Freebase Dali

I said I'm not a murderer/rapist because I don't want to go around murdering and raping people, not because I don't want to go to prison. Perhaps you misunderstood my post. It follows that I think murder and rape is immoral. I don't care where that morality comes from. It still isn't the kind of thing I refrain from doing simply because there's a prison sentence attached to it. I haven't changed my position on this.


So then your answer is unsupported speculation? I gave you a supported reason that it's to our evolutionary advantage to co-exist with our own species. We can speculate as to the intellectual mechanisms along those lines and probably be far closer to the mark than "reincarnation".

Sure. But at the same time, I don't think about driving to my parent's house and murdering them in their sleep simply because I won't be able to bring them back from the dead. I care about them, and I don't think I'd be able to go through with that even if I could bring them back.

It's true we are able to emotionally detach from far-removed tragedies. It was not required of our species to be emotionally attached to every living human or thing. Early man existed in tribes. It was to that tribe's advantage to invest in it, not necessarily the entirety of the species, at least emotionally or consciously. But even then, it was still necessary to co-exist with other tribes, because the gene pools needed the opportunity to become diverse.
I don't see this [being conditionally attached] as true psychopathy in our standard definition, as I don't believe such a thing to be a mental disorder. We ourselves characterize disorders based on a norm, not a standard outside of our own capacity to adhere to.
It's easier to see the relevance of this via the fact that we emotionally connect to people we spend time with, versus someone we've never met. It should be obvious why there are differences in emotional attachment there.


I'm not asserting a philosophical argument. I'm asserting facts and reasonable conclusions.

This makes absolutely no sense from a neurological standpoint.
Memories and consciousness is a function of our brains. When the brain ceases to function, that person's consciousness does as well. It doesn't mean that the brain was not functioning before it stopped. It just means it stopped.

Take a computer, for example. Pretend it is sentient. It does calculations with its processor, and stores information on its drives that it can access at any time. Let's say it prints out useful calculations, then someone pulls the plug and it stops functioning. It can no longer calculate, but it has calculated, and there is evidence of that. It does not go on calculating, as it is turned off. Its mechanisms functioned, now they don't. It was sentient during this time, and had consciousness... no longer having it does not change this. It doesn't matter from which perspective this is observed. It's verifiable. Even if it was not verifiable, the print out still exists as evidence, even though the collective consciousness is not there to see it. (tree falls in the woods...)

Subjective experience does not dictate the physical world, so we use a plurality of experience to make observations about it and arrive at a probable conclusion. Which is what I'm doing. I find that to be more valuable than a single person's philosophical meanderings that have no relevance to the world we live in.
Why would I try to do that? The problem here is you seem to be arguing that memory is something other than a neurological function, which you're still not any closer to proving.

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John Wilkes Booth

Though not quite as admirably as human morality, which they have to feed off like parasites in order to survive.

Lord Larehip

Not at all. Psychopaths have wrought tremendous changes to human history and consciousness. The Holocaust, the Stalin purges, Mao's Great Leap Forward, Pol Pot, the Inquisition, etc. The world will long reverberate to the impact of the psychopaths among us. I'll go so far as to say that human morality and ethics seem incapable of progressing without them. Nothing will make you appreciate compassion and empathy like running into someone who doesn't have any.

John Wilkes Booth

My point was more that while psychopaths are perfectly adept at manipulating people in a society with moral values, that doesn't make a society full of psychopaths viable from an evolutionary p.o.v.

Lord Larehip

I've read your post, Dali, and I appreciate your thoughts on the matter and I'll get back to them sooner or later but I don't want to get bogged down in that right now or I'll never finish this. Let me finish posting my argument.

Okay, having presented a case for the survival of consciousness after death, how do we then make the leap to reincarnation? In a word--sensation.

We have sensations of two particular types: 1. Physical--which are sensations related to the sense-organs such as feeling hot, seeing an apple, smelling bacon frying, touching a rough surface, hearing the chirping of birds, etc. In other words, the sensations caused by and indicative of outside events. 2. Mental--which are sensations related to emotion and qualia. Qualia are sensations we have that are so personal that we cannot describe to others. If I twist my ankle, I can only describe the pain to you, you can't experience it directly. I cannot explain my perception of the color blue. The way I experience the taste of chocolate is known only to me. I cannot convey it to you. The sensation of falling is another quale.

What sets sensation apart from memory is that memory is not real-time but sensation is. I can remember an event long after it happened but the sensations I felt occurred only during that event and are now over. While we can remember an event strongly over the passage of years, sensations will always dwindle to zero eventually. That's why a serial killer must keep killing, for example. For a while, he satisfies himself by recalling his last kill and how good it felt, how sexually gratifying it was, but sooner or later that memory just won't cut it anymore and he will need a new one to replace it with.

Memory and sensation are alike in that both occur in a two-fold process. First I sense an event, then I recall it. That constitutes an experience. With sensation, first I have a certain sensation but MUST experience it again to complete the full sensation. If you get hit the chest with a foul ball, many sensations will go through you but they are so fleeting that you can't categorize them. If you are hit again some months or years later with a another foul ball foul ball or some other object hits you, you will remember the last time you felt that sensation. In fact, you'll remember every single time it's happened. If you hit a patch of black ice in the road and go into a spin, you will remember all the previous times these particular sensations were experienced--when you lost control in the snow driving down the freeway, when your bald tires on a rain-slicked caused you to lose total traction, etc. In other words, you must re-live sensations. You recall memories, you re-live sensations.

