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My girlfriend recently asked me what I think happens when we die. I told her I believe that when you die you simply die and are non existent like before you were born, however your "spirit" or whatever you want to call it will manifest itself in another new born and you wont ever know it but you never really "die". I don't know how to really explain it any better but basically you die you are reborn but never know of your past life. I'm agnostic and never had a religious upbringing. I would like to hear about other peoples theories of what happens.
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Aug 24, 2014 07:42
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I think they call that reincarnation.
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Aug 24, 2014 07:58
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When your brain makes a dream when you're sleeping it only uses a very small amount of energy and a matter of microseconds to actually create it (like putting a DVD into a DVD player). Then when you actually dream the dream it takes a few seconds for it to process - so to an outside observer watching you sleep they might be able to tell you're having a dream for like, four seconds (this is like pressing "Play"). But when you're actually in the dream yourself it could last for minutes, hours, even days... So your brain can create a dream in a tenth of a second, process it in two seconds and make you think it's lasted hours. And that's using almost no energy with your brain under no pressure or stress. My theory is this: if your brain can do that, using a tiny amount of its power in a tiny amount of time, what could it do if it used significantly more power and had a lot more time to do it? If your brain has a few seconds warning that you're about to die then to stop you getting stressed out maybe it uses as much energy as possible to create and process as many dreams as it possibly can. Even if you have a heart attack I imagine your brain will be able to keep firing until it runs out of oxygen. This could be two minutes. If it can create a two hour dream in 1/10th of a second using 0.000002% of its energy, how many hours of dreams can it create in 120 seconds using 5% of its energy? Even in a second it could create centuries worth. So I believe that just before you die your brain creates an eternity of dreams and you basically feel like you're in this perfect dream world forever, or at least until you've forgotten what life actually is (or was). People who have died and been revived have reported moving towards a light, seeing God and angels, meeting deceased family members, childhood memories and pets, etc. If my theory is right then these people have basically seen the first few seconds of their dreamworld before being yanked back to existence. In my mind I know that my father died and was taken to a special room and burned and that was that. But my heart hopes that he's in an eternal dreamworld having a dream-beer with dream-me and playing with his dream-dog from his childhood 
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Aug 24, 2014 08:15
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duckmaster posted:So I believe that just before you die your brain creates an eternity of dreams and you basically feel like you're in this perfect dream world forever, or at least until you've forgotten what life actually is (or was). People who have died and been revived have reported moving towards a light, seeing God and angels, meeting deceased family members, childhood memories and pets, etc. If my theory is right then these people have basically seen the first few seconds of their dreamworld before being yanked back to existence. I kind of subscribe to this as well, but with the added modifiers for a "heaven" and "hell". You know how sometimes you might have nightmares over having done some bad poo poo? Well all that manifests in your subconscious so when hitting your death-dream, you can have an eternity of either nightmares or great stuff, depending on how well you're at peace with yourself. I mean I'd like to believe all of that, but honestly I think you just...end when you die. No light, no blackness, just an end of all forms of consciousness.
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Aug 24, 2014 08:38
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Octy posted:I think they call that reincarnation. But with reincarnation don't people know what they were in their previous life?
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Aug 24, 2014 18:13
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Guru Yaekob posted:But with reincarnation don't people know what they were in their previous life? That's not an absolute "must" for it to be considered reincarnation. It just means you die and are reborn as someone new.
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Aug 24, 2014 18:30
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Guru Yaekob posted:But with reincarnation don't people know what they were in their previous life? Generally not. That is why lamas/buddhas/bodhisattvas and the like are so special, because they do. Also, check into Aristotle's view on reincarnation. That may also help you express what you are trying to say. The Vedic stuff is good too but there is enough of a tradition there that getting a scholarly grasp on it takes some time.
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Aug 24, 2014 20:08
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Guru Yaekob posted:But with reincarnation don't people know what they were in their previous life? Of course not, that's just silly. If people could remember, you wouldn't be able to scam them out of hundreds of dollars by telling them what they were in a past life. All those psychics would be out of work! Well, they could retrain to do cold readings and give people messages from their dead relatives, or tell futures, the skills are transferable. And past life experiences are a niche anyway.
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Aug 25, 2014 01:12
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When you die you're given a test with 12 multiple choice questions and if you get the majority right you're put into Heaven and if you get them wrong you're sent to Hell. If you get all of them right you get both showcases and you're put in Super Heaven.
