a friend's wife is a doctor and her "lights off, that's it" attitude has never sat well with me. I'm surprised to see it repeated so much in this section. for me, I cannot accept that these consciousnesses and shared reality are destroyed
I'm probably quoting someone somewhere sometime with "our bodies are vessels, driven by souls, enroute to infinity", but I think this is the closest approximation to what I mixedly believe about life and death
evidently we are unique in our animal kingdom for having this soul/consciousness, whether it be planted or evolved, created or random
I like to toy with the ideas among civilisations of the belief that their afterlife can be envisioned here on Earth, passing on to a pre-imagined place
I live in the hope that those I love are reunited in death, on some remote-but-familiar plane of existence. the problem with this is that memory must be preserved to some degree and transcribed, as it would be odd e.g. to reunite with my father in his infancy. but problems and their questions such as these rest more easily than the cliche answers to the broader "what happens when"
at first I was hesitant to quote Iron Maiden lyrics here but then remembered a discussion from the other week on rap music, and the beautiful refrain seems poignant, so here goes "I will hope, my soul will fly, So I will live forever. Heart will die, my soul will fly, And I will live forever."
I'd say I'm roughly half afraid, half curious about what will happen when I die, but will never be persuaded it is nothing, so long as I live..
ultimately hope, belief, and online pondering are of little value, just more locks on the door to the unknown
Honestly I can’t understand this perspective, despite having come from a religious background and heard it many times.
When you turn your computer off the RAM is erased, the state is lost. Our brains are running on RAM.
Perhaps we have persistent, non-volatile storage too, but we have no way to access and continue running our conscious, outside of our brain.
There’s nothing to fear about that- it is the world we’ve always lived in, and the state after your brain stops processing is no different from the state of the universe before you were born.
the difference is that computers are manmade, they do not have a consciousness to wonder where they came from. we know how RAM works and that it was designed to forget. the bits that once flowed through them had a predefined source and destination. when they were volatile they were electronic in nature, but once discarded reduced to atoms and heat as exhaust
I agree there is currently no known way to transfer the state of a human brain, like there was no concept of RAM back when religions were started
> evidently we are unique in our animal kingdom for having this soul/consciousness
Why do you say that? We have mountains of experimental evidence that animals of all kinds experience consciousness to a degree that rivals our own. We’re better at some forms of consciousness and they are better at others.
while it's true animals can teach us a lot about ourselves, this obviously has a limit. I would rather believe alien beings interfered with a chimpanzee than the lowly animals could ever match our level of consciousness. when you start splitting consciousness into forms it just gets messier having to account for intelligence, emotions, empathy etc.
when I think of human consciousnesses and souls the first thing I notice is how unalike we are to other animals, it is uniquely human, and the comparison with other animals begins and ends there
I'm probably quoting someone somewhere sometime with "our bodies are vessels, driven by souls, enroute to infinity", but I think this is the closest approximation to what I mixedly believe about life and death
evidently we are unique in our animal kingdom for having this soul/consciousness, whether it be planted or evolved, created or random
I like to toy with the ideas among civilisations of the belief that their afterlife can be envisioned here on Earth, passing on to a pre-imagined place
I live in the hope that those I love are reunited in death, on some remote-but-familiar plane of existence. the problem with this is that memory must be preserved to some degree and transcribed, as it would be odd e.g. to reunite with my father in his infancy. but problems and their questions such as these rest more easily than the cliche answers to the broader "what happens when"
at first I was hesitant to quote Iron Maiden lyrics here but then remembered a discussion from the other week on rap music, and the beautiful refrain seems poignant, so here goes "I will hope, my soul will fly, So I will live forever. Heart will die, my soul will fly, And I will live forever."
I'd say I'm roughly half afraid, half curious about what will happen when I die, but will never be persuaded it is nothing, so long as I live..
ultimately hope, belief, and online pondering are of little value, just more locks on the door to the unknown