Life after death

[Esceptico]

Read an article in the paper this morning on a new Netflix series on life after death. I won’t be watching as such programs usually irritate me with their wishy-washy approach, allowing people to make spectacular claims without pushing them to provide sufficient evidence (on the basis that outrageous claims demand outrageous evidence).

I struggle to see how anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of science could believe in life after death. Makes about as much sense as believing in witches or faeries.

[Esceptico]

Chebble said:

TUS373 said:

eldar said:

A virus reproduces, hence alive. Been a bit of that in the news recently.....

No. Viruses are not alive. For starters, it is cells that get infected that get hijacked that amplify the virion.

Correct:

https://microbiologysociety.org/publication/past-i...

A definition of life that excludes viruses is just a bad definition of life.

[Esceptico]

fesuvious said:

Has there ever been a moment where scientists haven't thought they have it all sussed, right up until the moment it's found their knowledge is wrong?

It's all well and good asking for proof, but it's not possible to prove that consciousness cannot live on. The understanding of what constitutes consciousness simply isn't there.

If I'm wrong on that, great! Show me how it isn't possible that something science cannot quantify but accepts exists fails to live on after the carcass which hosts it ceases to function.

The programs that you run on your phone/computer are very different from the hardware yet without the hardware you couldn’t run them. Unless you believe in ghost computers. Same as for consciousness. Consciousness is more than just the sum of the underlying atoms and electrons but it makes no sense to think that you could have consciousness without the underlying physical matter.

[Esceptico]

Do bacteria have life after death? How about other single cell organisms? Humans have evolved from single cell organisms - so at what point did our forefathers “evolve” life after death? And how? And for what purpose? The whole idea of life after death is bizarre when examined rationally.

[Esceptico]

4Q said:

There is no point to humans, nor any other animals. Life finds a way to take advantage of the environment it is is in and those animals who are better able to take advantage thrive at the expense of other species. Having some people who are gay in a small prehistoric community and therefore unlikely to have children of their own might have been beneficial to the whole community as they’re able to contribute more as they wouldn’t have families to support.

Homosexuality may not have a positive benefit but it is probably fair to say it doesn’t negatively impact human communities, otherwise there would likely have been evolutionary pressure against it. Whatever the position it doesn’t justify discrimination.

[Esceptico]

hucumber said:

But reality and existence can't really be thought of rationally. Think of the weirdness of quantum mechanics. Consider that we can only see/hear/sense a tiny slice of what is there, and who knows what else we can't detect. This could be just one plane of reality, we only see and understand things on the most basic of levels, just enough to survive infact, but that doesn't mean that what we experience is all the universe is. Your train of thought would have fitted very well before the arrival of quantum mechanics, but now the only thing we know for certain is that we know fk all

The approach above drives me nuts. Yes quantum mechanics is weird and no we don’t know everything about reality but that doesn’t open the flood gates to any and all crackpot idea. However weird quantum mechanics may be it is consistent with observed reality. Anything new we find also has to fit into our existing knowledge of reality and be consistent with tried and tested laws. At macroscopic scales the weirdness of quantum mechanics disappears - when you are waiting for a bus to turn up you don’t have to think about the probability of it being in this town or perhaps the next one. It follows a well defined path through observable time and space and no practical problems you can ask about the bus and its journey will depend on quantum mechanics.

[Esceptico]

hucumber said:

Thats not really my point. At one time classical physics was all we had, and people thought we knew everything about the reality in which we live, then something new came along. I personally find it very arrogant to now assume we understand and know everything. Just because we don't know what happens to the 'soul' when we die, doesn't mean that the only answer is nothing

Simply answer is that you don’t have a “soul”. It is just something humans made up (like God, witches, demons, ghosts, etc). Before I can even consider your claims about the soul surviving after death please explain what you mean by “soul” and provide evidence that it exists.

