the living, the conscious, and those that have soul

Well again I am dismissing Pim’s book out of hand. I just don’t see where it means anything more than that people who are in bad physical condition tend to have crazy dreams. That ten percent of them are similar is within the realms of chance.

More interesting here is exactly when are we dead? I think we are both agreed that brain waves are the indication of life, well life on earth, you may have passed on to the great harp concert or the BBQ, but you would still have consciousness. Myself I believe that those brain waves are our consciousness, that we are the storm of electrical activity in our brains.

Makes one wonder if we could invent an electrical machine that duplicated those waves, and would that ‘being’ have consciousness. Could you have consciousness if you have no body, no memories? Well the only way you sense your body is through waves of electricity up your spine, and memories likewise come from electricity from other parts of your brain. When I was young I used to read a lot of science fiction and the theory that you think that you are living this life and then it turns out that you are just a head in a jar and evil scientists are controlling your inputs because, well I don’t know why, because they are evil I presume.

But it’s just an assumption of mine that we are brain waves, I could be completely wrong about that.

These are terms we are throwing around, consciousness, alive or dead, and the always mysterious soul. When we are sleeping or in one of those convenient comas we are certainly alive, though we are not conscious. Unless we are dreaming. I think we are generally assumed to be conscious when we are dreaming. When we remember our dreams we remember that we were conscious. Then there is that great mysterious unconscious mind which appears to be alive because it is always rummaging around in the basement and every now and then it slips a message, like the solution to some problem, up to the conscious mind.

There are some scientists that think what is going on is that there are all sorts of processes going on in the brain, like a rambunctious crowd in a meeting hall, every one of them trying to get the attention of the speaker and depending on which faction is making the biggest ruckus that faction gets the floor. Seems kind of plausible to me, though it’s pretty vague (what constitutes a crowd, who is the speaker?), and it’s not much more than a guess.

I think there is a prevailing thought that there is something distinct like a soul, something that is exclusive to you, like a candle lit at your birth, and extinguished at your death. Well the afterlife people generally think it goes on after your death, but is just like taken into another room, although in some Christian theories it may be extinguished in that other room. It’s a bit of a mystery since if you have a soul, you can’t be that soul, and it just seems to be a passive thing, it just watches you and you do the things you do, and maybe besmirch it, but then there are things you can do to clean it up.

Well I don’t believe in any kind of religious thing, so it really doesn’t matter to me what the religious thing, but I would like to get more into that thing about what is life and what makes you who you are, but maybe tomorrow.