idk this is your fantasy not mine. Not sure why I have to answer questions about it.

Why? This is a thread about Israeli violence. And I don't care about you.

To be complemented with the acknowledgement that children in Gaza live in hell on earth, as a result of Israel's regime of terror. But our newly joined pseudo moralist will no doubt make it his or her priority to cry crocodile tears about the 'violence on the forums' before he or she has a word to say about Israeli state terror.

Your general question is off topic and worth a thread of its own, but as to the collateral violence thing I fully agree. It means nothing other than: "violence I am allowed to dismiss and put out of mind". In any case Israel kills children willingly and the idea that they were just a series of ooopsy-daisies is the kind of thing only clowns can take seriously.

Well no I would have given FDR and Churchill a slightly more comfortable wall.

All three were mass murderers and only one got a bit of what each deserved.

It's always hilarious to me that bootlickers always assume everyone else is as enamoured of power and myth as they are.

Imagine both-sidesing this so hard that the standard of comparison is between an actually existing apartheid regime which regularly murders children and an imaginary future construct. Not to speak of the wahtaboutisms. These people may as well be bots at this point considering how they recycle such shit talking points.

I'm not sure why the hangup on semantics and grammar given that you've already pointed out that there is an actual non-semantic possibility here. — coolazice

Have I? Because I mentioned that while you at least offered something others didn't, even what you did offer feel into conceptual incoherency once you actually pried at it a bit - i.e. it had an underdeveloped concept of 'consciousness' at work. And frankly, don't talk to me about 'possibility'. 'Possibility' is a sham used by every half baked shaman wishing to defend aliens and cow mothers and square circles. The modality of 'possibility' simply does not excuse this trash. Anyone even entertaining the very idea of an 'afterlife' needs to minimally answer the question: what kind of thing is consciousness that it could be detached from a body, and how does or can this relate to what we know of consciousness as it pertains to bodies (i.e. everything we know of consciousness now)? What explanatory mechanism could be, even in principle, be at work here? The second part being the most important issue here. Because with out this, it's word games. That's it. It's not that anything 'outside my paradigm' is ipso facto nonsense. It's that without an articulated alternative paradigm, then I absolutely reserve the right to dismiss it as utter trash. Because then literally no one has any idea what they are talking about.

I have no time for clomping words together and then having to take seriously the idea that an accident of grammar ought to be dignified as something to take seriously either scientifically or philosophically. Just because one word can happen to follow another doesn't mean it ought to be 'taken seriously as a scientific possibility'. One can name a billion utterly stupid and ridiculous hypotheses and one can't use 'buT ScIeNtIfIc PosIbiliTy' as a cudgel to entertain any nonsense that pops into anyone's head. It's a 'scientific possibility' that say, Bob Marley's mum was a cow at some point, but no one has to take that shit seriously.

It is (again, logically) conceivable that upon death the consciousness continues to float without the body as in a OBE, latches onto some phantom limb, etc... with the original body remaining mute and thus unable to clarify the 'experience' of the consciousness. — coolazice

I disagree. In all these, let's call them, pathological cases of consciousness, you can trace the hows and whys of their pathology back to the body itself. Phantom limbs, for instance, tell us very much about the inter-modality of sense-experience, the fact that consciousness is an end-result of a process of sense-making and habituation. Which is why things like mirror therapy works to lessen phantom limb pain: it reintegrates vision and sense and shows just how much consciousness is both environmental and bound up with a sense of the "I can" which I spoke about earlier.

Hell, we can even induce OBEs by means of setups which allow subjects to 'feel' their own body a few feet in front of them, and then by means of a HUD and some tactile experience, subjects can be made to 'identify' with the virtual body in front of them. The key in these experiments was 'synchronizing' what the subject sees and what they feel. Again: the integration of sensory-modality and exercise of bodily capacity is at work. So there are actual mechanisms at work here which do the work of explaining these pathological experiences, which explain why these pathological experiences take the shape they do. To simply go "herp derp but what if no body?" without any corresponding mechanism or explanatory principles is, again, not philosophy, but children playing with dragon toys pretending to do anything remotely like it.

