Quote:
Originally Posted by Lord Larehip
You seem to be contradicting yourself. You said earlier you wouldn't be murderer or what not because of the legal consequences. I said if you ever broke the law before then you don't abstain for that reason because you have no problem with breaking the law. Now you've switched gears and are saying murder, rape and such are at odds with your general sense of morality. Part of my point was you don't do certain things because YOU don't want to and now you seem to be confirming that. My point was further that you don't know why you don't want to you just don't. You can cover it up with saying it's at odds with your morality but that doesn't really explain anything. You're just saying you don't do that because you don't do that.
|
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.
Quote:
|
I'm not talking about those things. I'm talking about doing something that could land you in jail but it didn't stop you from doing it. Some things we will do and some things we will not do. Why? We don't know. Or we could say that we were raised that way but then that's doing things automatically without any real thought going into it which is doing it without really knowing why.
|
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".
Quote:
|
I'm not saying people behave a certain way out of fear of reprisal. It's cause and effect. We watch bad causes beget bad effects and that, in turn, affects what we do. I wouldn't call that reprisal. We know once things are set in motion--that's it. It will have to run its course and we can't change it. That has to nag like a b-itch at the root of our subconscious.
|
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.
Quote:
|
And perhaps human beings are that way--we are all to some degree psychopathic. We have to be. If we were emotionally devastated by all the death and tragedy we read in the news everyday, we'd be complete wrecks in the space of a week, totally dysfunctional. Being able to detach ourselves emotionally from the tragedies of others and even joke about them also affords us some clarity, some sense, some way to learn from it without paying too high a price emotionally. And that's why, I believe, that psychopaths survive and in large numbers, because we share enough of their characteristics. But just as you can take solipsism too far, some people take psychopathic behavior too far.
|
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.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lord Larehip
I am advancing an argument that says that does not happen. You have to counter that argument with one of your own. We can assert anything we want to but that doesn't make it philosophically sound.
|
I'm not asserting a philosophical argument. I'm asserting facts and reasonable conclusions.
Quote:
|
First, I am not talking about real amnesia. I am positing a hypothetical amnesia--one that completely wipes your memory clean. I don't know that any such form of amnesia exists and I doubt it. I'm using it as a metaphor for death. If death wipes out all the memories of this life you are living, then how can you be conscious right now? If death occurs in a future moment, T1, and everything before it is wiped out then your consciousness can only begin accumulating memories at that point T1 or later but since you are dead at T1 then that can't happen and it is as though you never lived at all. You must have been unconscious your entire life. But since you know you are conscious now, then your future death will not eradicate consciousness. Somehow, some way, it survives.
|
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...)
Quote:
|
They are right in your own experience. That's what this argument is based on--your own experience. What's not part of anyone's experience is a big spook in the sky watching everything you do while sending down himself as his own son to deliver messages we don't give a s-hit about.
|
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.
Quote:
|
You could destroy the argument easily by proving there is no such thing as memory. But you're going to have a very difficult time of that. You're welcome to try.
|
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.