Evidence that Consciousness Survives Bodily Death?

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Count Lucanor
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Re: Evidence that Consciousness Survives Bodily Death?

Post by Count Lucanor »

Greta wrote: January 10th, 2019, 1:48 am
You are being defensive. Only you said that the unknown need have anything to do with God or gods. I sure didn't. God is your concern, not mine.

The unknown is exactly that - unknown. If we knew what was unknown then it wouldn't be unknown, would it? It would be the vaguely or somewhat known. I am talking about possibilities of phenomena and dynamics that we all have absolutely no idea about whatsoever.

If you wish to place a straw deity into "the unknown" to use as a punching bag, I hope it makes you feel better so the topic can move on from disproving God, which is still looking at life through an Abrahamic prism.

That is what we need to get away from so we can think about reality clearly, as if religion never existed.
Actually, I'm no more defensive than you are, or as anyone that states his/her point of view in this forums.

I didn't bring up a debate about gods, nor about dragons in someone's garage. Epistemological agnosticism is, obviously, an epistemological issue. The God of the Gaps reference is about the sophistry trick used in the discussions aimed at legitimizing supernatural beliefs. It's a common approach of traditional religious folks, and of course it serves to their advocacy of traditional theistic doctrines, but it can also be brought up by not so obvious supernatural idealists, as it is the case of NDE. And dragons. Let's be clear about this: you could be an atheist in relation to most religious claims and still hold supernatural beliefs. That includes godless animism and its modern variants (panpsychism).
The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience, the stupid by necessity and the brute by instinct.
― Marcus Tullius Cicero
BigBango
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Re: Evidence that Consciousness Survives Bodily Death?

Post by BigBango »

I've been to the mountain top and have seen things that make sense. I have no idea if they are actually true but they make sense to me.

Try looking at the various physical truths that we are fairly confident about, visible matter, dark matter, dark energy, galaxies, their black hole singularities and the Big Bang. The combination of the well known entities along with the not so well known ones form something that had a history before the Big Bang. It's a little like coming across a broken artifact, like a smashed vase, where it's history from before the big Bang was not a broken entity but a whole entity, whose pieces we now find ourselves immersed in.

Is it so big of a stretch to imagine that if we put the pieces together into galaxies that existed before the big Bang and imagine the Big Bang was preceded by their collapse we would get a younger version of those galaxies after the plasma cools. We might ask how are the galaxies we now have reverse map into their pre Big Bang galactic ancestors? It is really quite simple.

The pre Big Bang galaxies crunched each other into plasma. Their black hole singularities were distributed through space and acted as good little cooling plasma collectors that generated a strong force that collected the cooling plasma into our atoms of hydrogen. These new molecules collected into galaxies. Note the size change. A pre Big Bang galactic center becomes a quark. Everything else from those pre Big Bang Galaxies - their galactic centers becomes dark matter. Check the proportion of our dark matter to visible matter. It is the same proportion we would find if we compared the mass of our galactic centers to the amount of mass that exists due to the gravitational effect that dark matter has.

Why would we not also assume some of those pre Big Bang galaxies had intelligent life? If that life escaped the Big Crunch then it returns to it's cooled world to discover it's whole ecosystem is not much bigger than a Planck Volume. That life is what builds, Big to itself, creatures that harvest the energy from their collapsed world for itself. That is also the subject, tiny, that builds all the species, even the ones with large brains, to continue their adventure armed with big legs and jaws and the ability to build rockets that go to Mars. The question we need to ask is what percentage of a creature in our world is made up of the mentality that is brought to it by pre Big Bang consciousness and what percentage is simply robotic construct.
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The Beast
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Re: Evidence that Consciousness Survives Bodily Death?

Post by The Beast »

Aha. So far in the casting of the OP I have encounter the most erudite “Observer” but, if there is survival of consciousness there must be the other named “The Messenger”. The Gods of the Olympus are outraged. Of course, they live on top of the mountain and it is difficult for the mortals to understand the heavenly designs. We are painting with crayons the underlying beauty of the splendor. We must learn many rules to keep writing books of Ethics and then hire an assistant with sex benefits. Therefore, when is it that we encounter “The Believer”. And in all we must ask ourselves: What is the blessing of every morning? A red crayon please!
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Re: Evidence that Consciousness Survives Bodily Death?

Post by BigBango »

Good post Beast. Yes, my thesis is just a red crayon. Can I claim anymore than just a conceptual grasp toward a new paradigm. NO. We must accept the truth of our existence even if it is primarily robotic. Our death consists of all its robotic aspirations but it does noes not include our pre Big Bang aspirations.
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Re: Evidence that Consciousness Survives Bodily Death?

