This means we went from "non existence" to "existing" state. If it happened once, why could it NEVER happen again?
Nobody says it couldn't happen, you could very well reincarnate in a Panda that shoots lasers out of his eyes in another planet, but we have no reason to believe so.
We obviously can't know for sure what will happen, but the best we can do is try to find out the most likely outcome
I think we can both agree hell and heaven are fairly unlikely outcome.
What i tried to point out in my post is, the "we never exist again" outcome isn't as likely as people think. Because one thing we DO know is we used to not exist, and we suddenly existed. It happened once. So it isn't insane to think it can happen again.
Let's group the outcomes in 3 different categories:
A) Wishfull thinking: Hell, heaven, Vallhalla, things like that.
B) Reincarnation: Our own self is gone forever, but we do get to exist again, in some other form, in this world. Maybe on another planet or something.
C) We don't exist ever again.
I get the feeling most people on earth are either at 80%+ on A, or 80%+ on C, but me i personally think its like a coin flip between B and C.
And as insane as it might seem, i actually think the C outcome isn't that much worse than B. The thought of reincarnating into random stuff for eternity scares me a little actually. A lot of existences seems to be absolutly awfull. Just think of most animals's life today....
This means we went from "non existence" to "existing" state. If it happened once, why could it NEVER happen again?
Nobody says it couldn't happen, you could very well reincarnate in a Panda that shoots lasers out of his eyes in another planet, but we have no reason to believe so.
You make it sound like we have reasons to believe "non-existent" state is more likely. Thing is there are way too many possibilities, obviously we d prefer to believe in "life" after death, but all scenarios are possible. I'd like to see any meaningful argument supporting either development... there aren't any, its all just speculation we can't back up. There are way too many things we dont understand as species for such discussion to be productive from a pragmatic point of view. If you d like to go into philosophical part then thats another thing
On May 03 2017 00:42 Baalim wrote:
No you dont, if you teleport someone (it seems you are defining it as disintegrating someone and recreating it somewhere else with new atoms) all you create is a continuous consciousness or if you create a new consciousness and the other one dies you still dont know where that other consciousness go.
Creating as you wrote "continuous consciousness" is exactly getting more info if we use the definition you wrote and I assumed. The other option ("create a new consciousness" ) still don't provide any new info.
On May 03 2017 09:48 Spitfiree wrote:
its all just speculation we can't back up.
True, but speculation is not something wrong by itself. The Greeks speculated about the order of the planets 2k years ago and now we can look back at their speculations and put ourselves better in their pov (how they perceived the surrounding world etc).
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asdf2000 United States. May 03 2017 11:45. Posts 7690
On May 03 2017 04:42 Baalim wrote:
I dont mind the word itself (Qualia), its just one of a list of buzzwords when you know more often than not some sophistic babble is coming your way, epistemology is another favorite one.
oh so that's how you judge things? with how many buzzwords you feel are being used?
Grindin so hard, Im smashin pussies left and right.
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asdf2000 United States. May 03 2017 11:56. Posts 7690
so if i stop experiencing "me" it's pretty irrelevant, because what isn't important is who is experiencing, but rather what is being experienced.
How is it irrelevant? Are you saying human consciousness is somehow equivalent to a rock or a pile of ashes because they have some kind of experience too and who are we to discriminate?
equivalent? I guess but that wasn't really what I am getting at. What I am getting at is that we are experiencing those things too, we just don't know it.
consciousness is one thing. The illusion of separation is part of what we experience, it's what makes us think we are separate.
There's a catch 22 here. If what we experience as reality is illusion, then we can't know of any absolute from our unknowingness. Now I suppose you might say something along the lines of, "it's just our senses that are unreliable and can't grasp the interconnectedness of everything, but if you go within, you can find the truth and confirm it for yourself." To that I'd simply say: First, I'm skeptical of anyone who claims to have done this, especially in the Western world, and secondly, you can just as easily dismiss it as an illusion, especially if someone used drugs to come to that realization.
I certainly am not able to experience from the perspective of anything else. My point is that just because the nature of these personal experiences I go through are such that I am not able to experience everything else, does not mean that everything else (you, baal, maybe a rock?) are not being experienced by me. Now obviously I don't know this, but this thread is about opinion, and this opinion makes more sense to me(both intuitively and logically) than the alternative.
I would also add the following: our senses were shaped by evolution and they serve their purpose. That purpose is not to know or to transcend anything (obviously). If we were to abandon them in the quest of some transcendent reality, we would no longer be suited for living and procreating, so we would die and become extinct as a species. What is being preached as the way to enlightenment would then have to be seen as a maladaptation. I guess there's a kind of poetic irony there: if you believe in the teleological argument that Gaia or this one experiencer/the Absolute/God needed us in order to know itself, only to end up destroying itself... I mean, you'd have to say that is one insane God. That would also mean that Ulrich Horstmann was the only philosopher who saw it coming, to a certain extent.
