Yes, but science has taken this “first-person subjective experience” of ours and put it in context. Re…
- The evolution of human history
- The evolution of life on earth.
- The evolution of earth and our solar system – of matter – back to the Big Bang.
Then this part:
It turns out that roughly 68% of the universe is dark energy. Dark matter makes up about 27%. The rest - everything on Earth, everything ever observed with all of our instruments, all normal matter - adds up to less than 5% of the universe.
Then the part where that and all the things we are discussing in this exchange fit into an ontological – teleological? – understanding of existence itself.
Okay, but this assessment is relevant to any argument about anything — anything not able to be demonstrated.
But: with so much at stake regarding the existence of the afterlife, a demonstration is all that more crucial.
But my point is that we really have no definitive capacity to demonstratre that solipsism is not the explanation for what we think we know about the relationship between “I” and “out in the world”.
We always seem to be stuck here. Arguments are made regarding all aspects of human consciousness both before and after the grave. But sooner or later the arguments fall over into the abyss that is all of those “unknown unknowns” that stand between “I” and all there is to be known about existence.
Instead, we [all of us] are forced to fall back on one or another intellectual contraption to convey what we think “here and now” is a possible explanation:
So, is this one closer to the whole truth than the arguments of those here who have their own more or less sophisticated “philosophical” assessments of “the human condition”? Before and after we die?
Exactly. Your belief. But why should I or others believe this too? What are you able to demonstrate more substantively about the afterlife.
Sure, these speculations/conjectures can be really, really fascinating. No doubt about it.
But: as I myself get closer and closer [existentially] to oblivion, I tend to want something more.
“Where’s the beef?”, as it is sometimes put.
Basically, we have to keep coming back around to this:
Yeah, this might be right in the bullseye. As an intellectual contraption. But “for all practical purposes” it is useful only to the extent that you are somehow able to think yourself into believing it…such that the belief itself is what sustains your “comfort and consolation”. That you seem to have accomplished this “here and now” is something that I can congratulate you for. But this doesn’t get me any closer “here and now” to believing it myself.
You suggest that…
And “for all practical purposes” this clearly means something to you it does not mean to me. Actual evidence for me is more in the way that science goes about accumulating it experientially.
Instead [to me] you seem more compelled to approach the afterlife “by definition”. And “by definition” the afterlife is "a matrix world that exists behind the matrix world we call the ‘here and now’. "
And that means what exactly?
To you it does. But not to me. Nothing that you note here demonstrates to me in any substantive manner what is to become of “I” on the day that my own real brain ceases to be among the living.
Instead [to me] it’s just about what you happen to believe in your head here and now. And how [from my frame of mind] believing it procures you some measure of psychological equillibrium and equanimity. On this side of the grave.