Some comments on a picture
Got me thinking deeply, and I decided to stop by here again.
Check this stuff out. It doesn’t feel quite right to quote someone else out of the thread? Link is on the picture. It basically summed to wondering what goes on in people’s heads as they die. Here’s my comments:
Post 1:
@Cirrus Light
@Mr grump
Heh. I’m really upset I can’t find this, but there was a commedian who was talking about (I think it was himself?) a motorcycle crash he was in, and one of the questions; “What were you thinking when it happened?”
“Oh, as the motorcycle started swerving out of control as I’m going 90 mph down the freeway, I thought to myself; ‘Did I leave the iron on?’
“And when I was thrown off and I started skidding on the asphault at 60 mph, ‘we should get a puppy!’
“No, it was a bit more like; ‘AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH!!!’”
I think people tend to romanticize death a lot because we like things to have a finishing note. “Little Shop of Horrors,” iirc, was an extremely-well received play, but when it was translated into a movie, people hated it until they gave it a happier ending. Why? They attributed it mostly, I think, to a simple thing that completely puts […] any play, no matter how tragic, in perspective:
In the end, the actors all come out and take a bow.
There’s a strong sense of needing that finality, so I think death gets romanticized into something that has it.
Interestingly enough, though, as cliche as it is, the “life flashing before your eyes” thing is actually something that really happens sometimes, iirc.
@Mr grump
Holy crap that article on “Life Review” was fascinating!…
I’ve heard first and second-hand accounts of people who’ve nearly died in surgery having out-of-body experiences, and in one case, were even able to identify some tools on top of some locker that had been forgotten by the hospital staff, and sure enough, they looked and they were there.
Perhaps the most shocking realization about that, is that under anesthetics, your brain isn’t forming any memories. I’ve been under major surgery before - it shoots by like a blink. One moment they put the mask on, the next you’re waking up - it’s not like sleeping at all, it’s like traveling into the future because you have absolutely no awareness while you’re under. So how in the world can people come back with memories?
Lemme tell ya, after years of intensely studying theoretical physics and general relativity, it occurs to me more and more how pitifully weak our attempts to understand reality are.
Oh, they’re good enough to make the internet, to make laptops, to put a man on the moon (making rockets, life support / environmental control systems to regulate air pressure, temperature using thermodynamic principles and fluid dynamics), very precisely make predictions about the quantum world and the curvature of spacetime itself…
But when you ask
why, the
fundamental nature of reality is completely beyond our understanding. Our very
awareness is completely impossible to explain in any physical means - we should, by everything in the universe, be as un-aware as a “Furby,”
saying we’re hungry and tired and whatnot, but not actually
feeling it as we do.
Why is there anything at all? Why are we aware?
WHY does the universe follow laws at all!? I’m only 21, but
I’m studying my particular specialization a post-graduate level that attests to the fact that I’ve spent a larger portion of my life trying to answer questions and understand things than perhaps anyone I know, except some of my professors. Yet I still don’t think I’ll ever be able to answer those three questions in this life, however much the third tantalizes me.
However, I still do like Mormon theology as the best answer I’ve seen to understanding the metaphysical side of existence, and every bit of Life Review seems to be strongly in support of it to an uncanny degree.
Your question is the most difficult in the world. It is not a question I can answer simply with yes or no. I am not an Atheist. I do not know if I can define myself as a Pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. May I not reply with a parable? The human mind, no matter how highly trained, cannot grasp the universe. We are in the position of a little child, entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of the human mind, even the greatest and most cultured, toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged, obeying certain laws, but we understand the laws only dimly. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that sways the constellations. I am fascinated by Spinoza’s Pantheism. I admire even more his contributions to modern thought. Spinoza is the greatest of modern philosophers, because he is the first philosopher who deals with the soul and the body as one, not as two separate things.
@Eeveeinheat
I want to pat the Eevee and calm it down… Eevees are so cute…
In seriousness, though, I’m just kinda like, “Woah, these guys actually exist, don’t they?” I mean, I went to a Christian school that taught that hogwash, so maybe I’m just in permanent denial and ignore mode on people trying to debunk Evolution.
It’s… Sad. And I need to keep reading Less Wrong to make sure I never become like one of them :I
And once you do you learn that the most successful way of discovery is the scientific method, which contradicts everything ancient man says about god. This means even the idea of god was made up, and as such it’s just as valid as any other myth.
That is a huge pet peeve of mine. A HUGE one.
I know a little bit of science, and I’ll just go ahead and throw in my support of what Albert Einstein wrote.
