AN INVINCIBLE ARGUMENT FOR THE AFTERLIFE (PART THREE)

Hi Bob,

I’d like to think our sentience could be successful, but I see no sign of it. Life, sentience, is a verb. All else are simply adjectives. The power of our sentience is words. And yet, words are merely abstractions or symbols. They aren’t life but we substitute them as if they are the crowning glory of sentience. We trade living for words which takes us away from what sentience might truly be.

I’ve come to believe that what is truly sacred is silence. There is more communication in a smile than any thousand ponderous tomes of philosophy. Words can be useful and indeed, may be absolutely necessary if we have any hope of extricating ourselves from the mess we have made. That is the schizoid nature of our sentience. We need to communicate but have you considered just how much can be said in silence? A simple gesture of compassion or empathy doesn’t require words. Words may be necessary, but they need to be put in their place, not on some altar.

I think that what you are referring to is the fact that we know things intuitively before we find words for them, but having the power of perception by the senses is one way of being able to do that. Being conscious has its difficulties - our senses fail or fool us, our experience teaches the wrong lesson, we may not be sure how to act in an appropriate way, and not everything is a question of reacting with compassion or empathy.

Very often using words ruins the experience or the intuitive interaction, that is true. Very often keeping our mouths shut and enduring the “pregnant pause” can be more helpful. However, I think that these are exceptions and we need to find a way to communicate in a way that helps us become familiar with certain thoughts and ideas so that they flow into our intuitive reaction easily. You have spent many years developing the ability to react with compassion and empathy, other people have had to struggle too much with their surroundings, or perhaps never had to struggle, which puts them at a disadvantage. We have to reach out to each other at times, but I would agree that we do that best when we are familiar with the silence that enables us to sort out our mind.

I think Phenomenal Graffiti’s metaphysical subjective system in service of the afterlife is motivated by denial of death and the psychological trauma of the specter of eternal punishment.

I don’t want to speculate on PG’s motives, but isn’t what you are saying a very large part of all organized religions? Fear is a powerful motivator and while all the goodies of heaven are promised, it is the fear of losing self that figures heavily in all afterlife stories. The fear of eternal punishment is just icing on the cake. There is nothing wrong with buying fire insurance and this all hinges on the belief that there is an afterlife, which may or may not be accurate.

The icing on what cake? :wink: The following passage captures the problem in satire:

Felix,

Yeah,what cake? Bad analogy. Maybe icing on the cow patty? :smiley:

Response to Felix Dekat’s post 10-2-18:

Sorry for the (very) late response. Holiday jingles juggled with crafting the conclusion of the afterlife argument.

Most hold the view that there is a ‘real world that exists independently of us, independently of our experiences’ etc. that contains “real world” analogs of the content of visual perception. What takes conscious effort is imagining what “real world” chairs, for example, might be like, as they are chairs in the absence of a person’s perception of them or in the absence of any and all consciousness altogether. A person’s perception of a chair disappears when the person shifts attention, falls unconscious, or dies while a “real world” chair does not disappear or wink out of existence in response to this sudden and unexpected loss of self and consciousness.

If “real world” chairs do not wink out of existence in response to sudden loss of perception of chairs, “real world” chairs and perceived chairs are not one and the same thing. They are different existences. “Real world” chairs, therefore, are not made of subjective experience, as in the common view of consciousness and how consciousness comes to exist, consciousness did not exist before there were brains, can only exist when produced by brains, and cease to exist upon loss of function of the brain.

“Real world” analogs of the content of visual perception, meanwhile, are not created by brains and thus continue to existence when “perception” of these objects, which are created by brains and require brains in order to exist, wink out of existence (for those believing consciousness can cease to exist, that is) in response to dysfunction or cessation of function of the brain. But the only thing that we see and can see, is the thing created by the brain (for those believing the brain creates consciousness). We cannot see “real world” chairs or analogs of the content of visual perception because these are not created by the brain. Like God for the religious person, and as Kant observed, the existence of “real world” objects that are the foundations, causes, and analogs of the objects seen in consciousness is supported only by faith.

Why?

Because we can only see and experience our consciousness. The thing that supposedly winks out of existence when the brain stops functioning. We cannot see or experience things that are not our consciousness. Thus we have no evidence of their existence. The same argument against God in terms of the connection between God and our perception, it turns out, also applies to external world objects believed to be the analogs of the content of our visual perception.

If one thinks good to simply remove the existence of “real world” analogs of the content of visual perception, why, that leaves our subjective experience as the only thing that is truly real. If subjective experience is the only thing that is real, the world we perceive must be and can only be a virtual or artificial reality composed only of our subjective experience. Empirically, as in, “hands on” observation of reality, this hypothesis is readily evident because it’s right in front of our eyes every second we’re awake. Unconscious matter or “real world” things that are not our consciousness or that are imagined to be things that can exist in the absence of all consciousness we have no evidence for (as all we can experience is our consciousness) and may not exist.

Evolution of consciousness re: subjective experience or the fact or act of subjectively experiencing arising from unconscious matter is only a “possibility” only if that which is not subjective experience or is not the fact or act of subjectively experience either:

  1. Stops being something that is not subjective experience to magically transform into subjective experience or

  2. Magically conjures subjective experience from previous non-existence of subjective experience

Let’s really think about this:

-Unconscious matter is not simply matter that is not conscious, but matter that is not consciousness.

-Unconscious matter is believed to become consciousness or consciousness is believed to “arise from” or originate from unconscious matter.

But:

  1. Unconscious matter is not the fact or act of experiencing or someone experiencing and that which is experienced by someone.

  2. But it is commonly believed that one day, after an eternity of not being someone experiencing and that which is experienced by someone, unconscious matter contorts itself into a brain that either conjures someone experiencing and that which is experienced by someone from non-existence, or parts of the brain, which is made up of something that is not someone experiencing or that which someone experiences magically stops being something that is not someone experiencing and that which is experienced by someone to become someone experiencing and that which is experience by someone.

