Hard News: A few (more) words on The Hobbit
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Yes, but that means that we'll only find out if there's an afterlife if in fact there is an afterlife. And I don't like our chances.
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(People will be dismayed to know that I'm aware that I owe an answer to Kyle from when I was away - but I've been away and now I'm buried in deadlines, so it will have to wait.)
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Jacqui Dunn, in reply to
Yes, but that means that we’ll only find out if there’s an afterlife if in fact there is an afterlife. And I don’t like our chances.
But you could get a surprise!
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I don't recall being aware in another dimension before I was born, so the idea that I will somehow be conscious after I'm dead seems just ridiculously odd and arbitrary and wishful. "Surprise" wouldn't begin to describe how I would feel.
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Jacqui Dunn, in reply to
Ah, you see - you don't recall.
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If you're suggesting I'm going to regain consciousness in another dimension without memory, then it's pretty simple: it won't be me!
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Jacqui Dunn, in reply to
it won’t be me!
Any idea who it would be? It won't be Giovanni Tiso, any more than I was Jacqui Dunn before I was born, and doubt I will after death. Just the body that carried me around.
I have had, in the past, strange - what I can only describe as "big/tiny" physical feelings - which happened when I was just about to fall asleep. If one was going to have remnants of times other than in one's body and consciousness, the state of relaxation might allow those memories.
But all of this is total guesswork, I admit. Intriguing all the same.
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My bet is based on the same reasoning as Gio's, that any guesses made by the living about what happens to our consciousness after death would be a stab in the dark. Total disappearance is also an arbitrary choice, I just happen to like the idea because it tallies with the idea that our consciousness is related to brain activity, something that seems to be pretty clear, certainly my experiences of consciousness and unconsciousness (or rather, becoming-unconscious and waking-up), have had a clear connection to things happening in my brain. Typically, the less going on in there, the less conscious. And we know the brain stops working at death, indeed the definition of death in medical terms is usually specific to brain-death. There have been revivals, even from brain-death, but it's difficult to trust any reports from survivors - quite probably any experiences reported would be from either the time going in or coming out of the dead state.
But all these arguments presuppose monism. Various dualisms could be true. There's just no physical evidence, by definition, of them. They're immune to disproof, and hence unscientific. But I think it's a mistake to conflate "scientific" with "true". They're not the same thing. Even if science had discovered everything it ever could, was somehow complete, it would only describe a subset of truth - the objective truths. Subjective truth is not necessarily a meaningless concept. I'm not even sure that objective+subjective covers all truth.
Arse, I promised myself years ago I wouldn't think about this any more. Let alone as a threadjack.
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Jacqui Dunn, in reply to
Arse, I promised myself years ago I wouldn’t think about this any more. Let alone as a threadjack.
Ooh, is it a threadjack? Isn't this the thread that has woven itself in and around Life, the Universe and Everything?
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Can you jack a thread that has simply stopped talking about the original subject? You can't jack an empty car, that's just called theft. So this is probably threadstealing, rather than threadjacking.
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I have had, in the past, strange - what I can only describe as "big/tiny" physical feelings - which happened when I was just about to fall asleep.
Would your list of feelings include any of these? :)
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But, Andin, that’s the point. You won’t know until you’re there!
Yup, I think Occam’s razor is taken too far. Just because you don’t, and can’t possibly, know about something, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
Well I have satisfied myself there is no “there” after life. But I expect no one to believe anything I say on the subject because this fiction of something incorporeal in the walking meat has become so pervasive there is all manner of fantasising around it.
All I can say is if there is an afterlife/a god, any clues or hints as to what it maybe, will not to be found in any of the speculations of mankind so far. -
Can you jack a thread that has simply stopped talking about the original subject? You can't jack an empty car, that's just called theft. So this is probably threadstealing, rather than threadjacking.
Not stolen, just repurposed...
I have had, in the past, strange - what I can only describe as "big/tiny" physical feelings - which happened when I was just about to fall asleep.
I've had somewhat similar feelings before, mostly when in the midst of a flu - nothing seems actually bigger, but rather heavier and dense, like everything in the room (including my own body) has been hewn out of granite.
I wouldn't really ascribe it to anything more than a brain running at higher than optimal temperatures, but it seems like a fun imaginative exercise to wonder what kind of previous life it might point to - or perhaps a parallel life, elsewhere in the multiverse...
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So this is probably threadstealing, rather than threadjacking.
if we are talking about getting into "Heaven"
threadneedling might be more apt...
...watch out for camels!! -
Islander, in reply to
Sweet! Made me laugh for the 1st time in 2 days (the rain, you understand, the rain-)
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Jacqui Dunn, in reply to
Would your list of feelings include any of these?
No. It's a feeling of being everything, as in enormous, and yet really tiny - as in one-celled. I described it once to a group of people, and one person approached me later and said she had had the same experience.
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Jacqui Dunn, in reply to
Well I have satisfied myself there is no “there” after life.
Can you tell me how you did this? Without having died yourself?
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Jacqui Dunn, in reply to
You are a funny man!
I only hope nobody gets upset at this sort of discussion - like Ben not wanting to think about these things. It's not really worth raising the blood pressure. Just have to keep breathing and enjoy being alive.
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Sacha, in reply to
It's a feeling of being everything, as in enormous, and yet really tiny - as in one-celled.
"At one"?
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Jacqui Dunn, in reply to
“At one”?
Oooh....nice!
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I only hope nobody gets upset at this sort of discussion - like Ben not wanting to think about these things
I guess I should point out I majored in Philosophy, so I've spent, IMHO, far too much time thinking about these things. No answers, of course.
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I minored in Phliosophy. Even fewer answers, despite the side helping of Existentialism from a guest lecturer
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Good old Bob Solomon, did he still explain existentialism with constant reference to his sex life?
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Sacha, in reply to
Yes, there was shagging (more about that when we next meet face to face)
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Steve Parks, in reply to
Catching up on about 10 -15 pages:
I must say Kyle you have certainly worked yourself up into a tizzy about all this.
I didn’t see it that way. His comments certainly worked others into a tizzy, though...
Bullshit Kyle. You simply lack the wit or the courage to own the moral implications of your highly loaded weaseling. I’m really rather past caring which it might be. No amount of intellectual vanity can grant anyone the right to have their opinions taken as unvarnished gospel.
I'm not sure what the last sentence is supposed to mean, in context of the argument with Kyle. I must say (well, I will say, after having read though so much to catch up) that I find the reaction by some to Kyle's original point oversensitive. Pointing out that a certain generalised group were the main beneficiaries of some changes isn't the same as blaming them. I don’t see much difference in what Kyle said and what Sacha said here:
In general it is true that different generations benefited from and were harmed by those changes – but they only happened because poltiicians were able to make them (which in turn led to pressure for MMP, another chapter to be revisited this year).
I bet Kyle agrees.
So maybe there are elements of a left-right issue, rather than selfish “boomers” versus the rest.
I bet Kyle agrees, also.
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