Exsistence and afterlife

Discuss any topics related to metaphysics (the philosophical study of the principles of reality) or epistemology (the philosophical study of knowledge) in this forum.
Tamminen
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Re: Exsistence and afterlife

Post by Tamminen »

Fooloso4 wrote: March 14th, 2018, 3:57 pm Why can't the non-existence of a person be forever?
There is a novel by Italo Calvino with the title "A knight who did not exist". Calvino liked paradoxes.

But I understand the idea of the OP. Being does not depend on time. Time depends on being.
Fooloso4
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Re: Exsistence and afterlife

Post by Fooloso4 »

Tamminen:
There is a novel by Italo Calvino with the title "A knight who did not exist". Calvino liked paradoxes.
My response was based on the following statements from Weight:
No matter what happens when you die you can know that you did exist at one point in time ...

… the main question I asked was if you exist in one point in time "the present" how does that correlate with our non existence. Because non existence cant be forever …
If to die is to no longer exist then that may be forever. When it is over it is over. One once was but no longer is. The claim that non-existence can’t be forever is not the same as existence must be forever. The latter statement denies non-existence, the former affirms it but denies that it is a permanent state.
But I understand the idea of the OP. Being does not depend on time. Time depends on being.
There are some physicists and philosophers who think that time is fundamental. They stand in opposition to the prevailing assumptions of our time, but the history of science is a history of overturning assumptions. No doubt we will continue to think and argue about time for a long time. As to whether being is dependent on time or time on being we might easily talk passed each other without a clear understanding of what is meant by being.
Tamminen
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Re: Exsistence and afterlife

Post by Tamminen »

Fooloso4 wrote: March 15th, 2018, 12:36 pm As to whether being is dependent on time or time on being we might easily talk passed each other without a clear understanding of what is meant by being.
This is a question of subjective time vs. physical time. The unit of subjective time as I understand it is the present, the "now". There is nothing between two successive "nows", but there can be a million years of physical time between them, in principle at least. Subjective time is what we originally mean by time, with its present, past and future modes of being. Physical time is a secondary phenomenon, the time we measure with clocks. It has no present, past or future. By being I mean my subjective being, and as an ontological idealist I think all being is related to my subjective being, the 'I' here denoting the transcendental subject. So in this sense I am not something that exists at one point of time and does not exist at another point of time. Time is an inner structure of being and physical time is based on this original time as we are concerned with the physical world with our clocks.
Duckrabbit
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Re: Exsistence and afterlife

Post by Duckrabbit »

Atreyu wrote: March 13th, 2018, 6:37 pm Indeed, death is forgetting. You will have no memory whatever of anything that happened in this life, in your next life.

Nevertheless, it will be you living your next life. Not anyone else. And you will still be you. The big forces which created you will create you again...
Who - or, better perhaps, what - is this you that begins a "new" life after your body has died and gone back to the earth, so to speak? There will be no memories of a previous life (which, if it has any sense at all, sounds at least like a tautology). How does this being equal you? In what does this identity consist?
Duckrabbit
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Re: Exsistence and afterlife

Post by Duckrabbit »

Eduk wrote: March 15th, 2018, 2:48 pm Duckrabbit I'm not sure it's possible to clarify madness?
I'm not going there. I am genuinely curious and think this point needs discussion.
Fooloso4
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Re: Exsistence and afterlife

Post by Fooloso4 »

Tamminen:
This is a question of subjective time vs. physical time.
Time, as it is discussed by physicists and philosophers of physics is neither subjective time or physical time (defined as clock time), although both of these are discussed. The prevailing view is “eternalism” or the block model of the universe:
We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes. ( Pierre Simon Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities)
Those who claim that time is fundamental reject eternalism. The world, they claim has a temporal structure (or perhaps more accurately temporal structuring since it is not a fixed structure) and a direction from what was to what is to whatever will be that is not simply a matter of where one stands. Nothing would happen, nothing would change, nothing would develop without time.
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Sy Borg
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Re: Exsistence and afterlife

Post by Sy Borg »

Duckrabbit wrote: March 15th, 2018, 2:45 pm
Atreyu wrote: March 13th, 2018, 6:37 pm Indeed, death is forgetting. You will have no memory whatever of anything that happened in this life, in your next life.

Nevertheless, it will be you living your next life. Not anyone else. And you will still be you. The big forces which created you will create you again...
Who - or, better perhaps, what - is this you that begins a "new" life after your body has died and gone back to the earth, so to speak? There will be no memories of a previous life (which, if it has any sense at all, sounds at least like a tautology). How does this being equal you? In what does this identity consist?
Perhaps the same could be asked of you as an infant and young child because there is no memory of that time either? The conscious connection between the forgotten (never known?) self of the infant and the conscious adult seems to only come via memories and legal records. I emphasised "conscious" because there was much conditioning going on during those early "blank" years that still unconsciously impacts on our thoughts, feelings and behaviours today.

