I always found the atheistic interpretation of dying to be the most unexplainable of all the other ones. They just say, plainly, that after you die it's "lights out" and "eternal pitch black darkness". Now I would love if this were real but I don't think it is. It sounds way too good to be true. Here's the thing about this: even if this were to occur, the matter is still there, and it's going to be recycled. Who can say it stops there? Who can say the molecular arrangement that made up us will disintegrate forever and not simply form back up elsewhere? Trapping you again, thus, in this corporeal reality? Who can really say that this "nothingness" is the final destination? You're already here.. You're always going to be here in one form or another. Even if your particular molecular arrangement is gone, these atoms are still being recycled. It is impossible for you to have known nothing, being you. Since unfortunately, you are something, and always were and will be, a something. To even postulate anything else is incredibly absurd and preposterous, to even think that the Universe would simply do away with you is unthinkable.Oh no no no, it OWNS your ass. Now and forever. What, you think you're gonna go poof like some fucking fairy, atheists, I don't think so. Wishful thinking on your part. It seems like you just want everything to disappear, out of convenience, huh?
>>18636287Everything we know points to your consciousness being created by your brain.Destroy the brain and you consciousness is gone.Without some higher power transferring your consciousness somewhere else or recreating it in a new body, "lights out" is the default outcome.
>>18636290I really do think this is Ockham's Razoring the death process.
>>18636287You are not just your physical material body and your Self isn't actually just impossibly conjured up out of a configuration of inert matter but is an immortal soul; every NDE proves this. Fortunately, your soul can be saved by simply believing in Jesus and having faith in Him to save you if you genuinely confess Him and repent.But yes, atheism and the atheist view of death is indeed the most absurd and unlikely.
>>18636287As the Russians used to say, "If there's a person, there's a problem. If there's no person, there's no problem."This is attributed to Joseph Stalin (although it was popularized in literature by Anatol Rybakov in his novel Children of the Arbatat).
>>18636290Why would this necessarily require a higher power?
>>18636296What are you suggesting?
>>18636298How did consciousness arise in the first place, according to you?
>>18636303A beneficial evolution of the brain. A consciousness allows you to better plan for the future, increasing your own survival chances and the survival chances of your offspring.A bunch of animal species like crows and chimpanzees shows signs of more rudimentary consciousness.
>>18636311Ok. All I'm saying is that I think there is possibly more to this since energy cannot be created nor destroyed.
>>18636317Why would that mean that molecules would spontaneously re-arrange themselves to be an exact replicate of an organism that had previously existed but died?
>>18636394>molecules would spontaneously re-arrange themselves to be an exact replicate of an organism that had previously existed but died?Ummm I didn't say that exactly
>>18636405Assuming you think consciousness stems from your physical brain in your physical body and not a supernatural soul or similar then that is what would needs to happen in order for you (though one can argue that it's not even you, just a clone of you) to revive after death.
>>18636412It might be possible that some part of the consciousness can retain itself in a different body or thing, it doesn't have to be a clone of me.
>>18636414>It might be possible that some part of the consciousness can retain itself in a different body or thingLike what? Do you think your consciousness could be stored in a Rubik's cube or in the tooth of a squirrel?
>>18636290No it doesn’t you moron. The CIA did multiple studies on this during the Cold War investing various things from spirituality, The Druze reincarnating, to Soviet mind control.What they concluded in their official report can be found here:>https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/cia-rdp96-00788r001700210016-5.pdfI actually believe the government on this one. They say consciousness is independent of material processes.Now explain to me what evidence is in the other direction and why we shouldn’t believe the U.S. Army or the CIA.I know the CIA is the natural predator of conspiratards but let’s be serious just for once. I don’t think they’re a grand all powerful conspiracy. I think they’re right on a lot of things, consciousness surviving death is one of them.
>>18636417>Like what? Do you think your consciousness could be stored in a Rubik's cube or in the tooth of a squirrel?Perhaps..
>>18636419What evidence do you have that suggests that this would be the case?
