Thank you for the kind reply, HC -
in fact you raised the $M question here. The intriguing thing is: if I take consciousness to be not extended in space, then in theory it is possible that it survives me in full after I am dead. I wrote something to the extent that it wouldn’t be there anymore then, but this is imprecise writing.
Most natural philophers past and present agree that in deep sleep we are unconscious, same in fact when we are anaesthesized in hospital. Yet we regain consciousness in full after those states.
This is most interesting. Because it would mean that people with Alzheimer, who seem to be losing parts of consciousness by and by, theoretically can be said to not have their consciousness destroyed ever more, but that more of it gets to be ‘dormant’ for an unknown time.
By extension this could go for deceased people as well.
I am flabbergasted, Sir, what your tongue-in-cheek questions (and I know that they were meant that way!) have brought about in two simple sessions.
The only axiom in the whole story is that consciousness is not extended in space (i.e. knows no mass).
I will pursue the matter further.
(Cheers matey!)
Good follow up discussion - I like your style, A13! I think you are exactly right about the weight of that question, and I believe it is one that many people have wrestled with for thousands of years.
In particular, I appreciated your comment about Alzheimer’s. As I watched my grandmother progress through the stages, sometimes she would think I was me, sometimes I was my grandfather, sometimes my father, sometimes my uncle. It was like reverse schizophrenia. Always in her eyes was the spark of intelligence, just not always recognition. Once I listened to her vivid and animated description of riding horses across the prairie in about 1915, but then she couldn’t recall having eaten lunch 15 minutes earlier.
Anyway, now the question is really raised to the next level. If there is consciousness (which there obviously is), and if it is not extended into space (has no mass), then we can assume that things (for lack of a better word) exist outside of the material realm. So what are those things, of what do they consist, and what is their existence like?