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I used to believe that completely, until I got to experience my grandmother's Alzheimer's and Dementia. Nothing disproves the idea of a ever-lasting, metaphysic
by wintorez 3y ago
I used to believe that completely, until I got to experience my grandmother's Alzheimer's and Dementia. Nothing disproves the idea of a ever-lasting, metaphysical soul, like seeing it crumble before your eyes as various parts of brain decay and shut down.
I really hope that you never experience it yourself, and I respect your beliefs, but I'm convinced beyond a doubt that there is nothing in there that is not chemical.
- monero-xmr 3y agoYes I have had elderly relatives fall apart. But you can certainly appreciate that I have thought about all of the big questions - bad things happening to good people, injustice, our body and mind decaying - and it doesn’t shake my faith.
- stouset 3y agoI for one can certainly appreciate that faith often seems to be unshakeable in the face of contradictory evidence. When someone’s metaphysical soul passes on, what snapshot in time are someone’s memories plucked from their Alzheimer’s-riddled brain?
- monero-xmr 3y agoYour soul isn’t a snapshot in time. Aborted fetuses or mentally challenged people also have souls and go to the afterlife. It’s beyond human comprehension but I have faith we leave this world behind and go beyond once we perish.
- bundie 3y agoLmao
- Apocryphon 3y agoThis isn’t Reddit.
- DropInIn 3y agoAka faith is delusion used to avoid dealing with reality.... But you worded it in a way that placates the insanity and undermines any value of discourse. We don't get to Truth by saying "Whatever you feel like believing is fine"....
- kyriakos 3y agoEven though I don't believe in the metaphysical, one could argue that the brain is just a tool helping the soul manifest itself physically and a broken brain is just bad at doing that.
- krapp 3y agoIn the absence of actual evidence, one could argue literally anything.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agoThought experiment: Take a remote control car. Damage the radio receiver or the chips that translate its signals into signals to the motors. Observe that this creates degraded performance (perhaps the car can only turn left now, not right). Does this disprove the idea that something operated the car other than those chips?
- wintorez 3y agoWhere is the interface between the soul and the brain? How do they communicate? Why and how the chemical changes in the brain changes the character and psyche of a person if it comes from the incorruptible soul?
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agoI don't know. OTOH materialism doesn't have an explanation for consciousness so I can live with that.
- DropInIn 3y agoIt absolutely does, it's just not as detailed as we have for how computers work.... Consciousness is in many ways an illusion, manifested as a result of complex chemical processes passed on from our predecessors and developed over the course of billions of years.... Just because you perceive yourself as having free will does not mean you actually do... See the recent post on this site about people getting convinced they committed a crime they not only were innocent of but had never even happened at all....
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agoI don't think that's true; while it's obviously true that many mental processes can probably be explained away, something sits at the center of the mind that perceives things, and claiming that said awareness is a material or emergent property is a claim you can make, but it's a completely unsubstantiated one.