Can our consciousness last forever?

[arlentk]

A friend of mine posted this on Facebook and I was wondering what other people might think of it.

"It is not possible to be conscious of being unconscious. When death arrives, only our bodies die, but our consciousness will remain unchanged. A million years will pass, and we will never know of it. There are no gaps in our consciousness. We die, and then we are reborn again, resuming our conscious. Like energy, it cannot be created, nor destroyed. It only changes form.
Fear not death. We are immortal."

 

[bluejatheist]

Considering that there is no evidence that one's consciousness is anything but the product of their living brain's activity, not true. And their melodramatic style of writing is tacky.

 

[The Felonius Pope]

This idea that consciousness survives forever because energy can't be created or destroyed is, for some reason, a popular misconception. And your friend's comment is quite dramatic.

 

[scalyblue]

OP is quoting a corruption / paraphrase of this letter, submitted to a pre-blog website called "The Joy of Disillusionment" which provided support for people leaving dogmatic religion.
http://www.newrational.com/joy/

The letter that Op is paraphrasing appears about halfway down this subpage

Date: Tue, 12 Nov 2002
Subject: Immortality

I think the following words prove every conscious being is immortal, what do you think? Can you say it better? Can you express it as a calculus equation?

"It is impossible to be conscious of being unconscious"

In other words if you are conscious now, which you have to be to be reading this, you have always been conscious and always will be conscious because it is not possible to be conscious of being unconscious, or aware of the time between lives, or times when consciousness is not active in a given life form, due to death or brain injury. If consciousness is suspended as a result of physical death or injury time would stand still for you until your reborn in some form or conscious again. A billion years could pass and you wouldn't know it. Life, all life has to be never ending from it's own perspective, and that is the only perspective possible. Thus we are all immortal. True or false?

MD

David's Response:

MD,

I simply disagree with your "proof" statement. I can and I am conscious of being unconscious. It is the state I am in now when I consider my non-existence prior to my birth. Does that mean there is no possibility of "other lives" or a Jungian "collective unconsciousness"? No, it doesn't -- however, if I cannot perceive of myself as being part of those existences - if I cannot remember it, then it really does not matter to me now whether I am immortal or not. BTW, I have strong suspicions that there is a matrix of life as you suggest. I am by default a rationalist, now, however, and that means that I insist on real, empirical, scientific proof before I claim that something is PROVEN.

One cannot prove a negative. You cannot prove that there are not aliens in my soup. There may very well be some in there (really!) but we cannot say that "since it cannot be proven that they do not exist", therefore they DO!

Regards, and thanks for writing,
David

 

[Sparky]

A friend of mine posted this on Facebook and I was wondering what other people might think of it.

"It is not possible to be conscious of being unconscious. When death arrives, only our bodies die, but our consciousness will remain unchanged. A million years will pass, and we will never know of it. There are no gaps in our consciousness. We die, and then we are reborn again, resuming our conscious. Like energy, it cannot be created, nor destroyed. It only changes form.
Fear not death. We are immortal."

Strictly speaking I think it is possible for this to be true in that if your brain were to be reconstructed atom for atom as it is now, it would appear to you as though you were frozen in time (assuming you had the ability to sense the outside world via eyes, etc). The only thing is that I can't see how this would happen without a "to the atom" detailed plan of your brain and an intelligent agent to do the reconstruction. Some may argue that the universe will be eternal and that in an eternal universe everything must happen but as far as I understand things this is not true due to the physics within the universe.

 

[Prolescum]

I don't think so, but I'd like to imagine that there could be some technological means to continue one's consciousness beyond the limits of the flesh.