Post by BigBango »

Our death does not mean anything more than the death of our robotic manifestations in this world. What is left is our existence as realized in our pre Big Bang world.
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Felix
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Re: Evidence that Consciousness Survives Bodily Death?

Post by Felix »

"Yes, my thesis is just a red crayon"
Looks like burgundy to me....
"We do not see things as they are; we see things as we are." - Anaïs Nin
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Re: Evidence that Consciousness Survives Bodily Death?

Post by Felix »

... actually, you started out on burgundy but soon hit the harder stuff.
"We do not see things as they are; we see things as we are." - Anaïs Nin
BigBango
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Re: Evidence that Consciousness Survives Bodily Death?

Post by BigBango »

Felix, I do not imbibe in the >harder stuff . I did switch from an Australian Syrah to a local Picot Noir. Oregon rocks!
If you are suggesting a blood test for these deliberations then I think these discussions have come to an end!!!
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Sy Borg
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Re: Evidence that Consciousness Survives Bodily Death?

Post by Sy Borg »

Belindi wrote: January 10th, 2019, 6:00 am
Greta wrote: January 9th, 2019, 10:22 pm
What if there is something? Who knows? For all we know there could be informational preservation at the Planck scale. Maybe nothing is really lost? Maybe there are finer granularities beyond space and time (given that Planck scale is only the theorised minimal granularity where time and space can be said to be meaningful concepts)?

I don't quite support mysterianism, though, because that's an assumption too. I'm not saying that we can never understand the nature of consciousness, but that is still a possibility.


I know from introspection that when I sleep without dreaming and also when I dream my 'I' is absent. Only when I'm awake my 'I' makes decisions and choices.I am an 'I'only when awake. I can't be awake when my body is dead.

I know from introspection that I'm not a finer granularity or information, as I'm always conscious of I as a body/mind.
Subjective effects suggest ontology, but our nervous systems are far from the final word. For all we know, much more of what we think is reality is a perspective effect than we realise. After all, our true reality is hurtling through space at over two million kms per hour, but we only know it by inference. Nor do we sense relativity''s purported "block time".
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Re: Evidence that Consciousness Survives Bodily Death?

Post by Sy Borg »

Count Lucanor wrote: January 10th, 2019, 11:52 am
Greta wrote: January 10th, 2019, 1:48 am
You are being defensive. Only you said that the unknown need have anything to do with God or gods. I sure didn't. God is your concern, not mine.

The unknown is exactly that - unknown. If we knew what was unknown then it wouldn't be unknown, would it? It would be the vaguely or somewhat known. I am talking about possibilities of phenomena and dynamics that we all have absolutely no idea about whatsoever.

If you wish to place a straw deity into "the unknown" to use as a punching bag, I hope it makes you feel better so the topic can move on from disproving God, which is still looking at life through an Abrahamic prism.

That is what we need to get away from so we can think about reality clearly, as if religion never existed.
Actually, I'm no more defensive than you are, or as anyone that states his/her point of view in this forums.

I didn't bring up a debate about gods, nor about dragons in someone's garage. Epistemological agnosticism is, obviously, an epistemological issue. The God of the Gaps reference is about the sophistry trick used in the discussions aimed at legitimizing supernatural beliefs. It's a common approach of traditional religious folks, and of course it serves to their advocacy of traditional theistic doctrines, but it can also be brought up by not so obvious supernatural idealists, as it is the case of NDE. And dragons. Let's be clear about this: you could be an atheist in relation to most religious claims and still hold supernatural beliefs. That includes godless animism and its modern variants (panpsychism).
You are exceptionally defensive. The very moment an idea that is not orthodox crops up, you immediately move into "Critic of Religion" mode, which is such very old news. If it makes you feel better, you can tell me that Santa isn't real and I'll pretend to be surprised and praise you for putting me straight. An alternative is to consider the actual nature of reality and the limits of our perspective effects, you know, like philosophy. I do not care what others think, or the tricks they use to play rhetorical games. That's politics, not philosophy.

I am not convinced that:
1) consciousness is quite what we think it is nor
2) that we have considered that consciousness might come in variant forms, as opposed to just our type of consciousness, nor
3) that we perceive space and time as is, rather just an efficacious summary.

Thus, I see a case for keeping an open mind about this one. Logically, Belinda's take on it is close to how I've always seen it. It seems logical, like the many logical things assumed by scientists in the past later found to be completely wrong. When I was a child it was common knowledge that other species were not at all conscious and thus did not feel pain as we do; it was said to be "just nerves twitching".

That was mid last century - not so long ago - and the mistake was monstrously huge - we could not have been more profoundly wrong! When it comes to consciousness, I am far from convinced that we have a handle on it as a phenomenon even today. The field is in its infancy.
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Felix
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Re: Evidence that Consciousness Survives Bodily Death?