It is just becomes subjective experience.

How does it get from not being subjective experience to being subjective experience?

You’re response to this is: “We can’t explain it, but trust me, it happens. You’re supposed to believe that this is irrefutably reality, this is the way things are.”

To me this insistence upon unconscious matter and it’s magical, yes, probably impossible relation to experiencing ultimately stems from disbelief that subjective experience is probably eternal. It certainly does not come from and can have no support from experiment, as experiment requires and is materially composed of subjective experience and the only thing we can experience is subjective experience. Unconscious matter is something that is not subjective experience: we cannot experience something that is not our subjective experience.

Why not believe that subjective experience is eternal? We accept that physical energy is eternal without question, when we can’t even know physical energy even exists because the only existence we have evidence of is our consciousness.

At the end of the day, we’re talking brute transformation of something into something it is not, simply because one does not wish to believe in the eternal existence of something, but wishes to believe in the eternal existence of something the something one does not want to believe is eternal is not (whew).

Now that—positing that eternal unconscious matter inexplicably becomes someone experiencing and that which is experienced by someone—requires more of an infinite leap than just stating that consciousness has always existed. After all, existence only appears or manifests in the form of someone and the which someone experiences. It does not appear in any other manner. Why jump to something that is not someone and that which someone experiences to explain the existence of someone and that which someone experiences? Why do we need the opposite of consciousness to explain consciousness? Why is unconscious matter even necessary, save only because one does not believe in eternal consciousness?

Unconscious matter is simply an idea created by consciousness with the intelligence to imagine something other than itself. But the only thing it can experience is itself. Consciousness cannot rid itself of itself. And can only use itself to try to imagine something that is not itself, an impossible feat. In service to Occam’s Razor, it is far simpler to posit that consciousness is eternal than to try to conjure it from something it is not.

Touche. A mea culpa is in order. I do have anxiety about death and it admittedly does motivate my argument for an afterlife, but the anxiety is not the sole motivation. The logical possibility of the afterlife, given the existence and possibilities inherent within consciousness or the notion of consciousness also drive the argument. If one can posit “real world” analogs of the content of visual perception that existed before or consists of a substance that is not consciousness, with these analogs unable to appear within consciousness because they are not consciousness, one can posit the afterlife and God. In fact, it is far simpler for the latter than the former to logically exist, as the latter consists of consciousness and is not something that is not consciousness. That being said, the real existence of the afterlife, if it is a reality, is a reality regardless of my anxiety about death. The strength of my argument for an afterlife ultimately lies in the conceptual fact that anxiety about death does not nor cannot in itself falsify the existence of the afterlife if the afterlife objectively exists.

As before, my existential anxiety does not by it’s presence falsify nor indicate the falsity of the Bible in regard to its metaphysical assertions regarding the afterlife or the existence of God and persons in the external world. In the end, it does not matter if I have existential anxiety about death or worry if indeed it is eternal cessation of consciousness: the anxiety does not by its presence indicate or reveal the non-existence of God or the afterlife.


Response to felix dekat’s post made 10-13-18 6:50pm

But we can’t know that death (in terms of eternal and irreversible loss of self or consciousness) happens or is the actual fact of things.


Response to felix dekat’s post made 11:27pm

Mark Twain makes an excellent point. Makes a good support, given the absence of the concept of eternal torment in Hell in the Old Testament, for the concept of Annihilationism. Mark Twain’s point probably can be argued to apply to Annihilationism as well as Annihilationism is eternal death, rather than eternal torment, by afterlife flame.

No problem.

I disagree with your last point. The phenomena of experience are evidence of the real world. Perhaps you deny it because you cannot accept the evil and suffering in the world.

When there isn’t substantial correspondence between the subject’s phenomenal experience and the external reality, the subject becomes dangerous to himself and/or others. We say that he is out of contact with reality. Correspondence between perception and the external world has survival value. Even metaphysical idealists like yourselves treat the perceptual like it’s real. The ones who don’t win the dubious Darwin’s Awards. That is they contribute to human evolution by selecting themselves out of the gene pool via death or by their own actions.

That’s seems to be what you have done. Do you think it “good” because you can thereby deny the reality of the evil and thereby “prove” the existence of a Good God and defeat the problem of evil? You achieve this at the price of denying the validity of perception. And you can marshal perceptual mistakes, optical illusions and to support of this denial. Do you perhaps do this because you have already denied that we are fallible human primates who’s perceptual apparatus was designed by evolution to adapt and survive?

To assert that only subjective experience is real is to deny the neuroscience of perception. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous system, which in turn result from physical or chemical stimulation of the sensory system. You are denying the existence of physical or chemical stimulation. To you it’s a “virtually” supplied by God.

To the neuroscientist, vision involves light striking the retina of the eye, smell is mediated by odor molecules, and hearing involves pressure waves. To you light, molecules, and pressure waves are all illusions performed by God. From your theory it seems to follow that science is merely part of a grand illusion perpetrated by God.

Again your use of the adverb “magically” is unwarranted. Consciousness via natural selection may have evolved like other human capacities.

Your logic is unnecessarily tortured. You presuppose what you’re trying to prove. Even amoebas which have no nervous system react to stimuli. Sensation apparently evolved from that capacity of organic matter and consciousness from that.

Not so. What we are experiencing as subjects is material. The fact that I can give a causal account of how it comes about that I see the tree (light photons strike my retina and set up a series of neuron firings that eventually cause a visual experience) does not show that I don’t see a tree. There is no inconsistency between asserting, on the one hand, “I directly perceive the tree,” and asserting, on the other, “There is a sequence of physical and neurobiological events that eventually produce in me the experience I describe as ‘seeing the tree.’” Whereas, to maintain that there is no external reality corresponding to my subjective experience the scientific explanation is an illusion. I guess that’s why you had to come up with your hypothetical subjective elements. Contrary to your claim that there is no experimental evidence for the external objective world, the entire body of knowledge gained by the physical sciences is that evidence. Your subjective “science” is paltry by comparison.

