Assume that death ought to imply annihilation (i.e. cessation of consciousness)
Consciousness is consciousness of something
“Consciousness of existence” is the state that a reflective consciousness has when it is aware of itself
Annihilation is the state of there being no consciousness
By 5, annihilation implies that “consciousness of annihilation” is an absurdity
Our subjective experience is identical with that which consciousness is conscious of
Our subjective experience does not contain death
We are only conscious of existence; i.e. we subjectively do not experience death as annigilation
Time is a primitive element of the consciousness (i.e. consciousness requires time)
For 9 to be consistent with 10, we must always experience time
By 9 and 11, we perceive an eternity of time.
Perception of eternity is inconsistent with part of the model of reality which we operate on, the brain part
Our consciousness must break with “reality”
2 is absurd
Conclusion: annihilation violates the basic assumptions of a conscious subject; if observation dictated annihilation, then it would be forced to defer to the assumptions of the conscious subject by which observation is possible; immortality is deductive…
There’s a sort of amusing “cogito”-ness to this. “Now that you have imagined me”, I might say to reality or whatever is thinking me up, “You cannot just toss me away!” Reminds me of Goedel’s numbers coming to life and demanding meaning beyond formalism…
Is this defensible? Does anyone actually think we can know immortality a priori?
yes, the problem lies with 11 and 12. 11 says we must ‘always’ experience time. the only thing that’s true is that ‘as long as we are conscious we experience time’ to say that ‘always’ equals ‘eternity’ in that statement begs the question.
i have my own argument for immortality of consciousness, which i freely admit may be sophistic which wouldnt have a bearing on whether consciousness is actually immortal.
Everything that we think of as being the creation or destruction, or the origin or cessation of anything, is actually merely a transformation of energy. Conservation of Mass/Energy. The chair may have ceased to exist in the fire, but it’s actually a transformation of energy into soot, smoke, heat and light. The perceptual category of ‘chair’ itself is arbitrary. If you slowly take little pieces off of it until it’s reduced to rubble, at exactly which point would it cease to be a chair? And in the reverse process, at exactly which point would the chair pop into existence?
So
The creation/destruction/origin/cessation of things, at least as far as all of our experience and understanding goes and the reason for assuming the consciousness is similarly destroyed, only exists as application and cessation of application of arbitrary perceptual categories, as energy patterns morph into and out of those windows of parameters.
The conciousness, being the holder and inventer of arbitrary perceptual categories, is primary over them.
Per 2 and 3, the existence of consciousness is primary over the function of cessation.
Therefore, the consciousness cannot cease (or begin) (at least as far as our worldly reasons for thinking it does go).
Anselm: Yes, this is entirely my argument (if it were someone else’s it wouldn’t be so obviously fallacious)
12 not following, strictly speaking, from 9 and 11, is the most obvious flaw, and it’s the one I’ve struggled to work out. I have not taken the fact that it doesn’t work as sufficient to outweigh my intuition that in some form it could work. Besides, I find the fact that I can get even that close to an argument delightfully amusing.
The problem is that I’ve had trouble rectifying the notion of a “final moment” with the fact that the finality of that moment must enter through the limits of the consciousness. The finality of the moment is determined by the cessation of consciousness afterwards, but the cessation of the consciousness afterwards we have established to be undefined with respect to the consciousness.
Besides, I knew it was fallacious. That’s why I asked if it was defensible
inhahe: I’ll get back to you (I’m really bad with metaphysics)
I have a better understanding of your argument now. Maybe it wasn’t said well enouhg (or maybe i just didn’t read it right).
Consciousness can never experience its own cessation
which raises the question of whether it can be ‘locked’ in a moment of time at its death, like zeno’s motion, approaching its own death in a half increment, then a half of that increment, etc. with its own subjective infinite time line.
but then consciousness is painted as something that can’t continue without an external movement of time
so the result is that it continues to experience, and it can only do that in external time, therefore it exists eternally.
of course, these two thinsg contradict eachother, if consciousness is locked in a moment of time before its death, it’s not moving through external time. but i suppose you could put it in a way that it experiences an infinite internal timeline, due to not experiencing ceasing, with no specific framing in the external time (unlike my ‘locked in time’ picturing), and then bring in the necessity of external time argument to join the two together. i think you’ll have trouble with the ‘if consciousness doesn’t experience its own cessation, it will continue to experience’ part, or rather ‘it will experience an infinite time line’. you’l just have to skip over that part and hope nobody notices.
if i were the devil’s advocate i would suggest that the logical answer is that the consciousness ceases to experience, but in doing so does not experience its own cessation. although it may experience the processes of it. it blanks out at the precise moment that it would have experienced its own blanking out. of course i don’t believe any of this, but for people who believe the person dies with the body, that would be the answer.
impious:
Wow. I never would have guessed that, especially with 87 views and 6 replies. Of course I never would have thought through the strengths and weaknesses of the position before posting it, but had instead uncritically assumed that the outline of the argument was in fact sufficient to justify a deductive proof of such an controversial idea. Note that I had actually asked if anyone believed in a priori justifications of immortality, and had only posted the argument to get the ball rolling. Anyway, if by absurd you mean ~(9&11:->12), your point has been made. If not, then your statement is still useless.
