Few people tend to truly grasp recurrence theories or models that predict some kind of naturalist account of an afterlife. I can understand the group that protects themselves, nothingness is very comforting, but I don't see how anyone who takes our predicament seriously can come to the conclusion that nothing happens. I see my coming into existence as an event with probability 1, and I don't know how to change that just because I've died. I've probably died a lot. Its a terrifying blindspot that you think would encounter the greatest of consideration.
>>17042882Any model of afterlife is a model of the life you wanted to live but didn’t.
>>17042882For any recurrence model to have any meaningful value, you'd have to solve the vertiginous question first. Even taking at face value that a perfect copy of you is certain to come into existence, there is no guarantee that you will experience the copy's experiences. And a simple thought experiment makes the prospect appear absurd:If a perfect clone of you existed then would you not perceive the distiction between that clone and yourself? Or are you under the impression you'd be experiencing both perspectives simultaneously?
>>17042882Materialists are cursed to reinvent theology from first-principles in a fundamentally worse way.You can't actually create copies of people, because souls are entirely unique regardless of material substrate.I will prove my point by way of an example:Suppose that you experience amnesia. You are now roughly in the same state of mind as everyone else who experiences amnesia.Is there a non-zero chance of your retro-causally becoming or always having been one of those other amnesiacs, because your mental states are now very similar or even identical, if but for only a moment?If your answer is "no", then you have already assumed the existence of a non-physical observer who is secondary to the body and has an intrinsic sense of identity.If your answer is "yes", then you could literally get blackout drunk and then have a non-zero probability of retro-causally becoming a different person who also got blackout drunk. This doesn't seem intuitive to me.
>>17042903>Suppose that you experience amnesia. You are now roughly in the same state of mind as everyone else who experiences amnesia.nonsenseunless two hypothetical amnesiacs have the exact same molecular structure they don't have ""roughly the same state of mind"" as each other unless you think your state of mind is only the voice in your head telling you that it is has agency and doesn't believe in hangriness
>>17042882it's okay, you're just a midwit
>>17042919"Molecular structure" is not well-defined in this case because certain brain regions may or may not be external to your mind depending on whether or not you have effective access to them.Under impaired consciousness, access to higher-order brain function is lost. In that case, your effective "brain" at that moment is only a subset of total neurons, mostly those dealing with basic survival functions.If you demand a pedantic version of the thought experiment, then imagine that aliens from another planet are able to induce an emulated state of blackout drunkenness in humans by artificially de-activating neurons.Your "molecular structure" argument doesn't apply in that case, because the neurons pertaining to higher-order brain function have been formally shown to be an external aspect of the environment.
>>17042938>the neurons pertaining to higher-order brain function have been formally shown to be an external aspect of the environment.NTA, but that is not what your thought experiment shows. You have only shown that neuron arrangements can be influenced by external factors, which I don't believe was ever a controversial statement. It is perfectly consistent to say that the mind is malleable to material forces regardless of whether you hold to a materialist point of view or some alternative. In short: you haven't proven anything.
>>17042921Trooncasers face eternal oblivion.
>>17042887I somehow doubt that
>>17042961OP's position essentially amounts to a theory of perceptual transubstantiation based on a similarity of mental states between a copy of someone and the original person.What I'm trying to get at is that this same reasoning, when properly distilled and then analyzed, has a number of extremely bizarre implications that can be examined conceptually.Therefore, materialism either has to provide strong reasons why perceptual transubstantiation cannot take place, or otherwise accept the bizarre implications that it would entail.
>>17042966And a schizo!
>>17042991You can think OP's stance is silly for a variety of reasons. I spelled out my thoughts here: >>17042889OP being a tad silly does not make your less-related claims about materialism, in general, more valid. A simple framework for explaining the lack of mind transfer (among many potential others) could just be a requirement for temporal continuity. Adding that one requirement dissolves the "bizarreness" while introducing fewer assumptions than asserting the existence of an immaterial soul.
>>17042882>I can understand the group that protects themselves, nothingness is very comfortingah yes this is why religious belief in an afterlife is so famously unpopular
>>17042938as I said, if you take>state of mindas >the context of the narrative selfyour argument works, but this definition bites itself because your pedantic version then means that humans without higher brain function don't have a state of mind because the narrative self is a higher brain function
>>17042991OP here, no, my theory has nothing to do with copies but rather an unbroken causal chain. Copies are copies, no big whoop.
