I like my odds
whose with me
Thinking about running for president in 2024
- Thread starter Donald J Trump
- Start date
Mike Nasty
Veteran
Make sure you double down on those dog whistle tweets, and be sure to have your idiot sons in front of the camera every day.
Look at my African American friend over there
Last edited:
Ultimate Warrior
All Star
I like my oddswhose with me
******snorts 739789237897892347897239879823789 seconds****
I will come back down from the intergalactic room on the 45th floor in the great mansion in the sky to be your running mate, because there are five sections in this entry. In the first, we propose that beliefs about death and the possibility of an afterlife are of enduring significance because of our care for persons here and now, and thus our concern for their future and our own. Just as it is reasonable to hope that those we love have a fulfilling future in this life, it is natural to consider whether this life is the only life there is and, if there is reason to believe that there is an afterlife (or a life beyond this life), it would be reasonable to hope that this might involve a new, valuable environment or at least one that is not Hellish in nature. We bring to the fore other reasons why the topic of an afterlife is philosophically interesting. In sections two and three we consider the concept and possibility that persons survive death in light of two substantial philosophies of mind: dualism (section two) and materialism (section three). Section four addresses the afterlife in terms of empirical evidence. In section five, reasons are advanced for thinking that the reasonability of beliefs about an afterlife depends on the reasonability of metaphysical convictions.
What are the prospects for survival on a materialistic view of persons? One possible reason for thinking that materialism is not hostile to the prospects of an afterlife is that, historically, the standard view of the afterlife in the major theistic traditions is that it involves the resurrection of bodies. While there is a longstanding theological tradition that links belief in bodily resurrection with dualism, many theologians and some philosophers argue that dualism is a Platonic import into theistic traditions (Cullman 1955), and that it is more in keeping with the Hebrew, Christian, and Islamic stress on bodily life to understand the afterlife in materialist rather than dualist terms.
The central logical problem for materialist versions of the resurrection is personal identity. On dualist assumptions, personal identity is preserved by the persistence of the soul between death and resurrection. But for materialism, nothing bridges the spatio-temporal gap between the body that perishes and that body resurrected. Without such a bridge, how can the “resurrected” person be identical with the person who died? Considerable ingenuity has been expended in the search for an answer to this question.
Without doubt, the most popular materialist option here is the “re-creation” theory, according to which, at some time after a person’s death, God re-creates the person by creating a body with the identical characteristics of the body that perished (Hick 1983: 125–26). While this may seem rather ghastly in cases of violent death, there is no reason why God could not correct any injury and renew the body’s youthfulness, and so on. But can this re-creation preserve the necessity of the identity relation (the fact that your persistence over time as you is strict and not contingent)? If you are re-created, the “you” that comes into existence in the re-creation cannot just contingently happen to be you (as if someone else could do the job of being you). One reason to suspect that the identity relationship is not preserved (and this is not merely an epistemological matter) is that if God could create one body that is exactly similar to the body that died, why not two or more? It is not a satisfactory answer to this to say that God, being good, would not (and perhaps could not) do such a thing. On the view in question, what is necessary for resurrection is merely that material particles be arranged in the correct fashion, and it is hardly a necessary truth that only God could do this. (Perhaps a really smart rogue angel could pull it off!) Nor is it feasible to guarantee uniqueness by requiring that the identical particles present in the dead body make up the resurrected body. On the one hand, the body has no doubt shed, during its life, enough particles to make several bodies, and it is hardly credible that the replacement of one of the atoms present at the time of death with an atom shed by the body a few seconds before death would mean we have a different body (assuming other requirements to be satisfied). If, on the other hand, only particles from the body at the time of death may be used, there are the long-recognized problems about the availability of some of these particles, which within a few years may have made their ways into a large number of other human bodies. In any case there is a hard-to-quell intuition that reassembly, no matter how expertly completed, would at best produce a replica rather than the identical body that perished. Peter van Inwagen offers a compelling example:
