In this second lecture I can boil it down to one question.
Will I survive my death?
Shelly doesn’t profess to being a medical doctor to explain what happens to the body when the body physically dies but he does a pretty good job explaining the major sequence of events that would occur.
I hope that you will go to the website and listen to his second lecture about dualism and physicalism before you read the rest of my blog.
Go there now and come back to read the rest of what I am about to blog about so you will understand where I am coming from and my point of view.
To be true to my nature, I am a southern woman. I may have been born in the north and partly raised in the north but I can honestly say, all that snow is not for me. I remember living in New Richmond and Saugatuck, Michigan.
Looking up to see huge ice cycles hang from the roof. Drops of water beaded down the side of the melting upside down cones with the sun shining only to refreeze at the first hint of darkness.
I never thought about my soul as a child. My body didn’t fail me. If I fell, the blood would immediately clot and heal without a dab of Neosporin. I could play outside in the snow with shorts. I could ride my bike in a skirt on ice. I thought of myself as indestructible. It never occurred to me that there was this soul inside who would go on after my body failed me.
So as a child you could have called me a physicalist. I had this body who could play all day and only after a five minute nap, get up and stay awake half the night before making my daddy holler at me to shut up and go to sleep. My idea of self was to go on and on without feeling any recuperation. I’m sure that if you are a mother, like I am, or a father then you can understand where I am coming from with your children.
As a child I acted as a child who only knew my body could do these amazing feats. Things like jumping off of a huge pile of dirt. Rolling down a grass meadow on the side of hill. Making my bike jump off of or onto a curb. Turning around and around in circles until I made myself fall down dizzy. Running with my German Shepard until I panted just as hard as he did. Play peek-a-boo with my little brother just to hear him laugh for hours on end. I physically could do the same thing for hours upon hours without getting worn out.
My sense of self was within myself. As I got older my sense of self became detached from my physical body. I starting seeing myself as others saw me. When I looked into the mirror, I saw this person whom I didn’t know. As a child when I looked into a mirror it was the same a dog who looks into the mirror. I was seeing something there but not really caring what was there. That’s why we have mothers to dress us because as a little girl, I really didn’t care what I wore. This reminds me of this time I attended summer school in Michigan. Part of the class was to go to Lake Michigan and take swimming lessons. I didn’t have a swim suit because we were to poor to get new clothes until school started for the fall. This was the summer so I had to make do with clothes people gave us. The first time we went to take swimming lessons I had to be sent me down the hall to get a swim suit from some women who worked there. I had no idea who they were. I just remember that the lady who helped me put on the swim suit was talking to the other woman about how some mothers didn’t care about bathing their children. I knew the woman was talking about me and how she was disgusted at my dirty underwear and/or dirty clothes. As she dressed me I think I started crying. I didn’t understand why they were saying these things. I just knew that I couldn’t help it if I didn’t come to school clean. After all, that summer we were living in a shed next to a big house owned by Old Man Merlin on his farm. The shed had no running water nor a bathroom. It did have our bunk bed for my sister and me, a stove for mom to cook on and I can’t remember the rest of it. I do remember mom having to take us into Old Man Merlin’s house upstairs to take a bath once a week. How we survived that summer is impossible for me to remember but it gave me these bad memories that I believe contributed to my physicalist point of view evolving to a duelist point of view.
I want to tell you more about Old Man Merlin’s big two story house but that will have to be another time. I would be getting off the subject if I divulged all the incidents that happened. After all, I’m supposed to be reviewing and telling you my point of view about how Shelly Kagan gives his lecture on dualism and physicalism.
I even wrote a college paper on crying. Crying became something I was definitely good at as a child. Nobody told me to stop crying. Nobody told me that crying was a sign of weakness. I think it was and is because I am a girl. When my son would cry, I told him to dry it up and take it like a man and to be tough. Little girls who cried as much as I did was just ignored. I became to like the ignores I got from others. It kept me from having to deal with the bad mouthing or meanness from others I received.
So as I got older, the duelist view became into being within me. I saw myself become a woman in the mirror, literally. I would look at myself and wonder who that body was. It didn’t feel like me. I felt my body was just that – a body separate from whom I was deep down inside. I would just look in the mirror and stare at myself at my eyes to find my soul. I was behind those eyes. My soul, even though I didn’t know what it was called at that time, was some where inside. I don’t know where my soul is exactly but I know that without looking into my eyes you can’t see my soul. I’m not saying that if you look into anyone’s eyes you will see their soul but if you do then you would have a pretty good idea of who that person is and what they are all about.
I also want you know that I wasn’t raised religiously. I didn’t go to one particular church. I attended various vacation bible schools. But being one particular religion is not how I was raised. An atheist? No. A Presbyterian? no. A Pentecost? no. A Missionary Baptist? no. A First Baptist? no. A Second Baptist? no. A Catholic? no. I wasn’t schooled into knowing who or what to believe. Did this Not having set rules about being a good and a bad little girl have a lot of effect on me? Yes, it did. But it didn’t stop my belief that somewhere inside of my body was my soul. That little child who could slide her bike 10 feet on ice and scrape the side of her leg but still have the courage to go do it again when the chance came along.
So even with all this said, I can honestly say I am a duelist and will most likely be for the rest of my life. Born a Physicalist? Yes, spent my childhood that way. So it is my belief that when Professor Kagan wants us to only reference two kinds of beliefs about self awareness, dualism and physicalism, he is just merely trying to give us some bases to reference the rest of the class. To try to give a platform to spring from. To get us into thinking above and beyond ourselves. We can’t be restricted to a limited point of view if we are to grow.
Think of it this way. You have a self awareness only you know. Nobody else can make you think one way or the other. Or can they? The whole purpose of downloading and listening to Shelly for me is a personally one. I was and still am interested in studying the reasoning behind what will happen when I die. Shelly Kagan wants to persuade you, or/and give you other people arguments as to why, your self awareness should not be limited.
Thanks for reading this and I will continue to give my own personal experiences as responses to his lectures.
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