Is Eternal Life Even Desireable?

[robvalue]

Indeed. I don't know whether a deity is possible or impossible.

It would help if I knew what the fuck a deity was in the first place.

[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.

[Hatshepsut]

I think you mean Dragnet.

See, I can't even remember my '50s TV now. Adam-12 is way too late.

I wonder if you would characterize yourself as an agnostic theist?  The way I use the word, if you concede that only private reasons can justify theistic beliefs, I'd say you are agnostic.  (Me too.)  Doesn't mean you can't be plenty certain that belief is right for you.  Likewise, I'm as certain as I can be that theism isn't for me....

I'm a bit vague on how all these theists, atheists, agnostics, and dog catchers are classified. I do agree the belief business means you must choose; Nature is reluctant to say.

The thing about whether eternal life is desirable is somewhat interesting since I'll get to test this thing for myself in a few years. I won't be around in 2070 'less I be older than Jacob. If eternity is going to be like the temporal, with time flowing from minute to minute without stopping, the thread consensus that it may not be a good "buy" seems on the mark.

Here is a deity:



Isis didn't create the world, but she protects the god Imseti who in turn protects the canopic jar containing your liver after you are mummified. In Egypt, your body must be preserved if you want to live forever. Afterlife isn't heaven or hell elsewhere, but more like being a ghost haunting this world, continuing the same life you had while alive, but in a different state. Except Egyptian personal identity or soul had five components including a kA that partakes of food offerings and a bA that flies around like a bird. Body, shadow, and name are the others.

I wonder whether if asking whether deities make sense as agents in the physical world as we understand it today is the wrong approach. Isis is mute on the big bang, but she can tell us about how Egyptians used to think, and what the world meant to them. They made an effort to understand it. For instance, bA and kA suggest Egyptians may not have had our concept of one unified personality that experiences the world in only one way, which we take for granted. Maybe their kA is a sort of reptile brain for them, the part that is hungry for sex and food.

[Angrboda]

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.

It is probably accurate to say that it is impossible to prove monism or dualism to the satisfaction of most dualists, perhaps ever, but definitely for now. This has to do with a number of issues, one of which has to do with what is meant by proof, it's relationship to whatever truth is, and other epistemo-ontological questions. That being said, I don't think it's necessary to handle those questions at the moment. To my mind, at present, it is safe to say that the proposition that the mind is a product of the brain is a scientific fact, yet you need to be precise in your understanding of what the term 'scientific fact' means technically. A scientific fact is often misunderstood or rather ambiguously defined by most non-specialists. It does not mean that science has demonstrated what the truth is nor that what science says is the way reality is. A scientific fact is a hypothesis about the behavior of reality which, in conjunction with all necessaey auxiliary theories such as the theory of measurement and so on, is corroborated to a sufficiently high level that the possibility of the null or alternate hypothesis being true in spite of the corroboration meets a specific statistical improbability. This refers to type I and type II errors (type I in this case). There are a number of caveats to bear in mind. First, the hypothesis can be well corroborated and still be wrong, due to any number of things from an error in an auxiliary theory to ignorance of alternate explanations or the appropriate null hypothesis. Different sciences and different situations also call for different strength of statistical improbability, known as significance, and afaik, there is no hard and fast rule as to what is appropriate when. Moreover, from what I understand, if the exact mechanism by which the phenomenon occurs is unknown or implausible, it is considered appropriate to require greater significance in the result to consider the hypothesis to have been demonstrated. (E.g. As far as I know, the mechanism underlying the analgesic effect of acupuncture is not understood, but the effect is sufficiently strongly demonstrated that it is considered a scientific fact that acupuncture has these analgesic effects.)
. . . . . . .
Again, back to the question, a friend at a philosophy discussion once said to me that neuroscience is "awash in a sea of data." By this he meant that there is a lot of detail known about mind and brain, but no overarching model or explanation which ties all the data together, makes sense of it, and explains the subject in question, the nature of mind and consciousness. (IMO) As noted, I don't think this is as big a scientific issue as it is essentially a scientific fact that the brain is the cause of the mind in the technical sense given above, but that certainly doesn't put either the scientific or philosophical questions to rest, especially in the absence of an actual mechanistic model of how the brain and mind are explicitly related, causally. The lack of an established model or complete theory is a problem for both science and philosophy. This is just my personal opinion, but I'm not a fan of the way the concept of 'emergence' is used, both by professionals and non-professionals, and imo, saying that consciousness is 'an emergent property of the brain' is little more than hand-waving the problem aside; that answer doesn't explain anything. It just replaces a puzzle with a vague, official sounding word. That being said, I still think physicalism as an explanation has virtues over dualism, but I'm not going to go into specifics here. (Read Curchland.) The key point is that dualism itself doesn't actually explain anything either; it's just kicking the can down the road. "A seperate substance is responsible for consciousness." "Well, how does that second substance give rise to consciousness?" "I dunno; it just does." Dualism is similar in that respect to a lot of arguments that seek to justify belief in a creator, but then fail to explain where the creator came from or how, or how he created everything, and by what process or means. It's the philosophy of mind equivalent of "goddidit," to my understanding. (Correct me if I'm wrong. How does this other substance give rise to mind, qualia, and consciousness?)

So my understanding in summation is, it is a scientific fact that the brain gives rise to the mind; however that doesn't really imply that we understand how, why, or in what sense yet. There are legitimate scientific and philosophical issues to be explored and answered. Monism doesn't have it completely in the bag, but it has many virtues over dualism, dualism has vices and problems that themselves are as daunting as those facing monism, and to my view dualism's problems are insurmountable; moreover, dualism itself doesn't really answer the question which motivates the positing of dualism in the first place. It just defers it, and tucks it safely inside some commonly accepted but likely vacuous metaphysical and ontological notions.

