Why Does Energy = Consciousness?

[The Felonius Pope]

My cousin's dog died recently *I miss you, Kipp* which led to a discussion between my mother and I regarding consciousness. I don't think anything happens after we die, I think we are like machines, we just shut down. My mother, on the other hand, believes that consciousness survives death.

I asked her why she believed such a thing and she told me, essentially, "Living beings are made of energy, and the energy has to go somewhere."

My mother isn't a new age believer and in fact isn't a very faithful Lutheran. She doesn't even believe in ghosts. So why does she believe that energy is equal to consciousness? It isn't just her that believes this, I hear the same thing at every funeral I go to. So why do people believe this?

 

[Inferno]

I'd say because deep down, many people need to believe that there's something out there for them, that they can survive death. Many people would get depressed if that weren't the case. Heck, even I sometimes feel a twinge of unease when I remember that I have at the utmost best "only" 90 years to live. (I'm going for the maximum age that's been achieved so far.)

 

[australopithecus]

Because people don't know what energy actually is.

 

[Laurens]

People like to use the word energy to talk about something intangible (or some might prefer to say non-existent) because it lends some kind of pseudo credibility to the notion.

Energy is something we generally can't really see, yet it does exist, so people seem to think that calling other things that we cannot see (because they aren't real) 'energy' makes them more plausible....

Or something...

 

[Frenger]

It seems to be almost inbuilt that we deny death, it's something out of our control that we fear and thus need to find a way to come to terms with that, or not as it seems.

The problem with saying our physical body survives death is that we can see it decompose fairly quickly, heck we turn grey pretty quickly so there is no way we can resolve that in our heads.

So, with that in mind it seems a fairly logical next step to suggest that we our not only physical but also composed of something "spiritual" or some nonsensical word like that. Once we convince ourselves that we are made of something other than just our bodies, the sky is the limit (no pun intended) with how we imagine we survive death.

In terms of why your Mother chooses to use the word "energy", I agree with Laurens, it's a buzz word that sounds fancy and scientific that few people truly understand.

 

[Dean]

["¦] "Living beings are made of energy, and the energy has to go somewhere." ["¦] So why do people believe this?

This is rather silly, quite honestly (the concept that living beings have to "go somewhere" because of their arbitrational physical constituents). I fully recognize that there are wide number of individuals who "gee-whizz" so to speak, when someone uses the word "energy", just as it is in the case of religious propagandists such as Deepak Chopra who use terms such as "infinite", and concomitantly , and often far more frequently , "quantum". Of course, principally at least,ALL of these terms originate from scientific disciplines, and you will find that 99 times out of 100, the people using such phrases have no idea what they actually mean. Certainly among the general population (e.g. non-science folk).

Every bit of scientific evidence yet brought forth in the fields of neurophysiology and neurochemistry show , almost beyond doubt (be it indirectly) , that human-consciousness cannot survive bodily death. This is simply because if the brain is required for consciousness (and we have every reason to believe it is, and none to believe it isn't); then consciousness simply cannot survive the brain's destruction, hence bodily death. The premise that one must "go somewhere" due to their physical components (while popular)'; is utterly incoherent. I hear more often that we must live "after death", because of the fact that our atoms are eternal, e.g. change states, but this is obviously equally disjointed for a multitude of reasons. If we go anywhere after death, we go there,without our atoms.

Physical energy is essentially established as conserved scale of physical quantity, which arbitrarily characterizes a given object or object's power to mechanise. And of course, all energy can only be transferred within the bounds of physical force, and the energy per se is defined through the integral of that self-same force, typically measured in kilograms-(metre-squared > per-second, squared, a.k.a. joules. Thus, energy is not even a kind of "stuff" , a term which I use here synonymously with the scientific term "matter". Energy is often conceived as a kind of "stuff", but it can't be, because energy is NOT a substance. It is rather an attribute of a substance, i.e. of physical substances such as fields, bodies, or space(time) itself, and thus it has no physical application beyond it's influence within and around physical substances , invisibly, but nevertheless manifestly (not ethereally). And thus, despite it's renowned "property" of being incapable of destruction, nor formation, it is most definitely not supernatural, or anything like supernatural.

People often use terms such as "energy" to mean that which we don't understand, but I've never heard it used quite like this before. It's understandable I suppose, as it provides some refuge from realisation of the finality of death. Regardless of whether said people understand it , and I'm willing to bet than the overwhelming majority of them don't , this can be the only real reason they believe it, one would expect.

 

[The Felonius Pope]

I know people like the idea of an afterlife, but to equate energy with consciousness is absurd! That would mean the coffee I'm drinking is conscious! Madness, I tell you, madness!!! :evil:

 

[bluejatheist]

I know people like the idea of an afterlife, but to equate energy with consciousness is absurd! That would mean the coffee I'm drinking is conscious! Madness, I tell you, madness!!! :evil:

May the force be with you

 

[The Felonius Pope]

People often use terms such as "energy" to mean that which we don't understand, but I've never heard it used quite like this before.

You've really never heard it used like that? Like I said, I hear it all the time. I even heard it on a science-fiction show.

