A revolution in thought

[ChristinaM]

That's how I always leave when I go other than telling friends that I'll catch them the next time around. Eventually I get a message from an admin asking me if I still work there when they notice that I haven't shown up for a while. I don't even lurk to see if I get gossiped about.

[davidm]

Originally Posted by peacegirl

The connection is that consciousness is not only an individual expression of you, as you are now (and this is where Clark and Stewart agree)...

Well, I'm gobsmacked, peacegirl. So far as I can recall, this the nearest you have ever come to admitting error. So now you ADMIT that Clark and Stewart agree with Lessans, at least to a point. I can assure you all three are in entire agreement. You could contact Clark and win support at least for this part of the book!

The ideas being propounded here are not that hard to understand; whether they are coherent is a different matter. Clark explains it by differentiating between personal subjective continuity and generic subjective continuity.

"Personal subjective continuity" is the sense of always being and having been present, and of being a particular person with his/her own consistent set of memories and experiences that constitute a personal identity. It's what Lessans means when he writes that while alive, "I" can never be a "someone else," so to say, because my personal subjectivity, this sense of "I" is the only perspective through which I can view the world.

Clark (and Stewart and Lessans) argue, though they use different words (I'm going to use Clark's words now) that upon death, personal subjective continuity is replaced by generic subjective continuity, and the sense of "always being present" continues in a different personal context. That is why, to boil the idea down, earlier I wrote something like:

1. "I" go to sleep at night with a set of memories that constitute myself (personal subjective continuity).

2. "I" go to sleep the next night with the same set of memories, plus those of one more day (more personal subjective continuity).

3. "I" die the next night, and personal subjective continuity comes to an end. It is replaced by generic subjective continuity, and "my" next awareness is that of a newborn dimly struggling into existence. I am using "I" and "my" loosely here, as Clark also notes in his own explanation, since indeed, under this idea, the next conscious awareness after death is not that of the previous "Me," which is gone, but of a new locus of awareness. The problem is that in trying to explicate this idea, we don't have any personal pronoun that encompasses both personal subjective continuity and generic subjective continuity, so the best we can do (or I can do) to differentiate between them is use the personal pronoun I without quote marks to stand for personal subjective continuity, and the personal pronoun "I" with quote marks to denote generic subjective continuity.

Perhaps it could be better stated without recourse to personal pronouns: There is personal subjective continuity, in which a person experiences a certain stable identity over time. At death, there is generic subjective continuity, in which a new personal subjective awareness comes into existence to replace the old one.

If people really want to discuss this idea seriously, rather than just taunting peacegirl, I suggest, again, e-mailing Clark and alerting him to this discussion. I am quite confident he will agree that Lessans' argument is the same as his, and perhaps he can better explicate the idea.

I wonder, though, why anyone would find this idea (if it is coherent, a big if) comforting. It's not like reincarnation, in which some essential, irreducible part of you, usually called a "soul," simply leaves the dead vessel and takes up residence in a new vessel, guaranteeing some tangible continuation of yourself. And of course under most notions of reincarnation, good works in this life mean your next incarnation will be even better. However, also under many Eastern traditions, the ultimate goal or teleos of the many and varied reincarnations is to escape the wheel of life and of its inevitable suffering and to achieve Nirvana -- literally, to snuff it out: snuff out consciousness, or at least individual consciousness, and perhaps become part of some world soul or world consciousness.

But this stuff that Lessans, Clark and Stewart are propounding is completely different. Since there is no personal connection between the various lives, it follows that "you" (not literally you, keep in mind, because we are using the term loosely, in quote marks, to denote generic subjective continuity as opposed to personal subjective continuity) in one life will be a king, and in the next "you" will be a pauper. In one life "you" will be brilliant, and in another a moron. In one life "you" will live in a lap of luxury, and in another "you" will be confined to a gulag where the henchmen of a dictator will torture "you" with electric shocks.

This is comforting?

I know why peacegirl thinks it's comforting. She thinks that eventually Lessans' utopia will be established, and everyone will live in eternal bliss, a secular version of the Christian story. What I've no idea is why Clark finds it comforting, as he does.

Another thing that neither Lessans, Clark nor Stewart address is this: assuming generic subjective continuity is a coherent idea (Stewart calls it "existential passage,") why does the locus of awareness shift from one individual human consciousness to another? Why doesn't it shift to a bird, a beetle, a dog or an alien on a distant planet?

