h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I noticed this yesterday - interesting...

Maybe a sniff of, not so much troll, but alter-ego. A little strange the way his English improved so quickly and so dramatically. Interesting, too, that he mentioned the phrase 'freedom of faith' right at the top of his first post -- maybe someone from this thread trying to inject a little intelligence into askh2g2?

Good luck to them if they are...


Lear

Maybe, maybe. Still, an interesting question to answer anyway.

Yes, more 'alter-ego' than troll. I commented there on how he seemed to be getting older by the minute and then he came to visit me on my PS. So I complimented him on his new-found writing style.

Yes, the postings have gone from very simple to suddenly quite complex, and in a very different 'voice' than the first few. Ah well, makes life interesting. . .

az

There was a thread called "Truth Seeking" that was quite big a while ago, probably someone from there.

Ah, that thread was started by Nyss. I doubt it would be her in any sort of 'alter-ego', but I really cannot believe now that a young 20-year-old guy from Egypt is writing all this stuff. Could be wrong. I've been wrong before . . . now *when* exactly was that. . .?

az

I if i thought it was a alter ego would begin search for "traits" and quoted references in A665101 ,but also the premis that it is someone from Egypt, around the age of twenty, given the history of the country and that in the tourist towns young beggers of five and six will often have mastered oral communication in five or six of the major lanquages, if not in written skills.

Given also the emergence of the internet acess by phone it is plauseable that he is what he says he is.

If we look at the world through Einstein's eyes - an overly dramatic way of referring to space-time - then nothing ever ceases to exist. Indeed, "cease" is a term that depends heavily on time and our concept of it. When we shift into a space-time perspective, our point-of-view is outside of time, as we gaze inward - in our minds at least - at all of space, across all of time.

Yes, Pattern-chaser's finally cracked. OK, this isn't as rigorous as some science, but it's more or less valid. Back to space-time, and us looking into it:

Perhaps I look like a me-shaped tunnel, punctuated at one end by death, and at the other by birth. I can see there is a time period during which I am active: alive. From outside time I can see that I am a component of space-time, a part of it. And that observation is time-independent.

So, inasmuch as there's life before death, there is life after it too. Even if it's no more than I've described above. But if my soul can continue in some sense, without a body, or if there is a God in Heaven waiting to welcome me , then maybe there's a more concrete form of life after death. Who knows?

Pattern-chaser

"Who cares, wins"

Hi pattern,Einstein's eyes - an overly dramatic way, no not really he himself ,would have been looking at it from (xyz).

Yes space time perspective is part but instead of scaleing up ,look at it from the other side a carbon or oxegen atom, vibrateing at such a speed , who is to say that each individual one is not a individual world
, these quarks and such we know they excist yet so small we cannot see them ,time and distence traveled in relation to size vastly different
yet both seem to excist in same span-place.

Life before death, yet whilst we sleep we purchance to dream and all that, our for want of a better descriptive word (electrical self) thought and visual signals motivated transmitted electricly rather than
chemicaly, allthough both interact within our bodies, the same transmitters/reciever (brain/eyes:ears) we use for interputation dureing the day, are operateing in our dreams, in one night we can relive a weeks worth of real time liveing.

So is it possible that life is really death ,and as we are all little bytes of some electrical message or even a jpg file or who in actuality are no bigger than the humble argon atom.

Hi P-C

But if we observe the cyclical nature of the universe and park ourselves behind Moebius' eyes then your death comes directly before your birth, or perhaps re-birth .

Thus is 'proved' one of the great theories of natural science.

I expect the mathematicians of gloom will be along any minute now to bounce me all over the continuum.

Blessings,
Matholwch /|\.

Hengeware Analyst

<>

Or maybe just do this!



az

Traveller in Time on his head
"I think the concept of life after dead is closely related to the concept of having a mind and a body as seperate entities.

When there is no dualism in the mind - body relation, there can not be life after dead either.

Is the identity, the consciousness part of the brain? Or is this consciousness as being the sum of the body's thought processes a seperate thing? Numerous synchronised thought processes running through the nerves of the brain start a resonation on a 'higher' level. This resonation being the mind?