Those who believe in reincarnation (or "recurrence", in Atreyu's case) consider that there is equivalent conditioning from one's previous lives.

Personally, my current preference is that individuality is a subjective reality but paradoxically also an ontological error. Thus, what we think of as individual character and personality is only the tip of the iceberg of "you". Most of "you" is actually a pretty generic representation of chemistry, of life, of animalia, of humanity and of your nationality, culture and/or subculture, and personality type (explorer, conservative, dominant, submissive, etc). Those larger general channels of being tend to be taken for granted, as a give, so we are highly sensitive to those small individual variations and exaggerate them. Our focus on minutiae means and the problem of other minds means that we fail to notice the similarity between our internal dynamics, both physical and mental, even if their expression can be as variant as Stalin and Gandhi.
Tamminen
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Re: Exsistence and afterlife

Post by Tamminen »

Duckrabbit wrote: March 15th, 2018, 2:45 pm Who - or, better perhaps, what - is this you that begins a "new" life after your body has died and gone back to the earth, so to speak? There will be no memories of a previous life (which, if it has any sense at all, sounds at least like a tautology). How does this being equal you? In what does this identity consist?
I think Atreyu's idea would have been more consistent if this sentence had been omitted:
Atreyu wrote: March 13th, 2018, 6:37 pm Only small incidental things, caused by incidental forces, could be different next time...
There would then be an eternal, closed loop of my personal existence with no beginning and no end. And I would live my life as if it were the first time on each round. So I would have lived my present life an infinite number of times before my present life, and would live this life an infinite number of times in the future, with no difference and no memories from the previous round, so that I would think, as some of us in fact think, that life is finite and there will be nothing after death.

This would mean that subjectivity is personal and there are many subjects, each having its own loop of existing. For me this is not plausible although more consistent than many other scenarios. I think, as I have said many times, that there is only one transcendental subject and it is interpersonal, connecting all of us to the same stream of existing. In both of these ideas the present, the "now", is eternal, but in my version it has a beginning, which makes it logically more consistent.

But the justification of these kinds of speculations cannot be found in empirical evidence, only in their phenomenological clarity and logical consistency, keeping in mind that they should not be in conflict with science.
Tamminen
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Re: Exsistence and afterlife

Post by Tamminen »

Fooloso4 wrote: March 15th, 2018, 4:13 pm Tamminen:
This is a question of subjective time vs. physical time.
Time, as it is discussed by physicists and philosophers of physics is neither subjective time or physical time (defined as clock time), although both of these are discussed. The prevailing view is “eternalism” or the block model of the universe:
We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes. ( Pierre Simon Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities)
Those who claim that time is fundamental reject eternalism. The world, they claim has a temporal structure (or perhaps more accurately temporal structuring since it is not a fixed structure) and a direction from what was to what is to whatever will be that is not simply a matter of where one stands. Nothing would happen, nothing would change, nothing would develop without time.
It is true that modern cosmology regards the universe as a totality of space-time with a geometrical structure, and so looks at it from the perspective of eternity. But the philosophically most interesting question, for me at least, is the relation of subjective time with its present, past and future to this cosmic "eternity".

It must also be noted that quantum mechanics sees the world as genuinely probabilistic.
Fooloso4
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Re: Exsistence and afterlife

Post by Fooloso4 »

Tamminen:
It is true that modern cosmology regards the universe as a totality of space-time with a geometrical structure, and so looks at it from the perspective of eternity.
Whether a timeless universe is eternal or whether the view that the universe is timeless is seeing it from the perspective of eternity cannot be addressed without making clear what one means by eternity. If one means that it always was and always will be, that is to look at eternity from a temporal perspective.

My point, again, is a rather simple one: we do not adequately understand time. With regard to subjective time some say that they experience it as passing but others insist that there can only be the experience of now. For some now is tensed, but others claim that now has neither past nor future, and still others that each moment perdures eternally.

