The Resurrection

[arewethereyet]

Now that you mention this, I don't actually know what other churches believe about the resurrection, particularly the Catholic Church. I only know the stereotype of grandma going up to heaven after she dies. Whereas in my church, grandma is just dead, she's not in heaven or hell, until the resurrection at the end of days.

Tell me what you think about this: Over the past few years I've grown more interested in the idea of informational realism, that the structure of reality is fundamentally informational. Now, I don't know what that means in philosophical terms, but in practical sense it's as if information is at the foundation of the universe, more fundamental than matter and energy, etc.

And so, could that mean that we exist informationally as well? That just as there is a genetic blueprint, there's an informational blueprint? Of course, under this view you'd certainly be able to upload yourself to a computer as information, whether or not the absence of body ultimately changes who you are. It also solves the problem of resurrection from a continuation perspective.

But does information sneak the soul back in under another name? The information itself wouldn't be conscious so perhaps that's the difference, but it is still very soul-like. From the surface it sounds similar to what you explained about Dante's view, especially since it also contains info about the form of the body not just mind.

I think that in the long run a lot of people are going to end up with the conclusion that mind is prior to matter. (Not necessarily temporally prior, but essentially prior.) 

This has been the conclusion of a number of schools in Western thought, and of course it's a foundational idea in philosophy from ancient India. Brahman, universal mind, comes before everything else.

David Bentley Hart's recent book on the philosophy of mind covers -- exhaustively, it's a long book -- all the current theories in philosophy of mind, and makes a detailed case as for why mind is the foundation of everything. 

It's one of those ideas that people keep coming back to. As Blake said "Man has no Body distinct from his soul; for that called Body is a portion of a Soul discerned by the five senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age." It isn't dualistic, because it argues that matter is a portion or appearance of mind.

This is where non-dualism leads us when we have no persuasive theory about how a physical body can generate a mind. 

What this means for the condition and survival of the individual soul is a separate question. Christians and Vedic philosophers come up with different answers. But it seems to me that a lot of the current problems go away if we come at it from this perspective. 

People here are really going to hate this.

You don't speak for the members here.  You are not a mind reader.  STFU FFS.