>>17043030t. mega autist who needs to be explained to when you're being made fun of
>>17043040But how do you define temporal continuity?If your brain operates at one-half speed, is temporal continuity interrupted? How about one-hundredth speed? One-billionth?Temporal continuity essentially resolves to a standard of causality. Your POV cannot transfer to something it did not affect mechanically.But all processes in physics (except wave-function collapse) are time-symmetric and can be traced back to an infinitely dense singularity that set off The Big Bang.So arguably, whatever is going on in your brain at the present moment is mechanically related to what all other material in the universe is also doing.If we think of that universe as some sort of big "brain", we can argue that it possesses "temporal continuity" across all nodes in its network.Perhaps not if we exclusively consider the positive arrow of time, but at least technically speaking due to time-symmetric interactions that couple together all matter in the universe.If your brain is just one node in a larger network that possesses "temporal continuity", then that standard doesn't really prevent mind transfer, because all people are mechanically entangled.>>17043069I concede that my example was intended to be vacuously true because that was easier to explain.If you would like a non-vacuously true example, suppose that someone self-hypnotizes into believing that they are Michael Jackson in the year 1984.Is there any degree or extent of self-hypnosis that would grant them non-zero likelihood of being Michael Jackson in 1984?Or conversely, non-zero likelihood that the "POV" or "observer" who was formerly Michael Jackson in 1984 now becomes the self-hypnotized lunatic in the year 2026?>>17043090>Poincaré Recurrence Argument Has Nothing To Do With CopiesAlright buddy.
>>17043145Firat I'll clarify that I meant spatiotemporal continuity but that's not super relevant to the points you're raising.If I were to defend this framework:Continuity is preserved regardless of how slow or fast it is moving. All that matters is that it remains unbroken. The reaction in the brain which causes a mind is persistent. Any copy is just a copy. Any cessation is permanent. If you stopped all neural activity in a person's brain (ie. you killed them) then that mind stops existing. Even if you could restart the process, that would be akin to creating a new mind entirely.(Note this may or may not be distinct from temporary dormancy like dreamless sleep or amnesia as the fundamental interactions inside the brain still persist during these states.)An apt analogy would be a fire. If you created two fires under identical circumstances with identical fuel, you still have two distinct, albeit superficially identical, fires. If a fire is put out, it's gone. That fire simply ceases to exist forever. Starting a new fire with that partially spent fuel is a new fire nonetheless rather than a continuation of a previously snuffed flame. Do you have any further questions? Are there any perceived contradictions you believe arise from this model?
>>17042887trvke
>>17043194OP again, I'm mostly referencing Poincare-like situations, but working backwards from a framework of continuity preservation which does not imply copies, here's why; Imagine you take the "explode at the level of atomic bonds" pill, ill-advised but whatever, so you come apart at the level of all particulate resolution, you're basically just the forces and the potentials of the particles you were but as a diffuse "soup." As chance would have it, you also took the "okay reverse course and reassemble" pill. Takes a little longer to work, but that's what happens, you schwoop back together in exactly the prior state. That wouldn't be a copy, no more than the you that walks across the room is a "copy" of the you that began the journey. So yes Poincare, but also, no Poincare. Ya feel?
>>17043145if your way of making an argument easier to explain by having it conclude exactly the opposite of your actual argument then i'd rather just concede that i am not smart enough to understand what you mean
>>17042887I hope death is absolute nothingness for eternity, but that sounds too good to be true.
>>17042889NPCs are incapable of even comprehending the vertiginous question in the first place, since they are meat robots that don’t have first person perspectives at all. The bottleneck to answering the VQ is that sentient protagonists are the only people capable of discussing it in the first place.
>>17043347I've spent a lot of time on philosophy of consciousness, of course I grasp the foundational issue that drives the vertiginous question but it never really grabbed me as something to take seriously. More a confusion brought on by shaky statistics-based identity theories.
>>17043344Eternity of nothingness feels like nothing, sadly. You can't experience it. It passes instantly from your perspective which must include some you.
