crocodile deathroll

Tick one or more checkboxes


My personal choice is #2 because when you die then with all your memories obliterated then of course you will foget that you were ever born in the first place.
It will be akin to a great cosmic reset button been pushed on you.

I left it open for multiple choices with checkboxes instead of radio buttons.

excreationist

It implies that your consciousness still remains though even though your memories have been lost. But I think your consciousness is dependent on your physical brain (or some equivalent mechanism) functioning.

crocodile deathroll

I think question #1 however falls into a common trap of circular reasoning.
Like "we only life one possible life because we only live once".

excreationist

I think you mean "we only live one possible life because we only live once".

I don't think that has much to do with choice #1.

Choice #1 is "When you are dead, that's it. Game over."

Maybe you're saying choice #1 isn't justified... what about this:
"I think our consciousness is dependent on our physical brain functioning so when our physical brain stops functioning we stop being conscious. i.e. after death (of the brain) we have no more experiences or "afterlife"."

That's what I think. Choice #1 seemed to be the closest match.

BTW, I think Jehovah witnesses believe that when people die they stay dead (like materialists/physicalists do).... except that some people are resurrected to live eternally on earth. The rest stay dead.

crocodile deathroll

The huge hurdle is to get born and be started in the first place.
If you wind the clock back 200 years how do you know which brain that is been allocated to you?
If we reduce the brain down to individual molecules in isolation they all emulate the same physical processes. How do you sought them out if they haven't established any episodic, semantic and procedural memories?

Do you think like the Jehovah's Witnesses that when in spite of the fact that you are dead, you still remember the events of this life and you feel trapped in a void of eternal darkness?

A good standard argument for Jehovah's Witnesses and most other xtian denominations is is that God only created one possible life for us one this earth. So even if we have forgotten every thing about this life then there is God waiting for us on the other side to remind us that we have already spent our life.
Unfortunately I cannot believe in any such a deity.

If your brain was made of exotic particles that were found nowhere else iin the universe and not common quarks then I that would give a lot of weight to #1
Same speculate about exotic qualia particles
But I think this is a lot of BS myself.

crocodile deathroll

I think to put it more in a nutshell:
To wonder where the "soul" goes after the brain decays is as silly as asking where the 300 KPH (187 MPH) have gone after a race car has crashed into a barrier.

Buddrow_Wilson

I think choice one is by far the most likely, but I have often wondered if given infinite time and space is it not possible that you could be formed into a consciousness on some level again? If it were to happen, it would be instantaneous to you even if there were eons between the lifeforms existing and you would carry nothing of your former self with you. It's interesting to ponder such things, but like I said, my money's on choice one.
When i was a child i would sometimes sit in bed at night almost going insane pondering time and space. The concepts are oxymorons in a sense to me. no beginnings & no ends? Now, i've accepted that reality's true nature is unknowable and i don't let it bother me much.

crocodile deathroll

Yes I have pondered over this lot myself as when you consider there was 14 billion years between the big bang and the time you were born and did that seem like 14 billion years to you?

And then again if you were put under cryonic suspension for 10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^100 years and resurrected back to life, then all those years may just as well of been and attosecond from your vantage point no matter how imaginative you get with exponential numbers.


IF I wanted to pick the least likely on the list it would be a toss up between #4 and #6

Buddrow_Wilson

What does choice two mean exactly? Im pretty sure number one covers it unless its inferring something mystical that im not grasping.

PotatoError

An old star trek problem concerns the teleporters. It goes like this:

The teleporters in StarTrek work by first turning your body into a data, then beaming this data to a location and reassembling your body from the data. (something like this anyway).

The argument is that this teleporting method simply destroys your body and then makes a copy.

Questions that arise:

1) Where are *you* between the time your original self is destroyed and your new self is assembled (in Star trek i think your layout is stored in a buffer at each end and passed via a particle stream or something).

2) Is the copy actually you? When you enter a teleporter do you die and a totally different person who believes they are you steps out?

3) If *2* is proven true then should you fear teleportation? Or should you not care? If when we die we simply blank then I wouldn't care about walking into a teleporter knowing I would deexist. To everyone else observing, it would seem as if I was still me.




A more difficult question to answer is: does this make a difference?