Post by Felix »

Felix, I do not imbibe in the >harder stuff.
Just quoting a song lyric, BB, my juvenile attempt to inject some levity into a navel gazing extravaganza.

The line is from Just like Tom Thumb's Blues by Bob Dylan

I started out on burgundy, but soon hit the harder stuff
Everybody said they'd stand behind me, when the game got rough
But the joke was on me, there was nobody even there to call my bluff
I'm going back to New York City, I do believe I've had enough.


But my favorite line from that song is, "she takes your voice, and leaves you howling at the moon."
"We do not see things as they are; we see things as we are." - Anaïs Nin
BigBango
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Re: Evidence that Consciousness Survives Bodily Death?

Post by BigBango »

Felix, I love you!
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Re: Evidence that Consciousness Survives Bodily Death?

Post by BigBango »

The Big Bang was an explosion. We need to answer the question what preceded this explosion. To assume that the world before the BB was similar to our own world of galaxies is to choose the least stretch of imagination.

If we assume that the intelligence of the world, before the Big Bang, predicted the collapse of its own world then we should assume that they took whatever steps were necessary to avoid total destruction. These actions spell the difference between matter that must yield to the forces that it is subject to and the systems that work to distance themselves from any such destruction.
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Re: Evidence that Consciousness Survives Bodily Death?

Post by Count Lucanor »

Greta wrote: You are exceptionally defensive.
That's just an opinion you're entitled to, but there's hardly any substance for you to develop a case, so it stays like that.
Greta wrote: The very moment an idea that is not orthodox crops up, you immediately move into "Critic of Religion" mode, which is such very old news. If it makes you feel better, you can tell me that Santa isn't real and I'll pretend to be surprised and praise you for putting me straight. An alternative is to consider the actual nature of reality and the limits of our perspective effects, you know, like philosophy.
Critique of religion is actually just a part of a broader philosophical category: critique of idealism. While religions arise, disappear or change, their foundational idealist base keeps more or less the same and fuels the diverse supernatural approaches to reality. Yes, the myths of traditional, orthodox religions, get a big share of the pounding in the critique of idealism, and the history of the argumentative practices of the religious advocates certainly enlighten us about the bank of argumentative resources that other less institutionalized philosophical movements have at their hand (such as the epistemological agnosticism to which you resort every time one takes a shot at the supposedly unorthodox ideas that you endorse), but we are not to be fooled by the apparent estrangement and distancing of these movements from the grand religious narratives. Has anyone heard of New Age? What's the difference between those other narratives and NDE narratives? There's none that is relevant, as we can directly verify in the links that I have submitted before:

https://www.nderf.org/Archives/exceptional.html
https://www.adcrf.org/archives_2015_2016.html

The mild difference, of course, is the ecumenical character of NDE narratives: it doesn't matter what orthodox religion you happen to embrace, and there's even no need to embrace a particular religion at all. We are postmodernists, why conform with just one narrative, let's have them all. Don't like pastors and priests? Astrologists and psychics don't suffice? Let's get some Michio Kaku. Has anyone looked at Kaku's official website?, it doesn't look much different than your regular astrologist's. Meanwhile, another international association related to NDE, which publishes a supposedly "scientific" NDE journal, also endorses a publication like this:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1567184855/re ... ive=380549

Of course, it would be of the most valuable benefit to our knowledge to set the record straight about NDE, using rational philosophical arguments and empirical naturalistic methods of research, but as it has been made patent in this thread, there's little hope some will show up soon.
Greta wrote: I am not convinced that:
1) consciousness is quite what we think it is
I'm not convinced either that we know everything about consciousness, in fact we may know very little, and I don't think anyone claims differently. But we know that consciousness is embodied in living organisms, and we know a lot about what living organisms are and what are they made of. So that narrows the scope of our speculations about consciousness to the standard problems of the philosophy of mind and cognitive sciences.
Greta wrote: 2) that we have considered that consciousness might come in variant forms, as opposed to just our type of consciousness,
Other than speculations of the most vague kind, there is very little concrete evidence to impel us to consider consciousness outside the predominant positions in philosophy and science. It might happen that you want to reframe the whole concept to mean something else than the agential, mental aspects of living subjects, and so that even the concept of life itself is redefined, but that's another problem related to challenging pretty stable scientific conventions, which could be welcomed if it did something more than pure resemantization by means of metaphors.
Greta wrote: 3) that we perceive space and time as is, rather just an efficacious summary.
But you acknowledge we perceive it as something and that this certainty works for many practical matters in quite an effective way (your efficacious summary). While more research is done, there's no reason to abandon completely this certainty, actually you need it as the base for launching inquiries.
Greta wrote:Thus, I see a case for keeping an open mind about this one.
"Open mind" seems like a nice term, shielded from any criticism, but it has become patent that when you say "open mind" you're actually advocating epistemological agnosticism. It's the fallacy of "anything goes".
Greta wrote: It seems logical, like the many logical things assumed by scientists in the past later found to be completely wrong. When I was a child it was common knowledge that other species were not at all conscious and thus did not feel pain as we do; it was said to be "just nerves twitching".
Yet, the fact that scientists have been wrong in the past, and that they can be wrong in the present, is absolutely no indication that they are actually wrong about a particular affirmation in the present, nor that a new, current unsubstantiated claim has any merits for replacing a mainstream notion. Hypothesis shouldn't be dismissed summarily, but you have to actually get in the business of giving merits to the new claim. Arguments in the vicinity of "it sounds logical" will not suffice. I think I dealt extensively with this issue in my previous posts about the jigsaw puzzle analogy.
Greta wrote: That was mid last century - not so long ago - and the mistake was monstrously huge
Actually, that was long ago, much more than my lifetime.
The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience, the stupid by necessity and the brute by instinct.
― Marcus Tullius Cicero
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Re: Evidence that Consciousness Survives Bodily Death?