Infinite regression. My experience requires me as the experiencer. I didn’t create myself. All observable experiencers are born not eternal. So in hypothesizing eternal subjective experience, you are postulating something that cannot be experienced or known. Agnosticism is the correct epistemological response to this proposition.

It’s not a question of “wishing to believe” or not. The issue is epistemological. There’s no way to verify or falsify the proposition [if indeed it is even coherent].

Because this is the view that we hold prereflectively and this is the view supported by the physical sciences which are supported by evidence.

Everything should be explained as simply as it can be, but not simpler. Eternal consciousness is too simple to account for observable facts. We observe that consciousness is embodied in finite physical beings including ourselves. Consciousness cannot be observed floating around. Eternal consciousness is not observable.

Twain was satirizing the New Testament where it is shown that, ironically, Jesus was the first to preach the hell that he supposedly saves us from. Every generation since his alleged resurrection has demonstrated that he did not save us from physical death which goes on as it did before him.

I maintain that a perfectly good God, if such exists, would not relegate billions of his creatures to eternal punishment. Jesus, if he was a man motivated by compassion, would not have consigned people to that fate. So, eternal hell may have been the invention of the New Testament Christian writers.

“If one thinks good to simply remove the existence of “real world” analogs of the content of visual perception, why, that leaves our subjective experience as the only thing that is truly real.”

I just noticed this.

I’d say that for this to be taken as true one would have to prove that subjective experience can exist without real world objects to have experience of.

The burden of proof is on the solipsist.

Reply to felix dekat:

The phenomena of experience, in godless mythology, do not exist or appear unless there is a neural circuit in the brain that, by random chance, has the ability to create and produce a particular phenomenon of experience. The “real world” or “real things”, by contrast, are not created by brains and themselves do not create the phenomena of experience (well, the only thing that does is the “real object” version of the brain).

Thus:

  1. We cannot experience the “real world” or “real world” objects as these are not created or produced by the brain. A “real world” tree, for example, does not come from the brain, as the tree would rip the brain and skull apart and crush the body as it emerged from neurons trapped in a skull. The only thing we can experience is the ephemeral, intangible visible experience of a tree produced by the brain (for those believing the brain creates consciousness).

  2. One observes the existence of personal subjective experience of a chair, train, mountain, park, etc., then fancifully imagines or makes up (one must do so, as one cannot experience external “real” objects or worlds) the concept of chairs, trains, mountains, parks, etc. that are not produced by one’s brain, that is imagined to exist outside one’s consciousness and as it is not created by one’s brain, would survive and is unaffected by the loss of one’s consciousness.

  3. One then proceeds from the act of making up the concept of “real world” chairs, trains, mountains, etc., to believing that brain-produced subjective experience of chairs, trains, mountains, etc. are evidence of “real world” chairs, trains, mountains, etc. But they are not one and the same thing, as “real world” chairs, trains, etc. are not created by the brain and have nothing to do with the creation and appearance of experienced chairs, trains, etc.

  4. One therefore imagines things that cannot be experienced as they are conceived to exist (as things not created by the brain: we can only experience that which “comes from” or is produced by the brain) and state that a real entity (a person’s experience of an object) is evidence of something one cannot experience but has entirely made up in the mind (make no mistake: we do not experience external objects and events, but do nothing but imagine them and believe in their existence).


Of course I accept the evil and suffering in the world, you have to accept it every time you turn on the news. I do not believe in the existence of external objects and events that are doppelgangers (to whatever imagined level or extent) of the content of visual perception. This denial does not equate to a denial of the existence of evil. The evil and suffering in the world are just aspects of the virtual or artificial reality that is human consciousness.

How can one know whether or not there is substantial correspondence between the subject’s phenomenal experience and the external reality, when we have no experienced evidence of the external reality, because the external reality is something other than our experience as our experience is created by the brain and the external reality is not?

(For those believing the brain creates consciousness)

If he experiences, he is not out of contact with reality, because the only reality for which we have evidence is our subjective experience. We do not have evidence of the existence of anything that is not one’s subjective experience. We only have the idea of something that is not and that is outside one’s subjective experiences and we then go on to imagine that these imaginary things have creative or active input and connections and relations to subjective experience. All the while, the idea of external objects and events is just another creation of the brain, another aspect of subjective experience (for those believing the brain creates consciousness).

As the brain does not create external objects in the external world and we have no evidence of their existence (as they are not created by the brain and therefore cannot be experienced), there is no evidence of any correspondence between perception and the external world. There is only evidence of perception of something created by the brain (for those believing the brain creates consciousness). Acts of successful thinking and action resulting in survival, therefore, and survival instinct is all created by the brain and is just a part of a brain-created artificial or virtual reality that exists in the absence of external objects or events. (for those believing the brain creates consciousness). This goes into the following:

Of course they do, because that is the way their brains cause them to think, believe, and act (for those believing the brain creates consciousness). External objects have nothing to do with the existence and abilities of the neural circuits said to give rise to phenomenal experience of things believed to be experience of external objects. We have no evidence that external objects exist and if they did, they have nothing to do with:

  1. The existence of the neural circuit that by the luckiest chance, happened to be the very neural circuit that happens to reside in the brain and that happens to be able to, out of all the things the neural circuit could have had the ability to do, create a subjective experience of that external object or event that happens to act upon the body at just the current moment. What convenience this neural circuit happened be available at that moment in the brain!

The external object or event had no hand in creating the neural circuit that luckily represents it as it could not physically act upon the neural circuit to ensure the circuit produces only its image and nothing else without shattering the skull, imploding the brain, and perhaps crushing the body in the attempt.

A real world SUV, for example, cannot reach with its metal and plastic through a skull to make sure a subjectively perceived imagine of itself will one day emerge without destroying the skull, brain, and crushing the body containing the skull and brain.