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Aug 25, 2014 01:31
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Guru Yaekob posted:My girlfriend recently asked me what I think happens when we die. I told her I believe that when you die you simply die and are non existent like before you were born, however your "spirit" or whatever you want to call it will manifest itself in another new born and you wont ever know it but you never really "die". I don't know how to really explain it any better but basically you die you are reborn but never know of your past life. I'm agnostic and never had a religious upbringing. I would like to hear about other peoples theories of what happens. How does this work given a growing population? If there were one billion people in 1800 and seven billion now, where did those others six billion come from? Is there some kind of spirit pool out there that spirits wait in to get assigned to a body? Is it an infinite pool, or do we hit a limit some day? What happens then, does the miscarriage rate rise precipitously or something?
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Aug 25, 2014 01:45
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duckmaster posted:When your brain makes a dream when you're sleeping it only uses a very small amount of energy and a matter of microseconds to actually create it (like putting a DVD into a DVD player). Then when you actually dream the dream it takes a few seconds for it to process - so to an outside observer watching you sleep they might be able to tell you're having a dream for like, four seconds (this is like pressing "Play"). But when you're actually in the dream yourself it could last for minutes, hours, even days... I like the theory, that eternity is essentially asymptotic consciousness. However, what evolutionary advantage does this have to give rise to its development? A more comfortable final two seconds is probably the least effective way to propagate one's genes. Or is it an outgrowth of some non-imminent-death survival mevhanism?
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Aug 25, 2014 01:47
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Guru Yaekob posted:But with reincarnation don't people know what they were in their previous life? No. What you described is reincarnation in its more essential form.
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Aug 25, 2014 01:53
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duckmaster posted:When your brain makes a dream when you're sleeping it only uses a very small amount of energy and a matter of microseconds to actually create it (like putting a DVD into a DVD player). Then when you actually dream the dream it takes a few seconds for it to process - so to an outside observer watching you sleep they might be able to tell you're having a dream for like, four seconds (this is like pressing "Play"). But when you're actually in the dream yourself it could last for minutes, hours, even days... The best you could hope for with this is that the person dying perceives it as a long time. To an outside observer though, the time passes "normally". In other words, your dad's dream is over 
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Aug 25, 2014 03:56
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Kazak_Hstan posted:I like the theory, that eternity is essentially asymptotic consciousness. However, what evolutionary advantage does this have to give rise to its development? A more comfortable final two seconds is probably the least effective way to propagate one's genes. Or is it an outgrowth of some non-imminent-death survival mevhanism? I suppose the main issues for living people in proximity to a recently deceased person is the need to ascertain the cause of death and then dispose of the body quickly and effectively. Maybe in my theory the brain diverts energy from other sources, particularly the central nervous system, which could help make the cause of death more obvious to survivors, or even show symptoms of disease the body may have effectively been fighting off. Let's say for example you're a caveman and you've been hunting sabre tooth tigers all day or something with your caveman friends. You're at the back of the group and suddenly a tiger jumps on you from behind and digs its teeth into your back. You scream and fall backwards to the ground, alerting your buddies who run back. In the confusion nobody notices the tiger (because, er, it's camouflaged) and it slinks off into the bushes. Your body starts convulsing which worries the other cavemen - they're superstitious and might put this down to evil spirits or whatever - but soon your brain realises you're basically hosed. If we consider my theory to be a sort of "Shut Down Brain Sequence" (I'm going to call it SDBS, but I'll probably need to talk to some academics before I do the wikipedia article!) then this is the point your brain initialises it. Because of the diversion of energy from other areas the SDBS may stop your convulsions, encouraging your friends not to run away from you, and increase blood flow from the wound to your back which would help them quickly identify the source of death and realise a tiger is nearby. Or on the other hand - the main function of this theory is that it makes the dead persons final seconds more comfortable but if it can also lessen the symptoms of a traumatic death than that would be useful for the surviving people around you. We know that stress is bad and can lead to depression and all sorts of other mental issues, which can often have detrimental effects on peoples sex lives. If a young child watches a parent die of a particularly horrible illness then the final scene will stay with them for the rest of their life; but if the last two seconds at least appeared to them to be relatively calm and peaceful that will help with the grieving process and minimise any post traumatic stress issues, ultimately helping them procreate in the future. Just a theory. I'm no expert  I Am A Robot posted:The best you could hope for with this is that the person dying perceives it as a long time. To an outside observer though, the time passes "normally". In other words, your dad's dream is over Exactly, the person perceives it as lasting forever but the brain processes it in a microsecond. The dream is over for me but to him it's lasting until the end of time, and since time is a far more fluid concept than the hands on a clock moving round then the end of time is impossible to quantify. We'd have to ask Steven Hawking about that.
