Topic: What after death??
started by: blanalex
What if there was _absolutely_ nothing once your brain is dead? What will happen to those who believed firmly that there was some kind of after-life?
"I WANT TO SPEAK TO THE MANAGER! Everybody told me that there was an after-life, and there's nothing! I want refund!"
Do humans have the need to believe in an after-life to make them better? Do we created ourself an after-life because our race is pretencious and think that it would be an horrible waste if there wasn't something after death??
Sorry for the meta-physic questions tonight, but that's what is running in my mind right now...
------------------
#define QUESTION (2b)| |!(2b)
This message has been edited by blanalex on March 05, 2001 at 09:17 PM
In my system of beliefs no-one really agrees on what the afterlife is like... it could even be a sort of eternal sleep.
I don't think that the afterlife is somehow a preventative of suicide, IMO at least. I mean, to me it's sort of separated from me killing myself or not. Granted, there are people who won't commit suicide only because they think their god would be pissed off at them, but who knows if that's true?
So, yeah. I guess I believe in the afterlife, although sometimes I would much rather welcome the thought of death being final. I can see the argument either way, really. From one POV, you'd get to see your relatives and everyone again, from another, a complete death would just end everything nicely.
Maybe what happens to you is that which you believe to be true?
------------------
Fucknuggets flamed while you wait.< TeamWolfguard.com >
I almost forgot. Blanalex, you make it sound as though you KNOW the answer. If you believe that you do aren't you assuming just as much as those that believe there is an afterlife?
------------------
damage@detonate.net
"On a long enough timeline the survival rate for anyone drops to zero."
-Narrator 'Fight Club.'
This message has been edited by damage on March 06, 2001 at 08:37 AM
Now, if we just assume that a human is simply an organic structure that lives and then dies, we must assume that all memory, thoughts, and feelings cease. I, personally, have a very hard time with that, and I'd bet that most of the population of Earth share my feelings on this. Therefore, I like to believe that while my body may die and rot and become plant food, my "spirit" will remain in some form. This feeling is not pretention--it is grasping at a hope that all of this staggering about in this bag of bones is not all there is to Life.
Furthermore, I find no fault in this belief, since it gives me (and those around me) an incentive to act in a good an honorable fashion, as well as a goal (of sorts) to work towards. And what if I'm wrong? Well, so what? I am well aware that I may be deluding myself with my beliefs, but it's a healthy delusion--it keeps me sane in an insane world.
------------------
--Jynx
I used to be a kleptomaniac, but then I took something for it.
Heheh.
------------------
damage@detonate.net
"On a long enough timeline the survival rate for anyone drops to zero."
-Narrator 'Fight Club.'
quote:
Originally posted by damage:
Blanalex, you make it sound as though you KNOW the answer.
You have a good point there. I don't know, AFAIK i've never been there yet. But my personnal belief is there's no after-life or something along the lines of a eternal sleep, without the dreams.
also its been proven in pyscological tests that you're consciousness has virtually no control over any of your actions rather its just a resultant of what you most powerful sub-concious thoughts are so it might be considered that we are just here to observe what life is in some forom of conscious experience and we have to learn what lifes all about but the whole things gods way of taking the piss cos no one can really prove anything which in its own way i think is kinda cool cos theres always something for you to think about then
....I don't like to think about this too too much.. it'll get me depressed and I can't sleep
[edit: forgot that Tao was spelled with a T not a D]
This message has been edited by DeadAnztac on March 06, 2001 at 04:33 PM
------------------
"Who needs television... I have ISDN." -- Ben Gross
In other words, your soul is only temporary. All of which can be depressing, until you realize that if you are just a little droplet of the Universe, than the Universe itself is really fucking cool. From the tiniest quark to the largest galaxy, the whole thing is alive and kicking and has much cooler thoughts and sensations than you could ever imagine 
dkb, that sensation of seeing and being so afraid of "the afterlife" has a biological basis. It's an anti-fall mechanism leftover from when we were living in the trees. Very useful if you're a monkey, annoying if you're a human safe in your bed.
hmmm yes thats ok i can be mad at scientists seeing as i am one
------------------
Hey DKB shu'p with all that jibba jabber ya crazy foo!
quote:
Originally posted by CatKnight:
When you die and your brain is completely 'discharged', there is no conscienceness. It's not like being asleep, either. You're just...gone.
