[ericmcer]

I never remotely believed this because I don't even believe in a "me" really.

One hard hit in the head can literally change your personality entirely, then you have alzheimers and all the other degenerative brain diseases that will erase "you". Even if you avoid all that "you" will be wildly different every 15-20 years.

Christianity gets through this by saying you will return to your prime. That just seems kind of childish to me though, like "yeah when you die you and all your friends and family are gonna be 25 and you live in paradise together forever".

How do you resolve the idea of an eternal consciousness with the very real and common occurence of people losing their consciousness while they are still alive?

[BobbyTables2]

I wonder if there even is such a thing as “eternal consciousness” the way people assume.

It’s rare for me to remember -aspects of my daily life in dreams.

I would think being dead would be a significant hinderance.

[HerbManic]

I have a fondness for the idea that the brain is like a radio reciever for a greater flow of the universe. Thus brain damage is like a broken antenna. The radio can die but the signal continues.

That said, we do then to attribute a lot of thinking to the technology of the time. Buddhists had their wheel of time, folks today think we live in a computer simulation. Things like that, so best not to take the idea too seriously.

Remember, life is too important to take seriously.

[bryanrasmussen]

since I have dreams in which I am not in the dream https://medium.com/luminasticity/the-i-g-dream-log-5c3e5de92... it would actually be weird if I remembered aspects of my daily life in those dreams.

[smokedetector1]

The brain is like a sail thats catching the wind of the soul. The wind pushes and shapes the sail, and the sail limits the shape of the wind inside it. If the sail is in bad condition, it changes how the wind catches it, or prevents it from catching altogether.

So the brain is animated by the soul, and also limits and shapes its experience. When we're affected by anesthetic, or we're badly injured, or have a stroke, our conscious experience is impacted, while we're here on this plane. Eventually we leave this form and experience reality more truly. This could be one reason why NDEs happen - the brain is so badly damaged that it fails to even contain the soul and we approach a more death-like state.

[ericmcer]

It is a nice thought, but still has a pre-requisite that there are "souls" floating around that get ensnared by human bodies. If that is true then life is a kind of prison we endure before being liberated by death.

Even if we assume those giant leaps of faith are true, it still means "I" go away when I die. My soul will only remember "me" as a brief torture where I was forced into a human shell and had to endure being "me" before being released once more to be a higher being. All my struggles, battles, self-improvement, etc. will be meaningless and my kids will be a cruel trick I played that imprisoned other souls.

[smokedetector1]

I won't deny it takes giant leaps of faith. I think the questions are inherently unanswerable so any theory that's not in conflict with things we can know scientifically, and which doesn't lead to harming others, is as good as it can get. We can't really do better than thoughtful faith in this domain (and indeed I would (controversially) argue that the notion of inevitable scientific progress in this area is also a sort of faith, since there hasn't been any progress on the "hard problem" of consciousness..).

To your points, I would say that

> life is a kind of prison we endure before being liberated by death

Not exactly. More like a journey that we go through for mysterious reasons. Maybe so our soul can grow by learning lessons and having challenges that can only be when the stakes are real.

> "I" go away when I die

Not necessarily. Certain aspects of you, which are more contingent on brain traits, e.g. intelligence, some temperament. But the deepest self wouldn't disappear.

> All my struggles, battles, self-improvement, etc. will be meaningless

I see what you mean, but I wouldn't call it meaningless just because it wasn't "completely real." Also, I do believe that lessons learned here are learned for good. The soul is here to grow.

> my kids will be a cruel trick I played that imprisoned other souls.

I don't really see how you got here. In this theory, your kids are also here for their own purpose. Relationships and love are still meaningful and real. Life is cruel and involves a great deal of suffering, but that doesn't mean that existence is inherently bad.

[zzrrt]

I think Christian resurrection at prime usually means having the body of a 25-year old, not the mind. Maybe they'd say the physical brain can corrupt the eternal consciousness's expression while in this life, but it does still raise questions like how will you even recognize the eternal "you" when you've been trapped in a corruptible brain for all that you can remember, and what is the eternal part's worth if it can be corrupted by the brain. (Perhaps Mormonism addresses some of this, saying you lived as "you" unembodied before birth, but are not able to remember for now.)

[marcus_holmes]

Also well-known now is that our feelings are affected by things like our gut biome. Do all our little passengers resurrect with us?

[chubs]

The traditional concept of an 'embodied' resurrection (as opposed to ghosts playing harps) makes me lean towards: yes (eg the gut is part of the body). Who knows though, it's a fun question!

[marcus_holmes]

yeah it is :) Like, do we eat in heaven? If not, then all our little passengers must also be immortal in their resurrected form. But part of the biome is the dead bodies of those critters, and those dead bodies also affect our mood (chemistry doing its thing). So how does this work? Does heaven automatically maintain the correct chemistry in our guts to maintain our emotional and hormonal stability with needing the actual biome? Or does it maintain the biome at the correct chemistry without needing the actual ecosystem? And other parts - do the bugs that live on our hair follicles come with us? Does hair even grow in heaven?

I have questions...

[TrnsltLife]

John's vision of heaven in the book of Revelation includes both the wedding feast of the Lamb and the trees of life that will bear 12 different fruits in season. Jesus also ate fish a few times after his resurrection to demonstrate the physicality of his resurrected body. So there is the concept of eating in the resurrected paradise of the new heavens and the new earth.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

Hrm. I've thought about this a lot and came to the conclusion that we, or rather our brains are just an antenna, 'receiving stuff' from another plane of existence.

If you change/destroy parts of the antenna or the 'bioelectronic circuits' the channel fades out, and you get more and more noise, until there is no signal anymore.

No more resonance with the frequency of your station.

That equals death on this plane.