The SUV or any real world object outside the skull and body has nothing to do, therefore, with providing the brain with the neural circuit that produces visual perception of the real world object or grants the neural circuit with the ability to produce visual perception of real world objects (for those believing neurons produce visual perceptions of real world objects). Neural circuits of the occipital lobe and their ability to produce visual perception of external objects, therefore, exist for reasons that have nothing to do with the existence of the real world objects they purportedly represent.

Their actions in this regard are just part of the artificial conscious reality created by their brain, not any action by or reaction to external objects, as we have no evidence of the existence of external objects. One only imagines the concept of external objects and then comes to believe these imaginary entities exist and have something to do with the only real thing that has bothered to show up to the party of existence, subjective experience.

What does denying the existence of “real world” analogs of the content of visual perception have to do with denial of the reality of evil? Evil exists, and is part of the artificial or virtual reality that is our consciousness, even in the absence of “real world” objects and worlds behind the artificial reality.

Perception is “valid” only in the sense that it exists. Nothing more. It does not gain validity by an invisible something hiding behind it (in terms of an invisible, non-experiential copy of the object that is perceived). Perception cannot point to or indicate the existence of something behind it that is not and is something other than the perception itself. How can perception “see” something other than itself? In the mythology of the brain creating consciousness, you have:

(i) that which is created by the brain

(ii) that which is not created by the brain

If every instance of consciousness depends upon and cannot exist without some neural circuit in the brain, everything you experience and every reaction you have or do not have to what you experience is just a creation of the brain. That which is not created by the brain, therefore, has nothing to do with your experience as every experience is a product of the brain and things outside and are not created by the brain do not take part in the brain’s creation of one’s experience.

The neuroscience of perception or process of perception, if you truly wish to be honest about it, is a combination of experience and make-believe.

The end of the process of perception is a neural circuit in the brain producing a subjective experience of a particular visual image, the smell of a certain odor or combination of odors, the experience of a certain sound or combination of sounds, etc. This is the end of the assembly line of the process of perception, the “everlasting Gobstopper” that finally cranks out at the end of the Willy Wonka machine that is the link between the external world, objects and events in the external world, the peripheral and central nervous systems, the sensory organs, the brain, and that special neural circuit in the brain that by the luckiest chance just happens—can you believe it?—to have the ability to produce a sensory representation of that very external world object and/or event that just happens to affect your body and brain at the current moment.

What an awesome convenience, that the brain happened to have in it’s “magic bag o’ tricks” (pun intended) the neural circuit that just happens to be able to represent the external object and event that’s affecting the body “right now”, and to have this neural circuit set up within the brain years prior (science surely doesn’t expect neural circuits that create subjective experiences of external objects and events to assimilate seconds before an experience in the nick of time, given the immediacy of new, incoming experience?) to the object coming to affect the body and produce the lucky pinball shooting of electrical signals from the external object and event to the peripheral nervous system and/or facial sensory organs to the neural circuit that happens to have the ability to produce subjective representation of the external object or event.

But according to godless mythology in regard to consciousness, subjective experience, only exists if there is a neural circuit in the brain that creates the experience, consciousness is not believed to be able to come into existence by itself, independent of the brain.

Thus every part of the process of perception except the “everlasting Gobstopper” of subjective experience cranking out at the end of the Willy Wonka machine of the process of perception is make-believe, as neurons create consciousness but do not create the things in the process of perception outside consciousness itself. The only evidence of things having existence is subjective experience of things that have existence, and subjective experience of things that have experience can only come from the brain (for those believing the brain creates consciousness).

Ergo:

  1. Light striking the retina of the eye is make-believe. We have no evidence of the existence of light that is not light that is visual perception of light created by the brain.

  2. Odor molecules and pressure waves are make-believe. We have no evidence of the existence of atoms or molecules or pressure waves that are not creations of the brain (for those believing the brain creates consciousness).

Light, molecules, and pressure waves not created by the brain probably do not exist, and if they do, they do not personally create sensory perception but merely send mind-independent signals that, in probably the best “pool shooting” in existence, happen to route to and though the animal body to electronically activate the already-existing neural circuit that luckily (before the fact) had the power to inscrutably produce sensory perception that just happens to be sensory representation of the thing that just happens to send the signal to the body at the current time (whew).

In light, however, of the logical possibility of things existing “just cuz” in the form of there being nothing in existence except non-embodied persons experiencing artificially real worlds created by God and another hidden aspect of existence, we don’t need external objects and events.

I think it may be the other way around. You presuppose what you imagine or make-believe, not what is actually experienced as real. We have no evidence of the existence of organic or unconscious matter. We only have evidence of the existence of persons and their subjective experience. Unconscious matter or the concept of unconscious matter, therefore, can only be an imaginary object conceived by and within the imagination and has no basis in reality, because we use experience to determine what is real, and we experience nothing but our experience (something must be our experience or composed of our experience in order to be experienced and thus revealed as reality).

It would be odd to say that an account of the process of perception between the external world and the brain giving rise to visual experience of a tree does not result in one seeing a tree. One sees a tree, then gives an imaginary account of how the vision came to be, using imaginary objects and processes that have never been seen and therefore cannot be proven by experiment (as experimentation is composed of subjective experience).

If one chooses to believe in the made-up “existence” of ‘physical and neurobiological events that eventually produce in me the experience I describe as ‘seeing the tree’, sure. But the aforementioned events that purportedly result in visual perception of a tree are imaginary, as we only have evidence of and can only experience “seeing a tree”.

The entire body of knowledge gained by the physical sciences, if it is something other than that which was and is directly experienced by a person, is entirely imaginary, i.e. only a figment of the scientist’s imagination that the scientist believes has real, independent existence outside the scientist’s consciousness–although the scientist cannot prove it by direct experience as the scientist maintains and admits it is something that is not the scientist’s subjective experience as it is something outside and that is not created by his, or anyone’s, brain. But if it is something that is not a person or a person’s experience, it cannot be experienced. If it cannot be experienced but can only be “shown” to others in the form of a concept in a person’s mind, it is obviously imaginary and only exists in the form of a fictional concept or state of affairs.

