two questions - Page 2

Hmm.. that's a bit of a departure from the point I was actually trying to make (about Descartes' meditations). What I wanted to illustrate is that the fact that you experience the world as a conscious creature is a very fundamental thing, whereas the fact that others around you experience it that way is more of an assumption on your part.

If your arm gets chopped off, your arm is gone, but you keep going. While you often think your arm is part of you, it's just something that's attached to you (24/7). You can say that 'you' are your mind, and that your body is just a tool attached to 'you' to manipulate the world around you. However, if you start going insane, or get a mental disorder (in your old age perhaps), do you cease to perceive the world as a conscious being -- the same conscious being the was 'you' in your youth? I've never had a mental disorder, but I don't think people 'die' just because their minds function differently. So I would think that "you" transcends even your mind. You are the consciousness in you (a soul perhaps), and you are merely attached to your mind. The fact that your thoughts are so deeply ingrained in who you are is not a problem -- 'you' interact with your mind and depend on it just as your mind interacts with your body (and your body is not 'you', just as your mind is not in what I'm claiming). Just because there is an intimate interaction, or a co-dependence, doesn't mean you actually ARE all of the co-dependent pieces. I can easily imagine invading someone else's body and mind, continuing to experience the world as me but thinking as they did, not remembering anything from my other life. It would be kind of like wiping your memory, sticking other memories in, and replacing the body. If the other body/mind I'm transfered to was an atomic replica of me, my perception or thoughts would actually remain unchanged, but my host body would change. The point is that up until the moment I went in there, I saw this 2nd body/mind from a 3rd person perspective. Why? Does the information about which body/mind I reside in transcend the atoms from which I'm made? I think the answer is yes.

Possibly the most interesting aspect of this converstion is the use of the term, soul. Christians barely make distinctions about spirit (spirit of love and the manifestation of a spiritual being) let alone soul!
Prior statement made in regards to past life stem from experiencing spirit and the associated sensing the oneness (connection to) of existence.
That this asociated sense of being is prevalent to various religious doctrines as well as non-religious doctrine indicates a reasonable acceptance of being valid?

Very nice questions

1st question : *I* am not Craig James Willy. I am something (which might as well be called a spirit or soul) that uses Craig's body and life as a window to see the universe.
I am me because I see things through the eyes of Craig and not the eyes of anyone else.. I am not me because of my genes, name or any environmental factors. They define my body, one thing defines ME : I am linked to this body.
Err.. hoped that made some sense

2nd question :The birth of the universe was decided with utter complete 100% randomness. Think about it, something so fundamental as the universe cannot have been created except by randomness. We can always ask : "why was it god who made it? why did we start out with rock that blew up?"
To me, randomness in a sense "decided" what the rules of the universe would be (this randomness might as well be called God I suppose) because Ocam's Razor cannot slice this off. It IS the simplest explanation possible.
I believe the second AFTER these rules were created by randomness, there was the big bang and science explains most of it.
The neat thing about this randomness idea is that it can never be ruled out. Science or religion can decide anything to be the begining of the universe and it still could have been brought about by randomness.

(edited for clarification/typos)

Interesting ideas Crimson...I have been studying the Solar Nebula theory just recently (big bang) and have so many questions roaming around here in my "brain".lol.

think4yourself - How do you think our "soul" and minds interact? Science would tell us our minds make the decisions (and I'm inclined to agree) and that our souls are merely spectators.
In that sense I think we *are* our memories.
Everything we are and have experienced is there through memories because if we forget something it effectively did not happen.

This doesn't really answer the riddle though, and I think it is similar to an brain operation where you split the brain in two (usually because of a defective half). The person becomes 2 different people (they've been known to fight with themselves too) and only the person knows (and perhaps even she doesn't know) which one of her is the same as the old one.
If the person does know which one is the "original" then she's has effectively figured out in which half of her brain her soul was.

2nd question.

Our mind will never know if there was a beginning or not. I believe if there is a beginning there is an end, so therefore I think that the universe always existed. but thats something that will never be known