If one argues against the finitude of life by appeal to a theory of time, the argument, in my opinion, must be weak, because it is based on something we do not understand and cannot agree on.
Tamminen
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Re: Exsistence and afterlife

Post by Tamminen »

Fooloso4 wrote: March 16th, 2018, 2:07 pm Whether a timeless universe is eternal or whether the view that the universe is timeless is seeing it from the perspective of eternity cannot be addressed without making clear what one means by eternity. If one means that it always was and always will be, that is to look at eternity from a temporal perspective.
I think it is like jumping outside of the universe and seeing it as a spatio-temporal totality where space and time are intertwined. It is not timeless because it has the temporal component in its structure, but it is not eternal either, because there is no time outside of it. So it is seen purely from a mathematical point of view, as an abstraction where subjective time has been eliminated as useless in physics. And there is nothing wrong with this, as long as physics does not try to explain subjective time and other subjective phenomena by trying to reduce them to physics. That would be a total misunderstanding of what our reality is about.
Tamminen
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Re: Exsistence and afterlife

Post by Tamminen »

Fooloso4 wrote: March 16th, 2018, 2:07 pm If one argues against the finitude of life by appeal to a theory of time, the argument, in my opinion, must be weak, because it is based on something we do not understand and cannot agree on.
My being or, as Heidegger put it, the being of Dasein, is temporal. My being is not the same as the being of the universe, but they go parallel. If my being ends, the being of the universe is cancelled. But I cannot cancel the universe. The universe is what it is. Therefore my temporal finitude is impossible.

Not formal logic, but a piece of phenomenology. Believe it or not. I do not want to prove anything, just introduce to my way of thinking. I do not believe that we can agree on anything in a philosophical discussion. Our horizons of thinking are so different. We speak of different things. What we call dialogues are nothing but monologues touching each other here and there. But perhaps that is enough.
Duckrabbit
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Re: Exsistence and afterlife

Post by Duckrabbit »

Greta wrote: March 15th, 2018, 7:56 pm
Duckrabbit wrote: March 15th, 2018, 2:45 pm

Who - or, better perhaps, what - is this you that begins a "new" life after your body has died and gone back to the earth, so to speak? There will be no memories of a previous life (which, if it has any sense at all, sounds at least like a tautology). How does this being equal you? In what does this identity consist?
Perhaps the same could be asked of you as an infant and young child because there is no memory of that time either? The conscious connection between the forgotten (never known?) self of the infant and the conscious adult seems to only come via memories and legal records. I emphasised "conscious" because there was much conditioning going on during those early "blank" years that still unconsciously impacts on our thoughts, feelings and behaviours today.

Those who believe in reincarnation (or "recurrence", in Atreyu's case) consider that there is equivalent conditioning from one's previous liv
I have no conscious memories of being an infant. People lose memory of later years through brain damage and disease. But we know what it means to say, “I was that infant” (perhaps in a photograph, in stories told by older family members). Even if the Alzheimer’s patient does not remember her past, others may. There is a physical continuity over the stretch of one's life. Even if no one - neither the individual herself or other people - can piece together in memory her entire life - that is, no photos, legal records, other peoples' memories - we know that she must have been born, grew through childhood, etc. (assuming she is now an adult). Even if her DNA has changed, as has apparently happened with the space-station astronaut, Kelly, there was necessarily a continuity to her bodily growth and change. But that is not the case for our "born again" (not in the religious sense) person. No one has previous memories of this new-born person, simply because he, she, or it had not yet been born. There is no continuity from the "previous" body for the baby, once it gets older, or anyone else to trace.

In taking up this topic of reincarnation, recurrence, or "afterlife", we must be wary of wanting to have our cake and eat it too. People will say they believe that people live on after death, and then explain the after-life as some kind of cosmic consciousness, or they will say we do not die because we are all one and there really are no individuals, or that your traits are disbursed across future generations, or that all moments are actually eternal (contradiction in terms?), and so on. If the argument is posed as: "what happens to you when you die?", and your answer is that you, your individual being, lives on or recurs, you cannot then back up this statement with an explanation of how there was no you to begin with, or even that death is not real, because the question itself (What happens to you when you die?) assumes death’s reality. It seems on this thread there is much swinging back and forth between differing metaphysical view-points in a single argument.

So, let’s say there lives a person, say, for example, Duckrabbit. He gets old (older) and dies. Years hence there is a child in the world (call her Kathy) with different DNA than Duckrabbit had, different habits, interests, and personality, not mention gender and nationality. According to the theory I was responding to in the quotation at the top, it is existentially and logically possible that this young girl is the same person as this old guy who’s been dead for years. As I've pointed out, no physical continuity between the two individuals is even logically possible. No legal records, no memories, no resemblances. Maybe some really old person who knew Duckrabbit and now meets Kathy, might see something in her that reminds him of Duckrabbit. But many very different people may share certain traits, proclivities, expressions, etc. Remember we’re talking about distinct individual entities here (persons) and not generalized traits. There is no reason to link the two people in some quazi-identity.