Well this is kind of an aside conversation, but what you are talking about would be assuming that life is especially important. Maybe life is a product of karmic stress (sorry for the buzzword baal). Maybe it's a "non-peaceful state", which it is if you think about it. So there might be something better.
Grindin so hard, Im smashin pussies left and right.
This means we went from "non existence" to "existing" state. If it happened once, why could it NEVER happen again?
Nobody says it couldn't happen, you could very well reincarnate in a Panda that shoots lasers out of his eyes in another planet, but we have no reason to believe so.
You make it sound like we have reasons to believe "non-existent" state is more likely. Thing is there are way too many possibilities, obviously we d prefer to believe in "life" after death, but all scenarios are possible. I'd like to see any meaningful argument supporting either development... there aren't any, its all just speculation we can't back up. There are way too many things we dont understand as species for such discussion to be productive from a pragmatic point of view. If you d like to go into philosophical part then thats another thing
P.S. Floofy your groups are just....
How the hell do we not have more reason to believe non-existence follows our own individual death? Saying "there are too many possibilites, all scenarios are possible" is just a vacuous truth. We obviously cannot argue that we can ever know, but we don't need absolute knowledge, it's about the likelihood of each possibility. It's not like it's all equal possibilities just because you can entertain the thought that countless things are possible...
fuck I should just sell some of my Pokemon cards, if no one stakes that is what I will have to do - lostaccount
Last edit: 03/05/2017 17:40
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asdf2000 United States. May 03 2017 20:18. Posts 7690
Of course you can talk about likelihoods. It is much, much more likely that non-existence doesn't follow death. None of us know if we have ever experienced non existence, or if even such a thing is possible. However we do know that existence is possible, because we do experience that.
Of course we have to be careful what we mean by existence, because there is a difference between not having thoughts/sensations and not existing.
Grindin so hard, Im smashin pussies left and right.
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asdf2000 United States. May 03 2017 20:21. Posts 7690
Of course you can talk about likelihoods. It is much, much more likely that non-existence doesn't follow death. None of us know if we have ever experienced non existence, or if even such a thing is possible. However we do know that existence is possible, because we do experience that.
So which is more likely to follow death, the thing that we know is possible or the thing that we aren't even sure is possible?
Of course we have to be careful what we mean by existence, because there is a difference between not having thoughts/sensations and not existing. We go without thought/sensation quite regularly, or so our memory tells us. But that doesn't mean we weren't there,
because we were in some capacity. This is verifiable if you apply awareness and then really analyze what happens. Which I think is kind of what meditation is
oops it appears I quoted instead of edited
Grindin so hard, Im smashin pussies left and right.
This means we went from "non existence" to "existing" state. If it happened once, why could it NEVER happen again?
Nobody says it couldn't happen, you could very well reincarnate in a Panda that shoots lasers out of his eyes in another planet, but we have no reason to believe so.
You make it sound like we have reasons to believe "non-existent" state is more likely. Thing is there are way too many possibilities, obviously we d prefer to believe in "life" after death, but all scenarios are possible. I'd like to see any meaningful argument supporting either development... there aren't any, its all just speculation we can't back up. There are way too many things we dont understand as species for such discussion to be productive from a pragmatic point of view. If you d like to go into philosophical part then thats another thing
P.S. Floofy your groups are just....
How the hell do we not have more reason to believe non-existence follows our own individual death? Saying "there are too many possibilites, all scenarios are possible" is just a vacuous truth. We obviously cannot argue that we can ever know, but we don't need absolute knowledge, it's about the likelihood of each possibility. It's not like it's all equal possibilities just because you can entertain the thought that countless things are possible...
Give me one evidence of non-existence past death? No one coming back is not really evidence, as there could be some truth we have not discovered yet, that could explain that. If anything there s evidence towards the opposite, e.g. people surviving different circumstances that would kill 99% of people, or people being revived after a few minutes of clinical death. I cannot take any of those as evidence for existence past death however.
You are obviously aware that the lack of evidence about a topic does not validate that the topic is untrue. How would one evaluate such possibilities as well considering the spectrum there would literally be 0 to 100% for any statement possible. Everything about this is pure speculation. Prove me otherwise. As I said this discussion only makes sense in a philosophical kind of view
This means we went from "non existence" to "existing" state. If it happened once, why could it NEVER happen again?
Nobody says it couldn't happen, you could very well reincarnate in a Panda that shoots lasers out of his eyes in another planet, but we have no reason to believe so.
