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If this makes accepting death easier, the good news is the near-death experience. While I certainly don't intend to convince you that it's an afterlife experien

• jodrellblank 12y ago
  The two main disagreements I have with this are, one that I can't put into words very clearly and will come back to, and my generally repetitive comment on these issues that you - MichaelOChurch2015 - weren't born, you were made by your life experiences. A child was born, a nearly blank slate, and formed into 'you' by experiences. The idea that you could have been born "somewhere else" or "to someone else" or "in another time" is a nonsense idea. We know exactly what happens to children born elsewhere and elsewhen and to other parents - they become other people. Not people we clairvoyantly share qualia with, not people we are superimposed-upon or people we are hiding-inside, not "us" in any way shape or form, just 100% other people. Following that, the idea that someone could be born twice also seems nonsensical. (Boltzmann Brains excepted; MichaelOChurch2015 might appear for a few Plancktimes in the near heat-death void. Not that we'll ever know). The first point; moment by moment in life we experience our surroundings. Continuous sensory input which we continually respond to in large and small scales from planning the next week to blinking and shifting in our seats. I suspect this pervasive connection from experience to physical reality to be fundamental to qualia and consciousness, and so the idea that we could go to an afterlife with no body, no senses, no time, no drive for physical sustenance - and still in any way remain who we are - doesn't fit. If you don't get up in the morning, because you have no body and didn't sleep, and you aren't in your normal environment, you don't put on your clothes because they don't exist anymore along with all your other property, don't breakfast or exercise, don't stretch your achey ankle, don't prepare yourself for your day filled with not going places and not doing things that could affect the organisation of matter and cash, and you don't do all that in absense-of-time and there are no faces to recognise... then who are "you" in such an afterlife anyway? Especially if you arrived there age 95, demented and memoryless. If such an afterlife exists, so what? It's so different as to be not worth thinking of as a continuation of oneself. "Imagine waking up in someone else's body". "Is that what the afterlife is like?" "No, imagine not waking up. And you're not in a body". "What do I see?". "Nothing, you have no eyes and you aren't anywhere". That should have been laughed out the first time it was suggested. (I guess the short version is "we don't have a body. We are bodies").
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• jodrellblank 12y ago
  I don't think we'll have that answered within our natural lifespan. Both you and I are likely to die before we, as a species, know whether there's an afterlife Pondering this, for how much grief it causes and how many people die every day (around 150,000), I wonder why "studying the moment of death with every instrument and method we can come up with, to work out if there's an afterlife" isn't a worldwide obsession for our species.
• sago 12y ago
  I think we have answered, to the extent it is possible to answer, the question of whether there is an afterlife. And the related question of whether our minds are independent of our bodies. The typical responses of educated religious folks to this (as opposed to many religious folks who are still fundamentally mind-body dualists) is to posit some 'deeper' sense in which the mind 'can be thought of' as surviving death. Some religious folks simply defy any logical or evidential concerns and assert it based on it being a revealed fact, or a miracle, or a mystery. There are a handful of philosophers gamely trying to keep mind-body dualism going as a philosophical idea, but they're a small minority, with no neurobiological expertise, and the arguments are entirely unfalsifiable and easily refuted (in both my opinion, and that of most philosophers, as far as I can gather). I think people are entitled to believe what they want, and rationalise their beliefs however they choose, I am only responding to your claim of needing more evidence. So yes, I think we can be as sure as we need to be that NDEs are functions of brain activity, not of our consciousness somehow being liberated from the confines of the neurones that run it and journeying to the afterlife, only to be returned to its neuronal matrix again. I can't imagine what more evidence we could need, unless you're suggesting that, until we understand everything about mental processes, we should act as if we understand nothing about them. Presuming that I came from nothing, that means that "nothing" can produce qualia, which means that if I become "nothing" after death... Apple trees come from nothing (at least to the same extent that human beings come from nothing), so nothing can produce apples, which means if the apple tree dies, perhaps the apple-producing essence of the tree can survive and still produce apples, even though the physical tree is long gone. Qualia aren't 'things' that they can be produced.
  • michaelochurch 12y ago
    I think we have answered, to the extent it is possible to answer, the question of whether there is an afterlife. And the related question of whether our minds are independent of our bodies. I don't agree, if by "minds" we mean qualia itself. Of course, personality and memories and much of our experience lives in our brain. Most of what we call "mind" lives in the brain, and no one disputes this. The question, to this point unanswered, surrounds whether anything's left over when the brain is gone. I tend to doubt that a brain-less qualia would carry much in the way of memory; it might be completely memory-less, acted upon by karma but unaware of any prior lives. A minute after I die, I don't expect to remember who "Michael O. Church" was, just as I don't remember previous lives in this one, although the karma accrued in this life will affect me. Qualia is also impossible to measure except subjectively (and, of course, once the brain is gone, that person is not coming back to report). We can measure brain activity which is, under normal circumstances, highly correlated to subjective experience; we can't measure experience itself. Fifty years ago, people thought that a person's thinking would cease under sensory deprivation. However, we find that people in floatation tanks actually have more cognitive activity. It seems that the increased freedom allows for a more intense and powerful experience. As for the NDE, this is likewise a time when we'd expect the person's consciousness to be dimming, but it seems to do the opposite. Of course, that doesn't prove anything about what happens when a person is actually dead, because... well, you can't interview them. Maybe the heightening of subjective experience continues after the brain shuts down, maybe subjective experience just ends. We can't ask them. So yes, I think we can be as sure as we need to be that NDEs are functions of brain activity, not of our consciousness somehow being liberated from the confines of the neurones that run it and journeying to the afterlife, only to be returned to its neuronal matrix again. To make it clear, I don't necessarily think that NDEs are a pure, reliable afterlife experience. There's something we'd have to confront if they were: reports contradict. People've come back from NDEs with predictions like that Japan would fall into the ocean in 1997; that clearly didn't happen. If we took every report of subjective spiritual experience literally, we'd be in a lot of trouble, because people come back from such experiences with some weird ideas. I tend to think that there's something in the NDE, but a reliable afterlife experience that can be taken at face-value seems unlikely. I tend toward the Tibetan Buddhist interpretation, which is that it's still a subjective experience as the mind enters another bardo. Of course, it will never constitute a case for "life after death" because the people having such experiences never died. Even many people who believe in an afterlife don't believe in NDEs as reliably true afterlife experiences for numerous reasons. I can't imagine what more evidence we could need, unless you're suggesting that, until we understand everything about mental processes, we should act as if we understand nothing about them. That's not what I'm suggesting at all. We should learn as much about the brain and the mind and the connection between the two as we can.