Sadly, the preponderance of evidence is clearly against the notion. In any case, death is impossible to imagine. Only life after death can be imagined. And so it is.
Well I haven’t advanced a physicalist paradigm. There isn’t much evidence for an afterlife regardless of paradigm that i am aware of.
I know one guy who made the claim. A scientologist. he said it was as real to him as me sitting in front of him. I remember Brian Weiss’s “many lives many masters” too. But, at this point it seems to be a marginal phenomenon to me and perhaps desperate. I don’t know what kind of evidence it would take to change that impression for me. It is mainly a matter of faith, and that very fact seems to suggest that it goes against or operates in lieu of evidence or in spite of it.
Right. Well people tend to view themselves in the mirror of their technology. So in the era of the steam engine, a pressure cooker model like Freud’s seemed to make sense. We have progressed to the computer analogy and that’s an improvement because the computer screen is taken to be analogous to the mind. So, unlike the behaviorist reduction, at least it has become acceptable to acknowledge that there is an interior life world. But, regardless, consciousness always seems to be associated directly with biological life. And, biological life can go on without it as in the cases of comas or under anesthesia. Existential anxiety is based on the intuition that evidence points to the inevitability of non-being. To me the fact that the preponderance of evidence points to the conclusion that we will not experience death itself is a consolation. It does not eliminate anxiety entirely, but it promises that for experience, non-being will never be without the presence of consciousness and life.
That article has no evidence against the notion. Again. His work offers some evidence for reincarnation. I suggest you go to his works and see what he did, rather than going by an obituary in a mainstream newspaper. And note Sagan’s quote at the end. If linking the obituary means, he is no longer doing the work, he has successors, and then there are others not directly connected to him.
It seems like you are saying that because it is impossible to imagine Death Life after Death is imagined. This seems a very weak argument and kind of an ad hom, if a general one. Further lots of people seem to imagine Death in general and Death as final in their own cases.
it seems like the assumptions in your post reflected physicalism.
Again it seems like you are making claims about the psychology involved of those who Believe. I don’t see the relevence.
No, faith means that regardless of experience or evidence one Believes. There are people who Believe in reincarnation this way, but it is hardly a rule.
They did not view each other this way. And this of course was not my Point. My Point was that abstract arguments for certain things are pretty useless. Sometimes only experiential processes are convincing. And with good reason. I was also pointing out that current science supported what most people today take as obviuosly wrong and silly.
I don’t think the computer analogy is a good one, unless we are assuming that computers have subjective experience.
Only in certain parts of the West, very much influenced by both physicalism and Christianity. And notice the trend. Only slowly have White men granted things nto like them to have sentience. It took a while for other races, then finally in the second half of the 20th Century - and against huge outcry in science - were animals granted consciousness. Now plants are slowly being accepted as potentially having consciousness. There has been a huge bias in Western Culture to see consciousness only in those who are like White men. Cultures that do not have this bias have different experiences and beliefs, some of which are turning out to be true (for scientists) centuries and centuries later than needed to be the case.
My Point to the OP and also to you was that experience is likely a good way to find out what one Believes. Sitting by the fireplace with other philosophers in 1893 might have convinced someone that animals are not conscious. and if that was satisfactory for them, well good for them. But if one was actually curious, it’s a poor way to come to a decision.
There is a lot of evidence that consciousness goes on under these states. Memory is often compromised.
Well, since you have been mentioning the possible psychological reasons why one would Think there was an afterlife, here we have potential reasons for not wanting to Believe and not noticing the clues one has lived Before and died. DEath is scary and after Death often entails a great deal of utterly terrifying confusion.
Another read that can link one to other researchers with, also, some evidence is this…
One note of interest in that latter book is not simply that doctors and scientists deny the interpretation of near death experiences, but they actually deny the existence (in any significant numbers) of the experiences themselves. The book also challenges myths about when we are not conscious, often used in arguments against conscoiusness post-mortem.
The paradigmatic resistance here is very entrenched. Just as it was for animals having consciousness and in the transition period, now, as we begin to acknowledge plant consciousness. And note my bringing up the bias against consciousness in other species, is to point out 1) that science has had serious cultural biases but also 2) because scientific mainstream is accepting the existence of more and more life and consciousness. There is a serious trend over time here, and this relates to your objection that without life there is no consciousness. This is a physicalist objection, coming from that paradigm, and one of the reasons even suggesting research into reincarnation or afterlife is a dangerous thing for a scientist to do. Careerwise that is. We have gone on the assumption - note assumption - that consciousness is dependent on very large complex primate brains, even though we have no idea what mechanism causes consciousness. This is in contrast to groups that are pan-psych who have a different axiom.
Working from this axiom - of a dead, primarily non-conscious universe - is not evidence.
