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Comment by rustcleaner | Hacker News Reader

Just more evidence pointing to the glaring truth that the mind arises from the brain, and that if there is anything like a soul then it disintegrates away within minutes, hours, and days after cessation of cardio-respiratory processes.

Remember this fact before making big decisions. You only have this now for a short while, and then it's back to the pre-conception infinite void.

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> Just more evidence pointing to the glaring truth that the mind arises from the brain, and that if there is anything like a soul then it disintegrates away within minutes, hours, and days after cessation of cardio-respiratory processes.

Is it ...?

Is recognizing your mother's or spouse's face a spiritual/soul function? If the mind did not arise from the brain, how does one explain lesions in the fusiform face area making one unable to recognize faces? This is without blindness, you see everything and go about your day normally. It's just that the meaning of faces may as well be kanji characters in hanzi-land and all you know is English.

look before you leap my friend

Has there ever been one iota of hard evidence for the existence of a soul? I've always categorized the idea of soul the same way as the Greek gods. Fanciful nonsense with no basis in reality.

I too conclude as much. I used to be christian until I read revelatians and realized it was classic mafia racketeering. I went full bore after discovering Conway's Game of Life, that it was Turing complete (and what that means), then Stephen Wolfram and his principle of computational equivalence. I can see exactly how I am a living computational program encoded and processed in a 3D particle automaton, I can see how from a few simple rules, simple systems, you get complex behavior no less complex than the Intel sitting on your desk can produce.

When I read revelations, I felt god was an egomaniac if he actually cared for humanity at all. The perfection of the clockwork universe contrasts with the imperfection of the human spiritual and material conditions. Such a god is a bastard for punishing you for doing what you were destined to do by his very design for you. Satan is a far less cruel master. However, if no such monster exists in reality and we are the beautiful emergent results of natural computational systems, nature and the world become beautiful again. No longer is it a frail imperfect creation but instead a beautiful floral tapestry.

Computation is Life!™

> we are the beautiful emergent results of natural computational

What is beauty?

Tentative theory of beauty: it's communication across a gap. This certainly applies to flowers, and possibly also to humans, although we may be jaded by over-intimacy and arbitrary standards in assessing that objectively.

What’s something you believe in without proof?

Statistical significance, causal determinism, life goals, civil society. Why?

That’s quite a tangent there, comes off a bit as axe-grinding.

Religion or not, you will have to face the void and make peace with it eventually. It’s a primal human fear.

> it's a primal human fear

Yes. Just like monsters

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