Set aside questions about whether Erhman, or for that matter any agnostic or humanist, is right or wrong and assume they are. There is a universal jump from assuming that there is no afterlife, to Bart’s conclusion that a finite life without any extension after death should be morally and ethically lived to the fullest. There is a 99% (nothing is 100%) logical result inherent in a true nihilistic (as opposed to pseudo-nihilists Nietzsche, Camus, Sarte) end that argues against Erhman’s worldview. If human consciousness is the product of physical processes then on our physical death if there is no non-physical life, we cease to exist. If we cease to exist we are no longer a sentient entity, so we have no present or future. But here is the problem, we also have no past that is our past that we can be aware of. Indeed, those whose time to die has not arrived are aware of our history, but that history is like pictures in a photo album, it is not something the deceased has access to. If on our physical death there is no heaven, or other continuation of consciousness, then for us all will be as if it never was. That is the key, for each individual physical life will not “end”, it will be as if it never was.
There will be nothing to fear, nothing to look forward to, there will be simply – nothing. This logical fact negates any existential myth that says a finite life well lived is a life worth living. The logic also, perhaps counter intuitively, totally rejects Nietzsche’s Übermensch and Professor Kagan’s arguments for suicide. What it does do is leave belief in an afterlife, no matter how infinitesimally weak it may be, as the only rational, logical option for a moral human life (I would argue a good option indeed). This is true simply because those who accept that we are biologic animals, while they may be right, necessarily accept that on our physical death we meet the same fate as a cat or a mouse or an ant. Those who believe that there may be an afterlife are logically secure in the fact that science cannot say anything positive or negative about the possibility that a heaven beyond the bounds of human observation exists, or does not exist.
The simple conclusion is that if one wants to live a life that has positive meaning, they must believe in an afterlife. If right, then their life in fact had and will continue to have positive meaning. If wrong, then – nothing.
Some who read this comment will have visceral negative reactions. A somewhat rambling article by Darwinist biologist Lonnie Aarssen offers a solid explanation why: ** you do not have permission to see this link **
PSS – welcome aboard!
It would seem your definition of “meta-utility” only produces a positive result (e.g., meaning, life worth living) if and only if there is an infinite afterlife – because a finite afterlife would give you the same end result. It’s the finitude of the being, in your account, that seems to dilute away whether a life achieves positive meta-utility.
Why in your thinking would a system of ‘finite utility’ math imply zero “meta-utility”, where only a theory of ‘infinite utility’ math would produce positive meta-utility? I think I can understand how you see it, but I don’t want to assume.
PSSynyder
If human consciousness is the product of physical processes then on our physical death
if there is no non-physical life,
we cease to exist.
If we cease to exist we are no longer a sentient entity,
so we have no present
or future.
we also have no past we can be aware of.
Indeed, those whose time to die has not arrived are aware of our history. It is not something the deceased has access to. If on our physical death there is no heaven, or other continuation of consciousness, then for us all will be as if it never was.
For each individual physical life will not “end”, it will be as if it never was.
This logical fact negates a finite life well lived is a life worth living.
Belief in an afterlife is the only rational, logical option for a moral human life.
This is true simply because those who accept that we are biologic animals, while they may be right, necessarily accept that on our physical death we meet the same fate as a cat or a mouse or an ant.
If one wants to live a life that has positive meaning, they must believe in an afterlife.
Steefen
A person who lived, studied, worked, made a discovery that remains in the knowledge base of humanity has no positive meaning?
You are in error.
Another way to ask the question:
Consider you had the opportunity, by flipping a switch (at no cost to you), to bring into existence on an uninhabited planet 100 beings who would be guaranteed to experience blissful and meaningful existences, whose lives would be set to their maximum bliss/meaning at all points from the instant they came into being until the end of their precisely 100 year lifespan, at which point they merely (and painlessly) blink out of existence. In your thinking, would it be better/worse/neutral if the switch were flipped?
Life has no intrinsic meaning. Life is not an equation to be solved but an experience to be had. You don’t complain because a movie only lasts for ninety minutes and then is over. You judge it on its own terms and enjoy it while it lasts. You take life on its own terms and enjoy it while it lasts.
I used to put great stock in Lewis’ argument (can someone name the fallacy?) for a part of us being “unbounded by time” because a fish cannot say that water is wet, because that’s all it “knows,” (there’s a logical misstep), the implication being that we couldn’t conceive time unless something in us is other than this time we conceive, i.e., immortal.
