Re: Death is not the end?

On Oct 9, 6:00 pm, tochrisbut...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Oct 9, 7:26 pm, Pilgrim <mcisr...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:



But who are "you" if there is only change?

A moving picture show?

Or, perhaps whatever's left over that's not changing. I imagine
that's a very, very small, almost non-existent point.

You may well be right. For "me" though, I don't (currently) even
believe in that "very, very small" residual. The "I" is just an
organising effect of impulses. I just follow Deleuze and Guattari on
this stuff. They seem right to me. I haven't read a good refutation of
them, so if you know one, I'd be interested.

I tend to come from a mystical point of view, mostly Kabbalistic, with
neo-Hegelian, Yogic and Shamanic shadings. That "point" is how I (and
the Kabbala in general) think of consciousness before the expansion
from nothingness into somethingness. It's equally acceptable to say
the point doesn't really exist, but then there's a dissonence created
in how life came out of nothing - which is arguable from a religious
point of view, but not so much from an empirical/rational point of
view, though I can easily see it leading to an understanding of
nothing coming out of nothing. It's also how I deal with the pre-
expansion of the space/time continuum (as opposed to the expansion of
consciousness), which could certainly be a limitation on my part in my
inability to conceive of the universe coming from anything but a dense
pre-space and time point. On that view - the need for that "point"
could be reduced to an illusory conceptualization

The only French (continental school...) post structuralist I'm even
rudimenatally familiar with, as in <having read> is Foucault. I find
the "diversification" thinkers, or post-modern approach, very useful
as a stage like any other development. It's an apt tool to understand
complexity within our existence that fails to account for the unity of
life (and/or consciousness) that is a major focus in all mystical
thought I've come across.

I'll take both (over easy).

You might be interested in Manfred Franks "What is Neostructuralism"
for a strong criticism of Deleuze. He's a German philosopher and
historian of philosophy.
I see you're in Europe, so this may not help so much, but the reviews
will give you an idea of the books content:

http://www.amazon.com/What-Neostructuralism-Theory-History-Literature/dp/0816616027


That pretty much makes "you"
everything and not so much anything.

Yes, it could be that way, too. I = nothing = everything.

Death is
a forced change.

Death is an illusory change, or, iow, an abstract concept posing as
change.

It's not very abstract once you get a good look at it. One minute the
body's moving, the next minute, it's an empty sack of goo and the life
part of it is off somewheres else

Yes, but if we accept the "you" is illusory, then what dies? The
notion of one cohesive entity dying is abstract to me. What about all
the microbes that continue thriving in the corpse? And impulses (by
which I mean the desires which use us as hardware)--I don't know where
they go or come from. Death may just be a rationalisation of something
else.

I don't think the "you" is illusory so much as a temporary
manifestation that we
tend to become hung up on, identify with and become attached to.
Again, this opinion of mine is coming out of, in this case, primarily
a Yogic philosophy. In Hindu terms, I'd be in line with the Kashmiri
Shaivite form of concrete monism. It's not that we can't get away
from our own self consciousness and so project it onto the world, it's
that the more conscious we become, the more we're aware of the
consciousness that is in everything, including the inanimate world.
It's the glue that holds it all together.


I'd say it's the conception
that's illusory, the change is real enough, as changes go.

Again, I don't see it this way, but that's just my bent. Seeing a
human death as an isolatable change seems like an anthropocentric take
on processes. I may be misinterpreting you here.

Yeah, misread. I was thinking about watching one of my cats die and
with enough wine in me, I can get fairly philosophical about the fruit
flies that drown in my glass on a regular basis. I consider the
microbes that inhabit the dead body to be separate entities from the
corpse, but only temporarily separate. The cycle of mass/energy
conversion continues through the rotting and the consuming of the
rotting flesh. The life-energy that has left the body behind either
disperses, to be recycled within this conversion, or there is a core
that retains whatever is cohesive within it and is recycled in a more
or less cohesive fashion. I suspect that both dispersion and cohesion
can happen, depending on the situation.

But I've been
thinking about death and other "endings" (and beginnings) being social
fictions imposed on us, so I'm struggling against that. I suppose my
line of argument gives me away as idealist, and lacking the
philosophical knowledge to justify it.

Well, I fall into the category of idealist as well. I tend to
hyphenate it with pragmatic, so I think of myself as a pragmatic-
idealist. I rather like being a condradiction.




(I must just go and check the chicken...)

Ok, I'm going in.

How was the chicken doing when you checked in on it?

It was done, or so I thought.

And quite dead, I hope, with the feathers removed :)

.

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