You're making an awful lot of assumptions about consciousness. One of those assumptions is that it is a side effect of energy and matter, when it may well be a primary component.
At the quantum level, a lot of particles seems to have minds of their own. They very well might, in a small, particle-like way. There is nothing in physics that forbids an electron/photon/whateveron from perceiving the various forces acting upon it.
I'm not saying that they're conscious in the same way WE are, but I have a feeling particles perceive what's happening to them.
quote:
Originally posted by luth13n:
Granted, there are people who won't commit suicide only because they think their god would be pissed off at them
i guess i was one of these ppl but with all this talk of no god or afterlife i don't see a reason not to.... Thanks guys c ya later hmmmm come to think of it i guesss i won't
------------------
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"All those moments will be lost in time like tears in the rain, time to die..."
quote:
Originally posted by damien_s_lucifer:
At the quantum level, a lot of particles seems to have minds of their own.
no offense, but you don't know what you are talking about.
------------------
Hey DKB shu'p with all that jibba jabber ya crazy foo!
------------------
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"All those moments will be lost in time like tears in the rain, time to die..."
but i can still hold my own in a relativity argument
------------------
Hey DKB shu'p with all that jibba jabber ya crazy foo!
The work is worth it...
------------------
"Make things as simple as possible, but no simpler" - Einstein
------------------
Hey DKB shu'p with all that jibba jabber ya crazy foo!
< you have to sing the last three words like in the lion king movie for full effect>
------------------
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"All those moments will be lost in time like tears in the rain, time to die..."
Oh, wait... if you did that you'd actually be debating, rather than being the unimaginative pretentious fuck you are.
DKB, who knows about the multidimensional thing? I'd like to hear your thoughts about why what I said was "wrong," though. As far as I know there is no consensus as to whether the workings of the Universe are totally deterministic, or if stochaistic chaos (TRUE randomness, not chaos as in "chaos theory") has a role.
There are a lot of firm believers that the apparent randomness in electrons is actually determinate. Wanting it to be true doesn't MAKE it true, though.
What I'm suggesting is that the apparent randomness of the electron & other particles is sentience in its most raw form. The properties and workings of sentience is a topic for another thread.
------------------
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"All those moments will be lost in time like tears in the rain, time to die..."
quote:
Originally posted by damien_s_lucifer:
What I'm suggesting is that the apparent randomness of the electron & other particles is sentience in its most raw form.
no offense, but you're wrong. electrons (and quarks for that matter) move randomly, but their positions, veloticites, and behavior can be predecicted using quantum mechanics. the randomness of electrons is no more a sign of sentience then snake eyes are.
quote:
...rather than being the unimaginative pretentious fuck you are.
sit back down.
I'm going to assume that everyone here thinks of themselves as 'tiny' or perhaps has toyed with the notion that they are just a 'random speck' compared with the sheer vastness of the universe.
You'd be right, of course. As far as organized collections of matter go, humans (indeed, the entire Earth, which is bigger than I think most people can comprehend without the use of drugs...myself included) are pretty fucking small.
But consider how small we conceive atoms to be. . .or electrons. In relation to them our bodies are as big as entire universes. Humans are huge! There is so much going on at a level far smaller than we can imagine, that if you truly can get your brain around this concept, you'll realize (among other things) that the universe is way fucking bigger (does the word infinite mean anything to you?) than you thought it was.
There's your sophomoric thought for the day.
By nature, humans seek to know what happens after they die. Fortunately, I have no idea. If I did, then (at least for me) life would have no point. I am content to ask questions, much as Socrates did in the square at Athens, in order to get people to think. If for any reason I can't do that, someone please pour the hemlock, and quick!
