If There was an afterlife
How would you feel or respond if it was proven conclusively that there is an afterlife?
I am exploring peoples Intuitions here of whether it allegedly matters or not.
I am exploring peoples Intuitions here of whether it allegedly matters or not.
Comments (39)
Of course there's an afterlife. If I die, my biological matter is quickly rearranged into worms and such, which is life after my death.
"OK, but that's not 'you'" one might reply, but then we need a solid definition of what causally connects a given identity from one moment to the next. What if you (the person who replies to my post here) is a totally different person than the one that posted the OP. How would one go about proving conclusively that they're both made by the same person and not just some clone who happens to be a mildly rearranged version of the matter that made up the first person.
The answer to that goes a long way to defining how you might define 'an afterlife'.
As when we wake up each day aware of being the same person.
For an afterlife My body dies but my consciousness is relocated whilst preserving my mental identity.
It hinges on the nature of consciousness. It could be that consciousness goes to another realm or enters another body or entity as with reincarnation.
My question is if you knew that some scenario like this happened how would it impact you?
As far as I can tell, some of the great philosophical questions (afterlife, idealism, reincarnation, god..) would not make a difference to how I live. I would still live as I do now, doing the best I can, with what I have, with an eye towards continual improvement, where possible.
I might try even harder to never die. I prefer to exist in a finitely intelligible universe than in some "realm" we probably cannot understand.
My own conjecture / scenario, I think, is about as good as metacognitive-self-continuity-surviving-brain-death gets:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/548675 (+ link to further elaboration) :nerd:
Obviously, it would impact me for very much longer than my has. But I know nothing about this afterlife - not its characteristics, requirements, rules, form, expectations - nothing. Some kind of disembodied consciousness continues after biological. Is that the good news or the bad news? Is it mandatory or optional? Do I get a choice of manifestations? Do I get judged, rewarded and punished?
Disappointed.
I can actually think of no empirical test for this, so any such awareness is actually just an assumption. A manufactured copy of me would have the same awareness yet would arguably not be the same person.
Sort of like a candle flame being snuffed but the combustion still going on somewhere where it gets located despite a lack of combustibles there.
Sorry, I'm the wrong person to ask since I don't know how to envision my consciousness as an object.
As usually, top notch post!
List of people who need to be put in main bunker in case of nuclear Armageddon
1. 180 Proof
2. Myself :grin: Just kiddin'
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Back to topic.
There is reincarnation, Buddhism says so. It's a religion that's 2.5k years old and I can't imagine how something that old could be false. Someone would've seen the butler exit the dining room at 8:30 AM, oui?
Reincarnation
1. Explains
2. There's evidence albeit flimsy
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/529561
There's this feeling everybody has: The world is not enough! I love James Bond movies by the way.
Thatsh right! He wash the besht! :cool: :grin:
An end is meaningful eternity is nothing.
If death is like complete unconsciousness then we can have know concerns about the present or future.
Yet we live our life based on concerns for the present and the future.
Making plans for the future is hence irrational because you are planning for a future you won't exist in and won't know anything about. You can create children but have no idea what the future holds for them and any descendants. I doubt Hitler or Stalins ancestors predicted them.
We have to speculate about the future to live.
The rationality of these speculations depends on how they are framed.
Pascal's wager says you have nothing to lose by believing in God but everything to lose by not believing. Is there anything to lose by believing in an afterlife? Not believing in it could be an inaccurate and hence irrational stance. We always make plans for the future without any way to be certain.
With this complete lack of knowledge about how consciousness is instantiated it is faith position not to believe in the afterlife.
I have no reason to tell someone who is bereaved that they will never see a relative or friend etc again bus I don't know that likewise I cannot say they will see them again. but I would not take away hope based on my lack of knowledge about what happens to consciousness.
Even if you don't take a Pascal style wager you don't have the knowledge to tell someone one way or the other on this issue. But not knowing means we can speculate not that we should be silent. Science operates on speculating before facts emerge or knowledge is created.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/1980/evidence-of-consciousness-surviving-the-body
Yeppers!
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/727848
If someone's body is dead how is the continuation of their consciousness the continuation of life?
If a radio breaks down the radio programme still exists it just ceases to interact with the radio.
Consciousness is not identical with anything in the brain. It is its own thing and the thing we value (i.e. experience)
Quoting noAxioms
Why do you need to test whether or not I am the same person?
