The only way i can answer this (if you don’t believe in a soul/ immaterial aspect)
Is that God literally resurrects this body. Not a duplicate?..but hmm He won’t make the same kind of body so this is a problem!
Just to affirm here: You’re not alone in this preoccupation. I have struggled a lot with planning for my (hopefully a few decades away) death. If I insist on burial, this places a financial burden on my family. But if I go with cremation, which is less expensive, does this amount to an admission that I don’t think there is any real continuity to speak of with my current physical body? But then I remind myself that there are great saints who have burnt at the stake, whose bodies were essentially cremated, so God will have to establish some sort of continuity also for them.
I’ve brought this up on the Forum before, but it seemed pertinent to mention here again in this context.
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I’m glad i’m not alone in this. I keep telling myself that my knowledge is not even a speck of God’s knowledge and that i have to leave it to him…But something keeps me from fully doing this on this topic. I have no issue believing that God can get a virgin birth in order. But somehow this one thing doesn’t make sense to me.
But what makes you so sure that continuity is important? I’ve known people who hit their heads pretty badly and stayed unawaken for several hours. Does that mean that the person that woke up was just a clone? If you mean physical continuity (the same atoms being part of your body), they are constantly replaced during your life anyway, so the atoms in the body of the 10 years old you are not the same as the ones in the 50 years old you. I don’t see why continuity need to be so important, and if it is, then we shouldn’t be worried about death more than we are about temporarily losing consciousness or having the molecules in our body naturally replaced as time goes on. How do we keep personal identity without continuity? I have no idea. That’s one of the big questions in philosophy, but I see no reason to be so attached to the idea that continuity itself is important.
To be fair, I’m not saying I don’t have that weird intuition that continuity is essential as well, but science has shown us many times that our intuitions are often wrong, and when I think rationally about the matter and see all the weird situations that would cause, I’m very inclined to think that that is just an intuitive (and wrong) notion I have, not the most likely actual answer to the problem.
What i mean with that is continuity if my first person expirience. I wake up one morning and think: What a nice morning. I suddenly fall and die. I get resurrected. I will wake up. I need me to continue when i get resurrected.
Not another person that represents me. Every materialist philosopher i have read about seem to think that this me Won’t really continue. But someone identical to me.
Funny, because I know lots of materialist atheists (philosophers or not) who think that it would still be you, even if the new body was a computer running a copy of your consciousness. Have you seen any christian/religious materialist philosopher which holds that “someone identical” view? I would find it very curious for there to be one (and interested to read his arguments).
You say it yourself.
yes i have been listening to them all day today.
Do those materialist atheists think that when my consciousness is copied to another medium is still me? Do you mean copy or transfer?
Can you tell me what those materialists say?
Yes, I don’t believe it myself, I’m just saying that there are even atheists who believe in those ideas, so I found it a little bit weird when you said that EVERY author disagreed with that. What I believe is that just making a perfect physical copy wouldn’t be enough, and that is one of the reasons why I believe there must be something like a soul, but even if souls don’t exist, there must be “something” that keeps personal identity, maybe the “run your consciousness on a computer” guys are right (though I highly doubt it). What I’m saying is that I don’t see any reason (other than a vague intuition) to believe that the answer is “continuity”.
I should have said every author i have read/listened to today. (I should also say most)
My friend says this : Your mind (You) is the software and your body is the hardware.
God preserves the software and later places it into hardware…But this is almost the same as a soul while he disbelieves in an immortal soul.
Do you think neuroscience disproves a soul?/duality?
Some do, others don’t. Their arguments are basically “what else could it be other than the pattern of information processing?” since they don’t believe anything “more” could be accounted for it, so they believe that if that pattern is reproduced perfectly by a computer, your consciousness would return. I particularly find that view very weird and unjustified, and it does cause a lot of “duplication paradoxes”…but who knows, like I said, reality is not always intuitive.
Oh so you mean if my thinking. (Today i am going to play soccer, What will I look like in 30 years" is all a pattern.
If that patters in my consciousness. Then it will be me. I can see that but something about that isn’t right.
It would at best disprove that the soul interacts with the body if it could perfectly explain 100% of the human mind by purely physical processes, but not that we experience qualia because of a soul.
Has it done any of this?
It has explained a lot, but not everything, but then again, the same could be said for almost every area of science (or else scientists would be all unemployed by now), and that is why many people bet that it will someday, but there is no real way to know by now.
So what is your full view? Will we be a copy? Or will it be literally the same continuity that we have.
Same continuity (however that may be granted), but new body (a copy body, if you will).
Are you able to explain in someway how you piece this together?
Well, either God doesn’t exist or he will manage to maintain continuity, or else the resurection wouldn’t make any sense. As to how he can do that, I personally believe it is through the persistence of an immortal soul, but if it is not, there is surely “something” that sustains or consciousness (or else we would not be conscious in the first place), and God is more than powerful an knowledgeable enough to know what that “something” is and restore it. I have way more doubts about God’s existence than about that particular matter (once you assume his existence).
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