I count 3 problems in that sentence 🤔
It’s all just the one problem, just like how even the phrase decaying body could be split into multiple different evaluations.
They’re all different aspects, perspectives, or results of the same issue. The issue being a gradual unstoppable slide into The Twilight Zone.
You aren’t trapped in the decaying body, you are the decaying body. HA HA HA HA
You aren’t the decaying body, you’re the reason it’s decaying… 🥹
You are actively trying to destroy it as your body is continually trying to preserve itself … you are your own worst enemy.
You are both the reason it isn’t already rotten, and the reason it inevitably will be, no matter how hard you try.
Neat the power of good and evil, yin and yang, the dead and the living … a constant balance between forces
Where life may have momentary strength and periodically wins in the short term … death has stamina and plays the long game
Perhaps, though that seems a perspective biased by living, while the other 99.999% of reality would consider all life to be a fleeting anomalous spark that arcs brilliantly before returning to the collective abyss.
Materialism is cringe
Ewww, dualism is so fifth century BC.
Some people around then were well ahead of their time.
The Epicureans theorizing around all mass as made up of indivisible parts realized that if deterministic movements governed those parts that free will could not exist and thus ended up with their idea of the ‘Swerve’ and how indivisible parts of matter could have multiple probabilistic outcomes - much closer to 500 BCE than the 20th century experimental evidence both proving mass was made up of indivisible parts and that those parts have multiple probabilistic outcomes.
Maybe ideas you dismiss just haven’t had the proper supporting experiments dreamt up yet.
The Epicureans started with the idea that people were just bits of mass doing the things bits of mass do. Only by making a materialist assumption were they able to reach an interesting, novel, and possibly correct conclusion.
The thing that was the biggest contributor to the Epicureans being right about so much was their commitment to avoiding false negatives and insistence on not discounting explanations for things when they weren’t certain.
What is why it was weird they were so committed to the idea of the soul’s dependence on the body, particularly when their belief in eternal recurrence effectively provided the conditions for that not to be the case.
You can start from a materialist beginning and yet arrive at a non-materialist conclusion.
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Dualism isn’t even that old, Cartes is from AD, and it’s not even the only competition to Physicalism there is
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Physical Reductionism is weak as it requires all sciences to be reduced solely to physics, which just isn’t feasible nor is there precedent for one science to be made obsolete by the existence of another. (I mean Alchemy -> Chemistry, Astrology -> Astornomy sure, but… There’s never been a case of something like “We know enough about Psychology to know that we don’t need Marine Biology anymore!”
- Dualism was exposed as bankrupt at least 2500 years ago. Not everyone has picked up on that, obviously.
- Disciplines are collapsing in on each other. Both chemistry and biology are slowly collapsing into physics. The only reason biology might not completely fold into physics is practical: Biology is too complex. There isn’t any theoretical reason why it shouldn’t.
Edit: Psychology is the study of the human brain, but humans are mutated fish, so all that’s needed to link Marine Biology to Psychology is to ground Psychology in Biology, which is happening more and more.
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That would be an incredibly impressive feat to disprove it more than a millennium before the idea was even proposed in philosophy
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Citation needed
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The worst part is that they have convinced me that if this vessel dies I die when more intuitive knowledge would suggest that I would be free instead.
We’re all energy. Or more creatively - we’re created from the same atoms that existed bazillions years before.
If the universe is truly infinite then theoretically at some point your brain will be recreated because atoms are going to form any shape if given enough time.
Holy shit
It’s not that hard to be convinced otherwise.
The argument for the self’s dependence on a physical body (an argument dating back to antiquity) gets less persuasive with each passing month.
Ironically, by way of a counter-argument also from antiquity that was largely ignored and forgotten because it was wildly out of the context of the age.
I would love to be convinced otherwise. But it’s stuff like brain damage and general mental degradation that makes it difficult to believe that a “soul” or another spiritual body contains the self
If I were to create a perfect digital twin of your brain, with every neuron mapped on a 1:1 basis, and continued to send it signals relating to a physical world and subjective experience in that world, it would presumably continue to generate the data related to your subjective experience of self in that emulated world.
If those neurons were to then degrade or simulate damage, your expressed ‘self’ would also degrade accordingly, yes?
But unlike with your biological brain, I could always restore a snapshot of that brain from a healthier period and put it in a very different emulated environment after its natural ‘death.’
So while yes, there is an apparent local dependence of the self on physical constraints, this is predicted on an assumption of physical primacy and disregards the possibility of secondary recreation of that physicality.
Given the rapid progress towards exactly those kinds of secondary recreations, the assumption of our own primacy seems to be more and more spurious with each passing month.
Particularly given we’ve been measuring for a century that our universe at micro scales converts from continuous behavior to discrete at the point of interaction and switches back when persistent information about that interaction is erased, but only for the past ten or so been using continuous seed functions to build out massive universes which then convert to discrete units in order to track state changes from interactions with free agents - a very similar paradigm in much more primitive form.
Tell me moar
With each passing month we are moving rapidly in the direction of developing AI, building digital twins of ourselves and the world around us, and bringing back copies of our dead in various forms.
The argument in antiquity was that even if we were in a naturally occurring world and not one with any gods involved, that as long as the continued development of life one day created the conditions by which what came before could be recreated non-physically, that we might be in that non-physical copy and just not realize it, and thus our confidence in the soul’s dependence on the body and its dying when the body does is misplaced.
At the time, people really didn’t get it.
But in our age that argument has greater plausible context with each passing month.
The document proposing this was literally called “the good news of the twin” as it saw being the copy as far more desirable than being the original whose soul would die with its body.
Okay so what I’m getting from this, is that you took a pseudoscience documentary about digital twins seriously. News Flash: they were lying about AI just like Elon Musk was lying about colonizing Mars. All we have is a glorified chatbot that’s really good at plagiarism.
Also that argument you made about Antiquity was mostly just word salad, but the parts of it I were able to interpret basically claimed that if dualism were real we would already be in the spirit world. Which is one of the dumbest arguments I’ve ever heard as it makes an assumption. One might call it a form of begging the question really.
I love when people online try to correct other people about things that they have zero actual clue about.
Go ahead and cite any research supporting your view that it’s just a plagiarizing chatbot and nothing more.
To get the conversation started here’s a few counterpoint studies from Harvard/MIT and Princeton:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.13382
https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.02207
https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.06824
Actually that argument is literally Oxford philosophy professor Nick Bostrom’s argument in his simulation hypothesis given the unitary quality to the original and multiplicity potential of copies. If there can only be one original and can be more than one copy, then as long as there can and will be copies the odds are you are in a copy.
Wait are you unironically arguing for “creationism with extra steps” aka the simulation nonsense?
And fuck what does this have to do with dualism?
Oh nice, keeping it up with the commitment to a patronizing tone even when your little LLM misinfo was shot down with citations.
And it’s not creationism with extra steps, it’s recreationism - the theory is creation agnostic. It doesn’t matter how the original world came to be.
And yes, I am unironically a proponent of the belief that our own universe where at micro scales things behave as if guided by continuous mechanisms until interacted with when they switch to discrete behavior (which can be reversed by erasing persistent information about the interaction) just might have something to do with the continued trajectory of our work in the past decade creating universes with billions of planets using continuous generator functions which then convert to discrete units in order to track state changes from interactions with free agents.
As for what the theory has to do with dualism, if you can’t even wrap your head around how a non-physical recreation of a physical original might pertain to the topic of materialism vs dualism, this back and forth is probably a lost cause.
Except that you now depend on the physical nature of the universe in which you reside, when it fails, the universe fails. And this universe also does not in any way guarantee your survival outside of a physical body.
Not necessarily. You depend on sustained information consistency and resiliency.
But that doesn’t necessarily need to be mass based.
For example, you could exist encoded into gravitational waves or light.
And if the information of that universe is isolated, yes, you’d be dependent on its continuation.
But there’s a number of paradigms in cosmology where that’s not the case, from Penrose or Lee Smolin’s fecund universes to if there was any kind of cross communication between Turok’s CPT symmetric universes. Even more recent work on the black hole information paradox is pointing towards recoverable information being the case were your information to be swallowed into a black hole.
So if your existence is now data based, the question of longevity is very much tied to the longevity of information and not matter, which may be quite long indeed.
And certainly longer than a human body.
“May”?
Perchance.
You can’t just say “perchance”.
“Mysterious dimension” ruins it.
Me thinks
But I don’t think I am
He who is not busy being born is busy dying.
The day we are born is the day we start to die
I dunno, I think you have till you’re around mid to late twenties before the decline begins—at least, that’s when I began to notice it
We start to die in the process of being born.
No you don’t. Your body is growing and advancing in youth. It isn’t until your 20s that it starts degrading
That’s just dying with extra steps.
I know this is something people say and it sounds deep, but the truth is that growth and death are opposites. The day and acorn sprouts is not the day it begins to die, it’s the day it begins to turn into a tree. Death will come to that tree, but dying is not what it’s busy doing.
Get busy livin’ or get busy dyin’