OK, and? Again, if you think afterlifers would be happy with this sense of 'sense of a person' that funeral gatherers employ then so be it, they can have it. But they clearly aren't. Otherwise, this is just dissemination.

A case of capitalism making everything worse as usual.

You're right that endogenous change won't happen. Change will have to come from the outside. Israel needs to be treated exactly like South Africa was. Or like North Korea is. Pariah states. The association Israel = apartheid state needs to be an association no less closely connected than water to fish. The shamefulness of Israel needs to be normalized.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-57464794

The new inheritor of the Israeli state apartheid apparatus takes his seat.

The BBC article is kind of amazing. It barely touches on Bennett's attitudes or policies toward Palestine despite it being the most obviously relevant world issue. Policies including straight up annexing most of the West Bank, and attitudes including pride at having killed 'lots of Arabs'. It does take pains to point out issues of gay rights and just how many women he has in parliament though! All while discussing the PM of an apartheid state. This is wokeness weaponized.

One of my favs. Funnily enough, one of the things I've been getting more critical of as time goes on, even though I love it.

Tell me more.

--

I finally finished Davidson's How Revolutionary Were The Bourgeois Revolutions - an 800 page weapon and the best thing I've read all year so far. Holy shit it was good. So currently on to:

Theda Skocpol - States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China
Utsa Patnaik and Sam Moyo - The Agrarian Question in the Neoliberal Era: Primitive Accumulation and the Peasantry [PDF]
Two articles by Neil Davidson, "What Was Neoliberalism?", and "Neoliberalism and the Far Right: A Contradictory Embrace [PDF]".

LOL, that's arrant nonsense: you're clutching at straws now. — Janus

You literally brought up 'subtle bodies' - the nonsense and the straws were yours to begin with - I just happened to extend its application. The fact that you find the one utterly ridiclious - as it is - and not the other - as it also is - speaks volumes about the arbitrariness of selection involved.

That's it; when all else fails, resort to insult and mischaracterization of your interlocutor — Janus

In what way have I mischaractered you? All you've done is to avoid questions and insist, without any further qualification, that 'afterlives' make total sense - by fiat alone.

And I'm sure plenty of people have thought - through whatever linguistic shuffling - that square circles are possible on the basis of subtle circles and subtle squares or some nonsense.

But what if your body goes somewhere else when you die? Maybe the dead body is not your body in the sense that your new body is. Reincarnation happens when all the cells of your body are new. A resurrected body is the essence of your body as it passes through life and is in a new place. Think of Elijah on a chariot — Gregory

This does not deserve a serious response.

A believer in afterlife doesn't have to believe in disembodied consciousness, they might conceivably believe that upon death, all your consciousness gets 'uploaded' to the matrix and placed in a new body for you in your 'afterlife'. Of course for your consciousness to be able to do this it needs to be able to be separated from your body, but one can imagine some logically possible system where consciousness needs a body to function, but can still be transferred without a body, in the same way that software needs an operating system to be executable, but the code can still be copied. Is this a completely scientifically illiterate stretch? — coolazice

Cool! Ok, at least this formulation actually has some conceiveable content rather than just mashing words together to see how they stick. But here the underconceptualized term is 'consciousness'. Is consciosuness the kind of thing that can be reified like this? Because as far as we know, consciousness is consciousness-of: it is a product of a process of self-relation that enables situating oneself in an environment so as to act within it. Or as certain phenomenologists put it: the 'I' of conscioussness is an 'I can... x' (within a differentiated enviornment with more or less stable invariants). It's not a 'thing'. What would it mean to 'upload' something like this? And even if my rough characterization is contestable - it toally is - what is the alternate schema? What concept of consciousness is at play? How how to 'connect' it's 'uploadability' with it's function as we know it now in currently existing bodies/lives/etc?

In any case my point about the necessity of conceptualization before asking for evidence stands: we need to know what we are talking about before we can admit 'evidence' for... well, what exactly?

