of a staggeringly large quantity, and through happenstance creates mine, will I ‘wake up’? If the universe is truly infinite, that implies an infinite combination of events. That implies that after I die, at some point my personal collection of memories and thought processes will exist again. Will I perceive it? Or will it just be a simulacrum that looks like me but isn’t self-aware? This also implies that there will be (or is) an infinite number of ‘me’s’, with slightly to radically different ‘memories’. And it also implies that there will be consciousnesses that have memories mixed up in infinite combinations.
There are some good existential questions about what makes one self-aware and the implications of that in an infinite universe.
This is incredible. I agree with everything Sam Stone said in an entire thread.
Aeschines, I understand the bit about a trail of space-time that is occupied by the material aspect of your brain always existing. Like a corkscrew path of a planet around a sun within spacetime.
Is not, however, conciousness a PROCESS , whereby the sensory apparatus interact with the world in concert with memories. A process cannot always exist at one point in space-time. Also, the process will always depend on the frame of reference of the viewer. Does a sunset exist to an observer standing outside of spacetime?
What does this ‘wake up’ idea mean? Can you elaborate?
Again, waking up is a process. I wake up every day. My conciousness has been turned of temporarily and then it gradually switches on.
A persons conciousness will end once and for all, however this person cannot experience that ending. From the point of view of that person they are eternal BUT the conciousness of that person is not eternal outside of the point of view of that person in spacetime.