Quote:
Originally Posted by cardboard adolescent
I think pure self-awareness is consciousness of the self as nothing, in the sense that Sartre says. I don´t really define myself by my personality or intellect, that´s how other people define me. I feel like I could lose all my memories, my likes, my appearance, my opinions, and there would be something left (a general force, sure) that I recognize as being more fundamentally me. If all my personality experiences is ultimately my diffracted selves, then once I discard of it every personality would still be there, since they must in some sense be in the will/soul, ready to unfold. As such, I´d still be aware of what used to be `Tom´ but defining myself by what is ultimately just a perspective would seem absurd. The brain would just be a symbol Tom has constructed to attempt to understand himself, which seems equally absurd.
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I just have a hard time grasping that sort of idealism. I feel that ultimately everything I am is in my brain and once that dies the only way I'll live on is other people's brains but I won't be conscious of it so that's useless to me.
Though I do find one thing curious about that sort of thought. I just finished reading Pascal's Pensees which (you probably know this but for anyone else reading it) presents an idea that since we can't actually know for sure what there is after death we should wager that there is God exists and we have everything to gain in following his teachings and nothing to lose. Now I have several problems with this (there fairly obvious though, how do you know which religion is the correct one being the big gaping argument and then once you determine that somehow you have to hope that form of religion doesn't have a problem with your rather self-centered motives for following) but it seemed to be to be a commonly practiced idea even though most people aren't aware. I often hear sort of scaremongering arguments into following religions and rather selfish purposes for getting into religion, particularly Christianity (I hear from every kid in high school who argues with an atheist how do you comfort yourself without god and that just doesn't make sense to me. I don't understand how your primary motive for a belief is a benefit of the belief, you'd think that would come with a more concrete idea for it. I just think it's useless; its as if believing will simply make everything better. If you could manipulate reality like that so easily I think the world would've been blown up or something long ago.)
Anyway uh, what I was getting to it's interesting that that belief isn't motivated by the superficiality you typically see in most religious thought. Though I guess that has a lot to do with the lack of a moral code, or bible, or any sort of hint at a conscious interest in the human race. It kind of makes the idea seductive to me.