Afterlife (Endings)

by dhw, Friday, February 01, 2013, 20:25 (4311 days ago) @ BBella

We're discussing BBella's ideal form of afterlife, and again I shall pick out sections of your post that highlight the big problem which I'm afraid I still have with your concept of identity. I do appreciate your patience.-dhw: "...life is one long sequence of...experiences that subtly change us" 
BBella: Behind the meaning of this sentence may be the answer to the question of identity. The body in which your consciousness resides is what changes over the years, but the conscious/observer/witness of those changes does not itself change. -If there is such a thing as the soul, I would see it quite differently. Yes, the body changes all the time, but that would only be the container of my identity, and although I was no doubt born with many readymade characteristics, these are worked on and in many cases can certainly be changed by experience. I do not believe that as a baby I was already the same self-conscious, self-observing, self-witnessing dhw I am today. You have described changes in your own character that have come about through experience. The body may influence the identity (e.g. through illness, drugs, accidents), but I just can't see how the soul can be a fully formed and unchanging identity from our birth to our death. If it's not the soul that thinks our thoughts, and that broadens, changes, refines them moment by moment, what is it? Not my body, unless my brain IS my soul.
 
BBELLA: It's not the body of dhw that will be present in the IBT, it will be the conscious/witness/observer of dhw's life that will be present in the IBT. [...] The you that has observed and stored the memory of your life here is who will be leaving the body at death. Then you will journey thru the experience of re-membering your previous IBT life along with your new memories of the life of dhw stored in your memory bank, which could be recalled just like any memory. It would be the same or similar as you remembering the character you created's life, or me remembering a dream that I woke up from.
 
But just as I am NOT the character I created, and you are NOT the other person you became in a dream (like David, I'm always me in my dreams), according to your scenario I will NOT be dhw in the IBT. What survives will be the pre-dhw and post-dhw, conscious, unchanged and unchanging observer of dhw, and that makes dhw into somebody else's dream.-BBELLA: Without you dhw is nothing but dirt. There's not two identities only one. "You" have given your body life, because you wanted to experience what you have and will be experiencing here. Without you, the you I am addressing, there would be no dhw or soul to move on into the afterlife. So you are not someone else's dream, you are you, living this life now, whether you came here from the IBT or live on in an afterlife or not.
 
I am not someone else's dream NOW, but I will be in your IBT. Then dhw will be the dream and memory of that fully formed, unchanging identity described above, which observed me, and then left me for dead.
 
DHW: In other words, it's the gap between my current soul and this different, "eternal soul identity" that I can't bridge intellectually or imaginatively. 
BBELLA: There is no gap, because you don't have a current soul (altho you do have a current body in which to reside). You have only one soul. Whether it be the eternal soul that entered your body at birth and animated it into a life called dhw for which you have lived thru till you decide to leave the body of dhw and continue on your journey, or whether it be the only soul lived here as dhw. There is only one.-I think that sums up the problem I have here. Yes, if there is such a thing as a soul, there is only one, and I equate it with "my" identity, which IS current. It has to be the "me" that resides within my body and thinks dhw's thoughts. Not my arms, legs, or ... crucially ... my brain, but the ever learning (though alas all too frequently forgetting!), subtly changing "me" that gives orders to my brain. You go on to say: "The soul is what animates the body and gives it life - consciousness and subconsciousness, and the soul is what leaves the body when it's time to move on." That I understand perfectly. The difference between us is that I see it as my current (and maybe future) ever-developing self, whereas your version makes it into an unchanging observer that is simply occupying my body now (and has occupied other people's), and eventually will move on, with "me" as just a memory.