Lilith666 Posted November 23, 2015 Share Posted November 23, 2015 How is that selfish, Portobella? We all want the people we care about to stay around. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
roadrunner Posted November 23, 2015 Share Posted November 23, 2015 I'm with miamia on this. There is nothing scary per se about your brain ceasing to function and dying but the thought of leaving my family scares me. Will they be OK? Will religion ever die? Will we ever find intelligent life? Will my kid become president? All of these are things that I will miss out on. It almost pisses me off more than anything. There are more days than not when I feel like I've seen enough and am comfortable if anything were to happen. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Aiyana Posted November 23, 2015 Share Posted November 23, 2015 I don't fear death at all. What I do fear, however, is some Second Amendment Gun Nut going postal while I'm out shopping one day, or a neighbor not knowing how to properly hold his gun and accidentally firing it through the wall into my skull. This shit goes on every day here in the US. I don't mind dying, but I don't want to die solely because of someone else's stupidity. Wow. I'm sorry that you're afraid of me... Do you actually KNOW any "gun nuts"? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vigile Posted November 23, 2015 Share Posted November 23, 2015 When we're dead, we won't know we're dead -- the dead can't suffer. And, unless the doc tells you you're going to die, most of us won't even know it's coming, so what's to be afraid of? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mythra Posted November 23, 2015 Author Share Posted November 23, 2015 From "The Case Against Immortality" by Keith Augustine http://infidels.org/library/modern/keith_augustine/immortality.html Modern science demonstrates the dependence of consciousness on the brain, verifying that the mind must die with the body. This conclusion is emotionally difficult to accept. Dylan Thomas forcefully expresses the animosity that many of us feel toward the prospect of our inevitable extinction: "Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light" (Lamont 211). Miguel de Unamuno expresses similar feelings: "If it is nothingness that awaits us, let us make an injustice of it; let us fight against destiny, even though without hope of victory" (Lamont 211). Bertrand Russell comes to a different conclusion: "I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is nonetheless true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting" (Edwards, "Immortality" vi). I must admit that, when confronted by the death of someone close to me, or contemplating my own inevitable death, I am not comforted by such words of wisdom. Nevertheless, we cannot base our beliefs on what we want to be true; the truth can only be found by weighing the evidence for a given idea. In the case of immortality, the extinction hypothesis is supported by strong and incontrovertible evidence from the hard experimental data of physiological psychology, whereas the survival hypothesis is supported at best by weak and questionable anecdotal evidence from parapsychology. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
midniterider Posted November 23, 2015 Share Posted November 23, 2015 It's 15 minutes long. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mythra Posted November 23, 2015 Author Share Posted November 23, 2015 ooh, My bullshit detector just went off. Thank you Carl Sagan. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Furball Posted November 23, 2015 Share Posted November 23, 2015 I am no more afraid of death than I am afraid of going to sleep at night. I won't be conscious of the fact that I am dead anymore than I am conscious that I am asleep every night. People die every day from the most insignificant mundane things. A while back I remember people died from eating a hamburger a jack in the box. Someone can go outside to get the mail and inhale a flu virus which will kill them a week later. I remember a cardinals pitcher who just had a clean bill of health issued to him went to bed one night and died in his sleep of natural causes at the age of 33. Why should I be afraid of something that could happen to me at any moment. Living in fear is a horrible way to live. Fear of death is the #1 tool used in evangelism because it works. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bleedblue22 Posted November 23, 2015 Share Posted November 23, 2015 I'm not really scared of being dead, but I am anxious about dying. since it seems our bodies weren't designed by any intelligence and were instead slowly formed via natural selection to be survival machines, I see no reason for the dying process to be peaceful, since the body having ways to shut down smoothly would not result in any survival value and would not be selected for. So death is everything against what our bodies were programmed to do, so I don't see the human body as dying gracefully. And that probably means a lot of pain and discomfort along the way. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
midniterider Posted November 23, 2015 Share Posted November 23, 2015 ooh, My bullshit detector just went off. Thank you Carl Sagan. If ya cant measure it (with current technology) it aint real!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mythra Posted November 23, 2015 Author Share Posted November 23, 2015 No shortage of other pseudoscience to delve into. And usually some phD backing it up. Don't stop there. http://www.csicop.org/si/show/post-materialist_science_a_smokescreen_for_woo/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SerenelyBlue Posted November 23, 2015 Share Posted November 23, 2015 After I dropped Christianity I fear death less. My reasoning: I'm a biological organism just like any other here on earth. It makes no sense to believe in a magical afterlife. Cultish thought will tell fairy tales. I've grown up. I'm not into fairy tales anymore. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mythra Posted November 24, 2015 Author Share Posted November 24, 2015 I'm not into fairy tales anymore. Bravo. Me neither. And most fairy tales end in "and they lived happily ever after". Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mythra Posted November 24, 2015 Author Share Posted November 24, 2015 midniterider: Just so you know, my comment about bullshit wasn't directed at you personally. Since I have no idea what your take is on Dr. Gary Schwartz. My bullshit detector went off as soon as I heard him talking about materialistic science like it was closed minded and outmoded. When materialist science is SCIENCE. And what this guy is peddling is NOT. Unless he can show some proof for his claims that are verifiable by the scientific community, I know enough about science to know that his stuff will be rejected as quackery. There's no evidence to show that the brain is receiving a signal from some other place and that the brain is just a receiver. There's no evidence for a Universal Mind to which our "soul" or essence will travel after we expire. If you want to buy into it, go for it. But it's not science. It reminds me of the Church of Religious Science. Which is not science either. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bleedblue22 Posted November 24, 2015 Share Posted November 24, 2015 Well one interesting question is to ask, how would you test such a hypothesis? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kristin Posted November 24, 2015 Share Posted November 24, 2015 I have no clue what happens after death, but I am annoyed at my family for their ongoing certainties of heaven and all the etc, etc, etc that go along with their beliefs. Especially since the loss of my dad this past August. Even when I believed in a life after death as an "everlasting life", I couldn't understand how anyone could be so sure. Will my anger over the lies and ongoing annoying declarations of heaven and salvation ever go away? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mythra Posted November 24, 2015 Author Share Posted November 24, 2015 Hi Kristin, and welcome to ex-c. Sorry you lost your dad just recently. Both of my parents died in the past couple of years too. You know, "I don't know what happens after death" is a pretty intelligent answer. Seriously. Don't believe what christians tell you. They don't know there is a heaven. They hope there is a heaven. Two entirely different things. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hereticzero Posted November 24, 2015 Share Posted November 24, 2015 I am not afraid to die. As a Christian, I was afraid to die. After deconverting, I see death as one more adventure into the unknown. That doesn't mean I believe I will continue in spirit after death but rather I have never died before so it will be a new learning experience. The last thing I learn. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
miamia Posted November 24, 2015 Share Posted November 24, 2015 I was just having that debate with someone I know about the whole Is the brain the source of consciousness thing. I err on the side of yes, the brain is the source of consciousness, they were trying to convince me that modern neuroscience has it all wrong, doctors are quacks, spirituality oneness blahblah, the brain is a receiver of consciousness. but my argument to them was, why try to convince me?? If you want to know then find a way to test it. Because peddling speculation is dangerous, even if it seems benign. Your imagination alone cannot help you get any closer to the truth. Sadly a lot of people my age really think it can. That some mystical truth an understanding are built into their own brains and can be reached through meditation alone. Oh, and drugs. and festivals. or rather, not built into their own brains, because your consciousness is not from your brain, its from... something else. and drugs and meditation can "open that portal" to that other thing. That they can't quantify...or prove exists... outside of their imagination... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mythra Posted November 24, 2015 Author Share Posted November 24, 2015 People like the Schwartz guy on the previous page try and have tests that show they can talk to the dead. Double blind studies, etc. But the skeptics can see through them, and they aren't repeatable under controlled circumstances. I hope that guy sells a lot of books, because he will be a pariah in the scientific community. He just looks like John Edwards with a phD to me. You know - I'm a materialist and a skeptic. It is a reaction to losing 20 years because I was gullible and didn't have the tools enough to know it. But I don't think I'm closed minded. If this Schwarz fellow or someone else came out with something credible, and it was peer reviewed by scientists who got on board and who verified it as a real but yet unexplained phenomena, I'd be happy to go with it and spend time learning about it. But there is so much crackpot stuff out there, if you chased every claim around you'd never have time to learn about anything that's real. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
miamia Posted November 24, 2015 Share Posted November 24, 2015 Oh yeah absolutely. here is the video my friend showed me trying to convince me rife with false equivalencies too. which I brought up in response to my friend posting it. also noted that modern neuroscience works with whats in front of them when it comes to understanding consciousness because doing otherwise would not be science, so it isn't looking at it wrong, it just isn't preemptively jumping to conclusions, Idk. Its fucked. So many people around me are new age hippies that have taken college courses and I'm just sitting here not having any of this shit but I barely even finished 10th grade so nobody cares what I have to say. Idk maybe I am just talking out of my ass. asking for evidence, pfft. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mythra Posted November 24, 2015 Author Share Posted November 24, 2015 “One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” ― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.” ― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mythra Posted November 24, 2015 Author Share Posted November 24, 2015 A counter to Alva Noe's ideas: http://thebeautifulbrain.com/2011/12/response-to-alva-noe-art-and-the-limits-of-neuroscience/ 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
miamia Posted November 24, 2015 Share Posted November 24, 2015 Thank you! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mythra Posted November 24, 2015 Author Share Posted November 24, 2015 Noe and Schwartz here are both just repackaging an old idea and making it look like something new. It's called Cartesian Dualism. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts