Would you be conscious if you weren't born?

[Twilight Hue]

To aid the confusion:

What is the default? Existence or non-existence?

Are there more things that exist or more things that don't exist? One way to look at it is, there are more things that exist than there are that don't exist, because things that don't exist don't exist, and thus nothing doesn't exist.

It's a reactive universe. You require both conditions. At times, supposedly either condition having more or less dominance at any givin time.

 

[The Sum of Awe]

You're forgetting that the overwhelming majority of beings that have ever existed no longer exist. IMO, non-existence is the norm. Existing is like a fart in a hurricane, one half-smelt hint of a whiff and its gone forever.

Unless, of course, you consider the mind to unravel from physical. In which case, the mind (created) is the only thing that no longer exists, but everything that created it remains.

Though the action of flicking marbles is gone, the marbles still exist.

 

[Stephen Dedalus]

I'm glad to my parents for choosing that precise moment for concept me.
Or I would have never existed.

 

[samosasauce]

It depends if the brain is developed enough at that point

 

[DreadFish]

Because those who are not born do not exist, so there was nobody that wasn't born.

Yeah, basically. You have to be born to be somebody, or anything at all for that matter.

The rest, I didnt really understand. I haven't slept enough today :faint:

I'll get to the rest of this later.

 

[psychoslice]

What you call you is nothing more than conditioning and programming, your true nature is pure consciousness, so if you were born or not, you are still and always will be pure consciousness. In fact no one is born, and no one dies, its just the mind body organism that so called dies, and again that's not who you are, this needs to be realized from deep within.

 

[Kilgore Trout]

Materialistically speaking, if your parents did not have you as a child, would you simply not be, our would you be conscious as another?

It's got me thinking. What if life is default? Because those who are not born do not exist, so there was nobody that wasn't born. Every person exists, and every person is simply the collective senses following a meatsuit.

I really wish I could explain it better...

Conscious, like life itself, is a temporary state resulting from extremely complex emergent processes based in chemistry and biology. The matter that makes up "you," along with its current structure and interactions is the substrate through which the consciousness known as "you" exists. Without the substrate, there is no "you."

Of course, it is the nature of the emergent consciousness type known as "human" to fear the end of its existence, and thus it tends to invent fantasies about perpetual existence.

 

[factseeker88]

Conscious, like life itself, is a temporary state resulting from extremely complex emergent processes based in chemistry and biology. The matter that makes up "you," along with its current structure and interactions is the substrate through which the consciousness known as "you" exists. Without the substrate, there is no "you."

Of course, it is the nature of the emergent consciousness type known as "human" to fear the end of its existence, and thus it tends to invent fantasies about perpetual existence.

I disagree. IMO, consciousnesses is more like an idling motor. waiting for someone or something to put it in gear. Your post, for example, put my idling consciousness in gear.

:yes::yes::yes:

"This moment is your life." Omar Khayyam...

"The truth of things will not comply with our conceits, and our interests. Our belief or disbelief of a thing does not alter the nature of things” Tillotson