And nothing can be a powerful state, whether according to the Tao or the quantum fluctuations of a perfect vacuum wherein they claim that such would (and did) have the energy sufficient to produce the cosmos we have. It can easily just mean no-thing, either by the actual transformations of all things (lions and tigers and bears) on a moment-to-moment dying away of cells and replacement with new cells (we’re replaced or displaced every 7 years by this?), or by being subsumed into larger things like ecosystems. All is impermanent and without a self, and science has verified what we already knew. I’ve heard that the brain deludes itself b/c it has no reference outside itself, but I haven’t looked into any neurological explanations for such a weird, contradictory cerebral ping-pong game. But do I need that, when I find evidence every day that I habitually set up straw men and others in my own thinking that have to be knocked over?
Intellectually, these antipodes of the mind are everywhere, and we’re always stomping out these brush fires in our thinking, so why even give them play? Try Nagarjuna’s tetralemma/four-fold negation on your own conclusions or reifications. Was it Bodhidharma who said, “Bring me your troubled mind, when you can find it, and I’ll ease it for you?”
“The flower that once has blown forever dies.”
“Into this universe, and why not knowing nor whence, like water willy-nilly flowing; And out of it, like wind along the wate, I know not whither, willy-nilly blowing.”
“That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with great eons even death may die.”
“No one has lived longer than a dead child.”
In the case of the Khayyam quote, the first thing to notice is that it’s a simile, and I remember Mulcaster’s, “The likeness of unlike things,” which is oxymoronic under logic but not otherwise, suggesting maybe that anything strictly logical is still-born, or acknowledging that, in reality, nobody lives logically. Honestly, are you really being honest or sincere if you’d so straight jacket a life into impossible states of being vs. non-being? Where’s the play in the joints between these two absurdities?
As a footnote, I just learned a suggestion that I’ve been wondering about for over a decade–why did neolithic man use ocher to stain the bones of those they buried even 70k years ago? Maybe because we come into the world all bloody, and we go back to that place by the death canal. It’s a simile, or a profound absurdity…whatever it is, it isn’t strictly rational. We are an irrational animal, or at least non-rational in most regards. May as well ask a chemist to check the valency of his wife’s bonds when he goes home every night.
Man that hurts.
p.s. Anyone know about the work of Allan Botkin? (Resist the urge to compare it w/ Persinger’s “god helmet.”) He was treating Vietnam vets for PTSD w/ EMDR therapy when he just decided to give it a little twist with one of his patients. The result was an “after death communication” in wh/ the patient encountered the person they were grieving. He was worried he’d induced a split in the patient and watched him for the week following, but the healing was real and lasting. Half the patients who undergo the treatment say they know it’s just their brain but they don’t care, and the other half that the communication is more real than even their sitting there. What does matter, for the good doctor and his patients, is the healing.
His website
** you do not have permission to see this link **
and what the vets say
They’ve put up an institution in Germany for his work. And he got a lot of resistance in his field because it smacked of non-science. Good riddance to those who would box in either science or healing, or who would even think so simplistically as to think there can be only an either-or proposition for reality, life, anything. He can’t explain it, and won’t fall into the trap of such limiting constructions. It’s a hard habit to break.
p.p.s. Consider Whitehead’s Process Philosophy. He was Russell’s professor and together they wrote Principia Mathematica. He left mathematics for philosophy and dispenses with categories such as entities. Or Bohr’s statement, “Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.” Or von Neumann’s “Maybe Logic” according to RAW
As long as you’re there, I highly recommend RAW’s “Cosmic Trigger”
** you do not have permission to see this link **
“Suffice to say, what we behold is censored by our eyes.”
“The universe is made of stories, not atoms.”
Or the beautiful, completely trivial accident of language…In Spanish, no se–in English, “I don’t know, so I no say.” Sorry. Couldn’t resist.
LaoWho you and I seem to have read some of the same books. (For example I am very familiar with RAW’s work. And Nagarjuna.) One name very influential for me is missing. How well do you know the work of Wittgenstein?
Just a few initial comments, then.
It is probably impossible for us to understand Tao in the sense it was used by those who created it. The best we can hope for is to creatively misunderstand it.
Science very rarely confirms what we already knew. That is its very utility, that it can confound our expectations. We should be very suspicious when anyone tells us what we want to hear.
It is a mistake to think of our senses as separate from “us”. Our eyes are part of “us” just as the nerve endings on our finger tips. I am this body. This body is me. There is no other.
It is the ones who tell the stories who are made up of atoms.