Suppose a certain monastery claims to have in its possession a manuscript written in St. Augustine’s own hand. And suppose the monks of this monastery further claim that this manuscript was burned by Arians in the year 457. It would immediately occur to us to ask how this manuscript, the one we can touch, could be the very manuscript that was burned in 457. Suppose their answer to this question is that God miraculously recreated Augustine’s manuscript in 458. We should respond to this answer as follows: the deed it describes seems quite impossible, even as an accomplishment of omnipotence. God certainly might have created a perfect duplicate of the original manuscript, but it would not be that one; its earliest moment of existence would have been after Augustine’s death; it would never have known the impress of his hand; it would not have been a part of the furniture of the world when he was alive; and so on. Now suppose our monks were to reply by simply asserting that the manuscript now in their possession did know the impress of Augustine’s hand; that it was a part of the furniture of the world when the Saint was alive; that when God recreated or restored it, God (as an indispensable component of accomplishing this task) saw to it that the object God produced had all these properties. [para. break in 1978]
We confess we should not know what to make of this. We should have to tell the monks that we did not see how what they believed could possibly be true. (van Inwagen 1992: 242–43)
Given these difficulties with the re-creation view, attempts have been made to find other ways of accounting for resurrection in materialist terms. One of the more interesting of these is Lynne Rudder Baker’s invocation of a constitution view of persons (Baker 2000, 2001, 2005). On this view persons are not identical with, but are constituted by, their bodies. (She discusses the constitution relation at considerable length; the details of this are not relevant here.) What is distinctive of persons is a “first-person perspective”, roughly, the capacity to think of oneself as oneself. This ability, which humans possess but other animals seem to lack, is an essential component of moral responsibility as well as of our ability to plan for the future and to perform many other distinctively personal activities and functions. According to Baker, the constitution view opens the way for a doctrine of resurrection that avoids the difficulties of the re-creation theory. Since persons are not identical with their bodies, it need not be maintained that the resurrected body is the same identical body as the body that died. What is required, however, is that the first-person perspective of the resurrected body be the same: “if a person’s first-person perspective were extinguished, the person would go out of existence” (2005: 385). So the first-person perspective must somehow be transferred from the original body to the resurrection body:
person P1 at t1 is the same person as person P2 at t2 if and only if P1 and P2 have the same first-person perspective. (2000: 132)
Baker holds that there is indeed a fact of the matter as to whether a given future person has the same first-person perspective as I now have, though there is no “informative” way of specifying criteria of identity between the two.
Hoodoo Child
The Urban Legend
Look at my African American friend over there
OP is that after you do your bid in NY?
African Peasant
Veteran
OP ain't doing no bid.
Im white wealthy powerful and politically connecting...
you really think Im doing time?
OfTheCross
Veteran
******snorts 739789237897892347897239879823789 seconds****
I will come back down from the intergalactic room on the 45th floor in the great mansion in the sky to be your running mate, because there are five sections in this entry. In the first, we propose that beliefs about death and the possibility of an afterlife are of enduring significance because of our care for persons here and now, and thus our concern for their future and our own. Just as it is reasonable to hope that those we love have a fulfilling future in this life, it is natural to consider whether this life is the only life there is and, if there is reason to believe that there is an afterlife (or a life beyond this life), it would be reasonable to hope that this might involve a new, valuable environment or at least one that is not Hellish in nature. We bring to the fore other reasons why the topic of an afterlife is philosophically interesting. In sections two and three we consider the concept and possibility that persons survive death in light of two substantial philosophies of mind: dualism (section two) and materialism (section three). Section four addresses the afterlife in terms of empirical evidence. In section five, reasons are advanced for thinking that the reasonability of beliefs about an afterlife depends on the reasonability of metaphysical convictions.
What are the prospects for survival on a materialistic view of persons? One possible reason for thinking that materialism is not hostile to the prospects of an afterlife is that, historically, the standard view of the afterlife in the major theistic traditions is that it involves the resurrection of bodies. While there is a longstanding theological tradition that links belief in bodily resurrection with dualism, many theologians and some philosophers argue that dualism is a Platonic import into theistic traditions (Cullman 1955), and that it is more in keeping with the Hebrew, Christian, and Islamic stress on bodily life to understand the afterlife in materialist rather than dualist terms.
The central logical problem for materialist versions of the resurrection is personal identity. On dualist assumptions, personal identity is preserved by the persistence of the soul between death and resurrection. But for materialism, nothing bridges the spatio-temporal gap between the body that perishes and that body resurrected. Without such a bridge, how can the “resurrected” person be identical with the person who died? Considerable ingenuity has been expended in the search for an answer to this question.
