Who is I? The possessor of my body, mind, and spirit?
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Re: Who is I? The possessor of my body, mind, and spirit?
There is a difference between mind and consciousness, and that is probably more relevant to the point you are trying to establish.
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Re: Who is I? The possessor of my body, mind, and spirit?
They did discover some humans living in the wild who had been raised by wolves. These people never could learn a human language, and they forever transported themselves on all fours. Source: My 12-year-old brother when I was four. Take these two assertions about wolf-man with a grain of salt.
With regard to death: in some primitive societies it is commonly accepted that people don't die, only go through a transformation. They set a place for the dearly departed at the table, and place their bodies or just their heads and involve them in table talk. If the head starts to smell, or the body, then they use preservatives on them. The "shrunken-head" cult has started out this way.
Death is incredibly hard to conceptualize if you are living. There are too many unknowns, with no clues whatsoever. It's like a sudoku board with no numbers anywhere inscribed inside the puzzle.
-- Updated 2017 August 3rd, 3:02 am to add the following --
So sorry about the lack of Dasein. I am not familiar with the concept.Burning ghost wrote:I think a lot of this is starting to sound dangerously mystical.
-1- No comment about Dasein?
"death" is just a concept for the living. That obviousness of that statement is easy to miss.
Fear of death: they say it's a survival trait that developed and got incredibly strong with evolutionary change. Some say we need fear, to cope with dangerous situations. The loss of fear-sensations would not make us shy away from potentially harmful or even fatal situations.
We only need to fear two things in the ultimate: the fear itself, and the absence of fear.
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Re: Who is I? The possessor of my body, mind, and spirit?
False. I am alive and I understand the concept of death well enough. I would argue that the dead don't have much to say on the matter!Death is incredibly hard to conceptualize if you are living.
Death is for the living not the dead. That much is obvious.
Your line of questioning can be approached by employing differing philosophical stances. You seem to be focusing on the physicalist aspect of being and using a mystical approach to flim-flam among the refuse of lingual gymnastics.
I would recommend looking at language and the constraints of semantics. Also the parse involved can make two identical statements look completely different (context matters a great deal.)
Lack of context only promotes obscurity and veers toward mysticism.
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Re: Who is I? The possessor of my body, mind, and spirit?
- Burning ghost
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Re: Who is I? The possessor of my body, mind, and spirit?
So you understand what death means then. That is all that I am saying. "Death" is a concept of the living, just like "Wealth" is. I understand "wealth" too, don't you? The difference is you can imagine what it is like to be wealthy, but obviously you cannot "imagine" what can literally not be imagined (I cannot imagine "being dead".) The "lie" is pretending to imagine "being" without "being" (this is where Dasein skirts around and why Heidegger suffers with the need of using deeply ambiguous terminology.)
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Re: Who is I? The possessor of my body, mind, and spirit?
My confidence is shaky, because while I am an atheist, I can't prove to myself that the soul dies with the body, for the very dirty reason, that there is no known connection of the soul to the body.
Then again our souls (persceptive egos, the I's of oruselves, whatever you want to call it) is hopelessly tied to our own experiences, and to our own experiences only.
So maybe the very kernel of what I is, will live on, or perhaps it won't live on after my body dies.
This is why I can't say with any degree of confidence that I understand death.
I often used to challenge the street preacher in my town. He once asked me, "do you know what happens to you after you die?" I said, no, I don't know, and I am convinced you don't know, either.
That was the end of that day's informal debate.
- Burning ghost
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Re: Who is I? The possessor of my body, mind, and spirit?
Next you'll be accusing me of not knowing what a unicorn is meaning the thing as me being a unicorn. Nonsense.
If there is no language there is no "I". If you live on you are not dead right? Need I start quoting Monty Python and the parrot sketch? Dead! Ceased to be. No more. That is what death means.
If you don't know what death is then you're either illiterate or an idiot. I am assuming you are neither and have merely fallen prey to a concept taken as having an objective, concrete, physicalist, material meaning much like believe you can hold a weight of laughter in your hand and show it off to people and let them stroke it. It is a plain lingual absurdity to say you don't understand death. That is like me saying I don't understand "yellow" or "table".