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Aug 25, 2014 06:03
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Kazak_Hstan posted:Is there some kind of spirit pool out there that spirits wait in to get assigned to a body? That is a school of thought among some people, yes. They just consider it their version of God more or less.
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Aug 25, 2014 06:21
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In Judaism its called the chamber of guf. In that tradition it can never be emptied because its constantly restocked by a soul tree.
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Aug 25, 2014 07:29
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What happens in the spirit pool? Is it just like a chill party? Do they watch the embodied souls?
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Aug 25, 2014 07:40
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Kazak_Hstan posted:What happens in the spirit pool? Is it just like a chill party? Do they watch the embodied souls? Honestly the whole thing gets ridiculously overcomplicated dividing souls up in groups and subgroups like cadres/entities/etc. I don't really know. From what I understand they believe some act as guides to the incarnate while the rest kind of study existence and chill between lives. Before that they're just part of a whole. I just like to read weird books sometimes, I don't really follow or believe in it. 
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Aug 25, 2014 14:16
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Kazak_Hstan posted:What happens in the spirit pool? Is it just like a chill party? Do they watch the embodied souls? Some religions believe that you can reincarnate as things that are not human. Like you might be a duck or a horse or a tree in your next life. Other religions believe that we can keep adding more people bodies effectively forever because there are a gently caress ton more souls out there and you don't reincarnate directly after dying. If memory serves Hinduism (or just one its sects...Hinduism is huge and complex so I forget) teaches that the time is about 400 years between lives. Another view (again, Hinduism also believes this) is that everything is one thing. In Hinduism it's all Brahma. Anyway, you are just a chunk of that thing and when you die you go back to being part of the thing. You can get closer to whatever the main thing (i.e., the god) is by leading a good spiritual life, accumulating good karma, or whatever. In that case, there is no "you" exactly but rather a temporary incarnation of part of God that will eventually drift back to God. Other beliefs include things like a soul being created some time early in the body's existence that goes...well...somewhere when the body dies. In other cases (animism tends toward this, in its way) believes that we kind of borrow our spirit from a big, great spirit temporarily so we can have life. When we die we must give it back. In that case your soul ends up separating itself from the big spirit, walks around in a body for a while, and then goes back to being part of the big one. In other beliefs we never really separate but are just a clever, temporary arrangement of life and parts that exists in the cosmos as part of it. Then in some cases there is a party but it isn't chill. Vikings generally believes that if you were a good Viking you went to a big feasting hall where you drank and fought with all the rest of the good Vikings until Ragnarok hit and the final battle happened.
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Aug 25, 2014 14:47
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Guru Yaekob posted:My girlfriend recently asked me what I think happens when we die. I told her I believe that when you die you simply die and are non existent like before you were born, however your "spirit" or whatever you want to call it will manifest itself in another new born and you wont ever know it but you never really "die". I don't know how to really explain it any better but basically you die you are reborn but never know of your past life. I'm agnostic and never had a religious upbringing. I would like to hear about other peoples theories of what happens. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4S_Tg4-_WVk
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Aug 25, 2014 15:50
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being an epic retard. idiot
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Aug 25, 2014 17:03
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Some religions believe that you can reincarnate as things that are not human. Like you might be a duck or a horse or a tree in your next life. Other religions believe that we can keep adding more people bodies effectively forever because there are a gently caress ton more souls out there and you don't reincarnate directly after dying. If memory serves Hinduism (or just one its sects...Hinduism is huge and complex so I forget) teaches that the time is about 400 years between lives. An old co-worker was Buddhist and she believed that bad people are reincarnated as animals. Really bad people come back as insects. Someone leading a bad life as a human has to work their way back up to being human. We didn't talk about her beliefs in any real depths, so my knowledge ends there.