In what sense would I be a different person? If I dye my hair blue I am still the same person. If I move to America likewise etc.
What is the same is my consciousness associated with my memories.
There is no plausible reason to assume I become a different person between time 1 and 2 unless you are arbitrarily defining me as every atom currently in my body
As Descartes said "I think therefore I am" the only think we can't doubt is our conscious self. Indeed everything else could illusory.
Because you dislike life?
No, because I don't have any hope in future.
Similar to my treatment of fingernail clippings. I don't define my life in terms of the state of some optional parts that I've lost. If I'm conscious, then what matters is still there, no? Even if I'm not conscious (anesthesia say), I still seem to be alive, so the consciousness part is also not critical. What is then?
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Exactly, so the radio program does cease to be just because somebody shuts one radio off.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Can you demonstrate this, or is it just a wishful assertion?
You also call it experience, but sans a body, there's nothing to experience. Sensory deprivation pretty much violates any definition of 'experience'.
Quoting Andrew4HandelTo justify a claim of such, as you claimed being aware of being the same person each morning.
I mean, what if you suddenly woke up as a different person tomorrow morning. What would that be like? Would you notice? There's not a right answer to that since different views answer it different ways, so it just serves to clarify your position.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
But there is a plausible reason, at least if you know your physics. No, I don't consider me to be the sum of my atoms, a sort of Ship-of-Theseus argument. I (the pragmatic part of me) assumes this because such an assumption makes me fit. The fact that it doesn't stand up to logic doesn't bother that part of me since it isn't the rational part. It has a different job to do.
Consciousness is unnecessary for life to exist. I don't assume plants are conscious. Whether or not consciousness is dependent on the biological notion of life is a question (but somewhat irrelevant here).
Quoting noAxioms
Can you demonstrate that any conscious states are identical to brain states? When I think or dream it doesn't tend to be about neurons or the structures of neurons or biochemicals. If you think brain states are identical to conscious states then you need to provide examples.
Quoting noAxioms
You have to define "different person."
I would notice if my hair changed colour overnight or I changed sex in my sleep.
What is continuous is the coherence of my consciousness. A ship could be gradually altered over a few decades to become a different ship altogether but it wouldn't care because I assume it is not conscious.
If I woke up and found I had turned into a woman that scenario only makes sense if I had the same stream of consciousness as the night before. It is the severing of a stream of consciousness that would cause a loss of identity I assume.
There is a recent movie, "The Discovery," with Robert Redford that describes events after a scientist proves there is an afterlife. It is available on Netflix. Here's a link to the IMDB page:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5155780/
I watched a part of it but lost interest.
Agree, as per my anesthesia example.
Quoting Andrew4HandelHeck no, especially since I heavily doubt the accuracy of such a statement. But you make an assertion, I didn't. You didn't answer the question. Can you demonstrate that consciousness is not identical with anything in the brain, or was that just a wishful assertion?
Quoting Andrew4HandelNo, if I were to assert that brain states are identical to conscious states, then I would have to provide evidence. But I've made no such assertion.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Fair enough. You are Andrew one moment, and seconds later you are some 8 year old girl in N Korea singing a song in Korean. That kind of different person. As best as I can describe it using your views, your consciousness gets transferred instantly (or perhaps more subtly during sleep if you balk at the abruptness of the situation) to this very different body, and perhaps the consciousness of that girl switches to the Andrew body so nobody is left a zombie.
Point is, would you notice? Would the song get interrupted? Would you recognize the mother of the body of the girl in the audience?
In short, what do you take with you during the switch, and what stays with the respective body?
You do actually partially answer the question here, but I have questions:
Quoting Andrew4Handel
OK, you say 'found I had turned into a woman' which suggests that you noticed a change, which means your memory of being male is something you take with you. Memory is part of consciousness in your model, not part of the body. That helps narrow down which view you hold. You (the Korean girl) probably won't recognize her biological mother since that ability went to the Andrew body. You don't know Korean (presumably).
I don't know what you mean by "if I had the same stream of consciousness as the night before". Each night is different. I don't think you're talking about having the same dreams, but I don't know how else to parse 'same stream'. It would be a little like the scene changing to a new camera in a movie. Nobody is bothered by that. Longest continuous shot I've seen was a bit over 10 minutes. The scene changes, and it's not an interruption, but it would be an incredible surprise if you take your memories with you because you don't have a memory of that movie-style scene change every happening to you in real life.