IMHO.

[Pyrrho]

Indeed. I don't know whether a deity is possible or impossible.

It would help if I knew what the fuck a deity was in the first place.

What can be known depends on the deity in question.  Consider, for example, a deity that is perfectly benevolent, omniscient, and omnipotent.  Such a being cannot possibly exist.  The reason it is not possible for such a deity to exist is that bad things happen.  If there were such a deity, it would know about the bad things, being omniscient, and it would be able to prevent the bad things, being omnipotent, and it would want to prevent them, being perfectly benevolent.  Consequently, if such a being existed, it would actually prevent all bad things from happening.  Since it does not prevent bad things from happening, we KNOW it does not exist.  Such a being is incompatible with the world as we know it, and so such a being cannot exist.  It is impossible.

For other deities, other discussions would be appropriate.

If someone chooses to make a general statement, like:

It is possible for a deity to exist.

Then it would be perfectly reasonable to request that they say more precisely what they mean.  If one looks up the word "deity" in a dictionary, like:

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/defini...ctCode=all

One of the definitions is:

A representation of a god or goddess, such as a statue or 

If that is all they mean that can exist, then it would be foolish to disagree with them.  But, very likely, they have something else in mind, and, if so, they should clarify their meaning and state what, precisely, they mean.

[Pyrrho]

... 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.
...

The "privacy" is being worked on.  Here is an article to get you started:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/articl...eds-ahead/


Primitive people thought that fire was a thing or substance.  The modern idea is that it is not a substance, but a process.  It is the rapid oxidation of a material (called "fuel").  Stop the process, and you stop the fire.  There isn't any nonphysical part of it, but it isn't a substance; it is a process.

When one thinks, one thinks about something, and there is, for want of a better expression, constant movement, rather like a fire.

The best idea at present for consciousness is that it, too, is a process (or processes), and not a substance.  It appears to be a subset of the processes of a brain.

If, on the other hand, thinking were some non-material thing, how could it possibly interact with physical stuff?  Why would it be that, when alcohol is in the brain, one's thinking is affected, if one had an immaterial mind?

Of course, alcohol in the brain affects the processes of the brain, and so if thinking is a brain process (or processes), then it makes perfect sense that alcohol in the brain would affect thinking.

Examining people with damaged brains helps further this idea, that one's mind is a subset of the processes of the brain, rather than some immaterial substance that is magically connected to a physical body.

So, at present, the best idea for what happens when one dies is that the processes of the brain stop, and so one no longer has consciousness and so one does not live forever.  It is 'lights out,' giving one the same thing one had before one existed, or in other words, nothing.

The fact that people don't like this causes many to believe something else, but wishful thinking is a form of fallacious thinking.

[Hatshepsut]

A scientific fact is often misunderstood or rather ambiguously defined by most non-specialists.  It does not mean that science has demonstrated what the truth is nor that what science says is the way reality is.  A scientific fact  is a hypothesis...corroborated to a sufficiently high level...if the exact mechanism by which the phenomenon occurs is unknown or implausible, it is considered appropriate to require greater significance.

I like your take on scientific truths and dare say you're way more current on monism vs. dualism than I am. As well as filiing one's own posts for retrieval 2 years later. My computer's so cluttered I'm thinking I might be less prone to reject the null hypothesis inappropriately were my brain replaced by a Turing machine. Paul & Pat Churchlands' "luminous room" in Scientific American (Jan. 1990) is fascinating yet I'm unsure it overcomes John Searle's maxim that syntax cannot generate semantics, a thing nearly all linguists accept.

Primitive people thought that fire was a thing or substance.  The modern idea is that [mind] is not a substance, but a process [, and so for consciousness also.]

I'm sympathetic to this idea. Although I sometimes wonder if substance vs. process is a duality along the lines of particle vs. wave in quantum mechanics. Meanwhile, the brain scanner doesn't watch thoughts directly but watches the brain instead to look for activity signatures consistent with certain thoughts. It's not true telepathy, where a telepath experiences life from the perspective of the person who's mind she is reading.

I can accept that thinking requires a platform, much as software does. If your brain goes kaput it seems pretty clear any thoughts that were running also stop. Deciding whether computers "cause" software or the other way around is a bit of a chicken-egg problem, however. Software can't boot without hardware, yet once it's running it does seem to affect what the computer does. We might say the software instructions are "represented" by moving electric charges in the machine.

[robvalue]

A generic deity just seems to imply a lot of power, and maybe being immortal.

The problem is where exactly do you draw the line between a weak-ass example of a deity, and an extremely powerful non-deity creature?

I'd be interested to know if there is any kind of consensus between people who regularly use the world as to what the minimum requirements are. I kind of feel they want it to be supernatural as well.

Really, the more people define terms like this, the further removed from reality they seem to become. I hear a lot about what it "is not".

[Chad32]

I can just imagine living for eternity. Even if it was the best place ever, eventually I would have done everything that everyone could ever think of doing an infinite number of times. How could you not eventually want to end it completely?

[Whateverist]

I can just imagine living for eternity. Even if it was the best place ever, eventually I would have done everything that everyone could ever think of doing an infinite number of times. How could you not eventually want to end it completely?

Maybe create a race of beings inferior to yourself, impose a bunch of rules with grave consequences and give them the disposition to fuck up so you can torture them.  That shit never gets old.