What you are seeing as evidence against reincarnation is not that. What it is is deduction from a model. This would not pass as a research paper, drawing deductions from a model/theory. You need some empirical work for that. Deduction from models is, for examle, used to guide further research, but that is something other than evidence.
There is not ‘no evidence’ for an afterlife. It often seems like insufficient evidence is considered no evidence. And that’s going the objective route - and remember any scientist researching the afterlife is putting their career in Jeopardy. Just as any scientist who talked About the emotions, intentions, experiences of animals was likely ruining their career, even up into the early 70s.
I am going to leave it here.
My main Point is, if one is curious, asking people to sound off on the internet may not be the best route to finding things out. Experiential processes seem much more fruitful with certain kinds of questions. if there is no interest fine. But I find these kinds of discussions overestimate cultural, psychological and paradigmatic biases. Sometimes you have to change your own habits to understand something.
Nothing changed as far as animal conscoiusness. We already had Darwin and knowledge that we were primates and so on. What changed was a cultural shift within the scientific community - possibly due to the rise of women scientists, possibly due to shifts in the culture at large - and finally what was obvious to animal trainers and pet owners and many others became scientific consensus: animals are conscious and have feelings, etc.
The deck is stacked right now. If you want to draw conclusions from that situation fine, but it is not evidence.
Felix: pan consciousness is indeed different from consciousness per se,and the distinction is sufficient to warrant a state which needs a model. Would a functional continuum from pan consciousness to consciousness as an effect of neurological phenomena be a start for an adequate way to ground the behavior for a definitional analysis of consciousness?
Moreno: a temporal concurrence may incline to an objective definition of time, however it may also imply a an in-it-self of the concurrent events, where concurrent as sequentially defined -lead to the sense of objective time.
I had to use the word concurrent to being in the idea, had I used timeless or eternal, would have lead me back paradoxically to the type of assumed pan psychism which would have been an unsound presumption.
This is admittedly slippery slope, the only analogous idea which comes to mind is Jung’s use of the concept : synchronicity. There is no proof by analogy, but correlational similar facts tend to go shift toward probable certainty.
Moreno–I offered what I see as a relative certain consolation in view of the inevitability of death. If it doesn’t work for you or you don’t need it, for whatever reason, feel free to reject it. I see no need to persuade you. I will look at your links, but I doubt that there is much that can persuade me to try to ratchet up my faith in an afterlife. Death is manifestly the great discontinuity for living beings. If I find there is more to it after I die, it’s an understatement to acknowledge that I will be pleasantly surprised.
Consciousness is the problem. Pan consciousness seems to be an attempt to restore continuity of consciousness with the physical world. If conscious being evolved from inanimate matter, we can at least say that matter has the potential for consciousness. If energy is experienced as feeling by lower organisms, then consciousness may evolve gradually with sensation. Feeling might even be attributed to cells that don’t have discreet nervous systems. Waking consciousness seems to be an all or nothing phenomenon. But, dreaming and fugue states and altered consciousnesses testify to the contrary. And then there is language and the question of its role in self consciousness. For me, there are more questions than answers about consciousness.
As he neared death in Concord, on 6 May 1862, an aunt asked if he had made his peace with God. Thoreau replied, “I did not know that we had ever quarreled.” A friend asked his thoughts on the afterlife, to which Thoreau replied, “One world at a time.”
If death is a great disconuity, it is only because it is thought it is. Pan consciousness is also thought in terms of some thing which somehow forms into consciousness. Which argument again cannot be enveloped as a concept.
The problem with this kind of concept is, is that it’s a complex of embodied and disembodied fragments.
We intuit a limit clarifying the distinction but cannot not think about them, as separate. The embodied part wins, and we develop the idea of an afterlife or heaven or whatever as a consequence. However it is unthinkable as a unitary concept because of the embodiment.
The line between life and death in consciousness is the reason of believing in them.
Obe,
On the “fall into mind”–Damasio used that phrase to depict the evolutionary human advent of consciousness of self as distinct from simple awareness. I used the phrase a decade or so before I read Damasio. IMHO, this advent becomes the starting place for aesthetics and ethics. The “fall” becomes problematic when a sense of thisness becomes the only way of viewing reality. Perhaps this problem obscures ideas about the open endedness of evolving. Perhaps the open endedness provides hints of immortality.
One world at a time encapsulates the fix we are in. Life and death are not a matter of believing. We’re in this fix whether we believe in it or not.
So we live in this world now. And if there’s a world after this world, we’ll live there too, then. Why worry about it? Isn’t this world more than we can keep up with, without bringing in concern for the next? Do we really need to be overloaded with it? We’re gonna blow a fifty amp fuse.
And if there’s no world after this world … well … we won’t care. We’ll be dead … just like road kill.
I agree with most of this. But, apart from your first statement it seems to support the the proposition that death is final. The great preponderance of empirical evidence supports that conclusion. It’s not just an unsupported thought.