It's only incoherent if you conceive of life as inseparably linked to the body, to physicality. This does seem a most plausible assumption, but it remains an assumption. — Janus

It's not an 'assumption', it's how words work. What would a disembodied life mean? We know life to roughly be a metabolic process that reproduces itself, or that at least has reproductive ability at a phylogenic level. What corresponding kind of 'content' can you give to the idea of 'disembodied life'? Or are you, like all the pseduo-philosohical charlatans, just playing with words? Just throwing words together because grammar allows you and then 'speculating' about it isn't philosophy. It's infantile.

But as for afterlife, you’re otherwise proposing an unknown concept that you just attribute life to. We don’t know how to make sense of a disembodied life because we never observed such a thing, unlike molecular constructions, the problem is not just lack of data. — Saphsin

Exactly. It's not even that we have never observed such a thing: we don't even know what it would mean to observe such a thing. So you're right: it's not a lack of data. We don't even know what data would correspond to a concept like 'the afterlife', because there is no coherency to to the very idea of it. It's a grammar mistake, nothing more.

I pointed out that the continuation of some form of life for the individual after the individual's body has died is not logically contradictory or incoherent, however implausible you might think it is. — Janus

The 'death of an individual's body' is the end of life. That's just how words work, and no amount of squiggling with psuedo-distinctions changes that.

Is there individual consciousness after death?' seems like a pretty coherent question — coolazice

Maybe, but this is just a basic panpsychic position - if you're going to explicitly couple consciousness with the state after death, the implication is that not-living (=dead) things can have consciousness. And I'm not convinced anyone knows what that means.

But it's telling that the afterlife position can only be sustained by these kinds of word games that simply swap out one word for another, whichever is most convenient. It simply isn't philosophy. It's just some temporal extrapolation from one's present state to a state after death, and exactly how it's supposed to be given any coherent conceptual form is totally irrelevant. It's just ad hoc throwing together of terms - whatever it takes to justify this fantasy of extrapolation. The 'philosophical' content involved is wish fulfillment, nothing more. It doesn't respond to any problem, it doesn't illuminate anything - it's a vague notion aping at philosophical justification after the fact.

You didn't answer my question.

there is nothing logically contradictory about imagining that there might be continuance of an individual life in some different (obviously unknown) form — Janus

'Continuance' from what exactly. Go on. Spell it out. Which 'discontinious' moment is this 'continuance' meant to follow from?

Ed Said's assessment of Oslo in '93 remains unsurpassable:

What emerges from such scrutiny is a deal that is more flawed and, for most of the Palestinian people, more unfavourably weighted than many had first supposed. The fashion-show vulgarities of the White House ceremony, the degrading spectacle of Yasser Arafat thanking everyone for the suspension of most of his people’s rights, and the fatuous solemnity of Bill Clinton’s performance, like a 20th-century Roman emperor shepherding two vassal kings through rituals of reconciliation and obeisance: all these only temporarily obscure the truly astonishing proportions of the Palestinian capitulation. So first of all let us call the agreement by its real name: an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles.

...In sum, we need to move up from the state of supine abjectness in which the Oslo Accords were negotiated (‘we will accept anything so long as you recognise us’) into one that enables us to prosecute parallel agreements with Israel and the Arabs concerning Palestinian national, as opposed to municipal, aspirations. But this does not exclude resistance against the Israeli occupation, which continues indefinitely. So long as occupation and settlements exist, whether legitimised or not by the PLO, Palestinians and others must speak against them. One of the issues not raised, either by the Oslo Accords, the exchange of PLO-lsraeli letters or the Washington speeches, is whether the violence and terrorism renounced by the PLO includes non-violent resistance, civil disobedience etc. These are the inalienable right of any people denied full sovereignty and independence, and must fee supported.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v15/n20/edward-said/the-morning-after

What?

Yeah Pristine Culture was so-so. I liked just how sharply it drew the lines between France and England, but yeah, after the globe-trotting of HTWCTR it definately comes off as limited.

This is one my favourite after Origin. The first essay is *chefs kiss*.

