What do you believe happens when we die

igCorcaigh wrote: »

I still can't comprehend how any analysis of physical theory bears any meaning on the human project.

It just seems too hippy dippy to me.

igCorcaigh wrote: »

The sitting of the Dalai Lama next to a quantum physicist says it all. But maybe that was of its day.

It's all very 1970s

saabsaab wrote: »

I must say it does seem 'hippy dippy' However, this seems to be the way with quantum physics in recent times.

Well to be fair you don't actually know what Bohm is saying, since he's referencing concepts from advanced theoretical physics. I'd also like to know how quantum physics seems to be "hippy dippy" in recent times considering it's the most stringently tested theory in science.

Bohm's point is a very old one going back to Pauli and Heisenberg. Quantum theory directly means reductionism is false and some large scale properties/features don't emerge from/aren't patterns on top of lower level things. It's then a simple suggestion that perhaps the mind is one of these non-emergent holistic features. It might be wrong, but it's not "hippy dippy". There are people investigating it today still with some evidence for and some against. It's quite possible the mind might not arise from the actions of neurons and yet be physical. This is not to say some features of it would not correlate with neuronal action.

It also ties into a notion called complementarity, that ultimately observations of nature aren't coherent/don't fit together logically, but that is much harder to explain. Also (it has various names) contextuality, that physical properties don't have values outside of observation.

saabsaab wrote: »

To be fair I said 'seems' and not that it is based on sound mathematics and confirmation in experiments.

It is based on confirmation in experiments.

saabsaab wrote: »

There are things such as quantum entanglement that appear to contradict so called 'common sense'

'Einstein described quantum mechanics as "spooky" because of the instantaneousness of the apparent remote interaction between two entangled particles.'

There's a big difference between defying common sense and being "hippy dippy". Entanglement also isn't "recent", it's been known about since the early 30s.

As a side note things aren't actually interacting remotely in entanglement.

saabsaab wrote: »

It is confirmed the 'not' was unintentional, my mistake. 'Hippy dippy' wasn't defined but I took it to mean weird that's all.

Ah no worries. It's certainly weird.

Hotblack Desiato wrote: »

It's used, or rather misused, in a hand-wavey fashion by charlatans like Deepak Chopra to justify all sorts of bullshít they come out with...

I tend to have mixed feelings about this.

Deepak Chopra spouts total nonsense, but the problem is he gets refuted by people spouting total nonsense back. In an attempt to refute the insanity and woo of Chopra they over tame the actual oddness of quantum theory. I'll take for example this blog post here:
https://mjwrightnz.wordpress.com/2015/03/29/my-gripe-about-the-misappropriation-of-quantum-physics-by-new-age-woo/

It's just an example of many such writings. Taking two things he write. First:

From this emerged the misconception that the human mind is integral with the outcomes of quantum events, such as the collapse of wave functions. That’s a terribly egocentric view. Physics is more dispassionate; wave-functions resolve without human observation. Bohr pointed that out early on – the experimental outcome is NOT due to the presence of the observer.

So it's correct that the human mind is not integral to the outcome of quantum events. However (some) wave functions do resolve due to human observation and Bohr not only did think the observer was crucial to quantum outcomes, but the fact that the observer is required is exactly how he resolved an inconsistency in quantum theory Einstein thought he had found in 1935.

Part of this boiled down to the fact that you can’t measure when the measuring tool is the same size as what you’re measuring

This is another very common error. Thinking the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is due to measuring noise. So when you try to measure the position of an atom the light you use to do so changes its momentum or some similar idea. Where as in fact atoms don't have a position or momentum unless you choose to measure position or momentum. Unlike most everyday objects they only have properties when being observed.

So it's like:
Chopra: You create atoms with your mind
Counter-Chopra: Atoms are very small and you just jostle them a lot when measuring them or some nonsense about them being "in many places at once"
Truth: Atoms lack many properties until they're observed

In fact even how many atoms you are made of depends on the method of observation and in a sense they're not real like trees and stones since they have an observer dependent nature

Heisenberg 1959 wrote:

If the quantum theory is correct … elemental particles are not real in the same sense as the things in our daily lives—for example, trees or stones—are real

I know this is probably a bit much to go into, but the details here don't matter too much. It's just to some degree the counter woo from often atheist writers is just as inaccurate as what Chopra writes and undersells the shocking nature of what we learned in the 1930s. The average person interested in science still understands the world in a 19th century paradigm of determinism, atoms, reductionism and emergence which I think is a pity as that stuff ended nearly 100 years ago.

The cheek of you.

Go on, humour us...

To get back to the OP.:

Death is only the beginning of something. That premise has been hammered into my Judeo-Christian skull for like, ever… well, okay; maybe not ever, since we’re talking about eternity here, it would be facetious to posit everlastingness in that sense.

But, on a personal basis, my lifestyle is so boring, that the unproved notion that something happens "AFTER" you get slashed, or your heart bursts, or you get hit by a bus; becomes an attractive thought.

It's not an attractive thought to me, I can't imagine anything worse than eternal existence.

I think that when we die we just continue whatever dream we are in. Hope mine is not a nightmare though.

It's fun to speculate but let's not mistake speculation with what actually happens based on the evidence. As far as the evidence goes, what we actually know is that absolutely nothing happens after we die. As far as we know consciousness emerges from the brain and when we die the brain dies, consciousness and everythingelse the body does, stops. We cease to exist and our body decomposes. That's all we know according to the evidence.

Let's say your next door neighbours are annoying, but they're substantially older than you. Some day they'll move out, or get put into a home... but no! Now they're immortal, like cancer cells, and you're stuck with them forever.

Youth, growth, maturity, ageing and death are a fundamental part of human existence (and the existence of every other fúcking thing too, from stars to galaxies to plants to animals to fungi) so if immortality is a thing, at which point in the cycle do we get stuck? Do we get to choose? If you marry more than once, which spouse are you stuck with? If half your limbs are blown off in an unfortunate accident at age 40, in which state are you preserved?

Motivation on a grey Monday morning can be hard to find, what's the motivation when you know that you are stuck in an infinite cycle and everything goes on unchanging forever (you can't even kill yourself) - the ultimate Groundhog Day?

It's fúcking stupid. Nonsense for thick people.

Sure. We don't know if the eastern religions invented the notion of reincarnation.

Whoever invented it, as far as we can tell, they didn't do it based on evidence.

When you think of the comforts people enjoy relative to those who preceded us a hundred years ago, the Jesus-bound storytelling is less attractive than the scientific, if abstruse concepts about space-time. I think of my grandmother who had nine children, two of which died in infancy, the idealized, immaterial comfort of reuniting with "loved ones" in an afterlife seemed logical.

We are now way past a world where people poked only 25clicks from their place of birth and simple domestication. The middling classes can save enough to hop on a plane to far-flung places and gather different points of view at a glance, which to my father, in the early 1930s via Christian brothers education, were presented as barbaric, or deficient when compared to Western Christian tradition.

I honestly have no idea what happens after death. Even though I did technically die. My memory is of pain and confusion, then pain and controlled confusion and the feeling there had been a glitch in time.

I hope there is 'something' but only because it seem to me such a waste if all the knowledge (in the broadest sense of the term) is just erased. I hate waste.

Meeting people I love again would be nice but I don't have any expectation of that actually happening, I think it's a way we (as in humans) deal with the pain.

I simply don't know so I'm prepared to wait and see - or not see - as the case may be. There is no evidence to support anything after all.