ctmu

i’ve alwaye had a problem with this argument that nothing is lost or wasted therefore consciousness doesn’t die with the body. i’m not saying that i know or feel certain that consciousness dies with the body, in fact i would throw my money in with the idea that consciousness does somehow continue to exist after body death. however. the argument is dumb. here is why:

take a glass cup and drop it on the floor. it shatters. so where is the “cup”? does it still exist somehow in cup heaven?

no. the glass particles continue to exist but as fragmented pieces with no cup-form. the cup is a higher order emergent property, a more complex and dependent form. that form can be destroyed while the underlying elements remain.

so i always thought of this as an analogy for consciousness; conscious is a higher order emergent form, begotten by continually presiding and VERY complex dynamic interactions between neurological networks. from that view, the body can die and the neurons themselves still exist, but the activity inside the neurons is reduced to near-meaninglessness with respect to what consciousness means and is at the neurological level. the mind can be dropped and shatter, literally cease to exist just like the cup.

i’m not saying this is necessarily how consciousness works and again i have reason to suspect that consciousness or something of it does persist body death. however, my counter argument still needs to be addressed, because i believe that it refutes the typical argument of “nothing is ever wasted or lost” that supposedly demonstrates consciousness persisting after body death. in fact the cup is indeed wasted and lost when it shatters; in fact, things are always being wasted and vanishing. it’s just how reality works. it’s why there can even exist s selection mechanism like natural selection.

Thats a pretty good analogy id say.
I want to follow up on it but realize it matters in how many pieces the glass breaks.

Maybe a worthless person, i.e. someone with no structural integrity, shatters into a trillion grains and a big soul cracks in two.
Dunno.
Intersting idea.

damn yes. how did i not see that idea before.

also the cup analogy may not even be an accurate analogy because consciousness as form may not be the same type of form as a cup as form. it requires further exploration.

Its now caught my attention as a vessel.
That life is a holding-together of this organic, vulnerable something in some structure beyond that.

Inside the cup analogy the cup could also topple and spill the life but not get smashed.

Anyway thats just poetry.

I do sense that self-valuing integrity can survive as a sort of blueprint signature and then develop another organic, time-invested being.
A new character could emerge in a similar way, though it wouldn't be the same. Maybe even past life memories under rare circumstances when enough materials are present in the present to simulate or retrace an occurrence like the brain uses fresh sensory conceptions to give shape to more ancient occurrences.

All kinds of analogies are possible, but all will flatten the idea.

Im very unconvinced that there are not such things as dead former humans hovering in some twilight realm alongside us. Also people when they just died seem to be able to talk to everyone. Its just odd. I figure I might as well not have an opinion.

Hey but whats far more relevant than this is the survival of self-valuing integrity regardless of lifeforms-identity.

The choice on which the whole of the west is mythically based; Achilles preference for eternal glory over immortality.

The fearful soul wishes merely to avoid the mystery of death, where the strong soul sees that regardless of death, what can be done by life may take on a life on its own. Children are an easy way, great works a harder one. For me, resolving the noble 2800 year old question of the Greeks is my Achillean pride, my western heart.