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Eugine_Nier 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: Benito 14 May 2014 08:30:00AM *  7 points [-]

"We have a number of situations in which we can hear music in this world e.g. Hitting play on your laptop. However this is just the data we have; there are many situations we don't know about. Can we really say that when a song stops, it doesn't continue somewhere else? Personally I see no reason to believe this. At best we're talking fifty-fifty here."

The situations that cause music to be heard are exceedingly complex and are not likely to happen in other parts of the universe by accident. Similarly, the situations which cause consciousness are exceedingly complex, involving so many substructures and modules working in some currently unfathomable way (Daniel Dennett suggests the need for competition ). Even if you think it's likely that all of the necessary parts exist elsewhere in the universe, that's like saying you think music exists somewhere else in the universe - it doesn't explain why you expect the music that stops here to keep on going elsewhere. There's nothing so special about consciousness that it probably just jumps out of the atoms it's being run on - that's magical thinking. Of course, if you are thing like that, maybe you are religious, and you have to contend with everything we know about the mind so far in cognitive science etc.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 15 May 2014 05:33:17AM 0 points [-]

"We have a number of situations in which we can hear music in this world I.e. Hitting play on your laptop. However this is just the data we have; there are many situations we don't know about. Can we really say that when a song stops, it doesn't continue somewhere else? Personally I see no reason to believe this. At best we're talking fifty-fifty here."

The situation is not analogous since whether the song stops or continues where it can't be heard no one experiences it. Consciousness, on the other hand, is always experienced by the conscious entity.

Comment author: Benito 15 May 2014 07:09:56AM -1 points [-]

From an external point of view, the situation is analogous. Every time everyone's ever died, the evidence of their consciousness has ceased, and whenever a song has turn off, the evidence of it's being on has ceased. So to say that one has definitely ended, whilst the other one is fifty-fifty, seems a mistake.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 May 2014 04:28:58AM -2 points [-]

The difference is that with consciousness there is also an internal point of view, with songs there isn't.