Mind, body and ME

Death is the failure of the aggregate of actions we call a body to keep working to maintain itself as that sort of aggregate. It is of rather little metaphysical significance. The individual actions that are souls within the body probably are immortal in a sense, in that they involve the entire universe (as any electron does in a Schrodinger type equation) back to the Big Bang, but each one is probably very evanescent in its non-trivial contribution to the history of a body, let alone the world. I rather suspect the significant history of a soul lasts 20 milliseconds.

 

Not going to pretend I followed all of that . But many thanks.

I get the sense from what you say that no matter how we humans strive to model the dynamic behaviours within our universe, they will always be no more than that - models attempting to mimic dynamic behaviours, but never actually mimicking the real physics of what is generating those behaviours; they do not need to, which is just as well if it really is unenvisageable.

 

So the truly hard thing to accept, which Leibniz, neuropsychology and physics all indicate we should accept with open arms, is that there is no 'real physics' beyond the mathematical pattern of the dynamics and our experience. What makes the mathematical patterns real is the ability to create patterns of experience in observers. But those patterns of experience are neither 'like' nor 'unlike' the distal dynamics that they tell a story about.

Real physical reality is not like anything in itself. Because there is no 'like anything' other than 'like something to me'. The idea that there is a God's eye view that will see what things are 'really like' is an illusion built into our brains and the way we remember images and sounds and roughnesses. Once one realises there is nothing to know beyond the knowing we are familiar with, one can relax, liberated from mystery. Poor Kant never really understood. There is no thing-in-itself that we cannot know. True metaphysics needs no smoke and mirrors. It is as clear as spring water.

 

... and zen !