 

[nudger1964]

Strictly speaking I think it is possible for this to be true in that if your brain were to be reconstructed atom for atom as it is now, it would appear to you as though you were frozen in time (assuming you had the ability to sense the outside world via eyes, etc). The only thing is that I can't see how this would happen without a "to the atom" detailed plan of your brain and an intelligent agent to do the reconstruction. Some may argue that the universe will be eternal and that in an eternal universe everything must happen but as far as I understand things this is not true due to the physics within the universe.

so what happens if you replicate that brain from your "to the atom" plan...but the person you got the brain plan from is still alive and kicking.
i cant get away from the thought that your consciousness must be physically tied to that chunk of meat that is youractual brain...not one exactly like it. This does give me a problem as i am aware that all the cells in our bodies are replaced thoughout our lives, but i guess its a continuity thing that explains that

 

[Sparky]

so what happens if you replicate that brain from your "to the atom" plan...but the person you got the brain plan from is still alive and kicking.
i cant get away from the thought that your consciousness must be physically tied to that chunk of meat that is youractual brain...not one exactly like it. This does give me a problem as i am aware that all the cells in our bodies are replaced thoughout our lives, but i guess its a continuity thing that explains that

My guess is that while they will have the same pasts and have experienced the same past they will experience different futures. The fact that the brain is created while the person is still alive means that the brain does not continue a stream of consciousness but rather creates some sort of divergence of consciousnesses where the two share origins but not futures.

One thing I have always thought of with relation to this is the act of teleportation. What if a teleporter worked by scanning you from head to toe, sending the information to another teleporter where you were assembled atom for atom while simultaneously your original body was destroyed in the first teleporter. Have you been killed? To my mind yes and no. Yes in that your original body has been destroyed, no in that your "teleported" counterpart has just experienced being teleported from where you were to where they are now - they have the same consciousness, the same perception of reality, as you and hence for all intents and purposes are you. The stream of consciousness was stopped at one end and restarted at the other. Because of this I don't think that consciousness is physically tied to any particular matter but to an arrangement of matter.

You make an interesting point about the replacement of cells during life. It is a little like the teleporter example in extreme slow motion

 

[Master_Ghost_Knight]

so what happens if you replicate that brain from your "to the atom" plan...but the person you got the brain plan from is still alive and kicking.
i cant get away from the thought that your consciousness must be physically tied to that chunk of meat that is youractual brain...not one exactly like it. This does give me a problem as i am aware that all the cells in our bodies are replaced thoughout our lives, but i guess its a continuity thing that explains that

It is a bit late and I will only make a full reply tomorow, however here is a cute exercise.
How can you prove to yourself (never mind anyone else) that you have a conscious instead of a brain that is just convinced that it has a conscious? How do you tell the difference, how would a brain capable of thinking the way you do but without a consicous be able to tell the difference from having a conscious?

 

[nudger1964]

hmm, well you would first have to nail down exactly what anyone was proposing consciousness was.
For me it is an intuitive sense of selfness. By that definition i would say thinking you have it is actually having it.

 

[Master_Ghost_Knight]

hmm, well you would first have to nail down exactly what anyone was proposing consciousness was.
For me it is an intuitive sense of selfness. By that definition i would say thinking you have it is actually having it.

What is having an intuitive sense of selfness? Could a computer with those properties be considered conscious?
And how do you know that the you from now is the same you from 5 seconds ago? And how do you know that your conscious is not the same conscious of everyone else?

 

[televator]

Can consciousness last forever? Seeing as how our entire universe isn't expected to continue in a perpetual state that would allow for consciousness to arise, I'd say no.

Can consciousness continue outside the organic body? Possibly, but certainly not outside the bounds of a physical arrangement.
Neuroscience experiments have shown so far....you change the brain, you change the character of the entity "inhabiting" it. You turn off parts of the brain and you turn off parts of the character that reside in those regions. So I think It's safe to conclude that if you turn off the entire brain, you have nothing left.

 

[nudger1964]

What is having an intuitive sense of selfness? Could a computer with those properties be considered conscious?
And how do you know that the you from now is the same you from 5 seconds ago? And how do you know that your conscious is not the same conscious of everyone else?

it is intuitive because i dont really have answers to your other questions....just a sense of how it appears.
I have no idea if a computer could be conscious.
this is just about whether the mind is physical or a product of the physical. Either way you are gone when your brain dies....thats about as far as i take it.
if you have answers to your own questions im more than willing to take that into account.
i would say that i am in no way attached to the idea of being unique...i have no reason to think my consciousness is different to anyone elses beyond physical differences...or my dogs for that matter (which i do firmly believe are conscious creatures btw)

 

[Master_Ghost_Knight]

I can not say that my answers is the right answers, but from my prepective this is sort of how it goes.
Having a conscious and thinking that you have a conscious is indistinguishable. There is nothing that someone with a conscious could say or think that someone without a conscious could say or think. You can be certain of yourself that at least you have a conscious but a brain without a conscious could also think it is certain that at least he has a conscious, you can not convince yourself that you are not a delusioned mind thinking that it has a conscious and yet your brain protests saying "Yet I see, Yet I am conscious".