>>17043307See my point about reigniting partially spent fuel. The new fire you started is a new fire.Likewise, there's no guarantee that your mind would resume after your body is reassembled, even in a strictly materialist framework. "You" already died when you atomized yourself. The person that was assembled out of your parts is a new person with your memories.
>>17043354I pick up what you're putting down, but most of those discontinuity moments come from some sort of loss of causal connection. I'm more concerned with events that resemble "bit by bit" mind uploading models like Chalmers and folks are about. I'm not a Chalmers guy or hard problem realist, but I've never seen the flaw or "breaking point" in gradually changing the substrate.Again, I'm thinking towards naturalistic versions like that model, not that model itself.
>>17043354I guess I'm saying "where" did I die assuming all of the forces are in play, just, ya know, temporarily sublimated?
>>17043359>>17043360The "flaw" is that it's all pure speculation. Depending on how you interpret consciousness as "working," it falls anywhere between "kinda reasonable I guess" to "complete non-starter."You started this thread to discuss the mind as a recurrent phenomenon that could arise again in a future body. You presented this as near certainty when evidence that such a phenomenon is even remotely possible is anecdotal at best (in the form of people claiming to remember past lives after reincarnation). It's the false sense of certainty that bothers me and makes me feel compelled to push back when ideas like these are presented in this way.
>>17043364To be fair, the "near certainty," which is a fair criticism, is more informed by statistical considerations akin to doomsday argument self-locating nonsense like but not quite dickface's "vertiginous question" (sorry, idk your name so its Dickface, your arguments are totally appreciated)Paradoxically, I do give credence to some of that, only what is outlined by the ceaseless sensation of always experiencing, an unsettling realization when you really consider events of impairment short of total metabolic failure i.e. propofol or deep sleep. And then of course, fear, but also a consideration of unknown unknowns. I guess pointing out fear of the discussion and lobbying for post-death state agnosticism is my motivation. Give me the certainty in nothingness if you have it. I'll take it. I don't see where one gets it, so I was being honest.
>>17043194CPUs have a set tick-rate. There is in practice no difference between shutting off a computer for an hour and turning it back on, versus reducing its tick rate to once per an hour.Your framework requires uninterrupted, real-valued computation that is analog. Any digital bottleneck with a set tick-rate would be equivalent to killing someone and creating a new person every tick.But with that reservation, yes, your standard works. But why does it work? Because it indirectly smuggles mind-substance dualism back into materialism.Under the materialist regime, two things with the same material structure, are by definition the same thing. No ifs, ands, ors, or buts. You build an exact copy of a statue, it's the same statute. And we are all statues.Any other stipulation, presupposes the existence of additional entities other than physical matter with the ability to impose their own requirements on consciousness.Like that the new mind be made out of the same matter as the old mind (OPs position), or that it maintain an unbroken chain of analog, real-valued computations (your apparent position that I am inferring).>>17043317It doesn't conclude exactly the opposite of my actual argument. The whole issue w/ materialism is that losing access to higher-order brain function = either a type of death or a dimensionality reduction of the observer's mind resembling death.Therefore, any reincarnation argument that applies to death also applies to losing access to higher-order brain function. I don't agree with this b/c I am not a materialist.I think that unconscious people continue to "experience" things because the metaphysical observer is still present whether or not it temporarily loses access to higher-order thoughts, memories, or civilized beliefs.What you don't seem to grasp is that, by definition in materialism literally every state of mind is just the context. Vacuous context is easier to explain, but delusions also fit the bill.
>>17043701>Your framework requires uninterrupted, real-valued computation that is analog. Any digital bottleneck with a set tick-rate would be equivalent to killing someone and creating a new person every tick.Brains don't exactly have a "tick rate" in that sense. Multiple processes are ongoing concurrently so there's never a moment when the brain is actually "off" (until you die, ofc).>Under the materialist regime, two things with the same material structure, are by definition the same thing. No ifs, ands, ors, or buts.This is a very explicit strawman of the materialist position. If you have two identical statues, you have two statues. That's not two instances of the same statue. It's two statues that happen to be identical. Anything downstream of this strawman you presented is therefore irrelevant.
