philo-sophy

[vitale]

1. What 'parts' are there of you? What are the 'elements of your nature'?
2. How are you and your body related?
a. Could you exist without your body or without any body at all?
b. Does your body have any impact on your consciousness and does your mental state have any impact on your body?
c. Is your body you?
3. What is it that is you?
4. Have you had another life before you were born? (ie, you, what you are, your very self)
a. If so, what was/ were it/ they?
b. How do you know this?
5. What happens when we die? That is, what happens to you, personally? (not what happens to your memory or the atoms in your body ... ) Is complete non-existence conceivable?
6. Which is better-the prospect of an afterlife or the prospect of complete non-existence once we die?
7. Is it sensible to fear death? How is your answer related to your answers to 2, 5 and 6?

 

[Arthur Schopenhauer]

What the hell? I do not understand all of these questions. I will answer anyways.

1) 'My parts' are limited to 'my body'.
2) My body and me are the same person.
A) A brainless mind or a bodyless body is hard to comprehend. I say, no.
B) Yes, those are interrelated.
C) Well, it certaintly isn't anyone elses.
3. My body.
4. No, not in the sense that I was a concious being, or at least, I am not able to know if I was.
A) I was sperm and an egg.
B) I learned it in first grade out of a naughty medical book.
5. What? Ummm... Next question.
6. It depends upon personal preference.
7. Death is inevitable. Fear of the inevitable is not sensible. - um?

 

[Factotum]

1) I'm more or less my consciousness and my feelings. My mental abilities are more like tools which are linked to me in a special way.
2) It's a tool of another sort.
a) No.
b) Yes.
c) No
3) A person
4) No, this is the first time I'm living.
b) I can't imagine any believable way for a consciousness to exist except as the product of a brain. Since my brain hasn't existed before, I haven't either.
5) We stop to exist. This might happen when we're brain dead or at the latest when the brain decomposes. In that case, brain death would be comparable to sleep -- even if it is not possible to wake up again.
6) Depends on the afterlife.
7) We cannot know exactly what will happen after death which is indeed a reason to be afraid. On the other hand, it's inevitable anyway so being afraid does not help at all.

 

[Mole]

Welcome Vitale

G'day Vitale, good to see you here.

We are all part of the same tree of life. Gene sequencing has shown that we all have the same DNA from an elephant to a banana to Vitale himself.

And to boot our DNA is digital and consists of only four letters, oddly enough the same number of letters as MBTI.

The difference is that we can measure the gene with exquisite precision, while MBTI depends on self reporting and an immoral provenance.

You understand perfectly, Vitale, that Hydrology, your speciality, depends on evidence and reason while MBTI, like astrology, depends on imagination.

And imagination is wonderful but it needs to be tested against reality.

But at root imagination and reality depend upon morality.

And there's the rub.

The work of children is play. And the purpose of play is to learn the distinction between imagination and reality. And child rearing practices determine our morality.

So in the final resort we can always blame Mum and Dad.

 

[Polaris]

1. What 'parts' are there of you? What are the 'elements of your nature'?

I can't completely distance myself from any object, because the moment something falls under my gaze, it has already taken on a personal significance, by necessity.

2. How are you and your body related?

Because the self in its essence is the fact of transcendence, and because transcendence is the antithesis of existence, the self only exists insofar as it's hinted at by everything in the world. That which proves the existence of the self most directly is the body as an object; and that which is the self itself is the body as a flow of freedom that takes up the objective body as the tool it needs to express itself. Put simply, the body is a mirror by which the self sees itself, and this image of the self is the only self that the self has, although the self, as a perpetual transcendence, immediately senses a truer self behind whatever self it has.

a. Could you exist without your body or without any body at all?

No, for the reason mentioned above: the body is the foundation of my existence, and without it--nothing can be said of that scenario, because it's nonsensical.

b. Does your body have any impact on your consciousness and does your mental state have any impact on your body?

It isn't so much that they have an impact on one another as it is that they're intrinsically bound and largely indistinguishable.

c. Is your body you?

Yes, if by my body you mean both my physical and transcendental one.

3. What is it that is you?

See above.

4. Have you had another life before you were born? (ie, you, what you are, your very self)

"Another life" requires a "this life" to define, suffuse, and take priority over it; without a "this life" to define "another life," that other life would have nothing to serve as its proof. So to answer the question, no I did not have another life before I was born, if by "another life" you mean a life that is truly severed from the one positing it.

5. What happens when we die? That is, what happens to you, personally? (not what happens to your memory or the atoms in your body ... ) Is complete non-existence conceivable?

Death is with us at every instant, usually in subtle forms, but it can never occur because if it were to occur, it would wipe out existence, and the absence of existence is the fact of transcendence, and the fact of transcendence requires existence as its proof. Other people can die, though, and it's by taking ourselves (as a transcendence) for another in the form of the ego that we imagine we can die also. Death is the possibility of the impossible.

6. Which is better-the prospect of an afterlife or the prospect of complete non-existence once we die?

I can't answer this question, because the words "complete non-existence" are incoherent if taken literally.

7. Is it sensible to fear death? How is your answer related to your answers to 2, 5 and 6?

To fear is to sense a force of impossibility with the power to annihilate that which is possible. To fear is to fear death.

Is there an alternative to that fear? No, because even if someone should set out to commit suicide, their efforts will be threatened by the possibility of their impossibility (as with failure); and if you think about that, about how it is that taking another breath can seem terrible in just the same way as death, the relationship between life and its opposite, as well as their interdependence, should become clear to you.