Muh afterlife

We can now disable very specific brain functions:
mentalfloss.com/article/61704/7-things-we-can-turn-and-brain

>Disabling a part of the brain, disables it's function
>If you disable the whole thing, you can have an afterlife
^ Genius.

I couldn't give less of a fuck about your threats of Hell.

Other urls found in this thread:

skepdic.com/stevenson.html
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_hypothermic_circulatory_arrest
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobotomy
skepdic.ru/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/BeingNoOne-SelfModelTheoryOfSubjectivity-Metzinger.pdf
rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm
youtube.com/watch?v=xpFw7rR9d78
rifters.com/crawl/?p=7459
youtu.be/mkuRqZ-SssI
youtu.be/J4tbbcWqDyY?t=29m45s
plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

Nice, so Trump is in afterlife?

This has to be the least intelligent post of 2018 so far

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>You are wrong because I said you are not intelligent.
HA!
GOTEM!

...

What's your opinion on Ian Stevenson and how would you criticize his research?

Could you give it to me in a nutshell?
I'm going to work in an hour or so.
I will definitely look it up later.

Critics, particularly the philosophers C.T.K. Chari (1909–1993) and Paul Edwards (1923–2004), raised a number of issues, including claims that the children or parents interviewed by Stevenson had deceived him, that he had asked them leading questions, that he had often worked through translators who believed what the interviewees were saying, and that his conclusions were undermined by confirmation bias, where cases not supportive of his hypothesis were not presented as counting against it.

Also note:
Ian Stevenson suggests reincarnation.
So it leans to Buddhism and Hinduism, not Christianity.

>Stevenson became known internationally for his research into reincarnation, the idea that emotions, memories, and even physical bodily features can be transferred from one life to another.[2] He traveled extensively over a period of forty years, investigating three thousand cases of children around the world who claimed to remember past lives.[3] His position was that certain phobias, philias, unusual abilities and illnesses could not be fully explained by heredity or the environment. He believed that reincarnation provided a third type of explanation.[4][5]

". For my part, I have to agree with Stevenson's own assessment of his work: he's provided evidence, but no compelling evidence for reincarnation. I see no way to move forward using his methods or his data, so I see his work as a colossal waste of time."

skepdic.com/stevenson.html

I read his wiki article on a non-englsih site and there is a clear pro Stevenson bias and so I was confused with that but after I read his englsih wiki and know what to think of his studies.

It's kinda what we always knew (consciousness is a brain function) but I guess such research does drive the point home.

>His position was that certain phobias, philias, unusual abilities and illnesses could not be fully explained by heredity or the environment.
>He believed that reincarnation provided a third type of explanation.
So it's the reincarnation of the gaps, basically?

Stevenson himself:
> "the evidence is not flawless and it certainly does not compel such a belief. Even the best of it is open to alternative interpretations, and one can only censure those who say there is no evidence whatever."

He interviewed children who grew up in really religious societies. The confirmation bias is tremendous.

The ideal, according to Stevenson, was to seek out PLE stories and then try to confirm them. Failure to confirm, however, did not count against the reincarnation hypothesis. In fact, nothing could be discovered using Stevenson's methods that could ever disconfirm the reincarnation hypothesis. Many scientists would consider this a fatal flaw in his methodology.

He interviewed mostly, children who grew up in eastern religious societies.
Some of the children's stories didn't add up.
His method was not really scientific, because nothing in it would really put the claim in a position where the outcome could refute the hypothesis.
It's all a big fucking joke.

His evidence does not compel belief and that even the best of it is open to alternative interpretations.

That's not new
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_hypothermic_circulatory_arrest

He thought that the best evidence for reincarnation would be those cases where someone wrote down the instances where a child gives evidence of a PLE and then later the written account is verified. For example, a father writes down his three-year-old son's statements that he was Joey the blacksmith in Portsmouth and was stabbed by pirates in the neck on a wharf in Hong Kong. Later, it is discovered that there was a Joey who was a blacksmith in Portsmouth who was killed by pirates in Hong Kong. Adding poignancy to this account would be the discovery of some sort of birthmark on the neck of the child. One problem with such a method is that the verification process may not occur for a decade. But even if it takes place within a few months of the written record being made, we must take it on faith that the father is being honest.

DAMN.
That's cool asf.

