Lord Larehip

So, suppose you should wake up tomorrow morning and you have complete amnesia. I mean, COMPLETE amnesia--you have forgotten EVERYTHING. You are like a newborn infant and must relearn everything from scratch--how to walk, talk, learn your name, use the toilet, everything.

When do your memories start to accumulate?

To make answering that easier, let us assume that you were born at time T0. At time T1, you got amnesia. Now between T0 and T1 you lived a decently full life of, say, 30 years or 50 years, but let's make this interval long enough for you have reached well into your adulthood. During that time, you went to school, graduated, learned to drive, went to college, joined the service, got out and got married and had 3 kids. Suddenly, T1 arrives and you wake up with no memories of anything that happened in your life whatsoever--a total blank slate.

When do your memories start to accumulate? At T1 or later. Everything between T0 and T1 is lost. Your memories can only accumulate at T1 or later.

Were you ever conscious between T0 and T1? Well, if you meet the criteria I listed in my previous post--

I. I experience.
II. I know I experience because I remember my experiences.
III. I can also remember remembering my experiences.
IV. I can remember some experiences as many times as I wish--an infinite number of times theoretically.
V. How many experiences must I remember to be conscious? All of them.

--then you were conscious. But there is a problem now:

You lost your memories and can no longer recall them as many times as you wish or at all. They no longer meet the criteria of consciousness. Then could have you been conscious? No. And yet, you were conscious during that time. CONTRADICTION.

Will you get complete amnesia at some time in the future? No. How do you know? Because you are conscious right now and consciousness is continuous. If your T1 moment was to occur, say, 5 years from now--2018--your memories would not start to accumulate until then. All the memories/experiences that occurred before would be wiped out. Life began for you, as far as you know, in 2018. It would just BE 2018 for you. Since it is earlier than 2018 and you are conscious, you know you will not get complete amnesia in 2018 (or any other future date) or you simply wouldn't be conscious right now.

Now--if death extinguishes consciousness as many people assume, then death is a complete amnesia. So, now we can say that you WILL die at some time T1 in the future. Your entire life experiences and memories from T0 to T1 are wiped out. When do your memories start to accumulate? At T1 or later. But what about that whole life you lived from T0 to T1? It's gone. And yet you WERE conscious during that time (i.e. you met the criteria of consciousness). CONTRADICTION.

Conclusion: Death cannot extinguish consciousness. If it does, then you cannot be conscious now.

Once you are conscious, you are always and forever conscious. Consciousness, then, is eternal.

This is a big piece of philosophical meat to swallow but it is essential that you you understand it so I'll leave off here to give you time to digest it. Any questions--ask.

Paul Smeenus

This is the most preposterous argument I've heard since I tried to debate a member of the Flat Earth Society when I was a young man. I discovered then the futility of attempting to reason with someone who was using fallacy and illogical impossibility as a weapon.

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Sansa Stark

I think he's sending smoke signals

Lord Larehip

Try me.

Freebase Dali

The answer is yes. I've broken many laws, some reasonably serious. However, those actions were not at odds with my general sense of morality. They were at odds with legal expectation. Furthermore, I've done things that I consider immoral that have no legal ramifications, and I've felt bad about them enough to go to great measures to prevent such actions from reoccurring, based on the effect they had on the parties involved, who I care about. I don't understand how you're willing to speculate that all of humanity acts out of fear of reprisal, and simultaneously are unwilling to entertain the likelihood that most of us genuinely care about the well being of others because it's just part of who we are (most of us), which is far more evident than your sweeping assumption, which can be quantified as unlikely if you walk into a prison and see people occupying it without being able to classify them all as psychopaths.

I hope you're aware that the majority of the human race is not psychotic... The human race as a majority is what drives the whole. To use a statistical minority to make assumptions about the majority is fallacious. In fact, had the majority not been successful at co-existing with its own species, the deviant minority would not have survived either, since it's still part of the species. So in all actuality, that minority owes its survival to the co-existence of the species as a whole, which evolutionary morality supports in the first place.

Since you have unrequited access to the collective subconscious of our entire species, please tell me why people still feel remorse for things that are commonly forgiven.

Cynicism isn't in the detached analysis of behavior. It's part of behavior.

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Paul Smeenus

You clearly missed the central point of what I said, so I'll emphasize it. Then onto my ignore list you go

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Freebase Dali

The problem with this is you're basing consciousness on memory, which is a biological function, which ceases to function when you die. Amnesia doesn't erase a person's physical existence, it simply erases a persons reference to it. The existence was still there, and the person was conscious of it at the time, but that doesn't throw physics and biology out the window simply because you don't remember anything after you die...

I think you're going too far into the philosophical when the simplest answers are right here on earth, and contradictory to your venture.

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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'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.

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.

You mean psychopathic? Psychopaths are not psychotic necessarily. They are generally as sane as anyone perhaps even more so in some ways. They are simply devoid of a conscience.

That doesn't explain the presence of the psychopath or the proliferation of such. The truth is, no one is even sure how much of the human race is psychopathic. We only know they are found in every race, country, culture and both genders. Psychopaths are the premier solipsists. Solipsism is a philosophy that holds that you are the only real being and the others around you exist only for your benefit and can be used anyway you like. They don't really feel anything, they only appear to for your benefit. It's called a defunct philosophy but nothing could be further from the truth. EVERY ontological philosophy MUST have some degree of solipsism in it. This philosophy I am expounding relies on it a great deal.

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.


You can figure that out on your own. You too have access. That's why it's called COLLECTIVE.



It's part of nature and nature is cynical. What do you call the food chain? No loving god would have come up with something so brutal and thoroughly absorbed in self-interest. It's a bloody outrage.

Lord Larehip

???
As you wish. Your loss.

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.

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.

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.

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.