>>18636420It is a hypothesis and by the way, so is your lights out.
>>18636431A valid hypothesis is supposed to have reasoning. This anon >>18636290 has already provided the reasoning for the 'lights out' scenario. There's every reason to believe that our consciousness is created by and stored in our brain. There is absolutely no reason to believe that it would be stored in some random inanimate object that was created after you've already attained consciousness.
>>18636439>There is absolutely no reason to believe that it would be stored in some random inanimate object that was created after you've already attained consciousness.Anyway that's not what I was implying with the Anon I was chatting with and btw you're strawmanning me.
>>18636446You said as much here >>18636419If you think you're being strawmanned then plainly state your position and your reasoning why you think it is the case.
>>18636450I don't have a position I'm just making hypothesises.
>>18636317After death the body's energy gets converted into other energy, to feed other life on Earth. There is no identity to energy. It has no memory.
>>18636459Like I said, a hypothesis is supposed to have underlying reasoning to it. What reason could you possible have to believe that a human consciousness could be stored in a Rubik's cube or the tooth of a squirrel?
>>18636647Energy waves or something
>>18636673What energy waves? Have you or anyone else ever measured these alleged consciousness waves?
>>18636678It's all energy waves, Nikola Tesla claimed as such!
I agree.Not only does it make no sense, it's wishful thinking and the alternatives are far more horrifying.
>>18636287If you burn a book, where does the book go? I'm not asking where the matter making up the book went. That clearly became ashes and smoke. I'm asking about the book itself.
>>18636862The book is transmuted into other states. It doesn't disappear..
>>18636862The information exists as long as another copy of the book exists. Lesser (partial) versions also exist in the memories of people. Once all of the above are destroyed the information is truly destroyed.
>>18636287Reincarnation is the correct one. It makes sense because it answers the question "Why was I born in this time period and not in another one?"
>>18636418>DUDE I LOVE MYSTICISMYou might as well start a crack cocaine habit. It would probably be healthier for your brain. Better yet, how about you grow up, get a haircut, get a King James, and go to church?
>>18637152>get a King James>James certainly enjoyed the company of handsome young men, sometimes shared his bed with his favourites and was often passionate in his expressions of love for them
>>18636439>>18636290Even from a purely physicalist perspective there is always the chance of another physical entity coming into existence with your memories.
>>18636412>though one can argue that it's not even you, just a clone of youFor it to not be you would be assuming a non-physical aspect. It would be you.
>>18637174How large is that chance?>>18637178What if a clone was made while you were still alive? Which one would be you?
>>18637164>ackson openly acknowledged—and his defenders, including family members, corroborated—that he frequently shared his bed and hosted slumber parties at his Neverland Ranch with young boys.
>>18637185>How large is that chance?I think very low if all work just ends when the universe reaches heat death. Possibly very high or even guaranteed if there is an infinite cycle of work. >What if a clone was made while you were still alive? Which one would be you? Since they both have your memories they would both be you, but they would not be each other.
>>18637195>Possibly very high or even guaranteed if there is an infinite cycle of work.When you say this do you mean that a person will be born and eventually end up with an exactly identical brain and memories or do you think atoms will re-arrange themselves into the same configuration as a person that has existed, but without living its life? Because they "coming into existence with your memories" phrasing here >>18637174 makes it seem like the latter. If it's the former then we're in agreement but that's not really the same thing.
>>18637212I just meant coming into existence at all, not necessarily spontaneously. Although with truly infinite work I wouldn't rule out Boltzmann brains.
>>18636287>the matter is still there, and it's going to be recycled. Who can say it stops there? Who can say the molecular arrangement that made up us will disintegrate forever and not simply form back up elsewhere?You mean like a Boltzman brain? Even if that happens, I wouldn't consider it me. I have a connection to my past and future. If the same configuration of matter forms by random chance, it doesn't have that connection so it's a different person.