Stevenson would conduct dozens of interviews and spend hours searching through hospital and court records, trying to establish that there was no fraud involved, that the story wasn't contaminated, that there weren't errors in translation, that the events weren't just coincidental, that the child couldn't have gotten the information in any normal way. When he satisfied himself that there was no normal explanation for the concordance of story and facts, he would count the case as "solved" and see it as a piece of positive evidence supporting the reincarnation hypothesis. If he got a PLE story but couldn't corroborate it with facts, he called the case "unsolved." There is nothing that could be discovered by this method that could ever falsify the reincarnation hypothesis.

Indeed, people who have gone through that surgery were indeed dead and are probably not the same people unless you believe in some form of dualism.
Also interresting to know that personality and long-term memory are physically stored.

wew

Ever heard of the Libet experiment?
Even our will is physically.

This type of surgery shows that, when you temporarily disable the brain, and reactivate it, the person stays the same.

When you remove certain parts of the brain however, personality changes.

How the fuck does this prove dualism?

The evidence for "removing certain parts of the brain however, personality changes."

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobotomy

Unless you believe in dualism (or idealism) then either a continuity of subjective experience is an illusion (or is at least disrupted at least once in a normal human life) and so is a continuous human life (you can still care about it because of your psychological identity but you after a disruption of your subjective experience you will not experience anything, the same way you are not going to experience what your son will experience) or such a surgery would actually kill you and only create a mental clone of yourself.
I'm not arguing for dualism though, because I don't think that what is convenient or not for us has an influence on reality.

>"such a surgery would actually kill you and only create a mental clone of yourself"
No. The surgery simply temporarily interrupts your consciousness much like turning a computer off and on again. The code was always there, it just wasn't running.

>"Unless you believe in dualism (or idealism) then either a continuity of subjective experience is an illusion (or is at least disrupted at least once in a normal human life)"
Why? My consciousness is a result of my brain. I have memories which are also stored in the brain, and renewed. This counts as illusion? What do you mean by "illusion"?

This is my opinion (don't know if it's dualism or not)
Matter comes before thought.
Thought is merely a property of matter.

Could you state this in a simpler way?
I think it's written in a rather confusing manner.

If matter comes before thought and the matter in your body and brain is constantly being replaced how can you claim to be the same person you were 10 years ago?

Different user here and I'm not arguing you are wrong about thought being created by the physical matter of the brain. I agree with you. I'm just saying that philosophically speaking you are arguably not the same person.

DRUMPF RESIGNED!

Ah, I see what you mean.
Well, the genetic information and memories, are indeed gradually distorted.

But it's also interesting to note that Buddhism is arguably dualistic and does does not affirm (nor does it deny) the existence of a self.

In other words, a mind can exist, and still be unstable and subject to constant change, and from that one could argue there isn't a self either.

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PFRUMPFY BTFO!

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Well, unless you are an eliminative materialist (subjective experience is not real, we are all p. zombies), it's hard to explain an actual subjective experience without it being a continuous process.
"Thought comes from matter" is non-reducive physicalism (mind cannot be reduced to the brain and even has causal powers on it but is ontologically dependent on matter, it's what "mind as an emergent process" really means) while "mind as a property of matter" is property dualism.

Both non-reducive physicalism and property dualism imply an actual subjective experience and arguably something closer than a "I" than identity. (memories and personality)
Your subjective experience is basically your "first-person view" of the world, from the perspective of these two theories of the mind you would not actually wake up from such a surgery despite a new consciouness with your memory and personality taking your place.
It's possible that your consciouness never stop even when you sleep or are "unconscious" as your brain activity is never totally stopped unless you are brain dead.
I don't think you get the concepts of subjective experience and qualia.

>4165074
>"from the perspective of these two theories of the mind you would not actually wake up from such a surgery despite a new consciousness with your memory and personality taking your place."
Yes it would. Your specific consciousness is a result of the memories and genes in the brain, they were not destroyed, they were simply disabled temporarily.

You run the code, then you stop running it, when you run it again, the app is the same.

If it is indeed true that these two cannot coincide, I would be inclined to the first one, "Thought comes from matter", kind of like light comes from the sun.

I don't think we really know enough about consciouness to really say what would happen from your perspective.
Personally I just think we probably have a continuous subjective experience, stopping it is more of a death than losing your memories and personality and "you" are not really going to experience anything after that surgery.

I have to say I strongly disagree.
Losing your memories and personality is more of a death then stopping it temporarily.
I think that the way apps in computers work is a good illustration of that. The code is the same and the data was preserved -> The app is the same and it remembers everything.

