Life after death?

Rayanne2010 wrote: »

he was a dedicated skeptic who set out to disprove life after death.. but found nothing but evidence so became an avid supporter of the spiritualist movement.

Adumbrate the content of that evidence for us then and we can discuss it. What in particular do you feel he found that supports the claims he was investigating. In fact what claims specifically did he find support for?

I assume you are discussing something more compelling that photographs of fairies yes? Or no?

Rayanne2010 wrote: »

cloak of fear and have an open mind to see the other side of the argument..

Alas an open mind if superfluous if no one is bothering to offer anything to put into it. I can be as open to considering the evidence as it is humanly possible to be.... but if people (and you are a good example of it here) are not actually offering any.... then how can I consider it?

nc19 wrote: »

I feel from aggressively you are

You are still discussing the poster and not the contents of the posts. What is with the ad hominem campaign? Why invent tone on my behalf and assign it to my posts? Just to dodge the actual content or what?

nc19 wrote: »

you dont believe in god and think less of people who do

Making stuff up about me just makes you look silly when you are wrong. And you are. I think no less of people who think there is a god. I just want to know what reasons they have for thinking there is one. Because no one has ever shown me even a shred of argument, evidence, data or reasoning to support such an idea.

But I seperate ideas from the people who hold them. I might think little of an idea, but that does not mean I think less of the person who holds that idea. So pocket your misrepresentations of me thanks.

Take newton for example. Possible the finest human mind our species has produced. That mind however held some really egregiously bad ideas at times.
Truely unsubstantiated nonsense ideas.

Yet I think no less of him for it.

nc19 wrote: »

in terms of you not being capable of hope

And still making stuff up about me that are not true here too. Becoming quite the MO for you this is.

nc19 wrote: »

Oh, and I thought I ignored you.......

You are not the first user to pretend to put someone on ignore, and then forget. A user who eventually retreated in shame from the forum called Philologos used to claim over and over again to have me on ignore. He occasionally forgot however and replied to me. I somewhat expect you will do so again too.

Galwayguy35 wrote: »

People have being reporting sightings of ghosts and and other unexplained paranormal activity for centuries and it just seems too easy for atheists to sweep all this aside and say none of it is true and that once we close our eyes for the last time that's it.

Neither side knows for certain.

Its not about certainty. It is about all the current evidence pointing towards one conclusion and no current evidence pointing towards the other conclusion. It is about the rationality of deciding to go with the substantiated conclusions and not the unsubstantiated ones.

Currently the idea there is a life after death is not just slightly but ENTIRELY unsubstantiated in any way. Much less by anyone on THIS thread.

robbiezero wrote: »

I see. I have often wondered how threads like this and topics like SSM get absolutely flooded so quickly.

I doubt it is from me getting a single request to offer some input.

Rayanne2010 wrote: »

Yes -- of course - however the skeptics always go for the least viable evidence and not the irrefutable/physical tangible evidence..

I am referring to the evidence he discussed/documented i.e. spirit materialisation, ectoplasm, psychic rods, direct voice, table tilting, partial materialisation/parrafin wax moulding, levitation, telekinesis, superior clairvoyance, rapping, auto/slate writing, luminous phenomena, stigmata, moving statues, poltergeist etc..

He attended many seances and experienced objectively the evidence for himself...
Like most spiritualists... they start out as skeptics and seek to experiment with the above and only when seeing with your external senses do you become a firm believer.. it is not that he didn't support the phenomena itself - he did not support all the phenomena resulting from the testing of specific mediums.

You might believe in those things but using Conan-Doyle is a really bad approach. The link HERE demonstrates that he said "supernatural" when he meant "I don't know" when confronted with an experience that he personally didn't understand.

The fact that he wrote the Sherlock character who is so logical doesn't mean he applied the same logic to his every day life. As a result he believed junk like THIS

Energy cannot be created nor destroyed. Who is to say that your energy cannot be "live on" in another form after death?

I had a very interesting philosophy professor, an atheist, who had developed the view that the afterlife consists of "disembodied dream states". He talked about how ancient humans who were in a different stage of evolution had senses which worked differently to those of modern humans, kind of like a different species. So they would pick up on remnant energy left behind by the recently deceased, effectively "seeing the dead". Again, this guy is an avowed atheist. He referred me to an essay by H.H. Price. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._H._Price#Afterlife

folamh wrote: »

Energy cannot be created nor destroyed. Who is to say that your energy cannot be "live on" in another form after death?

