Kevin Solway wrote:Anything you might like to nominate as a "soul" necessarily operates by the same laws as anything else, and is just as easily brought to an end.
This is correct. It is just as easily brought to an end, and it just as easily continues.
Kevin Solway wrote:I did explain that all things work by the same laws of cause and effect, therefore nothing is excluded.
I agree. What I disagree with is that I believe that you are not accurately viewing causality in this case.
Kevin Solway wrote: I'm not sure what your position is, other than that you want to believe in some kind of a soul that can go from one life to another.
Obviously, you are not even reading accurately. Let me repeat:
Elizabeth Isabelle wrote: This is not wishful thinking, as my personal wish for myself is that my energy just dissipates. I am quite done with the experience of being alive ... so my logical conclusion that conscious energy could cohere is not tainted by desire.
This is not what I "want to believe" - it is an untainted logical conclusion.
I am repeating myself again to isolate my position:
Elizabeth Isabelle wrote: I have believed that consciousness allows a being to have a certain amount of "choice" regarding what happens to the energy that was previously cycling through their neurons and so forth. Like things tend to have a certain amount of cohesiveness - like how water tends to come down in raindrops rather than mist, or cluster together like how fallen leaves tend to be blown into piles caught against a branch, or clouds form rather than always being evenly dispersed particles - I see no reason that energy should be significantly different. The most significant difference would be that which makes certain energy into consciousness rather than that which powers the monitor or your computer. The will of what a person wants at the moment of death has to have an impact on the energy that is left in that person's body.
If you wish to refute this, please give a logical progression of what you find wrong with my reasoning.
If you want to continue with the fountain analogy,
Kevin Solway wrote:Once the heart stops pumping, and oxygen is no longer delivered to the brain, and the brain dies, thought is no longer supported - just as the column of water known as a "fountain" is no longer supported when its pump is turned off.
Yes, that explains the physiology of the brain. The brain is the seat of the mind, but it is not the mind itself. The energy of consciousness is the mind. When the brain dies, the mind is unseated - just as if someone yanked the chair out from underneath you. Just because your chair is gone does not mean that you cease to be. It just means that you must now take another position such as stand, squat, fall on your bottom, lie down, or find a new seat. If the conditions were right that falling on your bottom would kill you, then being unseated would coincide with your ceasing to be, just as in the final incarnation, the termination of the physical life process roughly coincides with the dissipation of the cluster of conscious energy.
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