I’ve finally begun to apprehend,
That knowing the meaning,
Will ruin not mend.
------------------------------------------
Anyone who finds philosophy interesting, and who wishes to learn, I recommend that you start by obtaining a copy of "Sophie's World - A Novel About the History of Philosophy" by Jostein Gaarder. The author taught philosophy in high school for eleven years, and wrote the book to get younger and in most cases, more fickle, minds asking questions. I implore you, read and learn!
(I apologize in advance for any confusion this post may bring. It's rather a jumbled mass of disordered thoughts. If anything needs to be clarified, I'm here, and I'll try to explain my feelings on this or any subject as needed.)
------------------
If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. - William Blake
And the use of nano robots to repair and replace nerve connections to my inserted brain, it would work pretty well. Except we don’t have any nano robots.------------------
"I am not a Marxist." -- Karl Marx
catknight, I assume you're familiar with the Heisenberg uncertainty principle? Yes, you can predict a lot of things about electrons. Especially when you have a large group of them. But there is some randomness, and that uncertainty is part and parcel at the quantum level.
Let's say you have an excited electron that has jumped into a new shell. You can predict what will happen when that electron drops an energy level - a photon of a certain wavelength will be emitted, depending on the material.
You can determine the half-life of an electron switching levels. You can determine how much energy is required or released when switching levels.
But you can NOT predict exactly how long a SPECIFIC electron is going to stay in that specific shell. You also can't predict the direction an emitted photon will travel. You can only give a distribution of the probabilities, and kick back and see what happens.
That's what I mean when I say electrons seem to have a mind of their own. That electron will switch shells when it's good and ready.
There is also a lot of somewhat predictable behavior in humans. For example, if you put two tunnels side-by-side, both going to the same place, the distribution of traffic thru those tunnels is going to be about 50-50, with a few people picking an alternate, non-tunnel route. But it would be hard to predict with any accuracy what tunnel, if any, Joe Blow is going to choose to travel thru.
It's all about randomness within bounds, capiche?
quote:
Originally posted by damien_s_lucifer
:
That's what I mean when I say electrons seem to have a mind of their own. That electron will switch shells when it's good and ready.
wrong! electons do not have a mind of their own. they jump down an energy level when whatever random conditions that are required are met. just because you don't know how something works doesn't mean someone else doesn't (in general, im not referring to this case specifically). and just because there is no concrete law defining some physical behavior logically doesn't mean there is some metaphyicsal meaning to it.
quote:
Originally posted by damien_s_lucifer:
That's what I mean when I say electrons seem to have a mind of their own. That electron will switch shells when it's good and ready.
I will refer you to the highlighted phrase above. There is, of course, a lot of disagreement among physicists about cause and effect at the quantum level. Depending on what you believe, either
1. the Universe is entirely deterministic,
or
2. there is a fundamental and irreducable randomness built in.
Which one is true DOES have a lot to do with metaphyics, because it determines just how knowable the Universe is.
Unpredictability exists to some extent in every system I observe in the real world. Therefore I'm inclined to go with #2. In that case particles are NOT ruled entirely by cause and effect; in fact some things that happen are their own cause - which is pretty much the idea behind "free will," so it makes sense to say electrons have a mind of their own. So there
Of course, there are a lot of people who find this sort of irreducable magic variable bothersome, and will assume the first case. It's a good working assumption, because it keeps you from using "magic" as an excuse for "I don't know."
Please note that this does NOT mean I believe we have eternal souls that somehow exist outside of conventional reality - as far as I can tell, our souls are products of the interaction of zillions of particles. What I'm saying is that the magic we observe on a daily basis is, in fact, part of reality.
This message has been edited by damien_s_lucifer on March 10, 2001 at 11:34 PM
i mean.. remember how they would torture the people.. (or did they kill them this way..)
by putting them into a machine that showed them Exactly how insignificant they were in the universe, and how what they did actually effected other things..
yeah.. i liked that.. (thats about all i had to say.. )
------------------
Oh, ho, ho, irony! Oh, no, no, we don't get that here. See, uh, people ski topless here while smoking dope, so irony's not really a high priority. We haven't had any irony here since about, uh, '83, when I was the only practitioner of it. And I stopped because I was getting tired of being stared at.