I had a very interesting philosophy professor, an atheist, who had developed the view that the afterlife consists of "disembodied dream states". He talked about how ancient humans who were in a different stage of evolution had senses which worked differently to those of modern humans, kind of like a different species. So they would pick up on remnant energy left behind by the recently deceased, effectively "seeing the dead". Again, this guy is an avowed atheist. He referred me to an essay by H.H. Price. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._H._Price#Afterlife

In order to demonstrate that the energy 'lives on' you would first need to demonstrate that the energy 'lives' in the first place. I presume you mean 'spiritual energy' or something along those lines. We know about kinetic energy, heat energy etc. but spiritual energy is just a linguistic convenience. for example 'I felt his energy as he entered the room'.

The argument collapses under its own weight as it is built on a presupposition that the energy is alive in the first place. I'm not saying you are definitely wrong, but you would need to demonstrate the first premise of the argument.

El_Duderino 09 wrote: »

In order to demonstrate that the energy 'lives on' you would first need to demonstrate that the energy 'lives' in the first place. I presume you mean 'spiritual energy' or something along those lines. We know about kinetic energy, heat energy etc. but spiritual energy is just a linguistic convenience. for example 'I felt his energy as he entered the room'.

The argument collapses under its own weight as it is built on a presupposition that the energy is alive in the first place. I'm not saying you are definitely wrong, but you would need to demonstrate the first premise of the argument.

I don't know what "spiritual energy" means. By energy I mean simple substance or matter. The corporeal bodies we immediately see don't comprise all of substance, just our anthropomorphic filtering of it. I don't think it was presupposed in my post that energy is alive in the first place, hence "live on" in quotation marks. This choice of phrasing is perhaps not justified. Most people who don't think in terms of material reductionism live with this presupposition that energy is alive (how else do you account for life/consciousness?) Whereas the likes of Daniel Dennett would take the view is that life is a kind of illusion. In any case, I think it's a bit besides the point and I can see how both accounts might be compatible with some type of experience after corporeal death.

Also, these theories are admitted speculation rather than proposed hypotheses. It's not the sort of thing that is subject to empirical testing. Given our limitations, we can't say anything definitive about after-death experience so it will always be pseudo-science. Interesting pseudo-science nonetheless.

folamh wrote: »

I don't think I accused you of reductionism? You expressed skepticism that energy is alive. I realize that reductionism does not follow from this. I also did not say that energy is alive: I said that most people live with the view that it is ("life" is living energy).

Any kind of consciousness after death would not be consciousness in the way we the living know it. The words "consciousness" or "life" are perhaps misleading (indeed, life after death is an oxymoron). I think "experience after death" is a more appropriate term.

I accept that if you alter the brain you alter the self (as we know it). However it doesn't follow from this that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain. At the very most it shows that consciousness is *dependent* on the brain. But dependence does not entail sameness of substance. A totally biological account of consciousness can't account for subjective experience. Subjective experience or qualia has never been demonstrated to be material in nature.

Ok to dispense with the 'I said, you said', I disagree that energy is alive. I disagree that most people presuppose that energy is alive. Do you think energy is alive?

If consciousness is *dependent* on the brain, then why would it make sense to think the consciousness survives the brain? Of course a biological account of consciousness can explain subjective experience. Brains work on heuristics, they build associations to use as short-hand. As an example 2 people smell strawberries, one person has a release of serotonin as they remember childhood summer holidays and watching Wimbledon with their granny and their favorite childhood dog. The other person gets a rush of adrenaline and cortisol because they were locked in a shed by an older brother who threw strawberries at them and taunted them leaving a lasting effect.

Today they both smell strawberries and have very different subjective experiences.

I'm not sure where any transcendent consciousness or living energy is involved or how you would get from subjective experience to experience after death

lukesmom wrote: »

Yes I 100% believe in life after death. I don't just think it but I know it in my heart and soul.

Why though? there's not a shred of proof

krudler wrote: »

Why though? there's not a shred of proof[/

Been told by a loved one who has passed. And that's as clear as I can put it.

folamh wrote: »

I have to re-type this because the webpage randomly reloaded so pardon the delay. I didn't say nor imply that subjective experience gives you experience after death; I was addressing the tangent about consciousness being an emergent property of the brain. It is not. When we observe the structure and mechanisms of the brain, no where do we observe consciousness. What we observe are the biological correlates of consciousness (i.e. serotonin, dopamine and various other neurochemical activity). Take Leibniz' mill argument outlined in this vid, starting from about 3:10: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIr22Puh1Wk (This is an excellent vid; I recommend watching all of it)

Your story about strawberries does not demonstrate that subjective experience is physical. You have merely described the biological *correlates* of their differing experiences. Again, all this shows is that those experiences are dependent on those biological processes. But dependence does not entail sameness. X can depend on or be correlated with Y, but we would not say that X therefore *is* Y. The conscious experience of smelling the strawberries depends on increasing serotonin and such, but it *is* not those biological processes. Consciousness depends on the physical, but it is not physical in nature. That has never been proven. The conscious state of happiness involves biological processes other than the neurobiological, for example increased heart rate. Is consciousness therefore an emergent property of the heart? No, processes in the heart are mere correlates of the conscious state of happiness.