Regardless of whether said people understand it , and I'm willing to bet than the overwhelming majority of them don't , this can be the only real reason they believe it, one would expect

I don't get it, Dean. I can understand why uneducated people might, for whatever reason, equate energy with consciousness, but my mom has taken college biology classes.

BTW: I've been thinking about what language I should learn for months now. I thought over the information you gave me and I've decided, against the advice of my Belgian neighbor, to learn German. Thanks.

May the force be with you

Strong am I with the force.

 

[Dean]

["¦]

["¦] Regardless of whether said people understand it , and I'm willing to bet than the overwhelming majority of them don't , this can be the only real reason they believe it, one would expect[.]

I don't get it, Dean. I can understand why uneducated people might, for whatever reason, equate energy with consciousness, but my mom has taken college biology classes. ["¦]

The sad fact is; the overwhelming majority of religious beliefs (and I would classify this as a purely religious belief),are at their foundation; cultural, emotional, and doctrinal, not rational. Though I'm willing to bet that in this case it is purely emotional. And this works independent of one's scientific education. While it's obviously true that religion does effect education, it's also clear to me that most people (educated or not), will cling to some slither of irrationality to comfort them in such times as this one. You might actually find that your mother agrees that such a claim is absurd after some . . . months, or years. Even some atheists end up praying to God in the last moments of their family-members, as a "last ditch effort". That doesn't make them theists as such. It's perhaps slightly paradoxical, and I've mentioned this "paradox" before: there more someone has education or specialized knowledge in a certain field that may influence certain aspects of their personal lives , in this case their views on death , the more of a tendency they will have to contrive and distort their knowledge in that field (whatever it may be), when a situation arises when this may effect them emotionally, psychologically, etc.

Of course, it's worth remembering that biology itself is rather specialized in this regard, and even a thorough understanding of it at university-level does not entail understanding of disciplines such as mathematics and physics, which are the fields (notably physics) from where the concept of energy is derived. Of course the "life force" concept is itself pure bullshit, and neither the so-called energy of conscious living-beings , nor any other "kind"" of energy , is truly infinite (eternal), despite that it cannot be destroyed as such. It is expended and (eventually) consumed. It may cycle through any number of different states (transformations); but it will eventually dissipate into entropic background-noise, as the universe as we know it starts to break down. The universe, given around 10[sup]15[/sup] years, will have nothing coherently verifiable within it. So "energy" cannot make for an eternal afterlife. Perhaps you should mention this . . .

["¦] BTW: I've been thinking about what language I should learn for months now. I thought over the information you gave me and I've decided, against the advice of my Belgian neighbor, to learn German. Thanks.

Excellent. In 5-10 years you will be able to comprehend Nietzsche's original words. Because of the grammatical discrepancies between German and English grammar and cases,you often find that his words (and others') don't sound nearly as witty in English as they do in German. As for Belgium, there is a user here , albeit she tends to frequent the chat more than the forums , who lives in Belgium herself, and may be able to give some commentary on German, I suppose. Then again, German is a minority-language in Belgium, and the predominant language there is Dutch,or "Flemish", as it is colloquially named. But since Belgium has 3 official languages, it's almost obligatory for one to be proficient in at least one of them (usually Dutch), and a thorough understanding of the basics (at the very least) in the other two. You might want to settle somewhere in Europe one day, I suppose.

 

[Visaki]

...
BTW: I've been thinking about what language I should learn for months now. I thought over the information you gave me and I've decided, against the advice of my Belgian neighbor, to learn German. Thanks.
...

So you decided to take the easy way out and not learn Finnish. I have just one thing to say about that: Finnish girls are hotter than German girls.

 

[Dean]

@ Inferno & The Felonius Pope
Speaking of German (excuse the pun), and since we've been having some considerable discussion of the theological arguments of W. L. Craig in the Religion and Irreligion subforum, I felt that both of you (and especially Inferno might be interested to see this.

The funny thing is, Craig is fluent in German. He received his doctorate in theology from the University of Munich.

For example:


His pronunciation is very good*. His usual arguments are not.
(Although it sounds perfectly clear to me, I am unsure as to how coherent it will sound to one accustomed to the Austrian or Swiss variety of German.)

 

[nemesiss]

i probably ask: If beings are made of energy, that was always around, and energy isn't living/alive, at what point does someone become "alive"?

yes, i know energy can be destroyed and created, blablabla.. but that would just complicate the thing.

 

[Laurens]

@ Inferno & The Felonius Pope
Speaking of German (excuse the pun), and since we've been having some considerable discussion of the theological arguments of W. L. Craig in the Religion and Irreligion subforum, I felt that both of you (and especially Inferno might be interested to see this.

The funny thing is, Craig is fluent in German. He received his doctorate in theology from the University of Munich.

For example:


His pronunciation is very good*. His usual arguments are not.
(Although it sounds perfectly clear to me, I am unsure as to how coherent it will sound to one accustomed to the Austrian or Swiss variety of German.)

So that's 3 languages he's fluent in:

Bullshit, English and German

 

[Inferno]

So that's 3 languages he's fluent in:

Bullshit, English and German

So is John Lennox.

By the way, thanks Dean. I won't watch it though, I wouldn't be able to stomach it.