General / Off-Topic Why there no life after death, when we are not alive at all

SpaceIsHuge

SpaceIsHuge
We're made of atoms, right? Atoms are dead, so we are too. Why fool ourselves by being alive. Why were thinking by being truly alive, when we are objectively dead. We all ran by dead atoms. So our body is just a deterministic machine. We all determined from start to end of universe. Enjoy your stay.

Im not sure of that tho. Just read that creepy rthing in some book.

But what do you think? Are you NPC or a real creature?
 

hairychris

hairychris
Caramel Clown said:
Define alive.
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Indeed. Something being 'alive' has pretty a specific meaning in biology. With that in mind, the book that OP read may be making an erronious point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_composition

YMMV if you believe in supernatural things like souls, but they throw up a whole other set of questions that don't seem to have a satisfactory answer!

EDIT: On second thoughts, the whole supernatural thing has a similar set of compositional issues to the life question.
 
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Vasea Azure

Vasea Azure
Feeling lil bit dead inside lately but on the outside still moving.
Seriously I have a very "sad" view on the entire world and imo we are just advanced NPCs made of matter the eventually move to state of "not existing" that is impossible to grasp for an individual.
 

Alien

Alien
SpaceIsHuge said:
We're made of atoms, right? Atoms are dead, so we are too. Why fool ourselves by being alive. Why were thinking by being truly alive, when we are objectively dead. We all ran by dead atoms. So our body is just a deterministic machine. We all determined from start to end of universe. Enjoy your stay.

Im not sure of that tho. Just read that creepy rthing in some book.

But what do you think? Are you NPC or a real creature?
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You're the life and soul of the party .... aren't you? Such a positive optimistic glass-is-half-full outlook.
 

Alien

Alien
Yes we are made of atoms. How the human body works on an atomic level, how the mind works, what is consciousness .... are questions scientists don't really have an answer for. "What is life?" We simply do not know. Without knowing that, we cannot say if reincarnation is real, it's something we'll each find out sooner or later, but right now, it's just a theoretical concept created to help the human mind cope with things they did not understand.
 

hairychris

hairychris
Alien said:
Yes we are made of atoms. How the human body works on an atomic level, how the mind works, what is consciousness .... are questions scientists don't really have an answer for. "What is life?" We simply do not know. Without knowing that, we cannot say if reincarnation is real, it's something we'll each find out sooner or later, but right now, it's just a theoretical concept created to help the human mind cope with things they did not understand.
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Life has a fairly exact definition when it comes to science - it needs a metabolism plus some other stuff* - which is why viruses are not classed as living beings but I think that bacteria are...

How conciousness was formed and how it works is definitely still an open question for sure. I tend to think that conciousness is an emergent property of brains becoming more complex over evolutionary time, but I have no idea how you (as another human being) exactly experiences conciousness, let alone how other concious** animals do.

And stuff like reincarnation? Well you're getting into the supernatural there so that's a whole other discussion! I stick to methodological naturalism so I need to be persuaded that something other then the natural world exists first. :)

* I am not a biologist!

** Whether animals have conciousness is still an ongoing argument in some circles, eg certain religious ones where conciousness is linked to the ensoulment.
 

Cmdr. Numa

Cmdr. Numa
hairychris said:
I'd suggest that the idea of living forever would end in insanity as the human mind really isn't built for it...
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It should cope.It's not built to store an accurate history, filling up more and more until it cannot take anymore, it's built to store especially strong experiences that help it to cope with the present. Less relevant things or things that don't have any use in the present are discarded and forgotten. Sooner or later if you could live centuries or even millenia, you would eventually forget most of your past life completely, but you'd still be functional in your present.
 

hairychris

hairychris
Cmdr. Numa said:
It should cope.It's not built to store an accurate history, filling up more and more until it cannot take anymore, it's built to store especially strong experiences that help it to cope with the present. Less relevant things or things that don't have any use in the present are discarded and forgotten. Sooner or later if you could live centuries or even millenia, you would eventually forget most of your past life completely, but you'd still be functional in your present.
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I'm not sure about that. We already have problems with perceiving the very large and the very small, which includes time as well as distance, courtesy of evolution. The mind also gets more set the older it is, and usually deteriorates, so how will that be managed even if extending life a relatively short distance? If you alter how the mind works is it still a human mind..?

Plus "Living forever" is a phrase that has a whole bunch of assumptions built in, and a whole other bunch of factors ignored. You need health of some description. You need to accept that everything that you know will be dust. A million years is nothing compared to eternity. Environment. Are you killable, or will you survive, say, the sun expanding to a red giant and consuming the Earth in 4.5billion years time? Want to witness the heat death of the universe, and then spend the rest of eternity just doing nothing?

Starting to sound more like a curse to me!
 

Cmdr. Numa

Cmdr. Numa
hairychris said:
I'm not sure about that. We already have problems with perceiving the very large and the very small, which includes time as well as distance, courtesy of evolution. The mind also gets more set the older it is, and usually deteriorates, so how will that be managed even if extending life a relatively short distance? If you alter how the mind works is it still a human mind..?

Plus "Living forever" is a phrase that has a whole bunch of assumptions built in, and a whole other bunch of factors ignored. You need health of some description. You need to accept that everything that you know will be dust. A million years is nothing compared to eternity. Environment. Are you killable, or will you survive, say, the sun expanding to a red giant and consuming the Earth in 4.5billion years time? Want to witness the heat death of the universe, and then spend the rest of eternity just doing nothing?

Starting to sound more like a curse to me!
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No worries, the expected actual lifespan of a potentially immortal human is currently estimated around 900 years. That's about the time where the likelihood of getting killed by accident, illness or natural catastrophe statistically gets near 100%.
 

hairychris

hairychris
Cmdr. Numa said:
No worries, the expected actual lifespan of a potentially immortal human is currently estimated around 900 years. That's about the time where the likelihood of getting killed by accident, illness or natural catastrophe statistically gets near 100%.
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They'll need to fix a hell of a lot of things with the human body for an arbitrary 900-year lifespan. And this doesn't even touch the brain issues!
 

[VR] optimal_909

[VR] optimal_909
Caramel Clown said:
Define alive.
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Anything that (temporarily) reverses entropy in and around itself.
A more human take would be: I am thinking, therefore I exist.

hairychris said:
They'll need to fix a hell of a lot of things with the human body for an arbitrary 900-year lifespan. And this doesn't even touch the brain issues!
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Aging process is a self-inflicted decay, otherwise some animals routinely live for 100s of years. But considering this age of comfort to which the human brain isn't designed for, I don't think mentally we could cope with living that long.

SpaceIsHuge said:
So our body is just a deterministic machine.
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Quantum mechanics is the RNG variable, so that's not true. :)
 

Alien

Alien
[VR] optimal_909 said:
Aging process is a self-inflicted decay, otherwise some animals routinely live for 100s of years. But considering this age of comfort to which the human brain isn't designed for, I don't think mentally we could cope with living that long.
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I heard a theory once that lobsters live forever (unless caught by a predator).
 
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