[Buddha-l] Argument for confusion

[lemmett at talk21.com]

I don't think phenomenologically [sorry if using the term poorly] transiting from being alive to dead is conceivable because that would arrive at an experience that is a non experience and that is contradictory. That does seem to follow: how can we go in our idea from Oxford to Cambridge if Cambridge is itself unthinkable? 


To support the psychological tendency that I think Freud states [that people can't imagine their own being dead] I assume that to think about phenomena I have to imagine something about those in this moment. It seems obvious that that sort of qualification would limit the concept in some way: if I'm not imagining variations of live phenomena then in a sense I don't impute them as me.


My reason is I cannot imagine my own internal consciousness existing in the future because: it does not yet exist in the future; and I am only what I already am [i am not what i am not yet, because my being X does not mean I will be it but that I am]. 


So that with Merleau-Ponty the only possible alternative to death being inconceivable then is, I think, that phenomenologically I do not always intend the future but do exist there, which seems to threaten continuity in life. Surely, if I exist at two points in time the contemporary one must intend the other else I have two minds that are split from each other?


But neither is the later mind somehow intending the present much of a solution. If at A there is X at A and Y at B, and B intends A, then at A, Y is Y and not X [it can't be X because Y has X but X does not have Y].


Sorry if that's *very* confused.