Stephen said
LaoWho you and I seem to have read some of the same books. (For example I am very familiar with RAW’s work. And Nagarjuna.) One name very influential for me is missing. How well do you know the work of Wittgenstein?Just a few initial comments, then.
It is probably impossible for us to understand Tao in the sense it was used by those who created it. The best we can hope for is to creatively misunderstand it.
Science very rarely confirms what we already knew. That is its very utility, that it can confound our expectations. We should be very suspicious when anyone tells us what we want to hear.
It is a mistake to think of our senses as separate from “us”. Our eyes are part of “us” just as the nerve endings on our finger tips. I am this body. This body is me. There is no other.
It is the ones who tell the stories who are made up of atoms.
No need to decide today, Steefen. I knew Wittgenstein too well once.
Yes, the Tao that can be named is not the Tao. But creative misunderstanding…nice. Reminds me of a Chesterton quote–anything worth doing is worth doing badly.
Sure it does. Eddington confirmed Einstein. But look, if you try to nail down the things I put up there from others, then they’re just dead letters. May as well say, “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” (Chomsky’s syntax illus)
I didn’t say our senses are separate from us. In fact, did you know that the sense of smell is equal part hearing?
No, the body is not you, any more than your thoughts are. There is no you.
RE: atoms, better take that up with Bohr.
As for reading, my majors were Lit and Philosophy, Theology minor, but since then I’ve found better stuff, like Bart’s work and pretty much what I can get my hands on, which is why I thank you again for that Peter-Jesus Debate paper you so kindly provided. Keep it up! I’ll certainly grab those. Much appreciated. Nice that you cite the works even here, too. BTW, I like the way you really go after a parse. Very incisive and unforgiving.
Laowho, an important clarification.
STEPHEN IS NOT STEEFEN.
I’m Stephen. Hello. Steefen is another. Aside from the different spellings you will find that Steefen and I live on different conceptual planets. I will let him speak for himself. If you read my posts through his lens you will not read them usefully.
Oh my. Do you know, he and I were in the throes of posts that were crossing–must have been 10 in the span of that many minutes and I couldn’t keep up. So when that particular post came up I didn’t even look to see who it was. I just assumed it was him, and that had been a bit of a tussle.
But yes, I did know you to be distinct, as when I read your response to the flat earth question, and I posted that “That was awesome.” You don’t find many posts in forums that are so well composed and erudite, and concise but with warmth. Honestly, it made me high, as Tolkien would say to Lewis, and I felt a little transported back to my undergrad days when everything had been so heady for me.
But…had I known yesterday that that was you–had I looked–I certainly would have answered differently, of course, and maybe only after hours of deliberation and careful preparation of a better answer. Maybe we can leave aside the above–I hate being polemical, and I think that you’re above such. Thank you for clearing things up and it’s a pleasure to meet you. Be gentle with me. We fear what we don’t understand, and you, sir, have an understanding.
Save you, Judith. No, what I fear in him is his intellect, especially if it be of the Wittgenstein sort. Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, these sent me into a tailspin whereupon I dropped out a semester to “live” in a cockroach infested tiny studio, seeing and talking to no one. I chanced upon a neighbor, an art student, and he showed me some of his work. The one I bought turned something in me and I recovered.
Anyhoo, I hope you don’t mind my referencing you yesterday, presuming to know you better than I do, but it really did strike me as “a good word spoken in due season,” and that’s an aspiration of mine, to be that. Thank you for saying hi, and I hope you’ll help keep me on track. Methinks a simple tsk-tsk from you would be worse than some eternal finger-wag from on high. The gods are in the valleys, not the mountain tops, no?
Robert said
LaoWho said
No, what I fear in him is his intellect, especially if it be of the Wittgenstein sort. Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, these sent me into a tailspin whereupon I dropped out a semester to “live” in a cockroach infested tiny studio, seeing and talking to no one. …Now it sure seems like I dodged a bullet!
There was still Kant to make you stronger! Lol. I was just too impressionable, but looking back Witt and I had too much in common, even my temporary flight from academia. That’s why I had to lay philosophy aside, especially when you live in your head so much.
Stephen said
Two concepts from Wittgenstein you might find interesting.
“Language Games”
“Family Resemblances”
Yes, and no. Thank you. I still have his collected works and just hope you don’t (won’t) pull me in again. But I did come up with a little ditty b/c of you, about the year he spent agonizing over the design of his sister’s door:
The key unlocks, locks;
The tumblers never reach the floor,
The feet the door.
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert
1 Guest(s)