People's Simple living Questions........

                       

                   What is Time?

          We are all caught in the unflinching grip of time. It's everywhere, associated with us, our lives, moment by moment, every moment. Some people define it as something that distinguishes beginning from end. Others call it the direction of increase in entropy of the Universe. Yet others define it as just what the clock shows us.

          Time eludes explanation and understanding, ever since one gets aware of it. It is like someone coming in one day to live with you permanently, someone who stays with you, follows you where you go, accompanies you in whatever you do. Even when you don't notice him, he's there standing by you, like a ghost. Yet you have no clue as to who he is, what he does and where he came from.

        A common view of time in science is of it's being a dimension of the Universe, something that is an essential part of the Universe, like space. Scientists tell us that the Big Bang was the beginning of time. It is senseless to ask what happened before the Big Bang because there was no time before Big Bang, thus there was no before and there was no after. They say that space and time are the essential attributes of the Universe. Others disagree.

        Another view is that time and space are of our making, not part of the Universe. There is no time in itself. They are merely our impositions on the Universe to make sense of it. They are the necessary glasses through which we view the Universe.

      Yet others believe that it is possible to take off these glasses. Stories are told about the Mystics' escape of time and space.

      I wonder how would the mystic respond to a timestamped recording of his meditation in a tamper resistant camera.

      "Time continues to baffle imagination and reason".

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                          What happens after death?

       In a sense, it is a wrong question to ask. Death, by definition, stands for cessation of being. Thus after death, life stops, and you no longer exist.

            However, this is not how this question is put to most of us, for a general person on the street is a Cartesian Duelist, which is to say most of us believe that there is more to our material bodies. That there is a mind, apart from our bodies. And the mind (or as some would call it, soul) is not governed by the rules and laws that govern physical material. So, when a person dies, his heartbeat stops, and organs stop functioning, there is still a reason to believe that the mind persists, because it is beyond the purview of the rules that material objects must follow, hence the mind doesn't need nutrition from the blood, it doesn't need to be maintained in the homeostasis of the body.

            The question then is, what happens to our minds when the body stops functioning? Here again, much explanation is provided by religious dogma. The entire concept of an afterlife, heaven and hell, and how one's deeds in this world would help in another.

             There are many problems with such thinking. The concept of a 'mind' plays a big role in philosophy, especially in characterization of subjective phenomena, consciousness & distinguishing humans from machines. But the very proposal that minds could persist the death of body seems more a result of the psychological fear of death, an escape mechanism humans adopt to handle the dark truth of the ultimate destruction of their selves, in the face of an innate desire to live. Secondly, the ways to know about the mind are debilitatingly limited. Minds, by definition are not subject to material laws, and hence escape any examination under the scientific method (which restricts itself to observable, experimentally demonstrable & repeatable phenomena), leaving reasoning and introspection as the only means to know anything about the mind. While existence & persistence of soul is acceptable as a philosophical possibility, the utter uselessness of construing a mind which continues an afterlife seems a fantastic construction of thought rooted more in psychological fear than in a need to solve a philosophical problem.

         Its not an uncontested thesis, but probably, we are nothing more than our bodies, may be our minds are just a result of our enormously complex brains. And may be upon our death, we just cease to exist.

           A study of what death is, and what happens after death requires an understanding of what it means to have a self, and it requires the investigator to possess some clear means to know about issues concerning death. In the absence of such clarity, the issue of death (if its an issue at all) remains shrouded in smog.

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           Are human beings just machines?

            The question whether humans are just advanced machines has been around since long, and whether human being is just a computer is a topic of intense research in contemporary philosophy. Perhaps to the primitive man, anything that moved was alive. The image of the first machines with moving parts must have given rise to the speculation if human body was just another machine.

                   Today, with increased scientific understanding, few would question that much of the body the movements and mechanistic in nature, following and exploiting some basic physical laws.  But when it comes to the special ability of human beings, the ability to think, that the debate begins. There are at at least two very clear positions. One position states that human brains are just sufficiently complex computing machines. The other position shrugs in disagreement, maintaining that there's more to the thinking phenomenon of humans, the mind, which is definitely more than just a computer (or any other machine that we know of).  One side contends that 'mind' is just a result of a sufficiently complex brain (or another view that 'mind' is just an illusion played by our biology) and the other school maintains that a computing machine, however complex it may be, would forever subjective phenomena like our perception of colours, feelings, emotions, our understanding of semantics (the meaning we attach to our experiences), our ability to direct our attention to anything that we want to direct it to (intentionality) etc. (see: Hard problem of consciousness

 

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Mwl. Nicetius Nicholaus .