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Aug 26, 2014 15:43
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MoraleHazard posted:An old co-worker was Buddhist and she believed that bad people are reincarnated as animals. Really bad people come back as insects. Someone leading a bad life as a human has to work their way back up to being human. We didn't talk about her beliefs in any real depths, so my knowledge ends there. I wonder how you work up from being a bug. What constitutes living a good life as a stick insect? What if you end up as some gross wasp that lays its eggs in a living host, is that "bad"? Seems unfair to me if so, they don't ask to reproduce that way.
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Aug 26, 2014 16:20
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Guru Yaekob posted:I would like to hear about other peoples theories of what happens. Whatever physical processes are responsible for consciousness cease to function. Your relatives put you in the ground, where worms eat your corpse. (Or they dump you into the ocean where fish and crabs do the worms' job, or your relatives take you to the macabre cremation center in a local strip mall and reduce you to ash.) If your family is the sentimental type, in a century you are perhaps remembered through a few instances of old media in someone's attic, like a photo album or a family Bible.
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Aug 26, 2014 16:38
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bitterandtwisted posted:I wonder how you work up from being a bug. What constitutes living a good life as a stick insect? What if you end up as some gross wasp that lays its eggs in a living host, is that "bad"? Seems unfair to me if so, they don't ask to reproduce that way. Also, how do so many horrible souls(?) make it to human? You'd think rapists, murderers, and the like would be stuck as jelly fish or something.
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Aug 26, 2014 16:51
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bitterandtwisted posted:I wonder how you work up from being a bug. What constitutes living a good life as a stick insect? What if you end up as some gross wasp that lays its eggs in a living host, is that "bad"? Seems unfair to me if so, they don't ask to reproduce that way. So I think it would depend on how much intent an insect is capable of generating. Just guessing I would say insects mostly follow their instincts without consciously being like "oh yeah I'm gonna lay my eggs in that sucker, wooop!", so they probably just generate the kind of karma you get when you blindly follow your instincts without thinking. As an insect you don't really have time to reflect on your actions, so you risk getting stuck as an insect (by virtue of creating all that insect karma) for a long time. Maybe, that's my take on it anyway. Aggressive pricing posted:Also, how do so many horrible souls(?) make it to human? You'd think rapists, murderers, and the like would be stuck as jelly fish or something. Edit: In Buddhism, karma isn't punishment for being bad, it is just the effects produced by actions. I think it makes sense that, for example, if you let the impulse to inflict pain grow in your mind - when your body dies - your mind will go somewhere where there is pain. Rhymenoceros fucked around with this message at 17:21 on Aug 26, 2014 |
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Aug 26, 2014 17:07
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Rhymenoceros posted:My understanding is that intention is the factor that decides whether you make good or bad karma. If you step on a bug by accident you don't incur the bad karma of killing a bug on purpose or with malice. I've never understood the point of this. What's the functional difference between ''there's a pool of souls, when you die you reincarnate and if you're ethical you get to retain the ability to make ethical judgements'' and ''there's a pool of souls, when you die you reincarnate''. If you're a good person, you'll keep being a good person. If you're a bad person, you become a horse or something. How are there still bad people? Wouldn't all the rapists and such be dung beetles by now? And if a relatively decent soul gets a run of bad luck that leads to them getting molested or mentally ill or something else that really fucks them up and leads to them behaving in a ''evil'' way? In fact, that really gets to my main objection with it: doesn't that sort of imply that the victim is ultimately responsible for every negative thing that happens to them? Ultimately they're just putting the ledger back into the black.