Also, we actually do have leading theories about the formation of the universe. I think Inflationary Cosmology is a leading one. No, though, if you’re referring to the singularity and times where quantum gravity was important - we don’t really know with any certainty, though every scientist has their favorite ideas and I have mine involving a modification to General Relativity to take into account the intrinsic quantum spin of matter.
So… Yes and no ? Depends on what you mean. First moments of reality, no idea. A milisecond in, a decent idea.
…It predicts that the collapse of a black hole into a schwarzchild solution leads to a rebounding sort of effect - not outwards in the same space that nothing in a black hole can go outward from, but it sort of creates its own universe in a weird… Relativistic way. I don’t think it’s even higher-dimensional, as much as I want to explain it like that. It’s just weird spacetime curvature stuff that our mortal minds struggle to comprehend but the math describes pretty well.
But… Okay, I’m sorry if this is rambly, but I think the real reason this annoys me so, is because one moment you’re mentioning how far the universe is beyond our understanding. I agree. This would seem to indicate a position of humility, knowing full well that our minds cannot grasp the true nature of reality.
But in the very next wind of breath, you say that all religions are so obviously false that they’re simply myths, science reigns supreme over any major religion’s god, and you’re absolutely certain of this, despite the humility that was present in the adjacent sentence.
How can you be so humble about reality, and yet be so certain as to not even entertain the possibility of any validity to any major religion’s gods?
I’ll go on to talk a bit more about this sort of thing (the nature of reality, why I think our understanding of the universe is so shallow, no matter how far science goes) in my next big reply after this short one:
But I will never let my search for answers control my life.
Why not? Then you get degrees, a Ph.D one day, and get to act all snooty because you actually know the science that everyone looks up to but doesn’t know :P
@archestereo
[wrote this for arche, but this applies to your post as well]
@Eeveeinheat
@HJSDGCE
I still don’t buy the nihilistic attitude.
Here’s why I logically believe there’s an afterlife:
1. The first and most fundamental thing we know, is “I think, therefore I am.”
2. On top of this, comes physical reality. This is only #2, though, because we empirically
know our senses can be lied to. It happens all the time even to completely healthy people; sleep.
Or if you want to get something even more relevant: Gravity only exists because we fail to comprehend the true nature of spacetime. Things don’t fall. They follow straight lines in spacetime. However, spacetime is curved, so they follow geodesics, and since we perceive space in single space-like “slices” of “now,” and we perceive time as going from one “now” to another, and to top it off, we can’t actually perceive spacetime directly, we can’t see spacetime curvature. We just see the paths of objects bend, so we say there’s gravity. If our perception was better, we’d come to realize that things actually go “straight,” and spacetime itself is curved.
But, our perception is weak and limited.
Because our perception is limited, 1. is superior to 2, therefore, 2 cannot be used to disprove 1. Our failure to discover the cause of qualia does not mean it does not exist - to make that claim is to use 2 to supersede 1 -
it is to say, while you’re dreaming, that the waking world does not exist because you cannot empirically prove the waking world to exist within your dream.
(I’ve actually had this happen before. I was at a doctor’s appointment, and the doc came in, and I had this weird feeling, so I asked him; “Is this a dream?” He said, “Yes.” But I immediately reasoned to myself; “I’m sitting on this examination table, though - I feel the weight of my body being supported by my bum sitting on this table. I
feel it clear as day! I see this room! It’s all so real. There’s no way I’m actually lying in a bed right now! Sure enough, though, it was just a dream)
That is why I think nihilism, physicalism, this thought that we simply cease to exist when we die - is nothing more than a result of bias, and clinging on to physical reality despite its proven weakness, and using something with proven weakness to try to disprove something that is completely infallible (“I think, therefore I am.”)
Something that would
immensely help discussion is if you understand what
qualia is. If you’re going to challenge it, I will probably refer to “The Mind-Body Problem,” ‘’
The Chinese Room,, ‘’
Solipsism, and ‘’
philosophical zombies. Not saying they disprove the notion - merely that they’re tools. It’s like, if you’re talking about a theory describing the big bang, as possibly being the singularity of a black hole, you need some understanding of general relativity and quantum mechanics, knowing what geodesics, spacetime curvature, time dilation, relativity of simultaneity, quantum spin, fermions vs. bosons, rotating frames of reference - those are important tools to
that discussion.
Likewise, philosophical zombies, Chinese Room, etc., are important tools to this discussion.
@neutralgrey
Stephen Hawking-type takes on aliens are far more terrifying than ones that just abduct a few people.
Hawking is a bit pessimistic, I think: He looks at how ancient colonials treated native African tribes, and thinks that alien civilizations would just as soon genocide us (say, shower the planet with deadly gamma rays from high orbit so we never even have a chance to fight back and entire race dead in ten minutes, or something even more high-tech, like collapse our planet into a black hole) as look at us.