But how would you explain a real continuity about the two consciounesses? if an app was sentient then I don't think that sentience would really survive the software being turned off and on.
You would get a new sentient being with your identity, I agree but your consciouness still died and wasn't ressurected.

A better analogy would probably if I created a carbon-copy of yourself, your perspective wouldn't magically merge with the one of the clone if you kill you, right? same thing if I kill you and create an identical copy of yourself at the same time, it's just game over for you.

Unless consciouness is somehow physically stored in the brain even without a brain electrical activity, then that surgery is the doing the same thing and IMO you would just stop experiencing anything forever while another consciouness will be deluded into thinking he is actually you.

...

Glondald flumpf btfo

Different user entirely here.
I was having a similar discussion with a friend of mine a week or two ago.
Frankly I just don't really get how you can separate qualia and conscious experience from the brain, any more than you can separate a computer program from and UI from the circuits it runs on. The hard problem of consciousness asks "why does conscious experience arise from physical phenomena" but rejects the physical answer for it and says "no no no, but *why* does conscious experience arise from physical phenomena." Which in my mind is sort of like asking "why do things fall towards the earth?" "Well, because of gravity." "No no no, but *why* is there gravity?" Why the conscious experience exists is about as answerable a question as to why the quantum basis of gravity exists. Which is to say: it isn't answerable at all. It just is. One day, we'll probably be able to explain how it arises from the brain in precise detail, and I still don't think that will be enough. It's sort of like the classic "why are we here" philisophical conundrum. In a random, unguided, uncaring universe, there is no "why." There is only physical causality. Nothing more.
So that's just a long way of stating that I'm a brainlet who can't separate conscious thought from the matter it is grounded in. It's just another complex system, in my eyes.
user, since you're not a brainlet, have you read Being No One, by Thomas Metzinger?
I haven't personally, but I've heard great things, and (shockingly) it's actually free.
skepdic.ru/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/BeingNoOne-SelfModelTheoryOfSubjectivity-Metzinger.pdf

GUMBALL DIPSHIT BTFO

FLUMPADRUMPF ETERNALLY BTFO

Chemicals are very complex and beautiful things that rigorously obey the laws of physics, regardless of my opinion on them.

Either way, I'm not really trusting the chemicals, I'm trusting the thoughts that originated from the complex systems they are a part of. (I see the sun because of the light it emits)

I don't believe that my house is stable just because of the bricks, I believe that because of the way it's structured and because it's been standing perfectly for tens of years.

>"All knowledge is ultimately based on something we cannot prove"
Sure, and God is no exception.

I would make a difference between God and knowledge that we hold true because we have relaibly tested and has no logical fallacies in itself.

Very respectable opinion.
I admire you, user, not bad.
No, but I might read it, thanks for the link.

The continuity is simply the fact that the code and the data remained intact.

>"A better analogy would probably if I created a carbon-copy of yourself"
What they do in the surgery is more similar to deactivating/reactivating an app than cloning something. I think your analogy is rather misguided.

>"Unless consciousness is somehow physically stored in the brain even without a brain electrical activity"
It is! that's my whole point!
Consciousness is simply genetic code and our memories, in my view.

You seem to have a very large repulsion towards the idea that consciousness can be turned on and off, and I don't share this with you, at all. Although I don't exactly censor you for it, either.

I definitely agree with you.

But some people say "God has revealed himself to me, personally",which sounds ridiculous to me, but what can you do, eh?

Thank you user.
I was introduced to Metzinger by a sci-fi book called Blindsight, by Peter Watts. Good read, would recommend. But that's how I know about it without having read it.
From what I'm told, the tl;dr is that consciousness is actually an illusion. He proposes something he calls the "self-model theory of subjectivity" which basically states that conscious beings don't exist. It's an illusion of the self modelling faculty of the human brain. To do that he uses exhaustive amounts of data. So it's pretty dense. Plus, he's German, making it even harder to read. That, plus the length, is by and large why I haven't tackled it myself.
If you find it's too much for you, he wrote a layman oriented version called The Ego Tunnel. I want to read that one someday, but I keep procrastinating it. After I do that, I'll probably attempt Being No One. It'll be easier to grasp if I preface it with a layman's introduction.

I got a boner just from reading this.

I too read Meztinger but I don't think that he wrote that consciousness is not real, but that our Ego is a transitent tool that allows us to thinks abstractly. The simulated Pilot in the pilot chamber.

Also have this extract from Blindsight.

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I have *not* read Metzinger, just giving a summary of what I've been told. I have, however, heard multiple interpretations of what he said. Most report the tl;dr I gave, but I've also heard statements like yours.
God, I love Blindsight. It's unironically my favorite book. I would even go so far as to say one of the greatest books ever written. Nothing is thoughtless. Everything is carefully considered and well researched. If something seems like nonsense - it isn't, you're just missing something. It really is what I aspire to in my own writing. That level of insane thought and fidelity. So often seeming inconsistencies are due to shoddy craftsmanship on the part of the author. But Blindsight doesn't get me to ask "what did the author do wrong?" Oh no. It makes me ask "what did I not understand?" And I LOVE that. I love it, love it, love it. I'm so genre savvy and have read enough that most plots are predictable and transparent, but that's a book that can kick my ass.
Echopraxia wasn't quite as hard - it was a bit more "out there" in some respects - but I still liked it, and it was marvelously constructed in terms of plot.

One concept I would love to be explored in a book would be autosentience, the very counterpart to blindsight. Autosentience is total self-awareness, sentience reflected upon itself in detail. You have no unconsciousness, your consciousness is absolute.

Blindsight is also free to read
rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm

The only part I disliked were the vampires, destroyed the hard sci-fi element a bit, otherwise top sci-fi.

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was to make people believe that he didn't exist

Albert Einstein

Let's see if you won't believe when you're in front of Satan

Didn't Einstein have a more pantheistic cosmic religion view on reality? Of a impersonal god with undefined godhood?

Some vague proto-new age pantheism, I find that funny that people always use him as an example of a smart religious person when his spirituality is the same as an average spiritualist guy.

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BIAHSHEHENSMSHUMPF IRREVOCABLY BTFO
YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAS

There's a lot of competition for that

>I couldn't give less of a fuck about your threats of Hell.

And, yet, there is a superhuman being that can empirically control human nervous systems... There must be much much more to the fabric of the universe than we have/can perceive.

We don't even know what over 90% of the matter and energy in the universe is.

Anyway, a few years ago I wouldn't have thought an afterlife remotely possible, but now that I've seen God my assumptions are out the window.

youtube.com/watch?v=xpFw7rR9d78

I actually want to explore that in my own writing. I've designed a superintelligence, formerly a human, that was expanded and rewired. Basic idea: trim away the subconscious fat, and rather than using the subconscious as the backbone of cognition, *begin* by using consciousness as the backbone of cognition. Sort of a "if a mind was designed to be fully conscious, what might it look like?" Obviously, I can't describe how they made it work, but it's more of a theoretical discussion - how would a mind have to be organized in order to be fully conscious of itself?

I actually liked the vampires. What made me love Blindsight so much is that Watts took stuff that was very implausible sounding on the face of it, but then went "ACTUALLY..." *and* backed it up with citations.
Here's a cool picture, too.
Curious who made it?
Well I've been wondering for a long time. Watts has been leaking them slowly. Turns out even he didn't know at the time. I may as well let the man himself explain it.
rifters.com/crawl/?p=7459
tl;dr - some super autistic fans are making what looks to be an amazing rendition of the novel. We'll have to see how well they capture the feel and dialogue, the visuals are looking great. Since it isn't attached to hollywood and it's fan driven, I have hopes that they'll actually make a good movie version of the book.

DORITO MUSSOLINI ON SUICIDE WATCH

youtu.be/mkuRqZ-SssI

You know, now that I think about it, your posts begin to make a certain amount of sense. It makes sense why God wouldn't reveal himself to us under normal circumstances, because people like you who do seem him go completely fucking insane and start spouting this utter nonsense, which puts other people off the concept of theism entirely.

So what comes out of this operation isn’t you, but your spontanously generated twin? Even if the memories are the same?

He himself argued that will is the ability to "not do". Resist urges. You know when an urge has been so close to becoming action, but you stop it and your entire body feel strange and twitchy for a second, that is will.

The reason why he believed that is cause it "arise" faster than urges do, but they're not reflexes/instincts. An urge grows while will is instant, or always there.

(You)
(You)
(You)
(You)
(You)
(You)
(You)
(You)
(You)
(You)
(You)
All me btw

Colossal if genuine

We know.

The game SOMA captures this really nice.
Anesthesia and similar consciousness stopping procedures, literally "kill you". Similarly how in SOMA, spoilers, the copies are you, yet not.
Or how uploading your mind won't give you eternal life, even if the "new" identical you just think they did. I recommend watching a lets play of SOMA, it's pretty disturbing.

Savage.