A great deal of evidence is gathered in this book, but further the author’s challenge the main positions against a wide variety of phenomena, philosophically. The assumptions in those around reincarnation are more problematic than is generally presented. It’s a long book, but really quite clearly written. Anita, here, recommended it to me.
It does support the idea of the finality of death, but it is only the idea of it. The idea of it, and what is behind the idea presents undifferentiability for most. If they are differentiated, then it seems as if there is but the consciousness of it.
This consciousness of it breaks it up. It is not breakable or differentiated, however, only the idea of it.
Therefore yes the idea death implies finality, but death? I don't believe it is.
Moreno: will look into suggested source.
Seems to me the question of awareness post death or not depends upon what awareness is, or what the source of it is.
If awareness springs only from the wiring in our head, so to speak, then when the current in the wires stop then awareness stops. We die and awareness dies.
But if the awareness reading these words is cosmically sourced, that is it is an energy sourced from cosmic powers, then it would be conceivable that awareness would live on cosmically after our body dies.
I’ve read of both extremes:
that the awareness reading these words is not our awareness. That we didn’t create. That God created the awareness reading these words. That it’s therefore not our awareness but Gods’. In this extreme view the awareness reading these words is God being aware of all that God is ; God being aware of God.
And then …
2) that awareness doesn’t really exist. That it’s just an illusion of the ego.
The first gives us hope that awareness lives on after death, and the second leaves us with no hope of awareness after death.
But Felix is right. The preponderance of evidence is number two. So when we die it’s number two … pretty shitty … but great fertilizer … to feed more life, that life goes on. We’d then live on in plant consciousness … if such a thing exists … perhaps reincarnated as a rose, or carrot, or tree.
The preponderance of deductive evidence within a certain paradigm. And a paradigm which the various books I linked to in this thread demonstrate that there are a lot of problems that paradigm has accounting for a range of phenomena. The most recent book I mentioned mounts a very solid wide ranging attack on that paradigm and supplies a great deal of reference material and research to back it up, along with philosophical arguments. If you peer at the World via the physicalist model, it will seem like the preponderance of evidence goes against this, but that’s assuming a lot of things already that are not proven at all.
we’ve also been heavily trained not to experience certain things, to dismiss them even Before they do more than flash a Little in consciousness. The Church and now science have been shaming and threatening certain awareness for a long time.
The church and science have the same kind of relationship problem as do pan psychism and consciousness. There seems to be an artificial divide, which in spite of the vast structural, definitional, and applicational reification, whose artifice is only apparent. But what if it's not one or the other, what if the basic substance is not within either reification but both? What if this is neither above or below pay grade, but behind? And this behind is also an appearance. The whole idea of the sense data reduction is caused by this confusion within the same substance. It is not of psychic/ or material substance, since these are simply descriptions. There can not be death only transformation, and an imminent transformation: a timeless eternal change as the waves appear to eternally change, but they are only forms of the subsistent ocean of ideas.
If the problem originates with the physicalists, we have been well trained indeed. The ancient author of Genesis must have been a physicalist for she wrote, "For you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
But biblical reference is equally noteworthy with the pronouncement , "In the beginning was the word". The what came first, the chicken or the egg, really can only be answered by the notion of contemporenuity, vis. That neither came first, because they are one and the same thing. The notion of the embededness of consciousness within the body is spoken as the soul inhabiting the body as a temple. It is with this original duality that philosophy of religion has been grappling ever since.my gut level feeling is that this is an artificial distinction.
Ecc 9:5 For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten.
Psa 146:4 His breath goeth forth, he returneth to his earth; in that very day his thoughts perish.
Ecc 9:10 Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.
Psa 13:3 Consider and hear me, O LORD my God: lighten mine eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death;
Isa 26:14 They are dead, they shall not live; they are deceased, they shall not rise: therefore hast thou visited and destroyed them, and made all their memory to perish.
So the Old Testament testifies to a belief in the finality of death even among theists. Thanks to Moreno, we now have before us the question of whether the finality of death necessarily entails physicalism. I don’t think it does. The Old Testament Jews weren’t physicalists. And one might argue that physicalism doesn’t necessarily entail the finality of death either. I don’t think so. It seems to me that the vast preponderance evidence for finality of death is empirical. Arguments for the ultimacy of matter and energy are not necessary to support the conclusion. Such evidence as there is for an afterlife, near-death experience, ghosts, what have you, could theoretically as easily explained physically as not. A soul could live on unobserved as sub-atomic particles or a force field. That’s at least as easy to imagine as a non-physical immortal soul.
Think of death the great transition. But, to what? We have no inside information about it. That is part of what evokes anxiety about it. But, anxiety is also instinctual. Thus, animals usually flee from death. If you have ever been deeply under anesthesia you have no recollection whatsoever. That and the absence of consciousness before we were born that all but those who claim to have remembered past lives experience. I gotta go.