Whether energy is alive is beside the point and a loaded question. I have clarified that by energy I mean simple substance or matter, and the meaning of life/consciousness is the very thing up for dispute (hence my initial putting "live on" in quotation marks, because it's contentious). Saying definitively that energy is alive or not alive presupposes a particular conception of consciousness. It's putting the cart before the horse. My initial point was that my particular energy will get rehashed in another form after corporeal death. Whether this involves consciousness as we the living know it, doesn't necessarily negate the possibility that it may involve some kind of experience. Let me impress that we can only speculate about this.

Most people pragmatically suppose that energy is alive in the sense that I am made of energy and I am alive.

Also, isn't your view that consciousness is material at odds with your view that matter is not conscious?

To answer your last question first, I do not hold the view that consciousness is material. I hold the view that consciousness is simply another word for thinking. It is our brain doing its thing and we experience it as consciousness. Matter is not conscious in my view, consciousness is psychological representation created by our brain.

As far as I am concerned all creatures that think experience consciousness. my cat expresses preferences and makes decisions based on preferences. she uses her brain and arrives at decisions. she is using the very same process that we use. We sometimes like to imagine that humans are different to other animals because we have consciousness. by the same logic, some hugely intelligent aliens could look at us they say 'well they have brains but they are not conscious like us'.

Yeah look I seem to be getting your argument wrong each time I respond so I went back to your first post to see what exactly you said. The professor spoke about 'disembodied dream state' after death and different stage of evolution with a sense picking up on remanent energy left over by the dead.... did he have a shred of evidence for that idea or was it more of a 4a.m. idea that happens after half a bottle of whiskey and a dooby doob?

Leibniz Mill sounds a lot like a strawman. There is no “piece of the brain that is satisfaction”, that is true but who said 'If there is no part of the brain that is satisfaction then we have justified the dualist presupposition'. So what. If we can stimulate parts of the brain and by doing so cause a feeling of satisfaction, then why involve dualism? It's not needed.

At 4.15 in the video he mentioned that mass is correlated to gravity. I agree but I go a step further and say gravity is an emergent property of mass. Consciousness is an emergent property of the brain. Alter the brain and you alter the conscious experience of a person. Say for example you damage the part of the brain involved in face recognition.Under the dualisticmodel can your consciousness still recognise faces but can't express that recognition through the brain? I contend that the brain was damaged and that aspect of consciousness is not done by the brain anymore.

We can't prove this position but it is where the evidence points. What evidence points towards dualism?

The biggest swindle of all time is the dualist presupposition. As for the video. we know about the process of transduction where we don't actually see anything as a faithful recreation of the world. Instead we turn what the eyes see into electrical signals and the brain represents it as an image we can 'see'. What I'm saying is that we know it gets filtered through the brain, we know brains have individual difference and it is perfectly reasonable to assume that two identical wavelengths of light hitting two people's eyes will cause a non-equivalent representation in terms of an image created. Why on earth do we need to revert a presupposition of dualism again?

Maybe it would help if I ask you if you subscribe to your professor's idea of disembodied dream state? Did he provide any evidence or was his idea totally rationalist?

folamh wrote: »

I was addressing the tangent about consciousness being an emergent property of the brain. It is not.

If your mind was remote-controlling your brain from some immaterial realm, damaging the brain might cause things like paralysis or blindness - your mind still thinks the same way but can no longer control your left hand, perhaps, or see in colour. But how could some sort of transmitter damage leave your sight perfect but destroy your ability to recognize faces?

Yet it turns out that damage to a particular area of the brain does exactly that - that area is called the fusiform face area as a result.

Damage to other areas will destroy your ability to read, even though you can see perfectly, or to remember new experiences, even though you can recall everything up to the time of the damage normally.

Damage in Broca's area can lead to someone who can physically speak, but can't form more than simple sentences. If the mind is remote controlling the body, how can it get through and cause speech, but not sentences with complicated syntax?

Brain injuries can change people's personalities, so that loved ones say they are now strangers - how could that work?

No, it is quite clear from studies of folks with brain damage that their minds are affected, not just the connection between their minds and bodies.

when im close to death i just jump to another clone