So what does happen when you die?
- Thread starter patty_lone
- Start date
When we see people picking through the garbage on charity commercials, those people aren't looking for food. They are recycling for living, get paid and then go buy food. In Canada we are just stupid and give our valueable garbage away after we've sorted and even washed it.
Why gold and jewellry but no cash?
I'll take that chance. When you die, that's it, no part of you survives the death of the body, that's the end of the world as far as you're concerned. If your view, or anything like it, turns out to be correct, I'll be very surprised, and I'll have a few sharp questions for whoever set things up. There's no logic to a story about an omnipotent benevolent being who creates faulty humans then holds them responsible for his mistakes. Since the Bible is egregiously wrong about where we came from, I see no reason to think it's accurate about where we're going.
Yes, and more. I grew up in a Christian household and once believed everything I was told by the authority figures in my life. Then as a young adult I learned how to think for myself and by the time I was 30 I had rejected all my religious instruction as preposterously illogical and inconsistent with the evidence. A good scientific education is pretty corrosive to religious belief.
The Bible - if taken literally, is chalk full of bullsh*t. That bullsh*t is mainly flawed interpretations by very primitive and unsophisticated people. I don't think that precludes spirituality (as Cliff wisely puts it). We just DON'T know if and where we are going.
Agreed, but neither does spirituality require that there be some other place we go. I've seen no good evidence that suggests there is, and what HAS been offered readily admits of simpler explanations, rooted in the well known cognitive and perceptual biases we all have. I'm a materialist, which in this context means I think that matter and its interactions are the fundamental reality, that what we call mind or spirit is, at least in principle, explicable in terms of complex and subtle interactions among various bits of matter. Materialism is the underlying assumption of modern science, and all the good evidence points that way. Parapsychologists after over a century of careful scholarly investigation have failed to come up with a single repeatable test, or even a coherent understanding of what they think they're investigating. Properly controlled tests always come up empty. Rather than conclude that the phenomena are elusive, as most of them do, the honest conclusion would be that there's nothing to investigate, the phenomena are not real.
Yet so much of science is based on immaterial equations that transcend time and space. Is gravity made of matter? Is the golden ratio made of matter?
The Lord of the Rings by Tolkien is not made of matter. You can change the format of the book, change the font, it can be read on the internet. If I burn the book at home, the story still exists.
Beethovens's 9th can be played simultaneously at many different points in space. An atom can't be at two places at once right?
The point being that some things cannot be reduced to matter. And that's why some of us are not materialists.
Of course, had there been no matter, there would have been no Beethoven and Tolkien to create their masterpieces. That is why I don't consider myself an immaterialist also. I don't deny the fact that matter is the ground on which the tower of human constructs stand...
A deeper and richer understanding of reality seems necessary, both materialism and immaterialism seem incomplete to me...
the neat ghost clothes you talk about, they must be for sale somewhere
on the way 'thru', or does one buy them before they die,to take with them
just in case they end up in a haunted house. lol
But they can, at least in principle, unless you're going to claim the realm of Platonic ideals has some actual reality outside the mind and independent of it, and if you do I'll demand the evidence for that. All those things are ideas, which are represented in the mind by its material structure. And no, gravity is not made of matter, neither is a magnetic field, but they're due to certain material interactions, without matter they wouldn't exist, which is why I claimed matter and its interactions are the fundamental reality, not all of it. There are no supernatural beings, no disembodied spirits, no souls, etc. Without matter and its interactions, there isn't anything else there.
Without an observer, does matter exist? It is the old "if a tree falls in the forest" question.
YouTube - BBC Horizon (2011) - What is Reality? (complete, uncut)
YouTube - BBC Horizon (2011) - What is Reality? (complete, uncut)
The key word here is ''interactions''. What are they and what are they made of? If scientists ask these questions about particles, why shouldn't we expect them to ask the same questions about equations and these ''interactions'' you speak of. These material relationships seem to be organized under certain mathematical realities that are in themselves immaterial.
Take Newton's law of gravitation for example, something you will obviously know much more about than me.
The law speaks of mass, which is directly related to matter as we understand it, but it also refers to distance and proportionality. Can you really say that the concept of distance and proportionality , which in essence are mathematical realities, are material? I can certainly go along the idea that these concepts exist as mental representations in our material brains, but I'm pretty sure you'd agree that stars would still have gravitational fields even if humans weren't there to study and experience the phenomenon.
So let me repeat my question... One that I've asked you many times under different forms and which I doubt you might perceive as a little bit of an obsession from my part...
What is Newton's law of gravity made of? What are numbers made of? What do mathematicians study if it's not matter?
Has anybody watched the film (above) What is Reality? Latest and greatest works in quantum physics and mechanics. Proves and is trying to prove some interesting stuff about reality. Makes the issue of death rather pale - at least the usual status quo versions.
Why must they be "made" of anything? I think you're making several errors here, starting with responding to claims I've neither made nor implied. I said, for instance, that matter and its interactions are the fundamental reality, not that everything is made of matter. You also appear to be confounding our descriptions of things with the things themselves, and failing to distinguish between the perceptual and conceptual, which leads you to ask questions that aren't meaningful.