Down to earth. These wacky simple computer systems running an operating system. If you switch it off, is the operating system still there? Or is it merely we know the operating system is present in a latent form. Not only we (human users) are convinced about the existance of this operating system, also numerous other computer systems are 'waiting' for it to return. (your provider, other computers in your network, the photocamera expecting to upload some images after you return to the computer system) (taking logininformation as part of an awareness of the existance of an operating system on your computer system).
Even if the hardware fails there is more and more left of the operating system in other systems.

Yes, this is a wacky example, computers are not even close to the complexity of an ant brain. But I am convinced some are capable of seeing the parralels.

The 'mind' lives on in the memory and active thought processes of other people. (some are convinced they can talk to their late beloved ones) Leaving mental footprints in the minds of others is a way to extend your life.
"

Some (selected) thoughts from an American Professor...
The Case for Life After Death
Professor Peter Kreeft: http://www.leaderu.com/truth/1truth28.html

The first reason for believing in life after death is simply that there is no compelling reason not to, no objection to it that cannot be answered. The two most frequent objections are as follows:
(a) Since there is no conclusive evidence for life after death, it is as irresponsible to believe it as to believe in UFOs, or alchemy. Perhaps we cannot disprove it; a universal negative always is difficult if not impossible to disprove. But if we cannot prove it either, it is wishful thinking, not evidence, that makes us believe it.

Now this objector either means by 'evidence' merely empirical evidence, or else any kind of evidence. If he means the latter, he ignores all the following proofs for life after death. There is a lot of evidence. If he means the former, he falls victim to the self-contradiction argument just mentioned. There is no empirical evidence that the only kind of evidence we should accept is empirical evidence.

In most supposedly scientific objections of this type, an impossible demand is made, overtly or covertly-a demand for scientific proof-and then the belief is faulted for not satisfying that demand. This is like arguing against the existence of God on the grounds that "I have not found Him in my test tube," or like the first Soviet cosmonauts' "argument" that they had found no God in outer space. Ex hypothesi, if God exists He is not found in a test tube or in space. That would make Him a chemical or a meteor. A taxi trip through Cleveland disproves quasars as well as a laboratory experiment disproves God, or brain chemistry disproves the soul or its immortality. The demand that non-empirical entities submit to empirical verification is a self-contradictory demand. The belief that something exists outside a system cannot be disproved by observing the behaviour of that system. Goldfish cannot disprove the existence of their human owners by observing water currents in the bowl.

(b) The strongest positive argument against life after death is the observation of spirit at the mercy of matter. We see no more mental life when the brain dies. Even when it is alive, a blow to the head impairs thought. Consciousness seems related to matter as the light of a candle to the candle: once the fuel is used up, the light goes out. The body and its nervous system seem like the fuel, the cause; and immaterial activity, consciousness, seems like the effect. Remove the cause and you remove the effect. Consciousness, in other words, seems to be an epiphenomenon, an effect but not a cause, like the heat generated by the electricity running along a wire to an appliance, or the exhaust fumes from an engine's tailpipe.

What does the observed dependence of mind upon matter prove, if not the mortality of the soul? Wait. First, just what do we observe? We observe the physical manifestations of consciousness (e.g. speech) cease when the body dies. We do not observe the spirit cease to exist, because we do not observe the spirit at all, only its manifestations in the body. Observations of the body do not decide whether that body is an instrument of an independent spirit which continues to exist after its body-instrument dies, or whether the body is the cause of a dependent spirit which dies when its cause dies. Both hypotheses account for the observed facts.

When a body is paralysed, the mind and will are still operative, though deprived of expression. Bodily death may be simply total paralysis. When you take a microphone away from a speaker, he can no longer be heard by the audience. But he is still a speaker. Body could be the soul's microphone. The dependence of soul on a body may be somewhat like the dependence of a ship on a dry-dock. Ships are not built on the open sea, but on dry-dock; but once they leave the dry-dock, they do not sink but become free floating ships. The body may be the soul's dry-dock, or (an even better metaphor) the soul's womb, and its death may be the soul's emergence from its womb.