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Aug 26, 2014 17:20
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CoolCab posted:I've never understood the point of this. What's the functional difference between ''there's a pool of souls, when you die you reincarnate and if you're ethical you get to retain the ability to make ethical judgements'' and ''there's a pool of souls, when you die you reincarnate''. If you're a good person, you'll keep being a good person. If you're a bad person, you become a horse or something. How are there still bad people? Wouldn't all the rapists and such be dung beetles by now? And if a relatively decent soul gets a run of bad luck that leads to them getting molested or mentally ill or something else that really fucks them up and leads to them behaving in a ''evil'' way? If you someone else fucks you up and you do evil things, you end up paying for those deeds, that's karma and a major incentive to get out of rebirth. CoolCab posted:In fact, that really gets to my main objection with it: doesn't that sort of imply that the victim is ultimately responsible for every negative thing that happens to them? Ultimately they're just putting the ledger back into the black. *This is just an example, I'm not saying this is why people feel bad after verbal abuse. What I'm trying to get to here is that karma (it seems to me) is a lot about how you react to things, because the pain of being called a jerk comes from the reaction to it, and not the event itself. So I think in this world, things happen; people die, your car gets broken into, you get cancer, etc. - and this is just the world, but karma is how you react to those things. Some people have bad poo poo happen to them and they get over it and live happy without suffering, that's basically good karma. Some people suffer a lot over even trivial things and that's basically bad karma. A major point here is that you can change your karma in the present by learning to deal with things skilfully, which is also a major point of Buddhism which separated it from other sects in its time (who had other interpretations of karma) - the pain and pleasure you experience here and now is not predetermined from your past actions, but a mix of past karma and the karma you make here and now. Edit: To put it another way, in the world things are always falling apart, and you can throw a fit when your collectible cup breaks and suffer a lot, or you can be like 'all cups break eventually' and not suffer at all. Same situation, massive difference in suffering. Rhymenoceros fucked around with this message at 18:03 on Aug 26, 2014 |
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Aug 26, 2014 17:42
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duckmaster posted:... I think you're pulling an equivocation. You make the claim that time is fluid and can be perceived differently, but then you claim that your dad's dream is still going since it lasts forever. Well, if time is fluid and based on perception, who's forever are we talking about here? Your dad's forever-dream takes place in the two seconds before death of your time scale, so once his forever is up, what's the justification to say that things are still going on in your forever? To come at this from another angle, once the body is dead and rotted away, or burned to ash, or whatever, then what exactly is still hanging around doing the perceiving?
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Aug 26, 2014 18:05
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bitterandtwisted posted:I wonder how you work up from being a bug. What constitutes living a good life as a stick insect? What if you end up as some gross wasp that lays its eggs in a living host, is that "bad"? Seems unfair to me if so, they don't ask to reproduce that way. The belief isn't that you must live a good life as a bug or an animal or something but rather it's punishment that lasts for a while. You don't really "work" but rather endure it until you become human again. The other belief is that if you're exceptionally bad you don't reincarnate on Earth at all but rather in various hells. If you're really good you reincarnate elsewhere as a divine spirit on its way to nothingness. In any event the main thing is that if you do bad stuff you accumulate negative karma that you're going to end up being punished for. Tao Jones posted:Whatever physical processes are responsible for consciousness cease to function. So what happens when the last human dies? When humans as we think of them no longer existed and all evidence we were even here has been erased, then what? Is there no meaning? Did we just randomly come into being by dumb chance?
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Aug 26, 2014 18:43
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ToxicSlurpee posted:The belief isn't that you must live a good life as a bug or an animal or something but rather it's punishment that lasts for a while. You don't really "work" but rather endure it until you become human again. The other belief is that if you're exceptionally bad you don't reincarnate on Earth at all but rather in various hells. If you're really good you reincarnate elsewhere as a divine spirit on its way to nothingness. In any event the main thing is that if you do bad stuff you accumulate negative karma that you're going to end up being punished for. In the same way, karma is not personal, it's not something that is alive to judge you and sends you to hell for being a bad person. Edit: Anyway, I'm not really an expert. If people want to try to wrap their head around the Buddhist concept of karma, why not look at the ancient Pali texts for themselves? (In English) Rhymenoceros fucked around with this message at 19:14 on Aug 26, 2014 |
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Aug 26, 2014 18:55
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ToxicSlurpee posted:The belief isn't that you must live a good life as a bug or an animal or something but rather it's punishment that lasts for a while. You don't really "work" but rather endure it until you become human again. The other belief is that if you're exceptionally bad you don't reincarnate on Earth at all but rather in various hells. If you're really good you reincarnate elsewhere as a divine spirit on its way to nothingness. In any event the main thing is that if you do bad stuff you accumulate negative karma that you're going to end up being punished for. quote:
That's a rather emotive appeal. The universe doesn't owe us meaning or comfort in life. However, "random chance" is a bad way of describing the non-supernatural explanation of the evolution of the universe or life on Earth; it's merely unguided.