Now for a person who cannot remember their infancy and is shown a photograph of a diapered baby, the proposition, “that baby is (was) you”, is possibly true and there are ways its truth can be proved or disproved, or made more or less likely. We also know what it means for such a thing to be possible. But say someone shows Kathy an old photo of Duckrabbit and says to her “that is (was) you.” There are no ways to prove or disprove that proposition (remember we’ve allowed for different DNA) or even make it more or less likely. What would the evidence look like? What category of thing would it be? You could bring in God here and say, “He knows it’s the same person!” But we haven’t established what even that would mean. Unlike the infant example, in this case we do not even know what it would mean to say that such a thing is possible.

Religion has played a strong role in convincing us that the world is made up of individual, mutually distinct, eternal souls. This has proven a very difficult idea to shake, even when it results in ambiguities, logical contradictions, and meaningless statements posing as something else.
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Sy Borg
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Re: Exsistence and afterlife

Post by Sy Borg »

Duckrabbit wrote: March 18th, 2018, 6:59 pm
Greta wrote: March 15th, 2018, 7:56 pmPerhaps the same could be asked of you as an infant and young child because there is no memory of that time either? The conscious connection between the forgotten (never known?) self of the infant and the conscious adult seems to only come via memories and legal records. I emphasised "conscious" because there was much conditioning going on during those early "blank" years that still unconsciously impacts on our thoughts, feelings and behaviours today.

Those who believe in reincarnation (or "recurrence", in Atreyu's case) consider that there is equivalent conditioning from one's previous ...
So, let’s say there lives a person, say, for example, Duckrabbit. He gets old (older) and dies. Years hence there is a child in the world (call her Kathy) with different DNA than Duckrabbit had, different habits, interests, and personality, not mention gender and nationality. According to the theory I was responding to in the quotation at the top, it is existentially and logically possible that this young girl is the same person as this old guy who’s been dead for years.
I am not a believer BTW, just exploring the idea, and also unsure if death is as it seems, having not yet died and undergone the subjective process.

However, your take on reincarnation lacks nuance. If there is any kind of reincarnation, strong tendencies will logically be expressed in each iteration. The old and new incarnation would not have very "different habits, interests, and personality". If they did, then that wouldn't be reincarnation, just someone else :) Also note that, if reincarnation was real and we had no memory of previous lives, the next incarnation might as well be someone else for all intents and purposes.

Taking a different angle, it is your tendencies that make you "you". You are the one who tends to do x and y" (and z, a, be, C, since we are obviously quite complex). If we are anything, we are effectively bundles of tendencies. Most of our tendencies are generically those of the biosphere, of animals, mammals, humans and cultures, but "types" to my mind boil down to how entities engage with the environment.

For instance, there will always be entities (non-living in some instances) that are more bigger or smaller, faster or slower, active or passive, and there will always be humans who tend to promote more growth or entropy, who are more or less gregarious or connective, more or less creative, smart, athletic, musical, artistic, etc and to some extent come to identify with their dominant qualities. These patterns will repeat as surely as electrons and neutrinos.

Probability ensures that plenty of people in the world will share strikingly similar bundles of tendencies to any one of us. There were probably plenty born in the past who were very much like each of us amongst the 100 million people who have died so far, and there will probably be many more born of that 'type" in the future.

The type or broad bundle of tendencies that each of us express is much more enduring than the individual. I suspect that at least some ancient proclamations of "eternal life" were based more on these ideas than the notions of esoteric heaven, hell and purgatory. A bit like Sgt Hartman in Full Metal Jacket saying that marines die but the marine corps live on.

Such a version of reincarnation is naturalistic, if woolly, but of cold comfort to those who fear the drawing of the dark curtain.
Duckrabbit wrote:Religion has played a strong role in convincing us that the world is made up of individual, mutually distinct, eternal souls. This has proven a very difficult idea to shake, even when it results in ambiguities, logical contradictions, and meaningless statements posing as something else.
Yes, but where did religion get the idea from? Seemingly because that's how things looks based on our evolved senses and unique (in nature) comprehension of time. The impression would be: "x person is here and then they have gone away. Where did they go?". It's a logical question to which "nowhere" is today's most broadly accepted answer amongst the educated, but there is still much that we don't know and perhaps there's another twist to be found?
Eduk
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Re: Exsistence and afterlife

Post by Eduk »

Greta let's imagine that the universe is some kind (star trek reference) of calculator. It's designed for one calculation but the calculation is dependent on everything that went before it. In this sense each human would live on. Would that count as a win for those people who claim to know there are souls?
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