>>18636287The lights out shit is usually just an off hand remark because the reality is - we don't know what happens. If your consciousness disappears then there is no "darkness", darkness still needs to be experienced.Here's a paradox. A total amnesiac will feel like his life only started at the point where he starts gaining new memories which he can save up. If our consciousness disintegrates forever, wouldn't that mean that what we experience right now, what we see, shouldn't be? Similarly to an amnesiac our experience supposedly gets erased as if it never existed, which means we shouldn't have the experience, but we do. You don't have to be religious to recognize this even. Now, our experience is information. Going out from specifically talking about the consciousness into more general scientific theories, in quantum mechanics information cannot be actually erased, only rearranged. There's even a whole unsolved paradox about it. Mathematically it was predicted that when a black hole evaporates, the particles it slowly turns into contain certain info about the initial state of the black hole but not all of the information the black hole attracted beyond it's event horizon. Which doesn't jive with the postulate of quantum mechanics that the information cannot be erased.
>>18637174You don't keep your memories I think, just your consciousness itself. Like waking up in a new body.
>>18637466Your memories are your consciousness. Everything you experience, from tactile to visual, happens first and then you experience it. By the time you experience something it has already happened, it's just that the time between the signals being received and signals being processed is less than a second. All your empirical experience is a memory of the experience.
>>18637506Nta. You might say that everything you're conscious of is a memory in a certain sense, but not that your memories are your consciousness. Theoretically someone could have the exact same experience you once had, but that wouldn't guarantee that you would suddenly be experiencing it rather than them or alongside them.
>>18637466I'm speaking purely in terms of physicalism. (you) are just a particular physical arrangement and there is no separate consciousness.
>>18637560The raw materials making up that physical arrangement will eventually become materials making up other conscious life forms, and after my death one of those will become me.
>>18637573Agreed.
OP is talking about this:https://youtu.be/xULSj4hyYrY?si=CiIMT_5kd9t62R-uIts the consequence of a universe that is finitely bounded spatially but temporally eternal. There are only so many ways to "shuffle the deck," meaning you will eventually find yourself reconstituted, over and over, forever.Now the universe may be spatially infinite or temporally finite or... plenty of unknown unknowns.I will say I am agnostic to the question of what happens after death due to considerations of this sort.I would prefer nothing, but truth generally cares little for my preferences.
>>18636290I am not my twin brother.
>>18637825Yeah because twins aren't actually perfect identical copies of each other. And even if you were, you also did not experience the exact same things, meaning your neural pathways aren't the same.
>>18636862The "book" as a concept ceased to be when it was reduced to ashes. It wasn't annihilated from existence, only transformed into another, non-"book" formIn a way, the "book" reincarnated as "ashes", which themselves can reincarnate into something else
>>18637847Nta. A person isn't a perfectly identical copy of themselves when they were a little kid, but there's still a deep sense in which they *were* that little kid. And it isn't fully captured by their memories. They could lose all their memories from when they were that age and it would still be the case that at one time they were that little kid.
Identity isn't fully captured by structure. Even if trillions of years after I died, a person with the same material composition and structure as me came into existence and lived the exact same life as the one I'm now living, it's very conceivable to me that they wouldn't be me because my consciousness might not be associated with them.
>>18637850>It wasn't annihilated from existence, only transformed into anotherThe matter transformed from "book" to "ashes", but the book was annihilated because it no longer exists.
>>18637854How so?
>>18637854Don't think you can prove that
>>18637952>>18637987I tried to explain it more here >>18637864 but I consider it to be more of an observation than an inference, so if you don't share the observation then I'm not sure how to convince you. Incidentally, I lean toward to atheism, but unlike most atheists I find the existence of something like a soul to be so intuitive that I'm practically unable to doubt it, so I fully an expect an afterlife of some kind despite the atheism.Maybe see https://benthams.substack.com/p/you-are-a-soul for one attempt at reasoning it out, though I suspect most people who disagree would consider the arguments to be assuming the conclusion or otherwise having premises they don't agree with.
>>18637864see >>18637816Not a copy. A copy is not you. The problem is an unbroken causal chain resulting in the exact same arrangement. That would be you, just like you retain a sense of continuity walking to one end of the room from the other.