Gravity, for instance, is a real thing generated by the presence of matter, we can feel its effects on us because we're also made of matter, and observe its effects on other bodies made of matter. That's perceptual. Newton's law is a conceptual description of it, which works pretty well most of the time, but it's turned out to be incomplete. Einstein's conceptual description of it is more complete, in that it correctly describes a wider range of interactions than Newton's version and correctly predicts things Newton's version doesn't, but we know it too is incomplete because it's not consistent with the other major theory of physics, quantum mechanics, which we also know is incomplete. But both general relativity and quantum mechanics are fully consistent with the claim that there is an objective reality that exists regardless of our perceptions of it or any conceptual models we make of it, and that reality consists fundamentally of matter and its interactions.
Mathematicians study ideas. Numbers aren't made of anything, they're concepts which, like many other mathematical concepts, have proven extremely useful in our attempts to create our conceptual models of reality, but they need not necessarily have anything to do with objective reality, any more than unicorns do. You might as well ask me what a unicorn's made of, it isn't a meaningful question to me.
You seem--correct me if I'm wrong--to lean toward the view that there is a realm of Platonic forms out there somewhere with an independent reality, where things like numbers (and possibly unicorns) exist. The main burden of your multiple questions amounts to "is that true?" I don't know whether it is or not, or what evidence could possible prove or disprove it, though it's often useful to think about things as if it's true. It's helpful, for instance, to be able to idealize a perfect circle whose circumference is a line of zero thickness exactly pi times its diameter, though we can't make one. This is a deep philosophical issue that much greater minds than ours have wrestled with at least since Plato's time, without a definitive result, and it's in mathematics I think that the really thorny questions appear.
Is mathematics implicit in the nature of the cosmos, or is it something we've invented to help us think about things? One of the most stunning results, at least to me, is what's called Euler's equation, a very short, simple, mathematical statement that connects five numbers, e, the base of natural logarithms, pi, zero, one, and the unfortunately named imaginary number i, the square root of -1, in a single elegant little equation: e^iπ +1 = 0. It's deeply connected to trigonometry, and thus geometry, and the same numbers show up repeatedly all over mathematical physics in contexts where there seems no obvious reason to expect them. To anyone with any sensitivity studying physics and mathematics, the immediate reaction is likely to be, "Why should this be so? Why are these numbers so intimately connected to all our descriptions of physical reality?" I don't know. I wish I did.
Are you suggesting they might be made of nothing?
I'm not sure I agree that the question isn't meaningful. If I ask it, it's because it's pretty meaningful to me at the very least. And I believe it should be to scientists also... I know I'm not wrong in my curiosity. Yet I'm not closed to the fact that I might be making certain kind of mistakes in my reasoning.
I pretty much agree with you there. But I'm still unsatisfied by the ''interactions'' part. If they're NOT made of matter, doesn't this suggest that at least part of reality is also immaterial?
But unicorns are not useful in describing reality. Numbers are, as you say yourself. That's why I think that it is meaningful to wonder what numbers are made of. To wonder if they have some sort of existence beyond the human conceptual framework.
I think it's fair to say that I used to be a Platonist at heart. I still am in some way. Yet I'm open minded enough to contemplate different scenarios and the more reading and learning I do, the more I embrace matter as being as real as the so called ''pure'' ideas that might sustain it. I guess it's fair to say that I've opened myself more to the aristotelian vision of reality. In the end, I'm just deeply curious about the nature of reality and every time I get to talk or exchange with people like you who are highly trained in science, I like to dig a little to see where the edge of their conception of reality is. Science brings us many answers and I'm grateful for it, but in the end there's always a point where its shining light fades and we must rely on pure speculative thought. I guess this is where pure philosophy comes into play.
Can't argue with that...
Same here my friend... As a musician, I am constantly in awe when I consider the mathematical principles involved in the construction and beauty of music in general. There aren't much parameters of music that can't be viewed in a mathematical way (except perhaps lyrics). And while my math is clearly limited compared to yours, I can appreciate your thoughts on Euler's equation. I thank you for this stimulating exchange and leave you with this amusing sound that describes fairly well the endless set of questions that arise from such discussions.
YouTube - shepard tone
In a sense, yes, but on the other hand, not really. It's late at night in my time zone, I'm tired and about to go to bed, I just came in here to see if you'd commented on that, so I'd have your ideas in my head for longer than I would if I didn't see them until tomorrow afternoon. So this will be shorter than it would be under other circumstances. Am I making sense?
What I'm suggesting is that asking what they're made of is conceptually not a useful way to think about them. Ideas aren't made of anything in the conventional sense of being constructed of other physical things, and I don't find that a meaningful question. You might better ask, what are the objects of our consciousness, what does it really mean to think about something? I've been reading a philosopher lately named Mortimer Adler, and he has this to say about it, among many other things: "Our ideas have the special characteristic and function of placing objects before our minds. It is always the idea's object of which we are directly conscious, not the idea itself. Ideas are nothing but the means whereby we apprehend the objects they have the power to place before our minds. They themselves are inapprehensible." That seems to make sense, but I'm far from sure I know what it means.