That is evidence. He's talking nonsense when he says there is none.
Afterlife and Pre-life
- Thread starter heresJohnny
- Start date
That is evidence. He's talking nonsense when he says there is none.
As Jan noted before -
When a person (soul) identifies himself with the body, limiting himself to the body, then he perceives damage to the body as damage to himself, to "who he really is."
People who don't identify so strongly with the body don't perceive damage to their body as damage to themselves.
This is evident in some severely handicapped people who nevertheless don't have a diminished sense of self.
Of course, in our Western culture, the default is to identify with the body, and we are taught from early on to project this onto others as well. Which is how we end up thinking that an old person, or a handicapped person, is somehow less of a person than one who is young and healthy.
Granted.
I'm not sure this is what James intended, for he had a more practical outlook on the matter:
"Since belief is measured by action, he who forbids us to believe religion to be true, necessarily also forbids us to act as we should if we did believe it to be true. The whole defence of religious faith hinges upon action. If the action required or inspired by the religious hypothesis is in no way different from that dictated by the naturalistic hypothesis, then religious faith is a pure superfluity, better pruned away, and controversy about its legitimacy is a piece of idle trifling, unworthy of serious minds. I myself believe, of course, that the religious hypothesis gives to the world an expression which specifically determines our reactions, and makes them in a large part unlike what they might be on a purely naturalistic scheme of belief."
(The Will to Believe)
I read in a secondary source, but couldn't quickly find the original text online, that James postulated two kinds of truths: truths of the will, and truths of the observer:
As William James once observed, there are two kinds of truths in life: those whose validity has nothing to do with our actions, and those whose reality depends on what we do.
Truths of the first sort — truths of the observer — include facts about the behavior of the physical world: how atoms form molecules, how stars explode.
Truths of the second sort — truths of the will — include skills, relationships, business ventures, anything that requires your effort to make it real.
With truths of the observer, it's best to stay skeptical until reasonable evidence is in.
With truths of the will, though, the truth won't happen without your faith in it, often in the face of unpromising odds.
If you don't believe that democracy will work in your nation, it won't. If you don't believe that becoming a pianist is worthwhile, or that you have the makings of a good pianist, it won't happen. Truths of the will are the ones most relevant to our pursuit of true happiness. Many of the most inspiring stories in life are of people who create truths of this sort when a mountain of empirical evidence is against them. In cases like this, the truth requires that faith actively discount the immediate facts."
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/faithinawakening.html
The question is, rather, whether they maintain that dichotomy at all, or whether, like James, they maintain that a philosophy is only worth keeping if one can and does act on it, on a daily basis.
Such an outlook has as a consequence a different attitude toward opponents and toward discussion of one's beliefs and actions.
It seems that the Western standard is build on valuing a kind of disinterested interpersonal verifiability. I think that kind of standard would be extraneous in Eastern cultures, but also in some more conservative spheres of Western culture.
As for the "informal jumble of passions," James would probably refer here to matters of what for a person is a genuine option, and what is not.
It seems that this dichotomy between theoretical/practical does not exist in all cultures, or in the same way in all.
I hope Lightgigantic chimes in on this one.
But Kant is effectively an atheist, and he doesn't allow for divine revelation of any kind, does he?
Last edited:
Excellent!!!
Now we actually know your defence is not based on real thought or inquirey.
jan.
I'm not sure exactly what you are talking about.
The brain has zero possibility of functioning in isolation of other organs, but that said, even in an environment of perfectly fine organs, in the absence of consciousness (ie life) it all amounts to nothing
Things like Alzheimer's, brain tumors, epilepsy, injury to the head and brain.
In most people, these conditions are perceived as a diminishing of the affected person's consciousness.
that is simply a diminishing of the perceived self as opposed to the self as context.
IOW its a deterioration of proximate causes as opposed to causal ones
American pragmatism wasn't British empiricism, but nevertheless a cousin of the latter as well as influenced by related positivism. Pragmatists shared the developing Anglophone trend of distaste in metaphysics (IOW, there's ironically little salvaging of transcendent possibilities in pragmatism compared to the former "practical division" of philosophy, corrected by Kant). So any survival of religious beliefs had to be grounded somehow in experience* or the empirical world. Such as indeed converting the value of "religious belief" or a state about its "truth" into merely action or observable events and their consequences. (*Or even restricted to language -- this more applicable, of course, to the emerging analytic philosophy and logical empiricism of the era).
There's no positive evidence of God in the natural world (of these later Anglophone philosophies) anymore than in Kant's natural world, but their (supposed) apathy or outright rejection of any noumenal possibility also removes the chance of a literal God. Furthermore, regardless of clinging to contrary beliefs, the individual always has the overhanging threat of her decisions not being her own in the world of experience -- a puppet of either determinism or some heteronomic situation -- making even pragmatic choices simply another illusion that personal decision-making is taking place.