Wittgenstein advocated an adherence to social norms in life, or what can otherwise be called earning or even accepting your labels. Language games between people as time progresses is determined by the social reality in which one lives in and seemingly comes to accept, stipulatively regarding whether one wants to reaffirm their social identity. — Shawn

As others have pointed out, this is an incorrect reading of Wittgenstein. Gesturing vaguely to "lingustics and social science" and the fact that "Wittgenstein treated life as a duty" is not even remotely the kind of evidence needed to back up this claim.

After-life = life after the cessation life. This is no different to a square circle. — StreetlightX


This is a disingenuous strawman: 'afterlife' is taken to mean life for the individual after this life. — Janus

Exactly what is different about what you said?

it is good form to at least try to understand what proponents of views incompatible with yours actually believe instead of mischaracterizing them and rejecting them out of hand. — Janus

It would be good then, if these so-called proponents offered anything close to a coherent concept of the afterlife with which to discuss.

It makes no difference to you if Israel collapses, and that's fine, it wouldn't matter to me if Australia was in some conflict or war and they got overrun. They were probably the oppressors anyway. — BitconnectCarlos

Ah, I see you're not done role-playing. When you are, hit me up.

Amazing.

That's what being principled means, yes. But now that you're done live action role playing where I live rent free in your head, perhaps we can get back again to the issue of real life Israeli state terrorism.

Do you care about dead Jews in the 20th century? 19th century? When do you draw the line? — BitconnectCarlos

I draw the line at what can be done in the present by present day aggressors.

It's true that I do not care one iota about some dead Jews in 750BCE (I don't discriminate tho - I don't care about dead anyone in 750BCE). You got me! Present day ethnic cleansing tho, got alot of time for that.

Dead Palestinians are not a game, but it's no surprise you have to treat it that way.

The only cleansing I'm laughing at is the your last brain cell as it evaporates under the weight of its own disingenuity.

Nothing you've said justifies the Assyrians destroying the Kingdom of Judea in 750 BCE and ethnically cleansing the Jews there. — BitconnectCarlos

:lol:

OK, but this is just word games - in a way that not even the after-lifer would accept! No 'after-lifer' would accept that the 'afterlife' refers to the 'same kind of thing' existing elsewhere (Gold on AC). No 'after-lifer' would accept that they're just talking about some impersonator having a good time after they are really dead. I'll grant you that grammar is flexible, but the afterlifer is after something much more than any of this. The best I can put it is a vague hippie-like, 'I'm like, dead, but like, also not dead because it's like I'm alive, but not dead, mmaaaaaan'. By all means, if it's a question of the legal politics of someone's estate than have at it - afterlives for all! I'm a believer! But I have this nagging suspicion that this isn't what's at stake.

The most charitably I can put it is this: the afterlifer is after something so radically different from life that it would simply have nothing to do with what we understand as life. It would be something wholly different that one could not even call it an afterlife. But what, exactly, would that be? Once the afterlife becomes unmoored from anything recognizable as life, then what conceptual bearings do we have to even talk of it? And here, the concept needs to be defined, long, long, long before any search for 'evidence' would even be remotely contemplated.

Hey I'm just answering questions!

I mean it though - the notion of an afterlife simply has no conceptual coherence. After-life = life after the cessation life. This is no different to a square circle. The woo peddlers reckon they get get around this by cleaving life into two such that there is bodily life on the one hand and then - depending on who you ask because there is no precision here at all - mental, spiritual, conscious or soul-life. But no one has any idea what this last kind of 'life' is, or exactly how 'life' and any of these categories are meant to be conceptually articulated. Or how the 'life' that qualifies any of these latter things has anything in common with the 'life' of the body. It's complete wordplay. A grammar mistake that, because it is so obviously incoherent to anyone with a basic grasp of english ("life that is no longer alive that is alive but not"), must cover it up by conjuring - like a cheap magic trick - internal distinctions that have no purport at all, and fall apart at the slightest prodding because held together by nothing than pseudo-grammatical glue. A conceptual tromp l'oeil with nothing behind the curtain.

One doesn't need to 'argue' that square-circles don't exist: anyone who thinks they do disqualifies themselves as a speaker of english. So too peddlers of 'the afterlife'. The question of 'evidence' here is already seven steps too far.