)------------------
"OH GGOD!!! NOT THE HYLIGHTER AGAIN!!! GO AWAY YOU LITTLE PEANUT HEDGEHOG!!!"
"The only thread about ME likened me to poo shaped mummy."
"Have a nice day, because monkeys don't."
-< PersonGuy >
quote:The reason that an afterlife was created waaaay back before year 0 was because whoever had this idea, just like the people who wrote the constitution, had the insight to see that if people were left to rule themselves, anarchy would result.
Originally posted by blanalex:
Do humans have the need to believe in an after-life to make them better? Do we created ourself an after-life because our race is pretencious and think that it would be an horrible waste if there wasn't something after death??Sorry for the meta-physic questions tonight, but that's what is running in my mind right now...
This is the idea beneath all religions.
The idea that a Higher Power ruled and judged all is what kept the peasants in check.
------------------
Telnet - Reach out and finger someone
------------------
All that I know there was no God for me
Force that shatters all, absence of mortality
This message has been edited by Greasemonk on May 15, 2001 at 02:50 PM
quote:
Originally uttered by Albert Einstein:
Reality is an illusion, albeit a very persistant one
------------------
Telnet - Reach out and finger someone
quote:
Originally posted by cr0bar:
Speaking of scary thoughts:I'm going to assume that everyone here thinks of themselves as 'tiny' or perhaps has toyed with the notion that they are just a 'random speck' compared with the sheer vastness of the universe.
You'd be right, of course. As far as organized collections of matter go, humans (indeed, the entire Earth, which is bigger than I think most people can comprehend without the use of drugs...myself included) are pretty fucking small.
But consider how small we conceive atoms to be. . .or electrons. In relation to them our bodies are as big as entire universes. Humans are huge! There is so much going on at a level far smaller than we can imagine, that if you truly can get your brain around this concept, you'll realize (among other things) that the universe is [b]way fucking bigger (does the word infinite mean anything to you?) than you thought it was.
There's your sophomoric thought for the day.[/B]
i could not agree more with cr0bar on this one
one thing that comes to mind right away is the talking dog from Men in Black who told them that they don't realize how small other things can be
and the entire galazy was fitted into a little ball on the cat's collar
as well at the end the earth is shown as a part of a huge galaxy in a marble, that aliens play with
we fail to realize that there much more things that we are aware of
there things so tiny atoms might seem like galaxies to them
just something i though about after i watched the movie and here it's being brought up again so i though i'd share my thoughts on the subjects
------------------
"Me fail English? That's unpossible!"
- Ralph Whigham
quote:
Originally posted by Dysorderia:
if people were left to rule themselves, anarchy would result.
I don't belive I'm being jugded, and I still pay my taxes and restrain myself from major crimes! I think religion is more than JUST a fabricated control device. I think it's something that's wired in our heads just like wanting to scare ourselves on a roller coaster or languages' connection of the 'N' sound to negitive feelings.
------------------
"OH GGOD!!! NOT THE HYLIGHTER AGAIN!!! GO AWAY YOU LITTLE PEANUT HEDGEHOG!!!"
"The only thread about ME likened me to poo shaped mummy."
"Have a nice day, because monkeys don't."
-< PersonGuy >
------------------
Net Syndrome - < http://www.netsyndrome.net/ >
Spydir Web - < http://www.netsyndrome.net/spydirweb/ >
I'm not even going to touch the religious aspects of this (at least not in this thread).
------------------
I don't believe in stereotypes. I prefer to hate people on a much more personal level.
Eastern religions and various others are on the right track -- reincarnation. In a sense, I believe in reincarnation; that when our bodies decay, we don't just -- poof! -- disapear, our substances become use for something else.
Death isn't the end. Death is a part of the cycle.
And you're just caught up in the midst of it.
This message has been edited by casuality on May 16, 2001 at 11:37 AM