[Esceptico]

hucumber said:

I mean your consciousness, the bit that makes you you, the bit that thinks, feels, has emotions etc. Soul in the traditional sense isn't really what I meant, but its the word that fits best.
You have no more of an idea than I do what happens after death. Thats my point, and you can argue against it if you want, but the reality is that no one knows. I am absolutely not religious, so I'm not blindly wandering down that path.
Humans think we know so much about the reality we live in, but the truth is we know a very small amount of what our brains can process, which in the big scheme of things, is fk all

Difficult to discuss this with someone who seems to start with a belief in life after death despite there being no evidence for it and it also not fitting in with our understanding of reality. Waving your hands and saying humans don’t know everything is not really much of an argument and doesn’t address in any way the underlying issues that having a “soul” would cause.

Consciousness is more than just electric signals in your brain but it can’t exist without said electric signals. Consciousness is easy to destroy. If you have ever had full anaesthesia you will know what I mean. The time spent in surgery just doesn’t exist for you. When your brain dies and the electrical signals disappear so does your consciousness. To think otherwise without a shred of evidence is just facile, wishful thinking.

Some light relief on this issue...


https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lm6YnAqPv4w

[Esceptico]

M5-911 said:

In Christianity, the soul is your mind, your emotions et cetera. Who you are basically.

But those are not immutable. Your personality and emotions are tied to your physical body - if you know people who have suffered a brain injury eg stroke, dementia you will have experienced that first hand. Experience can also cause changes in the brain and therefore personality (soul in your language) eg PTSD.

[Esceptico]

hucumber said:

colin_p said:

marine boy said:

colin_p said:

But I've still been effectively dead and don't remember a thing or recall anything of the time whilst being dead even if it wasn't proper dead. I'd say being proper dead dead would be exactly the same except you won't come back to talk about it.

Once you are gone, you are gone, that is it. That is proper dead dead and or pretend dead, shocked back to life dead but not really dead dead. Either way you are dead and I'm dead certain that once you are dead you are dead and there are is no sky fairy nonsense.

I've been dead, died from a cardiac arrest while sleeping, was dead for 10 minutes, after 3 jump starts I was un-dead or brought back to life

From my short time of being dead there was no walking to a light, no heavy blackness, no looking down on myself, no unicorns or rainbows or running around a field as a puppy or being any other reincarnated living animal

There was just nothing, don't remember anything about dying, being dead or coming back to life

I do remember waking up from a 3 day ice packed induced coma though which was quite a strange experience

I may have had more cardiac arrests and been dead more times that you, but your experience was worse!

Glad you are still with us.

My experiences have always been the same and like yours, there is nothing, once you are dead.

Neither of you were dead. You can't bring dead back to life.

Exactly. Death doesn’t occur when your heart stops beating.

[Esceptico]

Toaster said:

Max_Torque said:

At a purely scientific level, the issue with death is that we haven't yet been able to precisely define what life actually is!

Honestly, this is one of the unsolved scientific problems of our time.

We broadly understand the biology and bio-chemistry that makes live, er, alive, but we can't precisely define why or what.


That makes the question of "life after death" somewhat difficult, because we haven't sorted out the life bit yet...........

Science does have a pretty good definition

The biological and philosophical definitions of life

‘ A distinction must be made between various levels of thought. For a definition of life the formulation on the level of natural sciences,i.e. the biological definition, will not be the same as the philosophical expression. The biological definition is based on thephenomenon of life, the appearance, and considers the molecular structure and functions of a cell. The philosophical definition regards thebeing and it is proposed to consider life as transcendental. It is argued that there is no opposition between these definitions, but that together they can deepen our insight into the problems of matter and life.’ https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF015567...

Whilst this is an old academic article NASA and other research organisations would look pretty stupid if they search for life on other planets or even hostile environments in our world for signs of life if there was not a definition of what life is!

I think that “life” is one of those things that an instinctive level we know what it looks like but when trying to formulate a definition we have difficulty. I think viruses are a good example. In my view viruses are clearly life. Go to a planet where there is no other life and you won’t find viruses or anything similar. However, they don’t fit nicely into many of our definitions of life. Does that mean they are not “life” or that definitions that exclude them are just bad definitions? I favour the latter.