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DanielLC comments on What do rationalists think about the afterlife? - Less Wrong Discussion

-16 Post author: adamzerner 13 May 2014 09:46PM

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Comment author: DanielLC 13 May 2014 10:34:43PM 2 points [-]

Personal identity is an illusion. It's often a useful illusion, but when you're dealing with something outside the normal usage, it can go way off. It results in asking meaningless questions like "Where did we come from?", "Where do we go when we die?", and "Is the guy who came out of the teleporter the real me, or just my clone?".

I don't mean to say that suggesting the existence of an afterlife is meaningless. I just mean that we're using a flawed model that implicitly assumes an afterlife, when there's no reason to believe in one. You assume that you continue to be conscious, when in fact there is a conscious entity at a given point in space and time, and there may or may not be another further ahead in time. You tried to be more skeptical about it, but you're still given it even odds. Since we live in an ordered universe, it's clear that almost all possible beings don't exist, or exist less in some sense or something like that. It's not even odds.

There may well be conscious beings beyond what we normally interact with. The issue here is that they aren't ex-humans. We know that a human brain is an integral part of the human mind. We know what individual pieces do. If there is some part of the human mind that survives death, it's not going to work the same way after we die. The mind might be modular enough that it can exist with some low-level animalistic intelligence, but more likely it would break down completely. It's also pretty unlikely that there is such a thing in the first place. There are a lot of problems that would be associated with an incorporeal organ. For example, how do you hold it in place?

Comment author: [deleted] 14 May 2014 12:59:12AM *  3 points [-]

Personal identity is an illusion.

How do you know this?

Comment author: RichardKennaway 14 May 2014 09:16:02AM 1 point [-]

It's often a useful illusion, but when you're dealing with something outside the normal usage, it can go way off. It results in asking meaningless questions like "Where did we come from?", "Where do we go when we die?", and "Is the guy who came out of the teleporter the real me, or just my clone?".

These are not meaningless questions. The materialist answers to the first two are "we come into existence as our physical vessel developed, and cease to exist when that physical vessel has been destroyed." Non-materialists of various sorts may say "we existed before we entered a new body and depart from that body when it dies". Materialist and non-materialist answers to the third depend on the technology of teleportation. Since teleportation is fictional, you can make up any sort of technology you like to get whatever answer you want.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 14 May 2014 07:29:05AM 1 point [-]

Personal identity is an illusion.

What experiences the illusion?

Comment author: DanielLC 14 May 2014 06:52:57PM 0 points [-]

I'm not saying consciousness is an illusion. I have no idea what that thing is.

You, that is to say, the conscious being at a specific place and time (not that you exist at just one specific point, but it's my way of specifying "that one") has qualia of a memory of another, earlier conscious being. This is not to be confused with having the memory of the qualia of earlier consciousness. Your existence is the result of an earlier being, not an extension of it.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 14 May 2014 10:15:33PM 1 point [-]

Your existence is the result of an earlier being, not an extension of it.

This is a distinction without a difference. Decomposition into parts, temporal or spatial, does not demonstrate nonexistence of the whole.