What about the analogy of the candle? Even in the analogy, the light does not go out; it goes up. It is still travelling through space, observable from other planets. It 'goes out' as a child goes out to play; it is liberated.

But what of the need for a brain to think? The brain may not be the cause of thought but the stopping down, the 'reducing valve' for thought, as Bergson, James and Huxley suppose: an organ of forgetting rather than remembering, eliminating from the total field of consciousness all that serves no present purpose. Thus when the brain dies, more rather than less consciousness occurs: the floodgates come down. This would account for the familiar fact that dying people remember the whole of their past life in an instant with intense clarity, detail, and understanding.

In short, the evidence, even the empirical evidence, seems at least as compatible with soul immortality as with soul-mortality.


II
The first argument from authority for life after death is simply quantitative: "the democracy of the dead" votes for it. Almost all cultures before our own have strongly, even officially, believed in some form of it. Children naturally and spontaneously believe in it unless conditioned out of it.

Finally, we have the supreme authority of the teachings of Jesus. Belief in life after death is central to His entire message, "the Kingdom of Heaven." Even if you do not believe He is the incarnate God, can you believe He is a naive fool?


III
Arguments from reason are logically stronger than arguments from authority. The premises, or evidence, for arguments from reason can be taken from three sources, three levels of reality what is less than ourselves (Nature), ourselves (human life), or what is more than ourselves (God). Again, we move from the weaker to the stronger argument.
We could argue from the principle of the conservation of energy. We never observe any form of energy either created or destroyed, only transformed. The immortality of the soul seems to be the spiritual equivalent of the conservation of energy. If even matter is immortal, why not spirit?

IV. A.
The simplest and most obvious of these arguments may be called Primitive Man's Argument from Dead Cow. Primitive Man has two cows. One dies. What is the difference between Dead Cow and Live Cow? Primitive man looks. (He's really quite bright.) There appears no material difference in size or weight immediately upon death. Yet there is an enormous difference; something is missing. What? Life, of course. And what is that? The answer is obvious to any intelligent observer whose head is not clouded with theories: life is what makes Live Cow breathe. Life is breath. (The word for 'soul', or 'life', and 'breath' is the same in many ancient languages.) Soul is not air, which is still in Dead Cow's lungs, but the power to move it.
Life, it is seen, is not a material thing, like an organ. It is the life of the organs, of the body; not that which lives but that by which we live. Now this source of life cannot die as the body dies: by the removal of the soul. Soul cannot have soul taken from it. What can die has life on loan; life does not have life on loan.

IV. B.
Another quite simple piece of evidence for the presence of an immaterial reality (soul) in us which is not subject to the laws of matter and its death, is the daily experience of real magic: the power of mind over matter. Every time I deliberately move my arm, I do magic. If there were no mind and will commanding the arm, only muscles; if there were muscles and a nervous system and even a brain but no conscious mind commanding them; then the arm could not rise unless it were lighter than air. When the body dies, its arms no longer move; the body reverts to obedience to merely material laws, like a sword dropped by a swordsman.
Even more simply stated, mind is not part of the system of matter, not measurable by material standards (How many inches long is your mind?) Therefore it need not die when the material body dies. The argument is so simple and evident that one wonders who the real 'primitive' is, the 'savage' who understands it or the sophisticated modern materialist who cannot understand the difference between mind and brain.
IV. C.
A traditional Scholastic argument for an immortal soul is taken from the presence of two operations which are not operations of the body (1) abstract thinking, as distinct from external sensing and internal imagining; and (2) deliberate, rational willing, as distinct from instinctive desiring. My thought is not limited to sense images like pyramids; it can understand abstract universal principles like triangles. And my choices are not limited to my body's desires and instincts. I fast, therefore I am.

IV. D.
Still another power of the soul which indicates that it is not a part or function of the body and therefore not subject to its laws and its mortality is the power to objectify its body. I can know a stone only because I am more than a stone. I can remember my past. (My present is alive; my past is dead.) I can know and love my body only because I am more than my body. As the projecting machine must be more than the images projected, the knower must be more than the objects known. Therefore I am more than my body.