To put it another way: In the context of the division of philosophy into theoretical and practical, what James refers to would be probably classified as "technically-practical" -- actually on the theoretical rather than practical side (elaboration below). So pragmatism is captured somewhat by Kant's scheme, but not on the practical side of the dichotomy as one might initially feel because of the word-meaning similarity. Since translations of Kant can be rather uneven and bumpy, I'll use another one of John Watson's takes rather than quote the applicable passage from Kant's Critique of Judgement:
Watson: It is of the greatest consequence to distinguish clearly between these two spheres. If we look at the will from the point of view of natural causation, we cannot, strictly speaking, say that we are dealing with a problem which belongs to practical philosophy; for, so far as even our own actions can be regarded as phenomena, they are at the most only technically practical, not morally practical.
All technically practical rules are simply applications of theoretical philosophy to specific cases. They contain the rules of art and skill, or of the practical sagacity which enables us to influence men, but in themselves they have nothing to do with what is morally practical, and therefore they do not belong to the sphere of practical philosophy. Thus we obtain a perfectly clear distinction between the two contrasted spheres. Nothing belongs to practical philosophy except the laws of freedom, and those postulates which necessarily follow from them.
Such so-called "practical" arts as surveying, statesmanship, farming, etc., and even those prudential rules by which happiness may be obtained, are merely technically practical rules, and therefore belong to the sphere of theoretical reason. In this way we see that practical philosophy is identical with moral philosophy, which rests upon the supersensible principle of freedom; whereas theoretical philosophy is limited to the connexion of phenomena, whether these are events occurring in the case of lifeless matter or merely animal instinct, or our own desires, so far as these are viewed simply as events in the phenomenal world. --The Philosophy of Kant Explained, 1908
Well, again, that tradition in western philosophy was around before Kant. But Kant's scheme, when better understood, is maybe the only satisfactorily one I've found that can assimilate almost any of the other systems without doing any damage to science, while also preserving beliefs not compatible with science. I've tried to abandon it many times but repeatedly found myself returning because it was most equipped to dis-entangle the confusion elsewhere with minimum bias. As many people told me in earlier days, "As painful and tedious as it is, you will have to actually read and understand Kant yourself, not try to do it entirely from second-hand sources that are sometimes either clueless or mis-representative." And they were dead-on correct about that. Plus, once the era of the personal computer got into full swing, it helped greatly to paste an entire book on a textarea file so that the "find" feature could track down all the instances of a term or concept, to better understand it in its entirety or to overcome what might seem unclear in a single passage. Traditional indexes are considerably slower in that regard.
In the preface of CPR, Kant wrote: I have therefore found it necessary to deny [positive] knowledge [of things in themselves], in order to make room for faith. The dogmatism of metaphysics, that is, the preconception that it is possible to make headway in metaphysics without a previous criticism of pure [theoretical] reason, is the source of all that unbelief, always very dogmatic, which wars against morality.
Influences from either the human's noumenal self or other unconditioned sources would converge with natural causes in the experienced (conditioned) world, and thus be hidden or indiscernible. That is, quite futile to try and verify since there would always be an alternative scientific explanation available. So one might contend that Kant is non-theist from a positive POV in empirical realism, but vacillates between theism and agnosticism in practical reason (where a noumenal POV is viable).
The "distaste in metaphysics" can have many sources.
With James, I have the impression that distaste is due to his sense of urgency of moral action, rather than anything else.
The difference between the philosopher and the religionist is sometimes sumed up thus:
"Seriousness is precisely the difference between philosophy and religion. The philosopher deals in expendable theories; the religious man puts his life on the line."
Solipsism, consequent determinism and a few other choice players tend to hold us firmly in their grip, once they catch on.
And in our standard Western view, their threat is real, as we don't believe that a real change in how we experience the world is possible.
The Buddhists aspire to the as-yet-unrealized, the as-yet-unattained, to an altogether different category of being. This places the above threat into a different context, last but not least, diminishing it.
I come form a somewhat Eastern perspective, and from there, reading James and others looks different. James' pragmatism doesn't seem shallow or misleading.
The Buddhist would not ask "What exists?" Rather, he would ask "What, when I do it, will be for my long-term welfare and happiness?"
Buddhist empiricism, probably Eastern epiricism in general too, is dramatically different from Western empiricism.
Western empiricism looks without, seeking interpersonal verifiability. Buddhist empiricism looks within, seeking realization, attainment - within.
But everyone, East or West, at least implicitly believes, considers it a mark of maturity, to be able to "look oneself in the face," "to live with oneself," to know that "at the end of the day, one has noone to count on but oneself."
And the Buddhists and Western pragmatists are far more aligned with this basic principle of personal integrity, than the Western empiricists and analytical philosophers.