I still don’t get the equal situations between having kids or a twin and just restarting with your memories and personality intact. They’re not the same process at all. Your kids and twin don’t have your memories nor personality.

It's that the "chain of consciousness" is stopped. Or lets say we copy your mind without any fade out. "You" can't exist in both copies, so your "chain of consciousness" continues in only one of them. Yet you are technically in both.
The Prestige plays with this idea as well.

Now imagine that you are the guy with gun, you see your clone. Now imagine that you aren't the one who wakes up.

youtu.be/J4tbbcWqDyY?t=29m45s

Yes, why would memories matter that much? everything would end from your perspective anyway.

It stops when you go to sleep. And if you get split when you're knocked out, it just gets split, just like asexual reproduction of bacterium. There is no original one. It split into two. They both were the original one. Now they are separate from each other. It never stopped being either.

You just don't comprehend this identity because the human identity has never worked that way. Consciousness cloning is more like creating two independent consciousnesses from one original one.

>
>It stops when you go to sleep. And if you get split when you're knocked out, it just gets split, just like asexual reproduction of bacterium. There is no original one. It split into two. They both were the original one. Now they are separate from each other. It never stopped being either.
>You just don't comprehend this identity because the human identity has never worked that way. Consciousness cloning is more like creating two independent consciousnesses from one original one.
Where is the evidence? sleep is not brain death and losing self-awareness and capacity to make memories at times doesn't automatically mean that we don't have a continuous subjective experience.

>Where is the evidence? sleep is not brain death
Brain has lots of other functions besides providing consciousness. You still need to breathe while unconscious. Brain death doesn't imply lack of brain function, it implies irreversible lack of brain function, which is why the word death is used. What if your brain was like a computer which you could shut off and render completely nonfunctional? Then you can turn it on again.

>losing self-awareness and capacity to make memories at times doesn't automatically mean that we don't have a continuous subjective experience.
Yeah, it actually kind of does.

I disagree on his take on sleep.
You perceive sleep, it's just on a very low level, you don't "die". But anesthesia is different, that's a termination of consciousness.

You aren't in a dreamstate the entire time you're asleep. You aren't barely awake most of the time you are asleep. Your subconscious brain functions enough to boot up consciousness when it reacts to something

Maybe I have not done enough research but only en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_hypothermic_circulatory_arrest seems to really stop electrical brain activity and is indeed compared to a form of induced brain death, other types of anesthesia seem to merely reduce brain activity to the level of deep sleep but in various ways differing from how sleeping specifically works.
Try to read that, plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/ I feel like you are too deep down the mind = computer rabbithole to realize what a subjective experience is and I'm not eloquent enough to explain it to you.

I get what a subjective experience is. Subjective experience doesn't call for continuity. I like to use computers as analogs because it's useful to think about how our current vocabulary or understanding of it is inadequate.

The problem is that the way we talk about many of these concepts is we talk about an idea that is presently in reality uniquely applicable to humans, and we conclude based on the human condition. Many of these ideas aren't actually tied to being human or the limitations of humans. It's just humans (or whatever form of life) are the only beings we think of as experiencing them. You're talking about the idea within a narrow context. Not only that, but an idealized version of that specific context.

You are more than just mere consciousness. Don't let discontinuity of conscious bother you. You perceive others, but you only perceive everything but their consciousness.

I still don't see how people can't understand that you can have a continuous subjective experience, simply by preserving genetic code and memories, regardless of interruptions like that surgery.

Even if you don't pass out or get that surgery, there are always gaps, even if very small in our memories, even things that happened 5 minutes ago create some feeling of discontinuity.

This.
Why is this so hard to grasp for some people?!
Fuck!

>continuous subjective experience
>genetic code and memory
How? isn't preserving your genetic code, memory and personality merely preserving your identity?

...

But there's nothing that dictates that continuous subjective experience is tied to conscious or anything else in particular except maintaining a subjective frame of reference. There's no particular reason why a continuous subjective experience can't be split or transferred.

What is identity though? There's so many things we assume about human identity because of biological constraints.

Not exactly, memories create a continuous subjective experience and personality, with the help of genetic code.
This is so intuitive and obvious to me that I don't see how you don't understand it.
But maybe that's because I'm in computer science.

Sometimes people don't understand something because they don't want to...
Are you religious?

Good point.

Same personality -> same subjective view.
Same memories -> continuity.

What's so hard to understand?

Note that this user makes a good point against the importance of continuity all toghether:

Bump

But the Bible says there is one!
And the Bible is true because muh feewings!