IV. E.
Still another argument from the nature of soul, or spirit, is that it does not have quantifiable, countable parts as matter does. You can cut a body in half but not a soul; you can't have half a soul. It is not extended in space. You don't cut an inch off your soul when you get a haircut.
Since soul has no parts, it cannot be decomposed, as a body can. Whatever is composed (of parts) can be decomposed: a molecule into atoms, a cell into molecules, an organ into cells, a body into organs, a person into body and soul. But soul is not composed, therefore not decomposable. It could die only by being annihilated as a whole. But this would be contrary to a basic law of the universe: that nothing simply and absolutely vanishes, just as nothing simply pops into existence with no cause.
......................................................................

Whether the premises be taken from the nature of the world, of man, or of God, the last three arguments were all deductive, arguments by rational analysis. More convincing for most people are arguments from experience. These can be subdivided into two classes: arguments from experiences everyone, or nearly everyone, shares; and arguments from extraordinary or unusual experiences. The first class includes:

the argument from the demand for ultimate moral meaning, or long-range justice (similar to the argument from God's justice, except that this time we do not assume the existence of God, only the validity of our essential moral instinct)- this is essentially Kant's argument;
the argument from our demand for ultimate purpose, for a meaningful end, or adequate final cause-this argument is parallel, in the order of final causality and within the psychological area, to the traditional cosmological arguments for the existence of God from effect to a first, uncaused cause in the order of efficient causality and within the cosmological area;
the argument from the principle that every innate desire reveals the presence of its desired object (hunger indicates the existence of food, curiosity knowledge, etc.) coupled with the discovery of an innate desire for eternity, or something more than time can offer-this is C. S. Lewis' favourite argument.
the argument from the validity of love, which insists on the intrinsic, indispensable value of the other, the beloved-if love is sighted and not blind and if it is absurd that the indispensable is dispensed with, then death does not dispense with us, for love declares that we are indispensable;
finally, the argument from the presence of a person, who is not a thing (object) and therefore need not be removed when the body-object is removed-the I detects a Thou not subject to the death of the It.
From one point of view, these five arguments are the weakest of all, for they presuppose an epistemological access to reality which can easily be denied as illusory. There is no purely formal or empirical proof, e.g., that love's instinctive perception of the intrinsic value of the beloved is true. Further, each concludes not with the simple proposition 'we are immortal' but with the disjunctive proposition 'either reality is absurd or we are immortal.' Finally, each is less a demonstration than an almost-immediate perception: in valuing, purposing, longing, loving, or presencing one sees the immortality of the person. These are five spiritual senses, and when one looks along them rather than at them, when one uses them rather than scrutinising them, when they are innocent until proven guilty rather than proven innocent, one sees. But when one does not take this attitude, when one begins with Occam's razor, or Descartes' methodic doubt, one simply does not see. They are less arguments from experience than experiences themselves of the immortal soul.

VII.
Three arguments from unusual or extraordinary experience are:

The argument from the experience of medically 'dead' and resuscitated patients, all of whom, even those formerly sceptical, are utterly convinced of the truth of their 'out-of-the-body' existence and their survival of bodily death. To outside observers there necessarily remains the possibility of doubt; to all, who have had the experience, there is none. It is no more deceptive than waking up in the morning. You may dream that you are awake and in fact be dreaming, but once you are really awake you are in no doubt. Unfortunately, this waking sense of certainty can only be experienced, not publicly proved.
A similar sense of reality attaches to an experience apparently even more common than the out-of-the-body experience. Shortly after a loved one dies (most usually a spouse), the survivor often has a sudden, unexpected and utterly convincing sense of the real here-and-now presence of the dead one. It is not a memory, or a wish, or an image from the imagination. It is not usually accompanied by an image at all. But it is utterly convincing to the experiencer. Only to one who trusts the experiencer is the experience transferable as evidence, however. And that link can be denied without absurdity. Again, it is a very strong and convincing experience, but not a convincing proof.
What would be a convincing proof from experience? If we could only put our hands into the wounds of a dead man who had risen again! The most certain assurance of life after death for the Christian is the historical, literal resurrection of Christ. The Christian believes in life after death not because of an argument, first of all, but because of a witness. The Church is that witness; 'apostolic succession' means first of all the chain of witnesses beginning with eyewitnesses: "We have been eyewitnesses of His resurrection. . . and we testify (witness) to you." This is the answer to the sceptic who asks: "What do you know for sure about life after death anyway? Have you ever been there? Have you come back to tell us?" The Christian reply is: "No, but I have a very good Friend who has. I believe Him, and I follow Him not only through life but also through death. Come along"
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pondering over spirits, souls, minds
"It took me an hour to read it.
I will not claim to beleive this neither to reject this. It is perfect food for the mind on this topic.

I have some questions:
ad IV. B
control over limbs as evidence
--Venus fly traps refuse to close if they are over triggered. Do they have a mind too?

ad IV. C
'(1) abstract thinking',
'(2) deliberate, rational willing'
--Should we not add (3) playing, as in useless to survive or useless as exercise. Just for the fun we do things, even whithout any reward ( fun being not a reward?)."

ad IV. D
--I am afraid I have problems with properties of something we have jet not even a solid definition for. It merely sets up some restrictions whithout any ground.


ad VII
--Well, this touches some light. The various reports of the near death experience are more or less equal. "


Traveller in Time ing on his head
"I must be dreaming, I have just travelled the world twice in less then an hour."

Nephew Who tapping on his consoles
"I wonder how many times we have to split up before we are recognised as individuals. Or should we cooperate to create a single super persona?"

Susan Winkle aka

(Traveller translating)
"I am free, free to think what I am in the first place."

Cryptic Worm digging deeper
"Firing Nerves
Fluctuating Patterns
Oscillating Cortex
Resonating Brain
Harmonising Quantum properties <?> [thesis]
Never die, just fade"

Annie Laurie:

Do you have permission to post all that text here? It says "All Rights Reserved" at the bottom, and there is nothing on the page you linked to that indicates the text can be freely used. If you don't have permission, then it is a fairly blatant copyright violation; if you *do*, then it is courteous to point it out so that we know.

The best (and safest) way, when you're referring to someone else's work, is to give a link (which you have done) and then briefly summarise the argument in a paragraph or two of your own writing; and, if in doubt, refer to the following: A527267.


Lear

What Lear said.



I was thinking how nice it was to see someone trying to consider all aspects of the discussion, then this ... it didn't put me off, exactly, but it made me think again. Perhaps that's *my* problem?

Pattern-chaser

"Who cares, wins"

So do folks wnt the full point by point refutation, or something more general?

Or should I just give it a miss?

Noggin

Er, , I only signed up for the five minute argument (apologies to those who know nothing of Monty Python's Flying Circus! ).

There's quite a lot of it to refute, Noggin!

Pattern-chaser

"Who cares, wins"

Point by point would be good, but very long. Good luck to you if you've got the time and patience, Noggin.

The supreme evidence of Jesus, from a abok that has clearly been cobbled together by a group of people who dont know that not all snakes crawl on their bellies through dust and that not all snakes are venomous. From a book where bats are declared to be birds and the world was created in seven days 6,000 or so years ago

Yeah right! If Jesus' evidence was supreme why bother with any of that other clap trap?


Just look at this. We are meant to take the word of an organisation that has in the past deliberately hindered investigations and hidden serial child abusers; denied that the earth revolves the sun and corrupted itself in a way which contradicts Jesus' teachings by taking money in return for absolution from sins:
The most certain assurance of life after death for the Christian is the historical, literal resurrection of Christ. The Christian believes in life after death not because of an argument, first of all, but because of a witness. The Church is that witness; 'apostolic succession' means first of all the chain of witnesses beginning with eyewitnesses: "We have been eyewitnesses of His resurrection. . . and we testify (witness) to you."

Since when has the evidence of a single source material riddled with inaccuracies and internal contradictions ever been considered historical fact

one love