Is thought immortal?

Question

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Have a wonderful day!

Answer 1

The quick answer is that if anything is possible then the permanent destruction of everything including all thought and time is possible. Thus maybe nothing is immortal in theory.

Plato (like the cavemen in Mr Hart's BC comics) was convinced of his minds immortality through sheer gut feeling, and was unable to find any compelling logical argument to avert his conviction.

Maths and physics is a little unclear on the topic of whether the essence of things can be destroyed. Classical physics and Quantum Mechanics suggests that no matter or information is ever really lost. Classical and Information Physics have entropy which tends to cause things to die or stagnate.

Similarly the unicertainty principle can somtimes act to destroy things, but equally may cause things to appear with no cause



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I was going to give a long technical expose of the subject, but I will start instead with a more relaxed approach.

Here goes:

Before you were conceived you presumably had none of your own thoughts (or none that you can recall) , thus from your point of view all thoughts (passage of time) started sometime after your conception and depending on your religious beliefs of the afterlife (or your philosophical stance on the mind-body connection) you might assume your thoughts die with your body.

In a similar way our universe began its existence "after" the sharing of information from parent universes, which resulted in the Big Bang. Like ourselves our universe will likely eventually die after procreating new universes in hyperspace.

The evolutionary process on the whole seems (at least superficially) to progress forward. E.g. If we look at the thinking ability of our ultimate ancestral pond scum, we might assume we have more thinking ability and if we were to look back in hypertime (or backwards through causal links) we might eventually go back to an instance of the origin of thought. I.e. before that instance no life or thought existed.

Many people believe that if something can be created then it can be destroyed.
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In practice however it might be very difficult to stop thought or kill all thinking organisms.

Let us assume for the moment that there are other persons like ourselves capable of thought. Let us further assume that things that seem to be living by having the ability to procreate, feed, grow and maintain basic systemic forms, are able to think.

Given this definition; we might assume that a micro organism such as an amoeba (or even our entire universe) is a living thing with the ability to think, maintain its integrity through life and reproduce or regenerate more copies like itself.

Thus to kill all thinking organisms we would need to destroy every living creature in every universe. Even were we to do this we would likely find that life or thought would restart itself like it likely did in the first place.

Thus I think it unlikely that all thought would cease throughout creation.

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On to related matters:

Life after death.

If we assume that our thoughts are made of information and accept the claim that "information is never lost" we might assume that our mind may last after our death.

Some argue for instance that at the moment of the beginning of our universe or even the beginning of everything that a quantum entanglement or similar state existed such that everything throughout time and space is connectedin a single eternal moment or Godlike consciousness.

Thus everything and every event both in and out of time and space would be connected in the one eternal moment or consciousness.

In such a scenario every past and future thought might eternally exist beyound the reaches of ordinary concepts of time and space.

A more simple explamation would be that even if you lost all your thoughts God in heaven beyond time will never forget you and can recreate you whenever she wishes.

Answer 2

Do you mean thought in general, as a process, or a particular thought. It would be nice to think that a particularly 'perfect' thought might somehow remain out there to be tapped-into in another time and place. Sadly, that is not a notion supported by any evidence. But even if a thought is not immortal, maybe an idea can go some way towards it if recorded in some way for posterity - written down, described, represented by a photograph, filmed or whatever. Of course we all look at things differently so the representation of the idea might not mean the same to another person as it did to the originator.
If you meant thought in general, then I suppose it will last as long as there are life forms to think.

Answer 3

The sum total of human thought remains as long as human presence remains. Also, thoughts are mental, but are manifestations of corporeal beings, so individual thoughts are not immortal; an inventor dying with the secret of an invention is an example.

Perhaps someone else would 're-think' his thought, as it were, and make the lost invention. This has happened before, where ideas have been lost and rediscovered, but this is probably because human thought is generally quite uniform in its processes, only differing by degree.

(edit) But Grayure, numbers are nothing without people there to think them. You say assumptions are outside the mind, but this is like cold air being drawn into a fan, heated and blown out the other end as hot air. It is people making assumptions out of small pieces of existing knowledge.

Answer 4

Same here i only like Dance With The Devil but there are some songs are good IMO Caught in a hustle One remix The Prophecy The Getaway You Never Know It's Not a Game The angel of Death Bin Laden Obnoxious You Never Know The 4th Branch Peruvian Cocaine The Poverty of Philosophy Fight Until The End The Prophecy No Mercy Hollywood Driveby Freedom Of Speech

Answer 5

There is no thought, only the appearance of thought. The only Reality is Change, unremitting impermanence. The myth of immortality is Humanity's cry in the dark.

Answer 6

thought in and of itself is immortal because as long as there are people, thought will exist. Depending on the particular thought, it may or may not be immortal. As times change, some thoughts and beliefs become archaic.

Answer 7

Yes. A thought is not inside the mind. Here's an example. An assumption is a thought, but everyone makes an infinite number of assumptions. Clearly they are not in their consciousness all at the same time. This can be turned round. One has, for example, an infinite number of beliefs, positive and negative. Therefore, thoughts are akin to abstract entities such as numbers, and these exist outside time.

Answer 8

I don't think that any thought is immortal as I think that thought is very here and now. Something that can be very nebulous unless acted on. I think that it's the act that's brought forth from the thought that has any chance of immortality.

Answer 9

Thoughts are reactions like emotions or body sensations, so they come and go, even though they might be strong and last for some time, but they are not 'immortal'.
BeiYin

Answer 10

Is the thought of thought-immortality mortal?