Post by Sy Borg »

Count Lucanor wrote: January 13th, 2019, 12:21 am
Greta wrote: I am not convinced that:
1) consciousness is quite what we think it is
I'm not convinced either that we know everything about consciousness, in fact we may know very little, and I don't think anyone claims differently. But we know that consciousness is embodied in living organisms, and we know a lot about what living organisms are and what are they made of. So that narrows the scope of our speculations about consciousness to the standard problems of the philosophy of mind and cognitive sciences.
Greta wrote: 2) that we have considered that consciousness might come in variant forms, as opposed to just our type of consciousness,
Other than speculations of the most vague kind, there is very little concrete evidence to impel us to consider consciousness outside the predominant positions in philosophy and science. It might happen that you want to reframe the whole concept to mean something else than the agential, mental aspects of living subjects, and so that even the concept of life itself is redefined, but that's another problem related to challenging pretty stable scientific conventions, which could be welcomed if it did something more than pure resemantization by means of metaphors.
Greta wrote: 3) that we perceive space and time as is, rather just an efficacious summary.
But you acknowledge we perceive it as something and that this certainty works for many practical matters in quite an effective way (your efficacious summary). While more research is done, there's no reason to abandon completely this certainty, actually you need it as the base for launching inquiries.
We know that the kind of consciousness found in living organisms is only found in living organisms. That's all. They may be other kinds of consciousness that we don't know about. Vagueness is necessary unless we are going to assume that which we don't actually know.

I am not saying to abandon what we have learned and never did, but we need to be humble about it because the reality has so often turned out to be at odds with our assumptions. I don't see the problem with idealism, as long as it's presented as possibilities and not established fact and noting that not all possibilities are equal.
Count Lucanor wrote: January 13th, 2019, 12:21 am
Greta wrote:Thus, I see a case for keeping an open mind about this one.
"Open mind" seems like a nice term, shielded from any criticism, but it has become patent that when you say "open mind" you're actually advocating epistemological agnosticism. It's the fallacy of "anything goes".
No, that's for flat Earthers. I'm not speaking about a fallacy but a truism - that a lot more is going on in reality than we realise, or can even imagine.
Count Lucanor wrote: January 13th, 2019, 12:21 am
Greta wrote:It seems logical, like the many logical things assumed by scientists in the past later found to be completely wrong. When I was a child it was common knowledge that other species were not at all conscious and thus did not feel pain as we do; it was said to be "just nerves twitching".
Yet, the fact that scientists have been wrong in the past, and that they can be wrong in the present, is absolutely no indication that they are actually wrong about a particular affirmation in the present, nor that a new, current unsubstantiated claim has any merits for replacing a mainstream notion. Hypothesis shouldn't be dismissed summarily, but you have to actually get in the business of giving merits to the new claim. Arguments in the vicinity of "it sounds logical" will not suffice. I think I dealt extensively with this issue in my previous posts about the jigsaw puzzle analogy.
Greta wrote: That was mid last century - not so long ago - and the mistake was monstrously huge
Actually, that was long ago, much more than my lifetime.
I am not yet ancient yet I remember being taught that when I was young and finding it strange because animals sure seemed conscious to me, if oddly food obsessed. I think I mentioned earlier on the forum seeing a man at the markets wrapping a live chicken in a newspaper for a customer when I was a child. That makes clear the assumptions made at the time about the consciousness of what are now known to be intelligent, friendly and playful animals. Yet the old beliefs remains, as seen in the harsh processing methods of factory farming.
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