We obviously can't know for sure what will happen, but the best we can do is try to find out the most likely outcome
I think we can both agree hell and heaven are fairly unlikely outcome.
What i tried to point out in my post is, the "we never exist again" outcome isn't as likely as people think. Because one thing we DO know is we used to not exist, and we suddenly existed. It happened once. So it isn't insane to think it can happen again.
Let's group the outcomes in 3 different categories:
A) Wishfull thinking: Hell, heaven, Vallhalla, things like that.
B) Reincarnation: Our own self is gone forever, but we do get to exist again, in some other form, in this world. Maybe on another planet or something.
C) We don't exist ever again.
I get the feeling most people on earth are either at 80%+ on A, or 80%+ on C, but me i personally think its like a coin flip between B and C.
And as insane as it might seem, i actually think the C outcome isn't that much worse than B. The thought of reincarnating into random stuff for eternity scares me a little actually. A lot of existences seems to be absolutly awfull. Just think of most animals's life today....
If you lose any recollection of your past life you are essentially a new consciousness, especially if you have vast different cognitive capabilities, your option B makes no sense at all.
You have been conscious ONCE for a few years, you have been unconscious for billions of years, you have no basis to assume you will be conscious again after death.
Everything about this is pure speculation. Prove me otherwise.
You're using the same faulty reasoning that fundamentalists use when they ask atheists to prove that their God doesn't exist. Wtf, come on. It's like if I said, "prove to me that you really exist and you are not just a figment of my imagination or else I will not speak to you again." It's really pointless and self-defeating, you don't get anywhere from that.
Everything you are going to be suggesting about life after death and the likelihood of all of those possibilities is going to be pure speculation. It involves the belief that there is something about yourself (as in, your personality) that doesn't rely on physical, biological processes to exist. Being skeptical of those claims and holding the default position that there is no such thing as a soul, transmigration, etc. isn't 'pure speculation', it's arrived at by the absence of evidence to the contrary. The issue is, you're saying the absence of evidence is not strong enough for you to hold the default position, you're saying the likelihood of many other possibilities being true is just as high or higher. Well, why don't you present your case then? What has you convinced that the default position should be abandoned and we should entertain "all those possibilities" equally? Which possibilities are the most likely according to you? Is it just because of the sheer amount of possibilities (seems to be what you are defending)?
Again, don't give me the, "if you don't have absolute evidence, then you're just speculating and everything I imagine is just as likely to be true". That's just infantile. It's like people who dismiss entire scientific theories by saying they are "just a theory". No, evolution is not just as likely to be true as creationism. Now, you could spend years coming up with alternative theories as to how sentient life came to exist, just making them up with your imagination as you go. You could then say, "look at all those possibilities, doesn't that make evolution a lot less likely?" Now, wouldn't that be stupid? Just because you can entertain the idea of many other possibilities doesn't mean they should be believed or that they are just as likely.
I haven't seen any good reason to believe that the belief in an afterlife theory -- whichever one -- is anything more than the result of a scared animal attempting to deny its own mortality. Humans have a self-serving need to believe in something greater than themselves or that they will somehow persist after perishing. No matter how many other possibilities someone presents to me, it isn't going to affect my conviction that this is the most likely reason for the belief. And since there is no way to verify any of the life after death claims, then this is really the only aspect of it that is meaningful to discuss imo.
fuck I should just sell some of my Pokemon cards, if no one stakes that is what I will have to do - lostaccount
This means we went from "non existence" to "existing" state. If it happened once, why could it NEVER happen again?
Nobody says it couldn't happen, you could very well reincarnate in a Panda that shoots lasers out of his eyes in another planet, but we have no reason to believe so.
You make it sound like we have reasons to believe "non-existent" state is more likely. Thing is there are way too many possibilities, obviously we d prefer to believe in "life" after death, but all scenarios are possible. I'd like to see any meaningful argument supporting either development... there aren't any, its all just speculation we can't back up. There are way too many things we dont understand as species for such discussion to be productive from a pragmatic point of view. If you d like to go into philosophical part then thats another thing
P.S. Floofy your groups are just....
yes it is more likely since you have been non-exisant for 99.99999...% of the time.
And you could argue that these mental exercises are futile, however most of the people in this world believe in a childish afterlife and live their lives accordingly so, albeit people with lower IQs and less access to information than the norm in this forum.
On May 03 2017 00:42 Baalim wrote:
No you dont, if you teleport someone (it seems you are defining it as disintegrating someone and recreating it somewhere else with new atoms) all you create is a continuous consciousness or if you create a new consciousness and the other one dies you still dont know where that other consciousness go.
Creating as you wrote "continuous consciousness" is exactly getting more info if we use the definition you wrote and I assumed. The other option ("create a new consciousness" ) still don't provide any new info.