Without doubt, the most popular materialist option here is the “re-creation” theory, according to which, at some time after a person’s death, God re-creates the person by creating a body with the identical characteristics of the body that perished (Hick 1983: 125–26). While this may seem rather ghastly in cases of violent death, there is no reason why God could not correct any injury and renew the body’s youthfulness, and so on. But can this re-creation preserve the necessity of the identity relation (the fact that your persistence over time as you is strict and not contingent)? If you are re-created, the “you” that comes into existence in the re-creation cannot just contingently happen to be you (as if someone else could do the job of being you). One reason to suspect that the identity relationship is not preserved (and this is not merely an epistemological matter) is that if God could create one body that is exactly similar to the body that died, why not two or more? It is not a satisfactory answer to this to say that God, being good, would not (and perhaps could not) do such a thing. On the view in question, what is necessary for resurrection is merely that material particles be arranged in the correct fashion, and it is hardly a necessary truth that only God could do this. (Perhaps a really smart rogue angel could pull it off!) Nor is it feasible to guarantee uniqueness by requiring that the identical particles present in the dead body make up the resurrected body. On the one hand, the body has no doubt shed, during its life, enough particles to make several bodies, and it is hardly credible that the replacement of one of the atoms present at the time of death with an atom shed by the body a few seconds before death would mean we have a different body (assuming other requirements to be satisfied). If, on the other hand, only particles from the body at the time of death may be used, there are the long-recognized problems about the availability of some of these particles, which within a few years may have made their ways into a large number of other human bodies. In any case there is a hard-to-quell intuition that reassembly, no matter how expertly completed, would at best produce a replica rather than the identical body that perished. Peter van Inwagen offers a compelling example:
Suppose a certain monastery claims to have in its possession a manuscript written in St. Augustine’s own hand. And suppose the monks of this monastery further claim that this manuscript was burned by Arians in the year 457. It would immediately occur to us to ask how this manuscript, the one we can touch, could be the very manuscript that was burned in 457. Suppose their answer to this question is that God miraculously recreated Augustine’s manuscript in 458. We should respond to this answer as follows: the deed it describes seems quite impossible, even as an accomplishment of omnipotence. God certainly might have created a perfect duplicate of the original manuscript, but it would not be that one; its earliest moment of existence would have been after Augustine’s death; it would never have known the impress of his hand; it would not have been a part of the furniture of the world when he was alive; and so on. Now suppose our monks were to reply by simply asserting that the manuscript now in their possession did know the impress of Augustine’s hand; that it was a part of the furniture of the world when the Saint was alive; that when God recreated or restored it, God (as an indispensable component of accomplishing this task) saw to it that the object God produced had all these properties. [para. break in 1978]
We confess we should not know what to make of this. We should have to tell the monks that we did not see how what they believed could possibly be true. (van Inwagen 1992: 242–43)
Given these difficulties with the re-creation view, attempts have been made to find other ways of accounting for resurrection in materialist terms. One of the more interesting of these is Lynne Rudder Baker’s invocation of a constitution view of persons (Baker 2000, 2001, 2005). On this view persons are not identical with, but are constituted by, their bodies. (She discusses the constitution relation at considerable length; the details of this are not relevant here.) What is distinctive of persons is a “first-person perspective”, roughly, the capacity to think of oneself as oneself. This ability, which humans possess but other animals seem to lack, is an essential component of moral responsibility as well as of our ability to plan for the future and to perform many other distinctively personal activities and functions. According to Baker, the constitution view opens the way for a doctrine of resurrection that avoids the difficulties of the re-creation theory. Since persons are not identical with their bodies, it need not be maintained that the resurrected body is the same identical body as the body that died. What is required, however, is that the first-person perspective of the resurrected body be the same: “if a person’s first-person perspective were extinguished, the person would go out of existence” (2005: 385). So the first-person perspective must somehow be transferred from the original body to the resurrection body:
person P1 at t1 is the same person as person P2 at t2 if and only if P1 and P2 have the same first-person perspective. (2000: 132)
Baker holds that there is indeed a fact of the matter as to whether a given future person has the same first-person perspective as I now have, though there is no “informative” way of specifying criteria of identity between the two.