[LadyShea]

How is it even a meaningful way to look at life and death? What does it illuminate or clarify? "I will die but other people will be born and refer to themselves as I"...big newsflash! Who even cares and why would they care? I don't understand why anyone would even spend time trying to articulate it.

[peacegirl]

Originally Posted by Spacemonkey

That is a non-answer. A weasel. An evasion. What is his reasoning for thinking that the next consciousness will be numerically identical to the previous one? Why does he think our consciousness will be reborn?

If there are 100 people living, and a person suddenly dies making it 99, the next person born is not 101, but 100.

Originally Posted by peacegirl

Ughhhhhh. What do you think I've been doing? Playing tiddly winks?

Originally Posted by Spacemonkey

Weaseling and evading. Just as you've done in this post. Just as you've been doing on every topic you've discussed here for the last two years.

That's why I say, let's end this on a friendly note.

[peacegirl]

Originally Posted by ChristinaM

Maybe his version of consciousness is like some sort of cosmic clothing floating around. When you get born you get a set of consciousness clothes and when you die your clothes go floating across the death-gap and someone else has to put them on. Your clothing has forgotten all about you but you should rejoice anyway knowing that at some time in the future someone else is going to wear your hand-me-downs even if they don't know who donated them to the cosmic goodwill store in the first place.

There is no future time. The only time is now Christina, and when you die the conditions are exactly the same as before you were born. Do you remember before you were born? Of course not.

[ChristinaM]

Not that I'm suggesting that you leave since this is pretty entertaining but you can easily end it by simply not posting anymore.

Thanks for the additional info but David explained it perfectly well and I'd like to stay un-confused this morning.

[peacegirl]

Originally Posted by LadyShea

Then why not say a consciousness since the pronouns you and yours refer to the individual person you are speaking to?

I understand that. But you are failing to understand that the very fact that I am talking to you means that YOU are here as an expression of this potential consciousness. That's why I am using a personal pronoun, and that's why YOU will always be here.

[LadyShea]

Originally Posted by peacegirl

If there are 100 people living, and a person suddenly dies making it 99, the next person born is not 101, but 100.

Meanwhile in the real world there are 19 births for every 8 deaths, so where do the extra consciousnesses come from?

[LadyShea]

Originally Posted by peacegirl

I understand that. But you are failing to understand that the very fact that I am talking to you means that YOU are here as an expression of this potential consciousness. That's why I am using a personal pronoun, and that's why YOU will always be here.

"You" is a synonym for LadyShea when peacegirl is talking to LadyShea. So how would you make your argument using only proper nouns and no pronouns at all?

[peacegirl]

Originally Posted by LadyShea

Did Lessans believe consciousness was an emergent property of a living brain, or something completely separate from the mind?

Yes, consciousness has everything to do with a living brain, not a dead brain.

[LadyShea]

Originally Posted by peacegirl

Yes, consciousness has everything to do with a living brain, not a dead brain.

So when LadyShea dies LadyShea's consciousness ceases to exist, right?

[peacegirl]

Originally Posted by LadyShea

So when LadyShea dies LadyShea's consciousness ceases to exist, right?

I don't know how many times I've said this but yes.

[LadyShea]

Originally Posted by peacegirl

I don't know how many times I've said this but yes.

So then LadyShea will not always be here, although peacegirl said to LadyShea

the very fact that I am talking to you means that YOU are here as an expression of this potential consciousness. That's why I am using a personal pronoun, and that's why YOU will always be here.

So please make Lessans argument without using any pronouns. If peacegirl can make the argument without pronouns, then LadyShea will better understand what peacegirl and Lessans are trying to say.

The use of pronouns to refer to individuals and not individuals at the same time is illicit and confusing. If Lessans argument relies on the use of pronouns, then it is nothing but word games.

[peacegirl]

Originally Posted by LadyShea

How is it even a meaningful way to look at life and death? What does it illuminate or clarify? "I will die but other people will be born and refer to themselves as I"...big newsflash! Who even cares and why would they care? I don't understand why anyone would even spend time trying to articulate it.

Why? Because most people think there's nothing after death, or they will be sent to some purgatory or they will be granted a place in heaven. It's a wonderful feeling to know that when we die it's not the end. It may also create more interest in the book because it won't be our posterity that will get the benefit of this new world, but us. If that doesn't give you an incentive to spread this knowledge, I don't think anything will.