Maybe it would help if you tried to clarify what it is you know about "reading" that you seem to lack when you try to know about what is meant by "death"? What quality does "death" have that "reading" does not? Why are these concepts different?
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Re: Who is I? The possessor of my body, mind, and spirit?
The inner battle rages on. Am I, "I", as we now put it, an illiterate boor, or an idiotic imbecile?
I hope I have the wisdom to eventually choose the right one.
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Re: Who is I? The possessor of my body, mind, and spirit?
I am not saying you have no concept of death. I'm just questioning that you have a full concept. And agreeing that a full concept is difficult to attain.
Regarding wealth. I think most would struggle to imagine all of the possible consequences fully accurately. So you could argue for a better or worse concept of wealth. Likewise with death.
Also please note there is no need for supernatural events in order for death to be conceptually difficult.
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Re: Who is I? The possessor of my body, mind, and spirit?
It depends on the subjective experiences of the dying. Does a sense of being necessarily stop with brain death? We suspect it does, but that still an assumption at this stage.Burning ghost wrote:False. I am alive and I understand the concept of death well enough. I would argue that the dead don't have much to say on the matter!Death is incredibly hard to conceptualize if you are living.
Death is for the living not the dead. That much is obvious.
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Re: Who is I? The possessor of my body, mind, and spirit?
All subject matters have depth. What is a "full concept" as a opposed to a plain everyday "concept"?
Before you were alive you were dead. Tell me about it. "Better or worse"? Next you'll be telling me there are right and wrong ways to conceptualise "nothing". It is not more difficult than anything else. Some examples I can randomly come up with now would be "life", "oranges", "organ", or "backwards".
Greta -
When was the last time you spoke to a dead person about death and got a reply? Of course a "sense of being" stops with death, that is what death means. Things come to an end. I don't have an issue dealing with that concept because I live with it all day everyday and always have. The "I" yesterday is "dead"? The "I" that began writing this post is "dead"? Are there different ways we can employ the term "death" that are misleading?
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Re: Who is I? The possessor of my body, mind, and spirit?
1. By "mind" do you mean the noise of your thinking?-1- wrote:I have a body. My body is not me; it is my body, so I own it, therefore it is not me, much like a book of matches I own is not me, and much like a car I own is not me.
Similarly, I have a mind and I have a spirit. They are not me; they are mine.
So who is I?
I can't exist without a mind, body and spirit, yet I am separate from them.
What makes up ME, without the addition of mind, spirit and body?
That is my quest. To find that out.
2. I assume by "body" you mean the physical thing that is felt out to the boundary we presume is the outer surface of skin. Is this so?
3. What do you define as "spirit"?
You see, I cannot see how we can define you, or I, without understanding the terms used already to supposedly define ourselves.
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Re: Who is I? The possessor of my body, mind, and spirit?
Also are we talking about death only or dying too?
I find a lot of people on the forum are pretty blasé about their own death. But if presented with a plastic bag over the head I highly suspect their blasé attitude would very quickly vanish.
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Re: Who is I? The possessor of my body, mind, and spirit?
Damn tootin'.....dead right.Eduk wrote:Well death in my old age surrounded by family and death one second from now are two very different things to me.
Also are we talking about death only or dying too?
I find a lot of people on the forum are pretty blasé about their own death. But if presented with a plastic bag over the head I highly suspect their blasé attitude would very quickly vanish.
- Burning ghost
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Re: Who is I? The possessor of my body, mind, and spirit?
I am still waiting to see what we are talking about. The OP presents the problem of the idea of "I". I merely tried to show the function of langauge as being descriptive not possessive. That from any given moment the past and the future are not felt in the past or the future, that death is only felt in the moment. Beyond this existence what is there we can seriously make any claims about?
People are quite happy to talk about death so they must grasp the meaning. We also know what a cat is yet I do not go around saying I am not a cat so I know nothing about the "essence" of cat. Nor do I have conversation about subjects I cannot recall. If I did I would have to recall them.
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