One makes the mistake of asserting (it’s okay to believe and state that it is merely what one believes) that that which is only imaginary is irrefutably real. We commonly make the mistake (aggravating as it is) of stating what one believes as if it were irrefutable fact. The only thing that is irrefutably real is subjective experience. Again, we only have evidence of the existence of subjective experience, i.e. the fact or act of experiencing and that which is experienced only during a particular act of experience. Everything else is make-believe, and may not exist.

True.

True, given that most of our experiences are unexpected and unwanted.

Other experiencers are observable? One can only experience oneself. But under the belief (the belief that rescues one from overt solipsism) that other experiencers exist and are observed only to be humans, animals, and insects, this is true “on the surface”.

Fancy that, the same can be said for external objects and events like atoms, light, and pressure waves, or anything not created by the brain (for those believing the brain creates consciousness).

True, but I happen to believe in the existence of eternal persons. I have greater reason to believe in eternal persons than I do in things that are not and are not made out of subjective experience. Persons that are finite are finite by chance, as they exist “just so”. It is not out of the question that this same “just-so-ness” applies to eternal persons. There’s really no good reason for them not to exist except for…well…just plain ole’ disbelief in their existence. Other than pure and simple disbelief, there is no valid reason eternal persons do not nor cannot exist.

We only have evidence of one’s subjective experience. We do not have evidence of something that is not one’s subjective experience. Something must be or be made out of one’s subjective experience in order to be experienced. The physical sciences takes something that is real (subjective experience) and pair it with something that is purely make-believe (something that is not subjective experience). They believe that that which was purely made up in their minds is real on the basis that the imaginary entity mimics the appearance of visual perception, then go forth to preach the gospel that that which only appears in their minds is real and has something to do with that which is real (subjective experience), stating the fiction with such confidence and certainty that those who don’t know better believe they are stating irrefutable truth.

One guy remarked about the situation in an interesting way:

Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools.

-Romans 1:22

The only observable fact is that the only thing we observe and experience is one’s own subjective experience. Everything one experiences only appears when one subjectively and personally experiences it, and disappears when one no longer experiences it. Something (anything for that matter) requires one to experience it in order for it to be experienced, and must therefore (since it requires one to experience it in order to be experienced) materially consist of a substance called: “Your Experience Of It”.

We observe that consciousness is seemingly embodied in seemingly finite beings with bodies composed of their subjective experience of a body (the body is composed of “Your Experience Of It”). The body is not composed of something other than and that is not one’s subjective experience of one’s body.

Consciousness other than one’s own consciousness is not observable, yet we believe the consciousness of other people exist. One experiences oneself “in a body”, but the body is upon reflection made up of one’s subjective experience of it, as a central avatar of the artificial reality composed of one’s subjective experience. Thus consciousness “floats” in the sense of being fundamentally a first-person subjective experience that is essentially anterior to perception of a body.

We might say that we are software and not hardware; the psychological relations that are me are currently instantiated in this neocortex, but I am not essentially this neocortex nor even (more controversially) any neocortex.

-Max More, The Terminus of the Self

Christ not saving us from physical death is supported by the bible:

It is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment.

-Hebrews 9:27

Jesus stating:

I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live:

-John 11:25

Does not contradict Hebrews 9:27 as ‘yet shall he live’ follows rather than replaces the first death. It’s about God pulling a person from the current artificial reality of the world in which he or she perceives oneself in an animal body and is perceived by others as having been born an infant and evolving into an adult and senior person. It’s not God’s intent for man to remain in that artificial reality, thus, ‘physical death …goes on as it did before him’.

Many verses in the bible refer to man not being eternally tormented in hell, but (if Universalism as believed by Salisbury below is false) having consciousness eternally removed via fire of hell. I agree, a perfectly good God would not relegate anyone to eternal torment in hell (save perhaps Satan).

As far as eternal hell being the invention of New Testament writers:

There is no documentation that the church councils of the first four centuries embraced the doctrine of “eternal punishment.” The church councils at Nice in A.D. 325, at Constantinople in A.D.381, at Ephesus in A.D.431 and at Chalcedon in A.D.451 never embraced this doctrine. In contrast, there is documented evidence that many church leaders and teachers of the first centuries A.D. wrote acclaiming the doctrine of “universal salvation” or “ultimate reconciliation”, none of whom were censored. It was not until 553 A.D. that the Roman Catholic Church denounced the teaching of ultimate reconciliation as heresy.

-Salisbury, Lee: Eternal Punishment—Is It Really Of God?

Your system seems to be an updating of George Berkeley’s metaphysical idealism with a touch of quantum mechanics. I don’t think Berkeley was ever so much refuted as ignored and forgotten as materialist science and technology moved on to bring us the modern high tech society that we live in today.

What is surprising is that there’s more room for your way of thinking today because of scientific discoveries on the quantum and macro scales that defy common sense then there was in Berkeley’s time when science was limited to Newton’s physics which is verifiable in ways accessible to ordinary people.

Like you, Berkeley was motivated primarily by Christian apologetics. But, today it’s obvious that the Christian God doesn’t necessarily follow from metaphysical idealism. The Cosmic Perceiver can just as well be Vishnu or Odin or the Goddess or Lord Buddha or some new-age deity instead of the Christian God.

Still, I’m happy to see you supporting a universalist interpretation that doesn’t find eternal perdition in the Bible. If that interpretation is true, the Biblical authors should have made the point clearer. Cuz, it’s easy to miss as evidenced by the fact that it’s the minority view among Christians who take the Bible seriously and preach it to the rest of the world.

I am a disciple of Berkeley. I remain “sorta” a disciple of David J. Chalmers (Professor of Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona and Australia) as it is his “panprotopsychism” (the idea that, to explain how the brain creates consciousness, consciousness is not conjured from non-existence but exists in the form of particles of consciousness or “protophenomena” that reside in particles making up the brain and “jigsaw puzzle” into conscious experience in synchronized correspondence to neural function) that is the progenitor of the Psychoverse and the Thenanthrochism.