In a different model, the memory is part of the body, so the switch isn't noticed at all. This doesn't seem to be how you envision it.
Henry the 8th wrote the tune Greensleeves it is thought.
It was turned from music on a lute into some kind of musical notation.
Musical notation has changed over time so the melody was represented in a different notation instructing future musicians how to recreate the tune.
Eventually it was recorded in different mediums including Vinyl and CD. All the while the basic tune has remained recognisable across different mediums on different musical instruments (indeed on ANY musical instrument.)
So it seems very simple to preserve an identity across time and different mediums.
Quoting noAxioms
I think the burden of proof lies with you if you want to disprove this claim. However In what way can it not be proven?
Nothing I have read about the Brain so far is anything like consciousness or its contents. You can't even detect consciousness in the brain. I have read literature on the search for the correlates of consciousness and literature on brain structure. I see nothing identical with a thought or dream in any of these descriptions.
The closest they come is crude retinotopic mapping which suggests that the shape of light signals to the eyes is recreated in the brain. But it is the equivalent of a footprint in the sand preserving some limited info about a foot.
:up: :sparkle:
Agreed. But I think is not about "sense" but just faith. Buddhism doctrines promote reincarnation and afterlife as one of the main points of their faith.
But in my question you know that you will continue to exist. The important part is the continuation of your existence.
What happens now when you make plans for the future? If you have children you don't know what the future holds for them or for their hypothetical children and so on.
There is the element of the unknown in all our decision making.
One aspect I think an afterlife can have bearing on is justice.
If you are murdered and no one is prosecuted for your murder then some kind of justice or Karma may happen in the afterlife. If you are considering a murder the thought of afterlife consequences may make you think twice.
I have mentioned Pascals wager in this regard. There seems to be nothing to lose by living as if your existence continued after death.
In the reverse scenario other people claim believing this is their only life make them live it more fully.
I personally find the prospect of personal extinction on death makes life pointless. Something that we will forget like an irrelevance once dead.
I think in the face of the unknown we have to at speculatively and with agnosticism but we are not limited by the unknown but it offers potential.
I asked a question. If you think I have made a claim, quote the claim.
Quoting Andrew4HandelYour reading list is pretty short then. The same could be said of the opposing view.
So the instruments used by doctors to monitor conscious levels or dream states are all fiction. Sure, correlations say the dualists, but they're very detectable. They can detect something like intent before the subject is even aware of it.
Anyway, there is arguably evidence on both sides of the discussion, but that just suggests that neither view has been falsified (as is the case with anything labeled philosophical). The claim is thus unwarranted.
Just as an example, you put memory in the supernatural half, yet if the brain is damaged to say Alzheimer's, the memory should still be intact, it not being in the damaged part. That's evidence against the small bit of functionality which I managed to glean from your proposed view. Almost all the literature for the dualist side tends to avoid such discussion, indicating they know it doesn't hold up.
I have heard of the Glasgow Coma scale.
"The GCS assesses a person based on their ability to perform eye movements, speak, and move their body. These three behaviours make up the three elements of the scale: eye, verbal, and motor. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasgow_Coma_Scale
None of this relies on brain analysis. There is persistent vegetative state.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistent_vegetative_state
"Whether or not there is any conscious awareness with a patient's vegetative state is a prominent issue."
They cannot say for sure what degree if any of consciousness someone is in this condition. It is speculative.
Quoting noAxioms
This is probably based on the Benjamin Libet experiments that are widely debated and controversial and are actually only coherent on a dualist paradigm.
By dream states are you referring to studies into REM sleep? It is correlated with vivid dreams but dreams have been reported when people are woken from other states of sleep.
I don't know anyone who is arguing consciousness is unrelated to the brain and doesn't interact with it in any way. The argument is against the coherence of describing mental states in only physicalist language. The other alternatives include idealism (the mental universe) Solipsism, Dualism and Panpsychism which all lend themselves easily to afterlife scenarios.
The position with the most evidence is idealism because all humans have to analyse are conscious states. Science creates changing models to explain conscious states. The model of the atom changed several times because it was just a model not proof of a physical reality behind our experiences.
It is not clear how you would describe any unobserved phenomena and what attributes it would have. This is most stark when it comes to colours and pain and sound.