Why? What will clearly distinguishing between theoretical and practical philosophy accomplish?
But what does Kant's scheme do to help you in your own day-to-day decision-making and pursuit of happiness?
I admit that although I am fluent in German, I have barely read any Kant.
From what I have read, I doubt that he is a viable alternative to the Buddha.
But whence this drive for verification?
What is hoped to be accomplished by interpersonally verifying a hypothesis?
This is about religious beliefs, or what was originally more specifically antelife and afterlife; then this sub-topic discursion/connection of that to Kant, etc. Not the pursuit of happiness in between antelife and afterlife. One might as well be asking what the standards for conducting astronomy or carpentry have to do with happiness, or any number of everyday occupations submitted to be evaluated by this non sequitur. The average person throughout history surely spent the majority of time preoccupied with work and staying alive, wailing over the loss of one child after another that never made it to adulthood, and the like. With belief in an afterlife being the only stable source of a "happiness" for the proletariat, slave, or peasant to look forward to. Although even afterlife was often "just more of the same lowly status" in many historical cultures (little wonder Christianity scored in the popularity department there, offering even a habitual doormat of the elite a chance to be elevated after her/his resurrection!).
At any rate, you seem to be the one worried about the damage that science, naturalism, secularism?, etc. does to religious beliefs (or happiness, or whatever the devil it is). I'm interested in a system that allows the two to get along or avoid each other's turf, which is admittedly quite silly when neither side has exhibited inclination to want do so over the decades, regardless.
Maybe that's a meager gasp from Arthur Schopenhauer's bones, that I hear in the background. He not only declared himself to be a Buddhist at times and well-versed in other Indian literature, but seemed to pride himself in the view that he was the only legitimate Kantian among the other German idealists of the times.
"Kant not only expressed the same doctrine in a completely new and original way, but raised it to the position of proved and indisputable truth by means of the calmest and most temperate ex position; while both Plato and the Indian philosophers had founded their assertions merely upon a general perception of the world, had advanced them as the direct utterance of their consciousness, and presented them rather mythically and poetically than philosophically and distinctly. In this respect they stand to Kant in the same relation as the Pythagoreans Hicetas, Philolaus, and Aristarchus, who already asserted the movement of the earth round the fixed sun, stand to Copernicus. [...] Men generally are beginning to be conscious that true and serious philosophy still stands where Kant left it. At any rate, I cannot see that between Kant and myself anything has been done in philosophy; therefore I regard myself as his immediate successor."
But Schopenhauer also didn't either get or want Kant's "freedom". Like so many others both religious and non-religious, he was equally eager to seek therapeutic results in some "self-denying emptiness", wanting his own individuality to be another superficial illusion rather than fundamental. Some of the differing parties may share more of a common fetish or goal than they realize. Heck, even in the extinctivism of a materialist... garnering an absence of selfhood, along with the absence of its addictions (needs and desires), and an absence of everything pertaining to the world and thought, can also be accomplished by slashing one's wrists. If it's that great, then perhaps more people need to stop flirting with it as a therapeutic practice and make it a permanent solution ahead of time.
It's telling that you find it to be a non sequitur. It's also a Western standard - abolishing the individual person.
Because - "Happiness is for rednecks and retards. Serious people are above and beyond happiness."
And yet, it is happiness that matters the most, at the end of the day.
Indeed, you seem to be fighting in a war where neither side appreciates your input.
So it could be that you're tackling the problem at the wrong end.
As it was habitual at that time, Schopy assumed a stance of superiority over Buddhism etc. ...
To the best of my knowledge, he did not enter as a student into the kind of teacher-student relationship that is typical for Buddhism and Hinduism in general. It's no wonder that he could not reap the results of such guided practice.
But that way, they would cut themselves off from looking for a better solution.
Guru
Registered Senior Member
I agree it would be very wrong to judge everyone with a broad brush - there has been scientific study which has been conducted to compile these experiences ( Raymond Moody). I am not a believer in God but I believe that we have not yet researched a whole lot in finding out if there is any energy which people call souls.. Again a short study of reincarnation was uncovered when Brian Wiess started regressing people during his clinical sessions.:itold:
I am sorry Johnny but there very probably is no afterlife. Evidence shows that the brain creates the mind and after the brain stops functioning, we no longer feel anything.
My sources:
http://www.thekeyboard.org.uk/Is there life after death.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblivion_(eternal)
Last edited:
"If there was something beyond the mind and senses an investigation with the mind and senses would have revealed it by now"
Circular empirical reasoning called upon to lend credibility to atheist arguments at their finest, no doubt ...
:shrug:
kx000
Valued Senior Member
What makes you think we all go to the same place when we die?
if one is invalidating transcendental claims based on empirical reasoning one is already blindly following whatever feels right
:shrug: