Death Refutations

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blindwake
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Death Refutations

Post by blindwake »

What are your favorite arguments against the idea of true death in the sense of oblivion?

I find it odd that, at least in western culture, characteristics of death are assumed, then religions work on that fear to provide alternatives. It would seem just as plausible, to me, for the death assumption to be that our souls live on forever, and that we need religions to end our torment.

In any case, my favorite argument is this:

If I was born once, I will be born again. While this heavily depends on induction, a better way to look at it is like so:

I did not exist.
From non-existence, I was born.
From birth, I will return to non-existence.
This is the state from which I was born.

In other words, death puts you into the perfect conditions for life.

Another is this:

Anything that exists must be definable in sensory terms (evidentialism).
Non-existence cannot be defined in sensory terms.
Therefore, non-existence is impossible.
In conclusion, because non-existence is impossible, I must exist always.

In other words, because I cannot fathom death, and no one can describe oblivion, I decide that the term "death" is vacuous, a fear tactic, and simply does not exist.
When everything makes too much sense, that's when you know you've got none. It's this confidence in reality that makes me uneasy.

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Cybernetic_Jazz
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Re: Death Refutations

Post by Cybernetic_Jazz »

Experiencing transpersonal forces, whether we consider them gods, goddesses, angels, demons, elemental kings and queens, etc., has given me the sense that there's a 'there' to recede back to because it seems like I'm often meeting that world's inhabitants in small ways through the day and occasionally in rather relatively big ways. While I've carefully considered the Master and Emissary possibility that my right hemisphere is just playing all kinds of games with my left to keep me going that suggestion doesn't seem to hold all that well when I consider the variety.

What I often feel seeping through, when i don't feel fully pinned down, is a sort of vanilla, holy, innocence that sort of glows like a divine child on an old white-washed Hallmark card, have an almost Aspergian logical nature, and I think it's that child-like energy fusing with the struggles of life is what gives all of this the poignance it has.

So yeah, I'd say all of the internal dualities and adding a few good miraculous proofs for good measure where at this point it would take more credulity for me to be a materialist/physicalist.

Also I'd add, if I were to touch on something more philosophic, if matter's dead/unconscious there's no means for us to be here having this experience and from there we fall into the Dennett/Churchland absurdity of us not actually having this experience, or me hallucinating my experience of typing this post. Panpsychism is an attempted explanation to the contrary which works out so-so (the matter-binding is a bit too direct), Hillary Putnam's style of functionalism seems like it would go a long way to explain egregores and the like but it runs into a problem in that it models a behavior but it still doesn't give us anything solid to pin consciousness down to. While I've tried looking into Russell/Mock/James monism I still see more of an attempted truce between idealism and materialism through monism than I see a coherent attempt to explain the at least virtual in-behavior dualism, or I might just admit that Jame's 'Tigers in India' thought experiment goes over my head.
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CCoburn
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Re: Death Refutations

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I wrote that a while back, similar but different. That BW Guy is a lot like me, but also a lot different ! And I just wrote something similar on another Forum !

Anyway CJazz you remind me of the Stalking Hyena from OC, A couple of fucking Brains that evolved into something with legs and walked away, who knows ?

:-)

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cactusjack543
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Re: Death Refutations

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i kind of prefer the question.. (dark death?) my answer: Having a bad hair day.... . ..
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PoisonPen
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Re: Death Refutations

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Cybernetic_Jazz,

From a phenomenological perspective, what we experience is real, as, if "real" refers to anything, it must necessarily refer to our perception of being. And being can be defined by restriction to time and space, as these are the phenomena which differentiate our current state of being from any unremembered, putative pre-life state. In a Kantian sense, it's our insistence on creating artificial divisions of our experience into schema which makes us different from, say, a rock. To the Universe-in-itself there is no hot and cold, light and dark, male and female, good and evil, et al., there's just oneness in everything. One could say, then, that it's the willingness to accept restrictions which allows for being alive and self-aware in the sense we recognize it.

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CCoburn
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Re: Death Refutations

Post by CCoburn »

PoisonPen wrote:Cybernetic_Jazz,

And being can be defined by restriction to time and space, as these are the phenomena which differentiate our current state of being from any unremembered, putative pre-life state. In a Kantian sense, it's our insistence on creating artificial divisions of our experience into schema which makes us different from, say, a rock. To the Universe-in-itself there is no hot and cold, light and dark, male and female, good and evil, et al., there's just oneness in everything. One could say, then, that it's the willingness to accept restrictions which allows for being alive and self-aware in the sense we recognize it.
And "Being" can be defined in the "Absence" of Time and Space, e.g. Primordial Consciousness, God, Singularity, Kether, and Beyond...Nothing, Zero Volume ! Infinitesimal ! Paradoxical ! Something from nothing, ad infinitum ! Serpentae Insanium !

:-)

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PoisonPen
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Re: Death Refutations

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Spida,

Phenomenology is an attempt to do an end-run around metaphysics by accepting axiomatically that our dasein, our experience of we-in-the-world, is necessarily real as there's nothing else conceivably for us to consider real. And what differentiates this human perception of self and paradoxical awareness of both aloneness and shared gestalt with others from other kinds of existence is the restrictions of time and space. While physics can mathematically conceive of existence without time and space, and while you can assemble words which describe a state of existing without time and space, we can't actually conceive of them; if we could, we wouldn't have that distinctively human dasein. Husserl is crafting something akin to Kant's categorical imperative, but for being rather than thinking, establishing that which must be considered axiomatic in order for being itself to occur.

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CCoburn
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Re: Death Refutations

Post by CCoburn »

I would make a couple distinctions here. There is Macrocosmic Four Dimensional Spacetime created by an expansion of Primordial Consciousness, and then there is Microcosmic space created by consciousness as a medium in which to act out our dreams, for example. This creation of illusory space is a natural process of consciousness, Einstein even called our "Reality" an illusion, but that's a bit different.

As far as what's real. I would say consciousness is pretty foundational, perhaps even the most fundamental substance of existence given my current ideology.

But whether or not the "Space" is created Within, or Without it is difficult if not impossible to imagine an existence without it. It would be like pure Being - I am, I suppose and nothing else. Such as the Primordial consciousness prior to expansion when the entire existence is 'Within'.

That's a quick reply; about all I have time for. I will come back again and have another look.

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CCoburn
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Re: Death Refutations

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Initially I had a difficult time conceiving of an existence in the absence of space. I attempted this however because regression through the eons would ultimately yield this type of existence, given a contemporary cosmology. Eventually I considered this endeavor a success and have moved on, and now take it for granted for the most part.

If it were possible to create an experiment pertinent to consciousness within a zero volume existence. An existence that would be composed entirely within the microcosm. Then the microcosm itself could create an illusory four dimensional reality construct, and for me this is most effectively done in the context of a dreamscape. Granted the microcosmic reality is somewhat distorted in comparison with the macrocosm.

Another way I started looking at this earlier today(an analogy) involves the Guf or Tree of Souls(Tol), and the concept of 'Seeding'. The descending of souls from the Guf would be the macrocosmic Tol "going to seed", as the macrocosm began 'Within' as a so-called Godseed, thus expanding into a ToL. So there may not be a "Big Crunch", but instead the universe would expand into nothingness, and die. But not before seeding the aether which would serve as primordial origins for other universes, so something akin to a multiverse in lieu of a never ending singular causal chain of the absolute.

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Re: Death Refutations

Post by Cybernetic_Jazz »

PoisonPen wrote:Cybernetic_Jazz,

From a phenomenological perspective, what we experience is real, as, if "real" refers to anything, it must necessarily refer to our perception of being. And being can be defined by restriction to time and space, as these are the phenomena which differentiate our current state of being from any unremembered, putative pre-life state. In a Kantian sense, it's our insistence on creating artificial divisions of our experience into schema which makes us different from, say, a rock. To the Universe-in-itself there is no hot and cold, light and dark, male and female, good and evil, et al., there's just oneness in everything. One could say, then, that it's the willingness to accept restrictions which allows for being alive and self-aware in the sense we recognize it.
I think what stops me from going quite that stoic is the sense that, so long as I'm in the flesh, I'm a story. Even if I were willing to throw my story aside and say 'everything is everything' I realize that my story is something of a societal credit score, that I could also burn that score irreparably if I don't pay attention and my life afterward could be very long and hellish in all the worst ways. That last part also reminds me - it's my credit score with myself, and one I can't run from especially at the wee hours of the morning or as the alarm clock is beeping. The other thing, and it could just be my point in my own spiritual development, is if we abandon story in the way some Buddhist or Hindu schools might recommend - what's left for us but to collapse back into the dust? It could be that there's no purpose and no point, often times I think in the broader sense that's more likely than not, we're still each and all bundles of wound up stresses and pressures annealing our way through life and it often starts off with being fed huge dreams in childhood, running up the staircase in our teens like we're told to, sprinting as hard as we can in our 20's, either coming into victory, broken dreams, or more realistically a blend of both by our thirties, regaining sanity and balancing it out toward our forties, and I'm still not into my fifth decade yet (38) so I can't speak beyond that but I really sense that there's a natural curve to us - much like any other plant or animal where that growth and resolution curve walks itself out and major structural disruptions are often considered tragic.

When I look at consciousness I can't help but think we're the bleeding edge of mathematical monsters, and meditating on a few doses you can sort of sense the pen of the unknown writing your thoughts into being. In so many ways that rendering feels a lot like what one might expect if the universe were getting as close as it could to doing something like dividing by zero. The metaphysical uncanniness of people and animals makes life and consciousness almost seem like a dimension of space where, if consciousness were what it was to be a mathematical monster being etched on space time, it would be like the condensation of information into near infinite creases. Hard to tell if that intuition is autonomously accurate or just comes from being made of trillions of tiny machines which in and of themselves are complex beyond belief - it seems like a great description of the territory either way.

I'd agree that perception in a way is the source of everything that's deemed real, or at least we can't know its there without having perceived it (ie. real to us), and I even catch guys like Michael Shermer these days admitting that if you've experienced it it's technically 'real' - just that they may differ in their interpretation of whether an event or experience is only real in a neurological sense or real in a broader or more transpersonal/profound way. Part of what keeps me classifying is my desire to know how these things can be used, applied, learned from, and I think especially important to me is how we could find ways to have less frictions with other planes, less frictions with the rules of life, and find better ways to do society. I already love a lot of what Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, Bret Weinstein, and Eric Weinstein are trying to think through on that front and in a way I see the occult sphere and really touching base with it properly rather than just treating it as an oddity or entertainment item as critical for whatever sort of 'Game B' incentive model we may be able to come up with. In some ways I think guys like Gordon White also do a great job of keeping one foot in the magic and the other in the societal analytics and that curve of analysis is something I watch with keen interest.

You may very well agree with a lot of what I said above, I don't know, just that these are some of the main reasons why I generally don't push myself to live in the maximum zoom-out scale such as thinking of my significance over billions or trillions of years or anything like that. The sense of being almost infinitely responsible for this body, mind, and how well it fares in life (and to whatever degree possible other minds and bodies in my space) seems to be woven in and through me like white on rice.
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Re: Death Refutations

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But that's what narrative is, in essence: a deliberate limitation. As a Jungian, I'm always intensely aware of both narrative and the role of meta-narrative in constructing it. What makes narrative so challenging once one is aware it exists is the existential reality that creating it involves crafting walls, cutting off other potential meanings in favour of one specific meaning. While there's always branching options within the narrative itself, following it means deliberately blinding yourself to other ways of interpreting it. To put it another way, the reason you are who you are is because you've chosen not to be all the things you're not.
Cybernetic_Jazz wrote: You may very well agree with a lot of what I said above, I don't know, just that these are some of the main reasons why I generally don't push myself to live in the maximum zoom-out scale such as thinking of my significance over billions or trillions of years or anything like that. The sense of being almost infinitely responsible for this body, mind, and how well it fares in life (and to whatever degree possible other minds and bodies in my space) seems to be woven in and through me like white on rice.
I'm an INTP, so I'm all about overarching systems, patterns, and the "big picture" view. In fact, the major failing of INTPs is our tendency to bump into trees while we're examining the forest. From my perspective, you're trying to read a book through a microscope, while I imagine you'd see me as trying to find a contect lens with a telescope. I'm curious whether you've had your Meyers-Briggs archetype tested.

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Re: Death Refutations

Post by Cybernetic_Jazz »

PoisonPen wrote:I'm an INTP, so I'm all about overarching systems, patterns, and the "big picture" view. In fact, the major failing of INTPs is our tendency to bump into trees while we're examining the forest. From my perspective, you're trying to read a book through a microscope, while I imagine you'd see me as trying to find a contect lens with a telescope. I'm curious whether you've had your Meyers-Briggs archetype tested.
I've often tested INTJ but occasionally get INTP or ISTJ, a few of those tend to be a little bit over center.

I think the way I've put it is my life, and its circumstances, have had a lot of velocity (both good and bad) and that's probably done a lot to make me look for the best in things and keep exploring sectors that I identify as such.
You don't have to do a thing perfect, just relentlessly.

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