In life, you are building up a never-ending catalog of memories and sensations and you'll go on having them right up to the moment of death. Dying in itself produces sensations. But if death extinguishes consciousness, then you can't re-live those experiences. But you can't experience them disembodied either. So what must happen? You must be born again in a new body ready to reap what was sown in the last life. What is called karma.

Why isn't there a heaven or hell? Well, suppose heaven is a place of eternal bliss. How could you feel that? Your consciousness doesn't work that way. All sensations must dwindle to zero over time so this blissful feeling will simply fade. If heaven was a place of transcendent and eternal joy then any earthly memory you have is painful in comparison. CONTRADICTION. You can't have painful memories in a realm where there is only joy for all eternity.

Same with hell. If hell is a place of eternal pain and torment, you can't experience it that way because all sensations dwindle to zero over time. If you can never feel happiness again in this place of agony then any earthly memory will be pleasant in comparison. CONTRADICTION. You can't have pleasant memories in a realm where there is only sorrow for all eternity.

While I have skipped over a lot of stuff to make this as concise as I dare, that is my argument in a nutshell.

Freebase Dali

I'm still waiting for you to make a logical transition from dying to reincarnation, and explain why it must be true.

You simply said,
This is basically saying that you can't experience anything after you die, therefore reincarnation, because you must reap what you've sown.

That's quite a leap. And it ignores the fact that memory, consciousness and experience is still dependent on you being alive to do it, since it's a neuro-physiological process.

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John Wilkes Booth

Why don't I remember any of my past lives? That makes reincarnation seem rather pointless.

Freebase Dali

Good point. And according to Lord Larehip, if the memories aren't there, then they didn't exist to begin with. So ultimately, nothing exists. Not even Solipsism.

Good job. Argument over. Whatever response he replies with won't have happened, therefore, good thread. Good fun. Bye bye.

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Lord Larehip

Oh, but there is one last question, isn't there? What about god? Is there a god? Quite simply, I don't know but I had no reason to resort to one.

Then how does this mechanism of reincarnation work? I don't know but there is no reason to assume it is anything other than a natural and automatic process.

But what about the end of the universe? How do we deal with that if there must be reincarnation but no place to reincarnate into?

Now we enter the Twilight Zone.

If the universe come to a crashing end, it doesn't matter because consciousness is eternal. What is eternity? Time beyond measure. Indeed, eternity isn't really time because time by definition is finite, an interval--it is measurable whereas eternity cannot be measured. Our consciousness is eternal but its workings are not because we cannot experience eternity directly. Everything dwindles to zero eventually, everything decays, everything dies.

So how would we experience eternity in our finite state? Quite simply, we cannot reach the end. In the totality of our existence, even if we live billions of lifetimes, at the end of the universe we can only go back, Jack, and do it again. We would just live that same succession of lives over again with no idea that we are doing so. Each time feels like the first time, the only time. But, gee, couldn't that mean the universe has already ended and we are just re-living lives we've already been through a millions times? Yes, it could. Absolutely, it could.

But let's look at just this life you are living right now. What happens to it? You know you're going to die someday. And even though consciousness is eternal, the person you are now will cease to be. It will be as though this person never lived. Doesn't that contradict this whole argument? Yes, it might. One solution is that the total conscious entity that is going through all these births and deaths contains the "record" of this life and has access to it so that the conscious being you are now is not lost at death but is, in fact, retained. But even if that is so what happens to this you that you are right now, does it just go dormant? No.

Just as you must re-live all your various incarnations at the end of the universe, you must simply re-live this one life over and over again but each time will feel like the one and only time. And the same is true for all the other lives you have lived and will live. In fact, it isn't really proper to speak of them as a succession of lives. We are living them all right now--over and over and over again. Cogs in cogs.

For an eternal consciousness, a succession incarnations doesn't make sense. That implies time, a sequence, which eternity has no need for. An eternal consciousness just lives all its incarnations at once, over and over and over endlessly. So even if the universe ends, we wouldn't know it because it wouldn't matter.

Is there no way off this insane karmic merry-go-round, this samsara???

Perhaps. Ask yourself what then is reality if lives and worlds repeat regardless of whether there even is a universe left?? It is a dream of the total conscious entity that you really are. And you and everyone and everything are just bit players and props in that dream. You and everyone are all part of the dreamer just as everything and everyone is just some part of you in one of your dreams. That means we are really one consciousness--asleep. And perhaps someday, the dreamer will awaken and we will all be called home, just as all the characters in one of your dreams is called home when you awaken. Cogs in cogs.

We know that a dream can be real but whoever thought that reality could be a dream? We exist, of course, but how…in what way? As we believe, as flesh-and-blood human beings? Or are we just parts of someone’s feverish, complicated nightmare? Think about it and then ask yourself, do you live here in this country, in this world? Or do you live instead in the Twilight Zone? --Rod Serling from the Twilight Zone episode Shadow Play.

What if a demon were to creep after you one night, in your loneliest loneliness, and say, 'This life which you live must be lived by you once again and innumerable times more; and every pain and joy and thought and sigh must come again to you, all in the same sequence. The eternal hourglass will again and again be turned and you with it, dust of the dust!' Would you throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse that demon? Or would you answer, 'Never have I heard anything more divine'?--Friedrich Nietzsche

Freebase Dali

I think I read what you just posted, but I don't remember it, because I've reincarnated before I finished the last sentence.

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