Afterlife
- Thread starter jr_
- Start date
My feeling is that self-awareness, or sense of self, or ego, is continuous, as long as it is continually handed down to others through culture and knowledge. However, it is a subjective framework and creates the illusion of separateness. The body can only be considered to die if you put an intellectual frame around any particular body. Probably about half of "your" body, the cells, die everyday, and we think nothing of it, because we don't identify with the cell. Draw back your frame of reference to all humanity as the body, and the body is quite robust, has lasted for several million years, at least, and might last a few million more. Draw back the intellectual definitions to all life on earth, and we can say that it is practically immortal.
BTW jr, welcome to Sciforums!
I read about the U.G guy, and I agree partly with what he is saying.
That somehow you are what you experiance, and that what you don't experiance doesn't exist (to you). What he had done was, as it seemed when I read it, to take away everything that wasn't confirmed by his experiance. Taking away everything unnessesary. He became the experiance itself in search for the only truth that he could know for certain.
If I try to analyze this, then I guess that would be why he only felt parts of the body that was experianced, he didn't build a fantasy image of the body to compensate for the unknown.
I do not think that he took the right way. He was as far as I'm concerned playing with the scales.
I don't agree that love is contamination, neither is faith or hope. These three will stay, they are as pure as your awareness will ever be.
Someone may argue that whatever we feel is a disruption of that perfect awareness, and thus a contamination. But it isn't a disruption, all pure feelings go hand in hand, they are unique, there aren't only one pure feeling, there aren't only one "pure", it can be pure in different ways. Awareness is so pure that we don't really feel it, somehow it flows through us and is reflected upon us. I have a feeling it's God looking at us, from every angle, inside and out.
There is one perfect though, one God, and not the deepest depth can escape His light.
That somehow you are what you experiance, and that what you don't experiance doesn't exist (to you). What he had done was, as it seemed when I read it, to take away everything that wasn't confirmed by his experiance. Taking away everything unnessesary. He became the experiance itself in search for the only truth that he could know for certain.
If I try to analyze this, then I guess that would be why he only felt parts of the body that was experianced, he didn't build a fantasy image of the body to compensate for the unknown.
I do not think that he took the right way. He was as far as I'm concerned playing with the scales.
I don't agree that love is contamination, neither is faith or hope. These three will stay, they are as pure as your awareness will ever be.
Someone may argue that whatever we feel is a disruption of that perfect awareness, and thus a contamination. But it isn't a disruption, all pure feelings go hand in hand, they are unique, there aren't only one pure feeling, there aren't only one "pure", it can be pure in different ways. Awareness is so pure that we don't really feel it, somehow it flows through us and is reflected upon us. I have a feeling it's God looking at us, from every angle, inside and out.
There is one perfect though, one God, and not the deepest depth can escape His light.
"Proof of this is the fact that you are alive and self-aware. We are the afterlife of those who have gone before us."
No, those who have gone before were different people. Your "self" is generated by your brain, & each individual's brain is a unique state of dynamic order, represent the specific memories, personality traits etc of the individual.
Once your brain dies, you, that specific, unique "self", are gone.
But it's at least possible that at some other time & place, that exact same state of order might come into being again. But the probability of that seems to be extremely remote.
No, those who have gone before were different people. Your "self" is generated by your brain, & each individual's brain is a unique state of dynamic order, represent the specific memories, personality traits etc of the individual.
Once your brain dies, you, that specific, unique "self", are gone.
But it's at least possible that at some other time & place, that exact same state of order might come into being again. But the probability of that seems to be extremely remote.
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You misunderstood.Bubblecar said:
I'm not saying that our self (ego / I / whatever you want to call it) will survive death. But humans have something in common that we all share. That is the sense of being, sense of "I am"; I can say that I am, you can say it too. It is called self-awareness which we all have. This is what will appear again in the to-be-born individuals, after the death of an individual, such as you and me.
Yes, mainly it is indeed metaphorical, but it also describes in practice what happens in "afterlife" - that is, what happens after the death of an individual.Bubblecar said:
If you take my definition of afterlife in strictly metaphorical sense, could you conceive another way to see the term, such that would make any [practical] difference?
jr_ said:
Well, yes. As I argued above, it's at least possible that the state of order represented by an individual's unique "self", as manifested in the brain, might re-occur at some other time & place. In which case the idea of "afterlife" would maintain its traditional meaning, that of an individual "reborn" after the death of the body with which he/she was hitherto associated. (Although the term "after" in this sense is not necessarily a literal time-sequential thing. One could imagine, for example, a state of order arising (perhaps in an artificial consciousness machine) that corresponds exactly to the accumulated memories, personality etc, of someone who will die in a few million years time, on the other side of the universe. Nonetheless, as far as the perception of "continuity of self" is concerned, from the point of view of the individual himself, the "earlier" experience of self will become the "afterlife", because of the sequential order of memories)
We do share the same basic genetic sequence with all other humans, so our perceptions will be bound by the physical structure of our sensory organs. I think we have to separate the idea of self-awareness into two parts. One part is body awareness, which is similar among most humans and the other is ego, or self identification, which I think has changed over time. Identification has not always been with the self. Some historical or primitive cultures identify more with the group, in the sense that, the well-being of the group is more important than that of the individual and takes the place of our modern sense of individual self in the psyche of each member.
What happens after the death of the individual? It is an ending, the genetic printout that is the individual, stops functioning, and its constituent matter spreads out into the environment, from which it came.
Jr, I think what you are trying to define is a sense of continuity. At a time when old beliefs are fading in the light of doubt and science, and the world seems insecure and dangerous, we look for some permanent stabilizing metaphor, something to hold on to and give life meaning.
I wrote elsewhere:
"As long as there exists self-aware life,
there will be a witness to the world from the point of view of the individual."
So the individual POV cannot be gone for good. Otherwise we wouldn't be self-aware, right now.
Surely the "I" exists, at least in some emergent form (like language). How else could we currently say "I am"?
"As long as there exists self-aware life,
there will be a witness to the world from the point of view of the individual."
So the individual POV cannot be gone for good. Otherwise we wouldn't be self-aware, right now.
Surely the "I" exists, at least in some emergent form (like language). How else could we currently say "I am"?
spidergoat said:
On that day it was Adam and Eve who "experienced that consiousness" that was "separation" from God (natural intelligence of the body) through disobedience , and ego (superior) as well as a host of other selfish thought patterns, behaviors and actions began to evolve. Man was made superior to all creation but did not "feel" superior until after sin; the floodgates where then opened up to Ego and Pride and they began to then focus on Self for lack of a whole relationship with the Creator. Humanity has continued to slip away from the Source ever since.
I find the story of the fall to be a compelling metaphor, CosmicOne, we differ only in the details.