When I abandoned the existence of the physical I adhered more to Berkeley. To my surprise, in Chalmer’s latest paper he admits an increasing attraction to Idealism, particularly “Cosmic Idealism” (wherein the Ultimate Perceiver is not God or any deity but the Universe). Seems my former teacher is reaching the same conclusion about existence in his own way.

Very true. From our side of the fence it comes down to what one discovers over time one truly and deeply believes, despite the fact that “out there” it could be…

That pesky English translation of the Bible, huh? I totally agree. The eternal torment doctrine is unfortunate, because it generates, in Christians, a very special fear of death of a magnitude not shared by any other religious or philosophical type on earth (though many Christians would vehemently deny it). According to certain sources eternal torment in hellfire began either with Augustine (Peoples, Glenn: History of Hell-Hell Before Augustine) or the Catholic Church in 553 A.D (Salisbury, Lee: Eternal Punishment-Is It Really Of God?), with the first four centuries of the Christian church teaching either Universalism, in which everyone (including Satan in some versions) attains Heaven due to God’s mercy and understanding of man’s helplessness in possessing the sinful nature and as such eventually cures everyone of it–or Annihilationism, in which there are people who can’t be saved but are not eternally tormented in flame but destroyed by fire (leading to an “atheistic death” of eternal and irrevocable cessation of consciousness ironically imposed by an existing God).

I hope Universalism is the way of things, but in observance of the evil and incorrigibility of certain people in the world, I find myself leaning naturally toward Annihilationism. I just can’t see, short of a brute God-imposed universal lobotomy “no matter what”, how certain people based on how they are and unapologetically choose to be could achieve eternal life and absence of evil.

Thanks for the detailed reply. From your responses, it seems to me that you don’t hold your views dogmatically, but rather as possibilities which seem probable to you as a result of study and thought. I think that’s good.

I can entertain your views as possible in theory, but they are not where I live phenomenologically. Indeed Berkeley’s starting point in phenomenal experience I buy completely since that IS where I live. But, when he posits God as the perceiver who’s perception accounts for everything I am not conscious of at the moment, he begs the question. The move is simpler than when Descartes did it, so Berkeley can appeal to simplicity. But, it’s simpler as well when God is eliminated from the equation instead of the physical world. And that’s the one that seems to be present to my senses and the one supported by the massive evidence of the sciences. So, empirically, God loses billions of miles.

Be that as it may, are there any practical advantages to holding the immaterialist view that you do? Have you gotten to the point that it no longer seems to you like you are living in the physical world? If so, what is that like? How is it better, if, in deed it is?

My take on that is that certain kinds of animist, non-material outlooks allow for a more caring relation in all directions. One is immersed in life and consciousness, rather than a bag of chemicals, clanging its way through a albeit complicated, but mere, Newtonian universe where most things are unalive. One is always relating to life, affecting others, even when ‘alone’. It also allows for more change, or potential change. Let’s say Sheldrake is right that there are not laws but habits. Well, if we think in physicalist terms, things can’t change that much. But in idealism, things could change more and faster - if we can get deep enough in the emotions and thoughts creating the architecture of the world.

And last one thing I experience as better is that it fits my reality more.

But then I’m an animist, so of course it would. And a pantheist, so of course it would. It all radiates life to me, though some of that life, like say in a plastic container, is so squashed down and twisted it barely has a mood or presence. But, still, even there, I feel a kind of pity for that twisted down not matter.

Reply to felix dakat:

Actually becoming and being an immaterialist opened my eyes to what might actually be the true nature of existence. It’s not a matter of “seeming as though one is no longer living in the physical world”, but realizing that one lives in a world, but the world upon honest observation depends upon and actually consists of one’s experience of it as opposed to consisting of something that is not one’s experience of it. Immaterialism looks at existence as it actually presents itself.

Everyone starts off, I think, as a Naive Realist. But if one is lucky enough to have the metaphorical detective magnifying glass placed in one’s hand and told to look hard at one’s existence, this combined with the good fortune to have learned of the belief that the brain creates consciousness and the Process of Perception, Immaterialism falls into place when one performs the logic.

The materialist position: belief in unconscious matter, belief that consciousness somehow comes from and depends upon unconscious matter, and that outside the body and skull of conscious beings there is an unconscious world containing unconscious, non-living doppelgangers of the content of visual perception is the cornerstone of godless science and philosophy. When one looks hard at this belief “at the right angle”, one finds it is akin to the “D.A’s case” in this pivotal scene in the comedy-drama My Cousin Vinny:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHzOOMdhAhE[/youtube]

The materialist’s case “is an illusion, a magic trick” because…existence only shows up in the form of a person and that which the person experiences, and anything that is not a person or the experience of a person only shows up in the form of something imagined and believed by a person. Mind-independent objects and events are things that are not persons and as one discovers when observing the fiction of the Process of Perception, do not themselves create persons and their experiences and as such, save for the fiction of their signalling the brain due to its ability to create consciousness, are not needed to form persons or experience of persons.

The materialist position is therefore—like the “brick” in the movie example—“as thin as this playing card”.


[Note: The terms “you”, “your”, and “yourself”,as it appears throughout the remainder of this reply is purely rhetorical, as “you” is “a rhetorical person representing someone critically analyzing belief that brains create consciousness, the idea of mind-independent objects and events, and the idea that mind-independent substance is somehow capable of creating subjective experience.”]


As a Naive Realist, Direct Realist, Indirect Realist, or Materialist, when one visually experiences things, one’s mind informs one (in the form of intuition followed by belief) that one’s visual perception is of something (Indirect Realism and Materialism) or is something (Naive and Direct Realism) other than oneself.

Descartes…wrote a response to skepticism about the existence of the external world. He argues that sensory perceptions come to him involuntarily, and are not willed by him. They are external to his senses, and according to Descartes, this is evidence of the existence of something outside of his mind, and thus, an external world. Descartes goes on to show that the things in the external world are material by arguing that God would not deceive him as to the ideas that are being transmitted, and that God has given him the “propensity” to believe that such ideas are caused by material things.