On May 03 2017 04:42 Baalim wrote:
I dont mind the word itself (Qualia), its just one of a list of buzzwords when you know more often than not some sophistic babble is coming your way, epistemology is another favorite one.
oh so that's how you judge things? with how many buzzwords you feel are being used?
No, I was obviously being snarky about certain terminology, somebody wrote Qualia before you and it was an ok post, yours however was nonsense
On May 03 2017 19:18 asdf2000 wrote:
Of course you can talk about likelihoods. It is much, much more likely that non-existence doesn't follow death. None of us know if we have ever experienced non existence, or if even such a thing is possible. However we do know that existence is possible, because we do experience that.
You experience existence every day and non-existence every night.
For your argument to be true you are either arguing that only reality exist within your consciousness or that you have experienced consciousness in many beings/forms you just dont remember.
The first argument would be one of those absurd sophisms I was talking about, and the second is flawed because as I've said before, having no memory of past experiences renders your consciousness as brand new.
On May 03 2017 00:42 Baalim wrote:
No you dont, if you teleport someone (it seems you are defining it as disintegrating someone and recreating it somewhere else with new atoms) all you create is a continuous consciousness or if you create a new consciousness and the other one dies you still dont know where that other consciousness go.
Creating as you wrote "continuous consciousness" is exactly getting more info if we use the definition you wrote and I assumed. The other option ("create a new consciousness" ) still don't provide any new info.
What new information would we get?
The most important one - consciousness won't reduce to brain/matter (the materialistic scenario) since the moment you teleport a person you are basically copying brain A with consciousness A* into brain B, but if consciousness A* reduces to brain A you won't be able to achieve this "continuous consciousness" (brain B will just have a copy of A* (say A**)). So if A* stays intact (you achieve "continuous consciousness" after teleportation) then consciousness may reduce to information (depending on how exactly this future teleportation works) or matter reduces to consciousness (the idealistic scenario). Both these follow up cases however deny the yolo scenario.
I didnt undestand at all what you are trying to say, what do you mean with "reduces".
If person A is teleported to point B he will have a continuous experience of consciousness even if the teleportation process would mean to kill the source (A).
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asdf2000 United States. May 04 2017 01:37. Posts 7690
On May 03 2017 19:18 asdf2000 wrote:
Of course you can talk about likelihoods. It is much, much more likely that non-existence doesn't follow death. None of us know if we have ever experienced non existence, or if even such a thing is possible. However we do know that existence is possible, because we do experience that.
You experience existence every day and non-existence every night.
For your argument to be true you are either arguing that only reality exist within your consciousness or that you have experienced consciousness in many beings/forms you just dont remember.
The first argument would be one of those absurd sophisms I was talking about, and the second is flawed because as I've said before, having no memory of past experiences renders your consciousness as brand new.
my post isn't nonsense at all. many people who have devoted their entire lives to spiritual reflection have come to similar conclusions. you're arrogant.
So your definition of non-existence is what? Not remembering things? We certainly don't experience "non-existence" when we sleep. Nor do we stop existing, if you want to put it that way.
I don't even understand what your 2nd sentence meant, but I am pretty sure you haven't realized my position.
Grindin so hard, Im smashin pussies left and right.
On May 03 2017 19:18 asdf2000 wrote:
Of course you can talk about likelihoods. It is much, much more likely that non-existence doesn't follow death. None of us know if we have ever experienced non existence, or if even such a thing is possible. However we do know that existence is possible, because we do experience that.
You experience existence every day and non-existence every night.
For your argument to be true you are either arguing that only reality exist within your consciousness or that you have experienced consciousness in many beings/forms you just dont remember.
The first argument would be one of those absurd sophisms I was talking about, and the second is flawed because as I've said before, having no memory of past experiences renders your consciousness as brand new.
my post isn't nonsense at all. many people who have devoted their entire lives to spiritual reflection have come to similar conclusions. you're arrogant.
So your definition of non-existence is what? Not remembering things? We certainly don't experience "non-existence" when we sleep. Nor do we stop existing, if you want to put it that way.
I don't even understand what your 2nd sentence meant, but I am pretty sure you haven't realized my position.
From the perspective of the person, consciousness and existence is the same thing, and yes, having no memories is the same as non-existence.
For example, you could have reincarnated 100 times before your life but you dont remember, and that would be exactly the same as if you were a new consciousness, (setting aside all arguments about cognitive abilities for simplicity).
Most people who dedicate their lives to spiritual reflection end up with idiotic ideas, priests, imams, babas etc, and yes I'm arrogant what else is new?
What part of my 2nd sentence isnt clear? I was replying to the teleportation post
