The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #131699   Message #2989840
Posted By: GUEST,josep
19-Sep-10 - 03:31 PM
Thread Name: BS: The God Delusion 2010
Subject: RE: BS: The God Delusion 2010
One more thing concerning my argument I need to bring up--brain damage. I told someone we would discuss it but I forgot.

I know a guy who had a heart attack and died for a short time. When they revived him he had no short term memory. To him, every morning he wakes up it's still 1986.

Does this invalidate my argument? Let's see.

I said that if you get complete amnesia, your consciousness skips over events no longer remembered. Due to his brain damage, he does get complete amnesia concerning everything that happens after his heart attack in 1986. So what happens? His consciousness skips over it.

Suppose it was the opposite and he had long term memory loss? Then it would be as I already described--his consciousness skips over everything that happened before the amnesia occurs. To him, life began in 1986.

But he was conscious before that so my statement that if you get amnesia at T1 in the future then you can't be consciousness now is in error, right? Wrong. He may been conscious before but to his consciousness as it is, he still can't remember it. He still doesn't notice becoming conscious until T1 or later. That he must remember at some point in the future is unprovable in the case of brain damage because the brain was damaged. Maybe in the next life, the recollections of these memories will come back him in disjointed bits and pieces.

Consciousness is unaffected and timeless. It works as well as it ever did after the brain damage except the brain doesn't work right anymore. This is no different than energy working the same as ever even though the muscles it is being focused through are racked with MS or something.

So if you're shot in the head and you're brain dead, it would be like death if it extinguished consciousness, you'd have no ability to recollect or re-live and it's as though you never existed.

But other people would remember you and have memories of you.

But that's their consciousness not yours. Yours never existed as far as you are concerned. Effectively, there is no "you." But maybe you'll remember things in the next life in bits and pieces.