-Wikipedia: Rene Descartes

But sensory perceptions, despite the fact they come to one involuntarily and are often unexpected and unwanted is subjective experience, and consists or is made up of subjective experience. In order to experience anything, or to know that something exists, something must actively appear to present itself before oneself having the substance of your experience of it. If something is not made up of the substance of “your experience of it”, you can’t experience it.

In terms of “your experience of it” and that which supposedly exists when you’re asleep and not having experiences (if dreamless sleep exists) existence may be divided into:

  1. Your experience of something

  2. Whatever there is when you’re not experiencing something and everything you do not experience.

Once so divided, one can pick up the playing card of the brain–its ability to create consciousness thought to be a brick (using the “My Cousin Vinny” metaphor) and explained as though it were a brick.


People balk at my statement that human sensory perception is essentially an artificial reality that is something completely different from and that is not the world in the absence of one’s consciousness, but this is true regardless of whether or not you believe the brain creates conscious experience when in absence of Immaterialism you believe that brain’s create consciousness.

How?

Well, your experience of the world (or “a world”) is believed to come from your brain. Nothing else in the universe creates your experience of the world (or “a world”), as it is believed that consciousness—subjective experience—does not exist unless it is create and generated by a brain and did not exist before there were brains.

Thus for those believing the brain creates consciousness, the only thing holding up or supporting experience of the world (or “a world”) is the brain. That’s it. Nothing else creates your consciousness. In the absence of gods, nothing knows you exist, as everything is non-conscious and as such cannot care that you exist or have any concern or plan for your survival. Nothing knows you’re here in a godless world except what’s produced by the brain of another person, if that brain has a neural circuit that can visually perceive your body and movement and produce the experience of hearing your voice and sustaining the idea that you are individually conscious.

Everything on our side of the existence-fence, then, depends upon lucky chance that the brain just happens to possess a neural circuit capable of producing the experience of that which one actually comes to experience. If there isn’t a neural circuit in your brain capable (before the fact, no less) of producing experience x, you can’t experience x.

Doesn’t matter if x exists in the external world in a form that is not your experience of x (as the x that exists in the external world is not created by your brain and isn’t affected in the least by the function or cessation of function of your brain), all that matters is your experience of x, and you have to be lucky enough that your brain just happened to have a neural circuit capable of producing experience x prior to your brain’s production of experience x.

(Note: That’s if your brain produces x. While your brain has the ability to produce x it may not have the opportunity to do so: think of someone who has the neurology to experience Japan and everything they would have seen and done in Japan, but never goes to Japan).

Given this, everything we think and believe about the world, including the idea that there are things that are not you that existed before you were conscious, while you temporarily are not conscious, and after you are no longer conscious comes from your brain. And get this: they only show up in the form of your idea of them, in the form of thoughts about them. They don’t appear in any other form, and they cannot show up as they really are (as they are believed to be): things you do not or cannot experience because they are not your experience, as everything that shows itself to you must appear in the form of and be made out of your experience of them.

Mind-independent objects and events are not created by your brain (as they are believed to exist outside your skull), thus you cannot experience them.

So when you do the detective work to figure out what’s happening, what’s really going on, you have to be careful not to delude yourself into thinking that things that are not you and what you experience, things not created by your brain, are one and the same as you and what you experience, which are created by your brain (for those believing the brain creates consciousness).

Given that things outside your skull and body, if they exist, cannot be one and the same as the conscious experience created by the 3-lb. blob of flesh inside your skull, it follows that your brain creates a virtual or artificial reality of a world that exists and appears as your experience of a world. Easy peasy. If you experience something, that something must something created by your brain and is thus part of the artificial reality created by your brain. Every object, environment, and body and behavior of every person you experience, if the brain creates consciousness and conscious experience can only exist if it is created by the physical brain, comes out of you, as they are part of the world that comes out of you, that is, your brain, as your brain is within your body (for those believing the brain creates consciousness).

The world you experience then, is actually a projected “movie” that comes out of the “movie projector” of your brain, that is inside you. Every object, person, and event you experience comes from inside you, if consciousness comes from the brain.

All science, every scientific fact of biology, geology, physics, and so on and your beliefs regarding them are part of an artificial reality composed of your experience of them comes from inside your body, from your brain.

While the artificial reality part is true, the idea that brains create consciousness makes absolutely no sense.


Long story short, once you realize there is no logical relation between non-subjective experience to subjective experience, and you realize there is no logic to the idea of brains not made of subjective experience producing from itself something it is not (subjective experience), and you realize that the world and every object, environment, and bodies and behaviors of persons within it actually comes from you and are made out of you (your subjective experience of them, without which the objects, environments, and bodies and behaviors of persons would not appear), and given that any external, “you-independent” analogs or doppelgangers of these objects, environments, and bodies of persons if they exist do not themselves create your experience of them (as they are imagined to exist outside your skull and cannot directly reach the brain or themselves form conscious experience independent of brains), you can logically remove the physical world to be left only with the existence of persons and the artificial realities or worlds that they experience, that come from them and are made of them.

An immaterialist, therefore, basically observes an actual fact of existence (the idea that worlds, as they appear within actual existence, are experienced worlds made up of the substance of the person experiencing them), realizes that anything outside this fact exists only in the form of an imaginary idea that must be accepted on faith (Kant), and observing that the latter can logically have nothing to do with the existence of the former abandons the latter, leaving behind non-embodied minds experiencing artificial realities believed to have the same content (though perceived from different perspectives) in other non-embodied minds (giving rise to the idea of consensus reality).

Thank you for your lengthy reply. Unfortunately you really didn’t answer my question. Rather you restated how you arrived at you’re metaphysical position. My question was whether in the end there are any practical advantages to holding such a system versus other metaphysical ones. Does it make you happier? And if so why? Is there some advantage to the immaterial world you claim to live in or to the other immaterial persons that you imagine occupy it?