Now take into context our material nature, our brains are made of real materials and arranged to think what it thinks. The reach of this brain goes so far as the senses it holds (like vision touch), we can not reach senses that other people hold, yet other people are other brains limited to their own senses, having the same philosophical questioning and mental dialog of "what is conscious". The brain itself is composed of many different cells, each of them like an individual life form, clustered togheter with other life forms to form this super cluster we call ourselves. Which one of those cells is you?

What I porpouse is this. Our conscious is an ilusion, an ilusion caused by the limited perspective of our senses, our brain. And if we were to meld our senses and our brains with someone elses we would not see ourseleves as 2 different conscious but rather 1. Our experiences would be one experience and we wouldn't think to be more one person rather than the other. It is just our brain that it is wired to encode concepts sutch as self, a sense that we exist, to think and to say that we do. There is nothing but brains that think that they have conscious.
Then again what is conscious exactly, does anyone even know? I taught I did and that I have it, but what is it exactly? I don't know the answer to that, other than that feeling we have.
In other words, I do not answer the question, I deal them away into meaninless words by dealing away with the concept of conscious altogheter.

 

[nudger1964]

i think i am quite happy to accept that concousness may be an illusion.... but an illusion is still a something because it is that illusion that distinguises me from a creature without conciousness....if that makes sense

 

[devilsadvocate]

I think we have an on-going confusion between consciousness and personal identity in this thread, starting from the first post. I was going to write my 2 cents on what is consciousness and what is personal identity and how they relate to the topic of the thread, but just the first item on my list of properties of consciousness got way out of hand in terms of length. So instead, I'll just try to give some opinions as it relates here and perhaps start a new thread on consciousness later on.

Ok, first of all, consciousness is not the same as personal identity. They are related in that consciousness I have, I like to think, is MY consciousness. I am the one feeling the pains and pleasures and various other sensations and moods that I do. But what makes it mine, is not only the consciousness I have, but also my memories, personality traits, likes and dislikes and so on. The whole accumulated continuum of my personality. Were one mad scientist to take those away in the night while I am sleeping, and putting someone else's personality in place, I want to say I would cease to be. It is someone else now that is inhabiting what used to be my body, without a care in the world whatever happened to me.

So, it's not enough that my consciousness survives my bodily death, if all my personality dies with it. The "new guy" isn't like me, and in the circumstance given in the original post, nor am I of my plausibly hundreds or thousands of past identities. Nothing that they would have cared to preserve is left in me, despite the fact, in this scenario, that the raw consciousness is preserved.

Ok, so there are 3 major views of personal identity,

One is the soul view, which I am not going to waste time on. I find it implausible because of the inherent substance dualism and, to me anyways, overwhelming problems that brings about. How can the mind interact with body, if they are made of two completely separate substances? How do I know if there are other minds, instead of (philosophical) zombies or just nothing at all but my mind? There are other epistemic problems as well, but dualism doesn't seem to have overcome even those two in ~500 years, so I'm not going to pursue it.

This leaves us with the personality and body theories of identity respectively. The personality view of identity is what I already described a bit in the opening, and it is concerned whether personality undergoes sudden changes. The body view is, on the other hand, concerned with following the body (really, the brain) to see who gets to keep his identity.

Let's see what kind of answers those two theories then give on the problems raised in this thread, and I might add few more myself.

I don't think so, but I'd like to imagine that there could be some technological means to continue one's consciousness beyond the limits of the flesh.