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Aug 26, 2014 19:40
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CoolCab posted:In fact, that really gets to my main objection with it: doesn't that sort of imply that the victim is ultimately responsible for every negative thing that happens to them? Ultimately they're just putting the ledger back into the black. That line of thinking pops up a lot with Indian co-workers I've had. In Mahayana Buddhism, the whole point is to eliminate suffering so fault essentially doesn't matter. Shantideva, for example, went to various hells and liberated spirits/people there. It didn't matter that they belonged there, what mattered is that they were suffering and he was going to do his best to alleviate suffering.
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Aug 26, 2014 19:55
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ToxicSlurpee posted:So what happens when the last human dies? When humans as we think of them no longer existed and all evidence we were even here has been erased, then what? Is there no meaning? Did we just randomly come into being by dumb chance? Meaning is something that human beings generate, it is not inherent. As far as we know there is no cosmic plan into which everything fits and from which things derive value. We assign value based on our perceptions, misperceptions, and biases. That said, just because something doesn't exist anymore doesn't mean the existence itself was meaningless. A supernova or cluster of supernovas seeded our solar system with heavy elements. The effects of that still flow forward through time regardless of whether there is a record of it or whether anything is alive to remember it. Of course, the human race doesn't have much of a hope of affecting things on such a grand scale, but that doesn't change the underlying fact that we still do affect our little slice of the cosmos, and those effects won't be undone even when all our works are dust and utterly forgotten. I'm not actually a proponent of the view you're questioning. It comes across as naive and reductionist to me. That said if it is true, I don't necessarily see it as a stepping stone to pure nihilism. What is, is. What was, was. Causality dictates that this cannot be changed. If you want to find sacredness in a spiritually sterile universe, look to the primacy of the now, and how through our acts and very being we create the future. My personal opinion is that things are not as separate as they appear to be. The differences between my ancestors, myself, and the unthinking parts of the cosmos that we live on and within are mostly illusionary, an artifact of our ego and ignorance. A cell or group of cells in your body would not be able to be made to understand that they are part of a vast ecosystem that will long outlive any individual cell within. Still, they continue to act according to their natures, and the distinction of knowing vs not knowing vanishes if they become cancerous. Human beings are similarly on autopilot a lot more than we'd like to admit. In this context, a lot of our most obvious givens just break down completely. It might seem borderline idiotic to assert that the differences between myself and a dead ancestor are mostly imaginary, when they are obviously no longer present and alive. However the obviousness might just be due to our biological and cognitive biases. We are small-minded. We're a couple centuries out of thinking our world was literally the center of and purpose for creation, and yet some of us like to imagine that we have a far-seeing enough perspective by which we can rightfully judge reality. It's pretty LOL. Of course, the quest to better understand ourselves and our universe isn't a bad thing. Only by seeking further can we further dissipate our delusions. But you gotta be wary of your smart just like you have to be wary of your meat. Trusting in either too much leads to getting utterly blindsided by hubris, and that has immediate, rationally explicable consequences.
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Aug 26, 2014 19:57
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So people can somewhat comprehend the idea of a forever infinitely increasing void that is without limit in terms of the universe expanding, but reincarnation breaks down because of population growth and that makes us worried about running out of (theoretical) souls? How does that work? I'm not saying I believe in it one way or another, but like, what makes anybody think that if souls or whatever 'exist' in some sense that there is a finite discrete quantity of them and it is even possible to run out of something that is by its essential quality not limited to physical reality in the first place?
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Aug 26, 2014 20:14
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Jonithen posted:So people can somewhat comprehend the idea of a forever infinitely increasing void that is without limit in terms of the universe expanding, but reincarnation breaks down because of population growth and that makes us worried about running out of (theoretical) souls? How does that work? Well they're either finite, and as such there's a decent chance any example of life is a reincarnation of a previous example of life, or they're infinite, and life has only existed for a finite amount of time, so no one would ever be reincarnated. So there has to be more souls then there is the theoretical maximum amount of life the universe can support at any given time or souls can be generated by some mechanism. I would guess the later one is the one Buddhism trends towards based on the fact souls can apparently leave the system, but that's a complete stab in the dark.
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Aug 26, 2014 20:20
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OP, did your girlfriend call you an stupid for coming up with such a dumb idea all by yourself?
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Aug 26, 2014 23:27
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My own thoughts on death: If we consider death to be the extinction of a self, then i'm basically dying with each passing moment. Because at each moment, I'm changing. There's nothing about me, physical or mental or social or whatever, that isn't extremely fluid and subject to change. I'm made up of an amalgamation of ever-changing parts and processes, with nothing remaining static over the course of my life. So where am I in all of this? What do I identify as myself? I am not the same as I was a day ago, or a year ago, or a decade ago. My physical body has changed, my memories have changed, my personality has changed, my opinions have changed, my hobbies have changed, etc. So what is the self?