I am not sure that’s true. On the one hand, babies are more like solipsists and what is out of view is not and there are unclear boundaries between self and other. But coming at it another way, I think you have to train naive realism. To some extent I would guess there will be aspects of naive realism in people, independent of culture. But we tend to view things in binary terms - a Western training result - and one can be a realist part of the time and an idealist other parts of the time. I think culture, that is training has a lot to do with being naive realists.

I’ll keep answering because it is good to think about, obviously for myself and not PG.
Yes.
if everything is a part of life/mind/spirit and you react to it that way, it leads to a more intimate relation. In Buber’s terms I/you, certainly, rather than I/it, and then perhaps I/thou. What practical difference does this make? Well, first off, I think, in my case, it allows for intimacy even when other people are not present. You are ‘in the woods’ but you are not alone. Or at least, you are not alone in the sense of a physicalist who sees trees as chemical machines with no conscousness. He or she will not be feeling responses and presence. While this is palpable, it might not pass muster for some as a practical result. An artisan may come close, in his or her realtion to what gets called physical materials, the kinds of I/you relationship involving in co-making something with the wood, for example. It is a dialogue, a collaboration. It is intimate. The more you consider everything alive, the more likely you will have an artisan or artistic relation with what a physicalist will call materials. In experiential terms, it is a wildly different process. In end results, I think the care and affection will even be noticable by others.

I think so, yes. Though how to measure such things…
Modern physicalism presents us as something akin to 'sentient strangers in a universe that does not give a shit about us, is mostly dead, and where any sense of meaning will be grounded out of existence as if it never existed. It treats conscousness as an epiphenomenon or as a impotent witness or an illusion. It presents perception as a series of steps: object there, light bounces off, enters the retina, is interpreted and so on down the line. Even you closest loved one is sending telegraph messages through mud…you are not in contact with them. Being immersed in life and not separate from it, where life/consciousness is everywhere is a completely different life. And I think a more pleasant one.

Now most modern physicalists do not look over at their spouses at the dinner table and think of them as bags of chemical machines. They let themselves get lost in the illusions. But their world is improverished and deader. I know, I know what that outlook feels like. You also to work hard to keep up the illusoin of physicalism in your mind, constantly denying the immersion. Its a metaphysics that requires work to maintain and that’s also a drain.

I think one other advantage is you don’t need to replace and control nature as much as the physicalists feel desperate to do. You don’t see nature as modular machines that should always be improved - via genetic engineering or whatever - or yourself as a faulty machine.

Metaphors lead to action. They also lead to emotional states and attitudes.

The modern physicalist, to the extent he or she is one, is a bringer of death in life.

Reply to felix dakat:

I’m so enamoured of my position I wander away to caress and whisper sweet nothings to it. Thanks for snapping me out of it.

Immaterialism has the same practical advantages as any other system, because sensory experience and the rules of nature seen by the materialist are also observed by the Immaterialist. Everything in terms of the rules of survival, economics, science, etc. works and behaves the same way because its the same sensory experience in a consensus reality between conscious beings experiencing “this” artificial reality. There are no practical advantages in one that do not exist in the other because everyone is seeing, hearing, etc. the same thing.

Yes.

I’m proud of Immaterialism’s invincibility. That makes me happy. I feel it’s the actual truth of things after doing the detective work to discover the logical tenuousness of materialism (in light of the trap it sets for itself in the connection between belief that brains create consciousness, the process of perception, and the existence of mind-independent events and doppelgangers of the content of visual perception not composed of subjective experience). Immaterialism, meanwhile, aids theology and lends greater logical support for the existence of God. If the external world contains minds rather than material objects and events, God (given that only minds exist) can easily be one of those persons. That makes me happy.

The only advantage I can think of is an interesting, adventurous relation between minds in the external world and the personally experienced consciousness (the battle between good and evil, the journey to eternal life, etc.). Beyond that, there’s no advantage the immaterial world possesses (in terms of sensory perception and how it appears and behaves) over the material world. Both appear and behave the same and follow the same experiential rules.

Reply to Karpel Tunnel:

Well put.

Well Naive Realism is the belief that what you perceive is the actual world. Most people think, for example, that when they see a tree, they are seeing the tree as it exists in the external world, and that this perception and the external world are one. But this doesn’t account for the schism that occurs when the person stops looking up the tree or should suddenly fall asleep in front of the tree. The person is no longer seeing the tree. The schism reveals the truer case that one’s sight or perception of the tree is something different and that is not the tree (if it exists) as it is when you or no one in existence is observing it (or a mental copy of it, given the fact that experienced trees disappear when one stops looking or falls asleep).

So Naive Realism graduates based on the existence of inattention or sleep (or death) into Indirect Realism, Direct Realism (which to me is indistinguishable from Naive Realism but go figure), Idealism, and Materialism. These all (or should) admit that perception of the tree is not one and the same thing as the tree in the absence of anyone’s perception of it, for, if the tree was one and the same as anyone’s perception of it, the tree would necessarily cease to exist when you stopped looking at it and fell asleep, and would return to existence when you began to look at it again. If the tree continues to exist and is unaffected by whether or not you are looking at it or conscious, the tree that remains is not your perception of a tree and must be something that does not depend upon and exists entirely independent of your perception.

However, the person-independent or consciousness-independent tree is entirely make-believe, as it only appears within actual existence as an imaginary idea of something that might exist outside consciousness. In actuality, one finds we don’t need mind-independent trees in order to have perception of trees, because mind-independent trees are not one and the same as perceived trees and do not themselves create perception of trees. Only the brain does that if one believes the brain creates consciousness, or existence exists in the conscious form of a person and that person’s perception of a tree or Someone (or Someones?) somehow places perception of a tree into a subordinate consciousness at a particular moment, if one does not believe brains create consciousness (but are a deliberately illogical symbol of what truly creates consciousness).