Is Eternal Life Even Desireable?

[Whateverist]

But bring them to the table without anything more to support them?  You've got to expect some disagreement.  We all have our own flights of fancy...But jumping to magical solutions may just undermine your pursuit of those fine questions.  Your choice of course.  But no one who respects the questions is going to be content to plug in your fanciful, just-so story.  Good questions are not nuisances to be swatted away....But you may be missing out on better answers by jumping the gun this way....It doesn't seem too likely that an atheist hangout is the most likely place to find kindred spirits in this regard.

Well, rather boring if everyone agreed with me. Never underestimate magic, however. Perhaps the one thing where Australian Aborigines and ancient Egyptians were a little smarter than we. While a lot of mental and material benefits were gained by our discarding magic, we paid a price for that.

I agree with you that the mind and subjective experience are fascinating, as is the nature of consciousness. I just don't think it is necessary to posit an external agent to account for any of it. When I think about how embryos go through and incorporate other forms on their way to the finished product, I think maybe something like that happens with consciousness too. After all we have a huge frontal cortex sitting on a standard issue mammalian brain which sits on a reptile brain. Who is to say that those earlier forms aren't still bumping around below the surface? It might explain a lot.

I've experienced too many 'magic' moments to approach consciousness in a nothing-but manner. There is a lot there. But I prefer to see my self as an amalgam than as a beneficiary of a grand central agency of limitless power without which nothing at all exists. That just seems to go too far for my liking. My indefensible prejudice is that everything is natural, all the way down. It is only juxtaposed with our current hypotheses that things seem magic. Real magic is natural but not limitless.

I don't think I gave any "just-so" stories in my post. At least not intentionally. I certainly hope I wasn't swatting at questions as if they were flies. I was arguing that explaining subjective consciousness as an epiphenomenon or as an emergent property of complexity is too facile. These two explanations are popular, I see them everywhere. But neither of them proposes a mechanism. I was under the impression that mechanism is central to any scientific theory. Explanations that don't include a causal mechanism are usually considered unscientific. Yet the privacy aspect of consciousness seems to make it impossible to find a mechanism for it.

I didn't mean to disparage what you wrote. I very much like what you have to say and how you express yourself. It's great to have a thoughtful, articulate theist around too bounce ideas around with.

I don't bump into many kindred spirits anywhere I go. While belief in deity may not be the best answer, neither is the denial that a deity is possible.

For what it's worth, I feel some kindredness to you. Hope you get enough here to stick around.