What lead me to this apart from NDE/OOBE are the cases of so called Terminal Lucidity, when old or very sick people die, but regain conciousness in their last moments. In a timeframe from sometimes two to three days before exitus, but mostly just a few dozen seconds to minutes before exitus.

The thing is that some of these brains are so rotten and degenerated, that it is impossible according to our current understanding, that these people are even able to do anything coordinated, not to mention speak, and recognizing their loved ones/family, telling them things.

And yet this happens again and again, not that often, but it does. While their brains are absolute mush.

In a similar vein, there are stories of lost animals like cats and dogs finding their way back to the humans they once lived with. Over long distances like several hundred miles, often after years.

That can't happen by random chance. So either they can read signs, and understand our words better than we think, or there are other mechanisms at play.

What that is telling about this otherplaneness is uncertain, just that it exists.

Probably impossible to gain any certain insights about that, because of wrong cabling, interface, modulation, format, whatever.

At best we can just hope to skim the interface, membrane and get a few hazy views from the other side near that membrane, but not that far through it.

Maybe there are even other interfaces, membranes, from up there, going on and on, and/or recursing into others.

[chubs]

I believe you resolve it by the concept of spirit/body dualism, where your body/soul degenerates but the spirit is still fine.

[_DeadFred_]

Basically if the base reality that we experience through a holographic world/emergent reality has no concept of time, consequence, etc, you have to create a simulation/game with rules that can allow free will to happen, that has a timeline, has consequences. Once setup, those rules apply even if they ruin the simulation experience for some, they are a necessary part of the holographic world/emergent reality serving it's purpose. Sadly, to create an emergent reality that allows free will you have to create a reality that allows suffering and children dying of cancer and Alzheimer's and consequences if you hit someone in the head. But the blow to the head/Alzheimers is nothing different than an alcohol haze one night that goes away in the morning. The you in the underlying lower (higher?) real dimensions doesn't change just because you got drunk/alzheimers/hit on the head in the emergent dimensions/reality/holographic world.

Read CS Lewis 'The Problem of Pain' then think about emergent dimensions/holographic worlds being the only way to have our kind of consciousness/self determination/free will/experiential identity if one exists in a underlying dimensional state with no linear time, no physical limitations, etc, and so forth. The emergent reality/holographic world is the 'chess board with clear rules' needed for us to have/experience/pretend to free will from the underlying reality without time or rules. In CS Lewis 'The Problem of Pain', pain sucks, but is needed for this world to do whatever it is supposed to do. Alzheimers, consequences of blows to the head, etc aren't themselves needed but they themselves are emergent from the rules that are needed for 'here' to exist and serve it's purpose. But they are also just part of (or structure for) the holographic/emergent reality, not the true base lower (higher?) reality.

Not manic. Just not great at communicating these thoughts. Don't lock me up please.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

Nope. Everything decays. So does any substrate which reality may run on whichever way.

So there will be errors in the great plan of whichever nature. Some of them may get caught by error correction codes, some others not.

These uncaught exceptions are enabling deviations from the great plan :-)

[_DeadFred_]

Nope. It would be very convenient for the modern American/Western nihilistic religion called atheism, but nope. Science doesn't support it.

In our limited experiential world things appear to decay. If our spacetime experience is emergent from something else (in which time doesn't exist), or is holographic, we have no idea what's really going on at the fundamental (lower/higher?) level. How can you have decay in the base reality that doesn't have time? Is decay not an artifact of time? If time is emergent not fundamental, so is decay.

Check out some Susskind and CS Lewis The Problem of Pain. It makes for a fun thought game.

Start with 'what reality/rules would we need in order to exercise truly free will' (the concepts from The Problem of Pain). We need time (action/consequence). We need to be able to impact ourselves/others. I need to be able to hurt you/myself. Kill you/myself. Need the mechanisms that are then used/abused by things like Alzheimer's. But if we bring in Susskind, that is all just happening in the emergent space/time (my emergent free will reality) not in the base reality (my lower/higher? reality that doesn't have things like time). There is no reason that what impacts us in the 'free will reality' that enables us to have free will/experience time also impacts whatever we might be in the base reality (my lower/higher? reality). In that reality without time we are the child just born and the body turned to dust. We are forever in the moments when our loved ones held us. That is heaven. Not some new experiential timeline to reflect. We ARE ALL THE MOMENTS, not a reflection on the moments after the fact.

Hell IS repeating every bad thing, forever. Heaven is experiencing love from your loved ones, forever. But not in some cloud world we exist in after death thinking back. But in the same one that everything happened, only at the non-emergent level not the emergent spacetime level. Me in the non-emergent reality is already in heaven/hell, is already experiencing it all, because it exists in a space without emergent linear time. I will be in heaven, because I will have hugs from my mom and hugs for my children, forever. That is where lower (higher?) level me will dwell.

To be fair, this is the point I worked back from after my mom died. How do I deal with loosing her (as an ex-Catholic). In what reality are her hugs for me forever? This is what I gamed out. We are all the moments, forever, in the non-emergent reality without linear time.

How else can the non-emergent true reality contain our emergent linear space time reality?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Susskind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Problem_of_Pain

[BoardsOfCanada]

As for myself, I try to do a thought experiment. Imagine that I could travel back in time and meet myself at 18-20 years old. I could most likely convince myself that I was me from the future. But I don't think I could convince myself of the thing I've learned that are outside of what is imaginable for my younger self. So we could never be angry with other people for not understanding. Even so, with everything that you get right compared to the people downvoting you, I think you have a too simplistic view of reality, and frankly, not optimistic enough.

[_DeadFred_]

Hahaha. Downvoted for posting my random thoughts converging CS Lewis and Susskind. This site really isn't curious.