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Aug 26, 2014 23:34
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bitterandtwisted posted:That's a rather emotive appeal. The universe doesn't owe us meaning or comfort in life. However, "random chance" is a bad way of describing the non-supernatural explanation of the evolution of the universe or life on Earth; it's merely unguided. I didn't mean for that to be an extremely emotional thing, sorry. I just want to know what people think about it when they think about the idea of "I die, I quit existing, that's that." I've been thinking about things like infinite time frames and concepts of souls, afterlife, and what have you and trying to make logical sense of it. I'm actually a Buddhist of some sort so I think about lots of things like all the time. I also read about physics and what have you and am currently studying math, among other subjects. I try to fit stuff together logically and, like was said, humans actually give life its own meaning for their own lives, really. But what I've been thinking on is that if there is no afterlife, and we have no souls, and just end when we die, there will come a day when humans don't exist anymore. There will be no way for us to maintain anything and, eventually, the evidence that we were here will decay to dust. A lot of human meaning seems to come down to "I did X and Y thing in this life." But, you and the things you did will eventually be erased and forgotten, as will any other humans that saw them and remembered them. Conversely, if we do have souls, what are they, and how do they work? If souls exist, and they are immortal, than we're basically immortal creatures that have this big, neat playground to dick around in, but would by necessity take on lives within the physical universe where we can temporarily forget. Evolution, all told, is actually based on a certain amount of randomness. Mutations are ultimately genetic damage or response to changes. Life is so good at persisting because it adapts but the changes in the genetic code are ultimately caused by outside, unpredictable influences. Nothing is truly random, sure, but it also isn't predictable. Life doesn't just get "better" over time inherently. If it did jellyfish, crocodiles, and sharks would not exist. Those are creatures that are really, really damned old but also really, really successful. As genetic codes change things that are good at living in the current conditions survive. Things that are not good die off. As the Earth has changed so has all the poo poo living on it. Even so, if time is infinite, and the universe is just here, then all possible things are guaranteed to happen and time will just repeat itself forever. If that is true, and immortal souls can exist, then they do. If it is false then the universe just kind of sits here and loops around through a bunch of patterns repeatedly. Eventually the bundle of electrons, neutrons, and protons that makes me up are going to sit down in the same arrangement and type this post again. Maybe next time it will have Dickbutt. Jonithen posted:So people can somewhat comprehend the idea of a forever infinitely increasing void that is without limit in terms of the universe expanding, but reincarnation breaks down because of population growth and that makes us worried about running out of (theoretical) souls? How does that work? I think this, all told, gets into the area of "well we just don't know." One thing the scientific community will tell you is that we don't even know how much we don't know. We're starting to get deeper and deeper into things, of course, but we're running into issues with things like we don't even know why physical matter exists, it doesn't work the way we expected it to, and the laws of physics just flat out stop when you get to extremes. Gravity is a good example. Mass causes gravity and massive objects pull towards each other. We have no idea why. There are theories and we know the math behind it, in the sense that we know the gravitational constant and that X and Y object will have Z force pulling them together, but what causes it? More importantly, why does gravity also gently caress up space and time? Why the hell is dark matter and why is there so much of it? Science is starting to find particles that just kind of ignore physics as we know it. Neutrinos, for example, just kind of float through matter, giving no fucks, and do whatever they feel like. We're pretty sure that the brain stops working and just rots away but it's quite possible that there is something non-physical that gets pulled into it somehow that helps make it work. The brain, after all, works largely on energy and electricity. It's entirely possible that there is some form of energy we don't know about yet scientifically that "is" a soul that inhabits the body or persists afterwards. How much influence that has on how we act, though, who knows? Of course it's also possible that consciousness is ultimately an illusion and our brain just shuts off and we vanish when we die. Currently the only people that really know for certain are, well, rather dead.
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Aug 27, 2014 00:43
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Blue Star posted:My own thoughts on death: The self is what you think is staying the same. And that thinks it has changed, and expects future change. I'm really not trying to be sanctimonious, it's a slippery thing.
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Aug 27, 2014 01:19
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