Personally, I think this:
we came freakishly close to nuclear holocuasting ourselves a few times over. Like, more than you even think. There are literally three incidents where one person saying “no” prevented it.
- False “US airbase hit by nuke” signature at NORAD, almost triggered a nuclear response.
- Vascili Arkhiopov (probably butchered that spelling) being the only of three of the submarine’s officers to say “no” to sinking an American destroyer with a nuclear torpedo when it dropped warning charges on them to warn them to surface (which the submarine crew thought were actual depth charges)
- Soviet computer failure signaled hundreds of U.S. missile launches. They almost responded, but the technician on the computer, without any evidence of it aside from the U.S. only launching a few hundred instead of thousands of nukes, said “no.”
…There’s a few others, and who knows how many tales can never reach the public due to CIA/Spetsnaz type secrecy…
And we’ve stopped launching genocides against aborigines. Now we very much condemn that type of thing.
So let me ask you this; if we were more violent, do you really expect that we’d make it to a spacefaring civilization? We may not even be peaceful enough to keep from killing ourselves before then, because we still haven’t made it.
What if warp technology turns out to be something a million times more destructive than a nuke, but as easy to build as a lamp? Do you think we’d survive that?
Then how would any species more violent than us (we stopped killing aborigines) ever make it to that point?
@HJSDGCE
We don’t make God after our image, rather, God makes us after His image.*
Let’s say you’re an omnipotent being with unlimited power. When you can do literally anything, what do you do? If you’re going to have any kind of meaningful existence, you need to allow free will to exist, because an existence where you just make brainless clones worship you for eternity is pointless.
Friendship is Magic and all that. Doesn’t really count if the love’s not real, and the love can’t be real if there was never a choice.
**Here’s something that’s always struck me: maybe I’m just not as aware of it when theists do it, but I’ve noticed an awful lot of circular thinking among atheists. The argument that “We made God just like us - that’s unrealistic, so that is evidence against God” is a great example of one. The first statement is “We made God,” and for that to be evidence against God, we must accept that first statement as fact. Therefore, it is circular.
Both sides have a lot of this, though, so I like to try to step outside of the circles and take them wholesale, and ask which picture seems more accurate to reality. And, here I am, a Mormon, mainly on because of some of the “deeper” doctrines, such as reality being ruled by immutable laws (sounds oddly familiar), God being a self-existent being (much akin to a causal loop), and God Himself being subject to those laws.
Lesser-educated people look at the things I find so attractive and say they’re blasphemous, are confused by them, and often don’t like them.
I think they only think that because the views are unorthodox to mainstream Christianity since we don’t adopt the Nicene Creed’s theologies, giving Mormonism a distinctly different flavor from other Christian sects.
@archestereo
Wait, didn’t you say just awhile ago that science disproves religious things? I must be confusing you with someone else, ‘cause you just made an excellent point I love; science no more disproves the miracles of Jesus, say, than it disproves the existence of Abraham Lincoln. Both cases, all we have left is records and we can’t possibly re-create the exact situations of their existence.
Also, something I like to cite here - now hold on this will sound awful at first but I turn it around - is stage magicians. Yes, stage magicians are only a show, yes, they aren’t
actually doing magic, they’re just doing tricks. *
BUT, that’s all besides the point. The point is this: It’s something that, if all you have is some record of it, you would immediately declare it as impossible, and that said records must be false.
However, we’re used to magicians because we understand that they’re just tricks, that the fault isn’t in scientific understanding of the laws of nature, merely in how they apply in this particular circumstance. The same can be said for a lot of things in religious theologies.
If stage magicians existed in ancient Isreal, 30 AD, then we wouldn’t doubt their records or claims. But if someone does things in some way with no intent to deceive, but rather to, say, feed 4,000 people or gain followers, then we switch standards and say the record cannot be true. That is a double standard.
And because of how people love to murder statements into little soundbites, like trying to package an elephant into a lunchbox, they murder the entire statement so I’ll probably be echoed as; “He says Jesus was a stage magician!” when that’s a complete lie because what it conveys is so far removed from what my point is…
(News does this ALL THE TIME with science. Scientists learn to have a love/hate relationship with news. They make more people interested in science, but they “shorten and simplify” the theories to the point where, like I said earlier, they’re cramming an elephant into a lunchbox. Guess what? That’s not going to be an elephant in that lunchbox. It may have some pieces of an elephant, but that’s not an elephant anymore.)
@Zincy
I forgot how much science you are. I want to hug a science for being science.