inahahe: for the devil’s advocate answer
(let there be no) final moment f(t1) (which is )exactly when there does not exist a t2 such that t2 is greater than t1 and t2 is a moment in internal time; and let there exist a t3 such that t3 is greater than any internal time (Edit in parenthesis; when it messed up my formal syntax it messed up the quantification as well)
1a. 1-> the internal time is bounded above by some moment, t3
1b. → there exists a least upper bound, t4
1c. → loosely speaking, t4 is the limit of conscious time
1d. let us suppose X is some hypothetical final moment
1e. 1d is false, by design, because, by the concept of a limit, there exists a moment X’ such that X’ is less than t4 and greater than X
2. This requires that it must be possible (by 1e) for there to always be another moment between any given moment and the final moment (Edit: I mean t4), i.e. there are infinite moments
3. It is not consistent with the brain to be able to process an infinite number of moments; proposition 1 is absurd
4. This requires that the brain has moments stacked in such a way that for every moment there is some moment that has the relation “direct successor” to it and that the distance in time between any two of these moments has some minimum corresponence in distance in external time.
5. → there exists a time t’ such that it is the last moment (Edit: and it is in internal time)
I haven’t thought this through for long (I probably messed up the math somewhere; please read charitably), but roughly for the final moment not to occur within internal time, internal time needs to be infinite, which is (probably) absurd, i.e. for reality to kill me, it already has to violate mind/brain monism.
the argument definitely seems to parallel zeno’s paradox. as X approaches t4 (or t2 for that matter), it always has to cover half the distance, thus giving it another moment. of course the flaw in zeno’s paradox is that as the distance halves, the length of the moment halves too, and both approach zero simultaneously. what happens in your argument if we don’t even divide subjective experience into apparently discrete ‘moments’?
I posted a similar idea to this few years ago on this very site. It uses the premise that the many worlds theorum is possible and reaches the conclusion that if this is the case, immortality unto the self… the observer… must also be the case. I found that to be an undesired result, though.
a read the post. i think it’s essentially true. a few thoughts i had were…
i’m not sure but i think maybe the quantum physics many worlds only includes worlds that adhere to physical law. although on the other hand in qm anything is possible just extremely unlikely. so i guess by a sheer coincidence of quantum randomness you could live forever in some worlds.
you seemed to jump around between living forever in another reality and living forever in this reality as ways to be immortal. but i think well, other thanit happening in this timeline being extremely unlikely, they’re two different metaphysical things. actually being alive and being alive as a different you in a parallel reality seem to be kinda different.
the argument raises what i think is a huge question about what it means to be ‘you’. if all parallel worlds exist, there exists as a trace through that scape a gradient of ‘you’s’ that are born under slightly differetn people with slightly different genes because of slightly different time lines until at the other end is someone who’s completely not you. so at what point on that trace do they cease to be ‘you’? i don’t think it’s so black and white.
we can go to two extremes. 1. only you in this reality is you. the you in all the others are ever so slightly different as to not be you. (it also goes back to the question of, if you create a transporter that destroys you and then recreates you elsewhere, is that still you?) although this leads to hte coclusion that you are not even you from one femtosecond to the next. although we experience ourselves as a relatively unchanging being on a timeline, so maybe that’s not true. the other extreme we can go on is that EVERYONE, EVERYWHERE is you. how’s THAT for immortality. if you think the ‘you’ is a closed, self-contained thing or whatever ou said, then you have to go to one of those two extremes because it’s black-and-white.
i think there are different levels of ‘you’ from the most general to the most particular, but i’m not sure what implications that has given parallel realities. i think when you die in one reality, your experiecne isn’t going to ‘transfer’ to the you in another reality (or all of them), although it was already there even thoughy ou don’t know it on this ‘level’. i think it will still be a phenomenal experience, and a huge loss on this scale of experience, or at least… in the paradigm of subjectivity.but more for the survivors than for the departed, because I believe in the afterlife.
I may be wrong, but I don’t know if you got the basic gist of what I was saying.
The many worlds theory is the notion that every possible quantum occurance happens.
So you come to a point where a quantum decision is made, and in lieu of taking one particular path, the quantum result lies in both choices. So if a particle reaches a point where it can either decay or change its spin, it does both. However, we do not observe such phenominal in reality (Schrodinger’s Cat phenomina), so we have a metaphysical problem… how does the wave function collapse to one result.
One such solution is that parrellel universes exist for each quantum outcome. This is the many worlds theory.
Now, past decisions aside, you know you exist now. And you know that around you, in you, everywhere, there are quantum decisions being made by the googleplex. Given a simple “what if” presumption that all events that can occur DO occur … just in an alternate universe… you reach the afformentioned “problem”.
To be concise, I’m stating that if given a road with an infinite number of forks, and you are able to take all of them, there are infinite numbers of paths that are infinetly long. Since there is no difference in the present observer and the latter observers (the ones that take both forks), and since (by my definition of death), to observe death is absurd, then the observer who does not die continues on ad infinitum.
S’all I meant.
Granted, this is all moot if the many worlds theory is false.
Note that I had actually asked if anyone believed in a priori justifications of immortality, and had only posted the argument to get the ball rolling. Anyway, if by absurd you mean ~(9&11:->12), your point has been made. If not, then your statement is still useless.