BootsnAll Travel Community

Not being religious, but very interested by all religions, i have come across the one shot/reincarnate subject before. I am technically a roman catholic (only because i wasn't able to debate it when i was 6 months old...) but i feel the closest to Buddhism. But personally, no one knows what goes on once the (seemingly) final door is closed on us. So personally I feel live this life to the fullest because it's the only one you got, right now.
--Diana

I just keep thinking our brains are essentially computers. If you destroy a computer, the information it stored was lost. So is probably true of a brain, which holds ourselves in it.

not sure...but i'm gonna get it right the first time

I'm with Stephen Mattison on this one. I'm a big fan of the Computational Theory of Mind, that we are essentially information processors that have evolved over time. The theory dispenses of the need for a magical "soul" that "breathes life" into our bodies.

Whilst reincarnation is a lovely concept and one which undoubtably helps many to deal with inevitable human mortality, the only sense I feel we can each "live on" as a whole past death is as information, which *can* be transferred. You as a person can continue to live on in people's memories, in stories, in photographs as information. To me this is a wonderful thing.

Without wishing to sound too morbid, I also like the concept of burial; that after I pass away my flesh will provide nutrients for other plants and organisms to flourish. There is, in a sense, a certain pleasurable feeling of togetherness with the universe knowing that some of your atoms will be part of other living structures after you have passed. I think this fact, coupled with the mindblowing fact that we are all made of stars - yes, the atoms we are made of originated from some distant stellar explosion billions of years ago - demonstrate that scientific theories consistent with the observable facts can be just as thought-provoking and profound as fanciful mystical concepts such as the "soul" which don't have an ounce of proof.

quote:

Originally posted by imposter:
I'm with Stephen Mattison on this one. I'm a big fan of the Computational Theory of Mind, that we are essentially information processors that have evolved over time. The theory dispenses of the need for a magical "soul" that "breathes life" into our bodies.

Whilst reincarnation is a lovely concept and one which undoubtably helps many to deal with inevitable human mortality, the only sense I feel we can each "live on" as a whole past death is as information, which *can* be transferred. You as a person can continue to live on in people's memories, in stories, in photographs as information. To me this is a wonderful thing.

Without wishing to sound too morbid, I also like the concept of burial; that after I pass away my flesh will provide nutrients for other plants and organisms to flourish. There is, in a sense, a certain pleasurable feeling of togetherness with the universe knowing that some of your atoms will be part of other living structures after you have passed. I think this fact, coupled with the mindblowing fact that we are all made of stars - yes, the atoms we are made of originated from some distant stellar explosion billions of years ago - demonstrate that scientific theories consistent with the observable facts can be just as thought-provoking and profound as fanciful mystical concepts such as the "soul" which don't have an ounce of proof.

Agree 100%. I'm an athiest myself (in the sense most people misuse the word "agnostic," though), yet my friends find it paradoxical that I'm also rather philosophical and captivated by the continual wonder of existence. The most aggravating are those that refuse to believe one can be both athiest and "spiritual." They're convinced I'm a closeted theist. Bah.

Personally, I think the cosmos is a much more fascinating place if we cut out the assumption that there's some old geezer in the clouds who made it all for our benefit.

Stephen and those who agree,
1. A computer is created and loaded with data. How was yours created and loaded?
2. If you believe that it was pure accidental combination of basic "particles", how did those particles get created?
3. If you believe that it was all created in the "Big Bang", what was there to create the "Big Bang"?

If you accept the "scientific" premise that nothing can be destroyed (simple movement back and forth between matter and energy), then how could anything be created from nothing? Or, rephrased, how is it possible anything exists?

There is clearly much I do not understand.

quote:

Originally posted by ItchySoles:
Stephen and those who agree,
1. A computer is created and loaded with data. How was yours created and loaded?
2. If you believe that it was pure accidental combination of basic "particles", how did those particles get created?
3. If you believe that it was all created in the "Big Bang", what was there to create the "Big Bang"?

If you accept the "scientific" premise that nothing can be destroyed (simple movement back and forth between matter and energy), then how could anything be created from nothing? Or, rephrased, how is it possible anything exists?

There is clearly much I do not understand.

I'll provide my own answer, not speaking for anyone else.

1. Our brains are the product of billions of years of evolution. "Data" or "information" is imprinted on our brain via electric impulses that receive it from external stimuli. I know that sounds rather simplistic, but there it is.

2&3 are essentially the same question:

This notion is put to rest by two very basic points: There's no logical reason to assume there had to be a state of "nothing" from which the Big Bang and thus all matter emerged. We've never encountered "nothing," it's a completely unproven concept. For all we know, "nothing" is an impossible state and "something" is the default state of affairs.