[LadyShea]

Originally Posted by peacegirl

Why? Because most people think there's nothing after death, or they will be sent to some purgatory or they will be granted a place in heaven. It's a wonderful feeling to know that when we die it's not the end. It may also create more interest in the book because it won't be our posterity that will get the benefit of this new world, but us. If that doesn't give you an incentive to spread this knowledge, I don't think anything will.

peacegirl has explicitly stated that there is nothing after death for LadyShea, or Spacemonkey, or any named individual and that death is the end of that named individual. So any named individual's fear of cessation of that named individual's existence is not eased in the slightest.

[davidm]

Originally Posted by LadyShea

So then LadyShea will not always be here, although you said to LadyShea

So please make Lessans argument without using any pronouns. If peacegirl can make the argument without pronouns, then LadyShea will better understand what peacegirl and Lessans are trying to say.

The use of pronouns to refer to individuals and not individuals at the same time is illicit and confusing. If Lessans argument relies on the use of pronouns, then it is nothing but word games.

The argument is that at death of the personal subjective continuity x, there is a shift in the locus of awareness from x, which subject is well and truly gone, to y, which then constitutes a different personal subjectivity. For Clark, this "shift" is generic subjective continuity; for Stewart, is "existential passage."

Now, the immediate problem, is this: WHAT shifts? WHAT passes? WHAT continues? And from all the exponents of this thesis, we are met with deafening silence.

[davidm]

Now we can all start talking in the third person, like

[LadyShea]

LadyShea will continue to speak in the third person until peacegirl can explain Lessans position without the use of personal pronouns.

[davidm]

I believe there is only way way to make sense of these sorts of claims. In order to believe this, you would have to believe in a meta-mind or meta-consciousness in which our individual subjective awarenesses are but mere subsets of a larger, "global" mind. Some people do believe in a world mind or world soul, though there is no evidence for said mind.

But if things were like that, we can imagine an analogical argument for existential passage, or generic subjective continuity: Just as the contents of our brains, our thoughts, might "pass" from one state to another, so too might individual subjective awarenesses "pass" from one personal perspective to another at death, in the same way a brain thinks different thoughts from time to time. But this would require some meta-mind in which individual people are somehow "thought" into existence, and the "passage" point on death from one person to a new person would be a shift in the thoughts of the meta-mind. Without this posit, I really don't think these ideas wash, with all due respect to Clark, who seems a reasonable fellow.

[LadyShea]

Universal Consciousness is another useless concept.

[thedoc]

Originally Posted by LadyShea

In Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy(movie version) an alien does that.

That must have been in the more recent film, because I don't remember it in the original BBC production. I was so appalled at the new movie that I really didn't notice that part.

[thedoc]

Originally Posted by ChristinaM

I was just wondering if the show ever ends without someone having to cut the mike and drag her offstage.

I believe they usually use a hook, but I think this admin has lose theirs.

[peacegirl]

Originally Posted by davidm

Well, I'm gobsmacked, peacegirl. So far as I can recall, this the nearest you have ever come to admitting error. So now you ADMIT that Clark and Stewart agree with Lessans, at least to a point. I can assure you all three are in entire agreement. You could contact Clark and win support at least for this part of the book!

The ideas being propounded here are not that hard to understand; whether they are coherent is a different matter. Clark explains it by differentiating between personal subjective continuity and generic subjective continuity.

"Personal subjective continuity" is the sense of always being and having been present, and of being a particular person with his/her own consistent set of memories and experiences that constitute a personal identity. It's what Lessans means when he writes that while alive, "I" can never be a "someone else," so to say, because my personal subjectivity, this sense of "I" is the only perspective through which I can view the world.

Clark (and Stewart and Lessans) argue, though they use different words (I'm going to use Clark's words now) that upon death, personal subjective continuity is replaced by generic subjective continuity, and the sense of "always being present" continues in a different personal context. That is why, to boil the idea down, earlier I wrote something like:

1. "I" go to sleep at night with a set of memories that constitute myself (personal subjective continuity).

2. "I" go to sleep the next night with the same set of memories, plus those of one more day (more personal subjective continuity).

3. "I" die the next night, and personal subjective continuity comes to an end. It is replaced by generic subjective continuity, and "my" next awareness is that of a newborn dimly struggling into existence. I am using "I" and "my" loosely here, as Clark also notes in his own explanation, since indeed, under this idea, the next conscious awareness after death is not that of the previous "Me," which is gone, but of a new locus of awareness. The problem is that in trying to explicate this idea, we don't have any personal pronoun that encompasses both personal subjective continuity and generic subjective continuity, so the best we can do (or I can do) to differentiate between them is use the personal pronoun I without quote marks to stand for personal subjective continuity, and the personal pronoun "I" with quote marks to denote generic subjective continuity.

I really don't care how you represent the personal pronoun from the generic, but I think it's confusing because there is no "I" in potential consciousness, only the potential of becoming "I". Therefore, let's stick to the terms they use.

Originally Posted by davidm

Perhaps it could be better stated without recourse to personal pronouns: There is personal subjective continuity, in which a person experiences a certain stable identity over time. At death, there is generic subjective continuity, in which a new personal subjective awareness comes into existence to replace the old one.

That was good until the last sentence when you used the term "replace." Being born as a baby is not replacing any other existence.

Originally Posted by davidm

If people really want to discuss this idea seriously, rather than just taunting peacegirl, I suggest, again, e-mailing Clark and alerting him to this discussion. I am quite confident he will agree that Lessans' argument is the same as his, and perhaps he can better explicate the idea.

If he is going to come here, I would want him to discuss determinism, since I already talked to him on the phone and he is interested in the book.

Originally Posted by davidm

I wonder, though, why anyone would find this idea (if it is coherent, a big if) comforting. It's not like reincarnation, in which some essential, irreducible part of you, usually called a "soul," simply leaves the dead vessel and takes up residence in a new vessel, guaranteeing some tangible continuation of yourself. And of course under most notions of reincarnation, good works in this life mean your next incarnation will be even better. However, also under many Eastern traditions, the ultimate goal or teleos of the many and varied reincarnations is to escape the wheel of life and of its inevitable suffering and to achieve Nirvana -- literally, to snuff it out: snuff out consciousness, or at least individual consciousness, and perhaps become part of some world soul or world consciousness.

Right. That's what the Course in Miracles says; that we came to Earth as separate beings due to an original sin of seeing each other as guilty, and when the world is forgiven we will all become One Mind and there will be no need for bodies.

Originally Posted by davidm

But this stuff that Lessans, Clark and Stewart are propounding is completely different. Since there is no personal connection between the various lives, it follows that "you" (not literally you, keep in mind, because we are using the term loosely, in quote marks, to denote generic subjective continuity as opposed to personal subjective continuity) in one life will be a king, and in the next "you" will be a pauper. In one life "you" will be brilliant, and in another a moron. In one life "you" will live in a lap of luxury, and in another "you" will be confined to a gulag where the henchmen of a dictator will torture "you" with electric shocks.

This is comforting?

But you are forgetting that these evils are coming to an end. We will no longer live in the middle ages, and we will have developed to a point where there will be no poverty so how could there be paupers? No one will be on a higher pedestal than another when we learn the truth of our intrinsic equality, and there will be no dictators running our lives. You have projected your life now into the future, which makes being born as I, with no relation to me as I am now, rather risky.

Originally Posted by davidm

I know why peacegirl thinks it's comforting. She thinks that eventually Lessans' utopia will be established, and everyone will live in eternal bliss, a secular version of the Christian story. What I've no idea is why Clark finds it comforting, as he does.

It's interesting how close his version of reality is to my father's. He just didn't extend the knowledge that man's will is not free to see why a no blame environment can prevent from coming back that for which forgiveness was previously necessary.

Originally Posted by davidm

Another thing that neither Lessans, Clark nor Stewart address is this: assuming generic subjective continuity is a coherent idea (Stewart calls it "existential passage,") why does the locus of awareness shift from one individual human consciousness to another? Why doesn't it shift to a bird, a beetle, a dog or an alien on a distant planet?

Because there is no shifting. This term makes people think there is some previous awareness connected to an awareness that has now come into being, which prompts the question that you just asked. That's why I don't love the term "existential passage."

[peacegirl]

Originally Posted by LadyShea

peacegirl has explicitly stated that there is nothing after death for LadyShea, or Spacemonkey, or any named individual and that death is the end of that named individual. So any named individual's fear of cessation of that named individual's existence is not eased in the slightest.

You're right, not in that sense. But I didn't create the universe so who am I to tell God that he should have done it differently.

[LadyShea]

Originally Posted by peacegirl

You're right, not in that sense. But I didn't create the universe so who am I to tell God that he should have done it differently.

Is LadyShea to infer from this weasel that peacegirl is unable to make Lessans argument without the use of personal pronouns?

Can peacegirl provide an answer as to how an individual's fear of the cessation of that individual's existence could be eased or comforted if, in fact, that individual's fear is perfectly warranted because that individual will cease to exist?