This is quite interesting, and there is lot's to say on the subject, but I will try to limit myself on the personal identity. Let's for example, assume that in the future it will be possible to change some parts of the brain with artificial organs, much like it is now possible to keep people alive with pacemakers or iron lungs. How much of one's brains could one change for computers parts to keep her identity? If we, part for part, started to replace parts of the brain with functionally identical microchips, at what point does the person lose her identity? Once the first microchip is planted in her brain, at the midpoint, or at the very last brain tissue being replaced? Or does she ever, assuming that this is a continuous process without any drastic change?

The body theorist here would be in trouble, I think, because even if there is a place in the brain where the executive command center is (considered to be in the prefrontal cortex by most neuroscientists, though I am sure they would object to such simplistic view) we could still plausibly change it slowly, neuron by neuron by similarly functioning microchips.

The personality theorist has no problem with any of that. He doesn't care what the vessel is that contains the personality, he's only interested in that there aren't any non-continuous changes in personality. So, the personality theorist laughs at the silly body guy. But what if we then step the thought-experiment up a notch? We get this next problem presented in the thread:

so what happens if you replicate that brain from your "to the atom" plan...but the person you got the brain plan from is still alive and kicking.
i cant get away from the thought that your consciousness must be physically tied to that chunk of meat that is youractual brain...not one exactly like it. This does give me a problem as i am aware that all the cells in our bodies are replaced thoughout our lives, but i guess its a continuity thing that explains that

Just to keep with the thought-experiment, we now got a brain that is part by part transformed into basically a very decent computer that would leave the Intel guys jealous for a century. But what's prohibiting anyone with the whole blueprint from making another one just like it? It might not be so obvious at first glance, but the personality theorist is in quite deep trouble here. She is, after all claiming, that what makes a person, is the memories, dispositions, likes and dislikes and so on, that the person has. Now we've got two of them! To realize what kind of problem a personality theorist is in here, she must acknowledge that there is one person that inhabits two locations simultaneously. There's the first man turned into a robot, say, in the U.S and another one, a copy of him in Europe. But it's intuitively quite hard to realize one person could be in two distinct places at one time. So, it seems, the problem must be in the personality view.

Now the body theorist is laughing, because he knows the answer to this one. There isn't one person out there, but two, because you've got to follow the physical brain. The on in the U.S is the real one, the one in the Europe is impostor, or model two, depending on how nicely you want to put it.

But what if the brain wasn't only copied, but instead half of the original brain stolen and half of it copied. Which one is the real person now, according to body theorist? He must admit he doesn't know. So they both theories fail with these, admittedly sci-fi, but still plausible enough, conceptions


To keep this short, I am here inclined to agree with what Master_Ghost_Knight, proposed. Personal identity, and identity in general is fiddly, and I do not know if I am the same person after and before blink of an eye. According to Leibniz law of identity this only follows logically: A is the same object as B, if, and only if, all properties of A are true of B. This is a view that no object perseveres any, however minute change possible, if taken seriously.

I do not, however, share the view that consciousness is something to be skeptical about, though I'm fairly sure this disagreement stems from different definitions of consciousness, which is still an ill-defined term, rather than a disagreement about how the world works. In the definition I use, and I suspect nudger1964 uses here, you cannot logically be skeptical about the existence of consciousness, because the very awareness of that skepticism, is proof that you have consciousness.

 

[Laurens]

To answer the question of the title:

Maybe, but we currently have no reason to assume that it can.

 

[Neanderthal]

Isn't this question on the same level as: do unicorns lay eggs?

 

[Laurens]

Isn't this question on the same level as: do unicorns lay eggs?

Nope I'd say that this question has slightly more worth than that.

We know that consciousness exists, and we have no way of knowing exactly what will happen to it once the body dies. We have good reasons to assume that consciousness ceases at the moment of death (but no proof), however the question isn't quite as silly as 'do unicorns lay eggs?' because at least we have good reasons to think consciousness exists, whereas we have no reasons to assume that unicorns do.

 

[Master_Ghost_Knight]

Isn't this question on the same level as: do unicorns lay eggs?

Except that you are seeing, hearing, touching and eating the unicorn and everyone experiences the same thing despite the fact there may not be a unicorn (yet they taste so awsome).
Consicous seems to be an experiened shared by everyone, yet nobody knows what it is or have any reason to sugest tha it is even there.
It has an answer, it may just be senseless, pointless or unknowable.