Second, the belief that there always have to be a cause for an observed phenomenon is not necessarily valid. The physical laws that we know and love cease to be valid reference points in extreme states, such as that which would have existed at the point of the Big Bang. Quantum theory also shows that the universe does operates by completely different rules at the most minute states. And, in fact, scientists have shown that particles do indeed appear and disappear into and out of existence, rendering the "neither created nor destroyed" clause for matter invalid.

That's the marvelous thing about the universe: so many of the things we take for granted as being how things operate is clearly not the way it is in the most extreme conditions (singularities, black holes, etc.). Our Laws of Physics are useful for building things and such, but they cannot be maintained into the quantum level.

quote:

There is clearly much I do not understand.

Join the club! You ask some truly fundamental questions that rock the foundations of any explanation of where the universe originated from - even those who comfortably claim "God did it" have to respond to the uncomfortable question "so who created God then?"

I do not claim that science has all the answers. What I do claim is that the scientific method is the only valid tool we have at our disposal that has a hope of getting closer to those answers.

To answer your questions:

1. I view the mind as being "what the brain does" - it is the activity of the brain, which is an organ of the human body, which has evolved along with the hands and the liver and the lungs over millions of years through adapting to its environment. Our brains have been hard-wired into a series of specific "modules" to solve day-to-day problems that help us to survive (a random example being, say, depth perception of a three-dimensional world from a 2-D image).

2. The particles which make up you and I were originally created in the Big Bang. This theory is supported by much experimental evidence; firstly there is a residual "glow" of radiation in the universe that is the lingering aftermath of the Big Bang. Secondly, every part of the universe appears to be rushing away from itself - which suggests if you could play time in reverse, the universe would shrink in on itself to a single point. Thirdly, particle physicists devote their entire lives to accelerating particles to ridiculously high energies and smashing them into one another in huge accelerators, and are briefly able to create particles - and conditions - such as occurred during the Big Bang. Similar to evolution, it's not a question of "belief" as you put it - it's a well established fact.

3. This is the biggie, and the answer is: we just don't know. I think it actually ties in nicely with question 1. Our human minds evolved to solve problems of our day-to-day existence; our most pressing issues for thousands upon thousands of years were finding food, not getting eaten, procreating and looking after the little'uns - all on a predictable, three-dimensional earth. Our brains simply aren't wired to imagine four, five?, eleven? dimensions, or the curvature of gravity, or the effects of special relativity. But thanks to their incredible adaptive nature to logical problem solving and with the help of some real-world models and helpful analogies, we can imagine such concepts - but it's bloody difficult.

Think of the concept of nothing. What do you imagine when you think of nothing? Personally I picture a black space with nothing in it, and I think most people would imagine this too. But in the Physics sense, this is wrong - nothing is the absense of something. It's simply not there. No black space, no time, no colour - nothing. It simply doesn't exist. The nothing outside the universe isn't an infinite black void. The universe is not a glowing sphere expanding into an infinite black space as many commonly see it. It's just a glowing sphere. There is no infinite black space. It's not expanding into anything. It goes against all common sense - surely it must be expanding into something? - but our common sense is based upon our hundreds of thousands of years of evolution on our "flat" three-dimensional Earth, where things always expand into other things. Everything we know goes completely out of the window when we consider the universe.

My point is we have to re-train ourselves from our three-dimensional "programming" in order to begin to entertain such questions as how did something come from nothing? As Mahlerite mentioned, it is already possible for "something" to come from "nothing" - the empty vacuum of space can spontaneously split into matter: a particle-antiparticle pair. But to me, empty space is not the same definition of nothing as the pre-Big Bang nothing, so I think it's dubious to extend that concept to the universe's origins. In fact, all the "scientific" theories that currently try to answer this are about as scientific as "God" to me, as they are pure philosophical conjecture...

Yep, we've a long way to go.

maybe I should finish what I started 2.5 years ago in this thread...

NATION

interNATIONal
NATIONality
NATIONalism
coroNATION
alieNATION
DAM-NATION
denomiNATION
destiNATION
discrimiNATION
domiNATION
elimiNATION
termiNATION
incliNATION
multiNATIONal
nomiNATION
NATION state
NATIONwide
origiNATION
extermiNATION
condemNATION

oh yeah....reincarNATION

When we start being ONE family again we will no longer see each other as different NATIONs.

Then we will no longer practice discrimiNATION. Nor will we try to elimiNATE(ION) each other in war. Nor will we want to subjugate and domiNATE(ION) others. We will no longer race each other to see which NATION is on top of any list.
Too bad, we haven´t been ABLE to get the UNited NATIONs to work!

pattern holds more or less across Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian and into Romanian, Swedish, Danish, German, Lithuanian, Latvian, Dutch...

so...how you chose to live in a past life, determines where you are re-born into in this LIfe.

You forgot one...

diviNATION

The pretended art discovering secret or future by preternatural means.