Dualism (Identity)

by dhw, Wednesday, March 18, 2015, 21:25 (3537 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

DHW: And the backup? You have said the spirit has no consciousness, so what and where is this wretched back-up with all the information about me?-TONY: From a biblical perspective, the spirit returns to god, much like taking the back up of your computers hard drive and putting it in your pocket. Why? Well, because (from a biblical perspective) there is the prospect of resurrection. In order to resurrect someone, you would need a back up of their critical data, no? Otherwise you wouldn't be restoring someone, you would be creating someone new. -But you keep saying that my spirit has no consciousness and is not “me”. I don't understand how it can have a backup of me without being me. I asked what and where it was, not why you think there has to be one. Now you are talking of resurrection, which is physical. So is your theory of consciousness that God is recording our lives and has a library of memory sticks stored somewhere in his cosmos? And one day he will bring up my skeleton, blow my particular blob of his spirit back into it (which presumably will bring back my inners and outers), insert the memory stick labelled dhw, which contains my consciousness and the rest of my identity, and hey presto here I am again? If not, how do you visualize the process, and once more please explain the actual nature of the backup. 
 
DHW: As regards NDEs, David tells us that many patients claim actually to have met dead people. You have referred to them as providing support for your analogy, so you must know this. Are you then claiming that those patients are lying, or deluded?

TONY: Deluded or lying are both very negative statements. Perhaps misled, misguided, or even conned might be better put. I think that they see something. I think that they believe what they see is really what they think it is. So no, I do not think they are lying or deluded. However, from a biblical perspective the are not speaking to the dead.-Yes, they are negative, and your substitutes, especially “conned”, all suggest that somebody is tricking these near dead folk. Do you think the surgeons are injecting them with some hallucinatory drug that happens to provide them with information that not even the surgeons know? This is absurd. On the other hand, “I think that they believe what they see is really what they think it is” means that, since you disbelieve their claims, they are deluded. Your criterion for believing that they are deluded or are being tricked appears to be your interpretation of something in the bible. I'm not going to be drawn into another dispute over exegesis, but surely you can come up with a more convincing explanation of how these patients mistakenly claim to see dead people and get information from them that nobody could possibly know (see David's response).-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx-I have just read your response to David. I'll leave the above, but I see you are now claiming that the Devil has conned the NDE patients. As a result of his con, Eben Alexander, an atheist, is now a firmly committed theist, and as far as I know, many NDE patients do feel much closer to God after their experience. So who the heck is your Satan working for? And I would still like to know how the backup is made and is going to function.