>>18637871I'm serious, watch the stupid apple video, its like 4min long but it explains natural recurrence (Poincare, if you'd like) perfectly. I'm not sure what OP is on about with "souls" or "energy cannot be created or destroyed*," but again, I'm an atheist, physical reductionist, and I am completely agnostic on what happens after death.No hate, OP. Just saying, there's a real model here and it doesn't get addressed. Probably because its not terribly comforting. "Nothingness" or "what it was like before I was born" is comforting. Unfortunately, its an article of faith. *yes, I understand thermodynamics, it just doesn't do much lifting in this model, its an aside
>>18638388OP hereI don't think I ever mentioned souls? Not sure why you guys make these assumptions. I did say, "Energy cannot be created nor destroyed", to support what I was trying to say here.. You filled whatever else needed to be said here and I thank you for that. However we are still left with the most uncomfortable conclusion that "nothing" is whatever and whatever is an imposed something upon the Universe.So the real question is, how can you comfort me regarding any of this?
>>18638405Likely I'm attributing other's arguments to your central thesis. See, this is why we need usernames, maybe cute little avatars and a voting system, the ability to reward posts with gold, a ban on racism, etc.
>>18638405As for comfort, well1. Get comfortable not knowing2. Personally, I think process might be the name of the game concerning reality. Not only are we not spatially bounded, but the concept of bounds and even cause preceding effect are probably useful artificial constructs. In a real sense, nothing ever occurs twice because there isn't two of anything, just helpful categorizations. Now, that opens up whole fresh suspect cans of worms re: the matter at hand, but I will tell you that the last thing I'm worried about is repeating anything.
>>18636418First of all you're wrong second why do people always assume the cia has some superior ability to acquire knowledge that scientists don't they just have a shitton of money to murder people and influence foreign agents and thats it. They don't have space lasers and they're just as retarded as everyone else case in point that kiriakou guy actually believes in that china has 600 million people claim that is backed by nothing.Americans really are fucking retarded man they actually believe they have some kind of an all knowing magic dark government. This will come bite you in the ass. You are not special you are just a country that hoards massive amounts of wealth from its strategic dominion on trade and the brain drain
>>18638562P. sure the CIA thing is just flat earth, posted to muddy the waters during real nigga existential hours.Nobody worth a damn takes it for anything but govt waste, fraud, and abuse.
>>18636287Comatose existnece and being "permanently asleep" are two different states. To say the total collapse of brain functions would approximate sleep rather than being in a coma is pretty silly. Like for coma survivors time basically skips when you awaken and you have no grasp of ANYTHING that was occurring. For sleep you actually can keep a good grasp of time and you aren't totally cut off from perceiving the outside world.
>>18637139thats begging the question and doesnt supoort reincarnation at all, nor does reincarnation answer that at all. we are born in the time period we wre born in because thats where we essentially originate from our sperm.
>>18636287You simply forget what you were and will forget what you are now Dementia proved this
Hard determinist interpretation is you are stuck in an eternal static pattern of reactions and do not realize it because it is all static from the god perspective and our sense of time is an illusion.
>In the Egyptian religion ceasing to exist was reserved only for the most evil/reprobate and was seen as a horrific outcome>atheists think this is the fate of everyoneGrim
>>18638319A copy is you
>>18638043>Maybe see https://benthams.substack.com/p/you-are-a-soul for one attempt at reasoning it out >The final argument in this vicinity is that it seems like two beings with identical mental lives can swap minds. Suppose that in a galaxy far, far away, there is a physically identical copy of me. It seems that he and I could swap minds. One way to see this is that, perhaps now it’s the case that tomorrow I’ll have a red tomato fall on my head and he will not. It seems that we could swap such that instead it would be his mind that would tomorrow have the red tomato fall on his head. But how can non-soul-theorists make sense of this swap? The physicalist perspective on this is that there is no swap. That you and the identical copy share an identity until your experiences diverge.
