Your memories, personality, desires, habits, beliefs and thoughts, these are all functions of the brain. They can be mapped via imaging technology, then can be influenced and altered by drugs and other chemicals or electromagnetic fields, and in cases such as severe brain injury or Alzheimers they can radically change or vanish altogether.
What “you are” in terms of your consciousness, everything that you attribute as an aspect of you (of your mind, feelings, thoughts) is created by physical processes. Thus when these processes terminate so do the higher-order functions which are created and sustained by them. Just as you can forget something and never remember it, just as an Alzheimers patient can forget everything, the degeneration of the neural networks and brain structures leads to loss of all aspects of your consciousness. You are temporal and finite, nothing about you lasts beyond death.
Or, rather, there is no experiential, experimental or logical basis for concluding that anything about your consciousness lasts beyond your death. To believe in an afterlife which sustains any of the qualities or aspect of yourself that you have at present is unjustified from any perspective other than a total faith in the undemonstrated and irrational. Of course you can believe this if you wish, but do not trick yourself into thinking that your belief is justified or rests on anything other than a blind faith.
Just as the brain creates consciousness, just as everything about your mind, personality, thoughts, feelings, desires, habits, etc can be altered or terminated by physical damage, chemical damage, radiation damage or disease such as Alzheimers, without the brain these vanish altogether. There is no reason to think that these in any way survive death, and every reason to think otherwise.
Yep. That’s the way it is. Or at least you should live your life with that conclusion in mind.
At the very best you could say tentatively that you go, upon death, from being a conscious, active agent concentrated into one body, to a passive, distributed entity held within many - fragments of your conceptualizations of life and its living becoming behavioural modifiers effecting the way others live theirs after your material passing.
Small recompense for a life well-lived I’ll agree.
We really have absolutely no way of knowing what happens to our consciousness when we die, any more than we can know what goes on inside a black hole, or what “was” prior to the birth of the universe. If the laws of physics cease to exist inside a black hole, then who’s to say what our ultimate fate is; maybe something occurs at a quantum level and we continue on in some other place/time/entity. Or, maybe we’re just done, period.
There is no possible way we can ever know that.
So in a way, Tab, I agree with you that we should probably live our lives assuming there is nothing after, making the most of our experiences here and now. But in another way, maybe our actions in this life DO have consequences for us if we should go on to some other form of “being.” IMO it doesn’t hurt to remain open to that possibility.
I guess for me the bottom line is that we do not know, and can’t ever know in this lifetime, what happens to us after. So live life to its utmost, but try to keep your karma points in the positive, just in case.
Our experimental data is all dependent upon the phenomena. We have no experimental data as of yet to determine whether idealism or materialism provides the true explanation of the phenomena. Is consciousness a transient epiphenomena that is generated by matter, or are both the phenomena of matter and consciousness epiphenomena of the thought of God? We won’t have a sufficient set of data to answer that question until we have died and found out whether our consciousness continues (which we will find out only if we survive death).
So the question of whether consciousness survives death boils down to the question of whether God (or some other entity capable of making it happen) intends to make it happen. You are right that it is clear that our bodies are incapable of causing consciousness to survive after death, which is what your data shows. However, I do not know of anyone who ever suggested that our bodies are capable of causing our consciousness to survive after death.
Why even suggest that there migth be a god or other being who would do this for us?
On the basis that evolution has a pattern of developing persistent beings. Consciousness gives greater persistence. Progressively more perfect consciousness is progressively more persistence. It is reasonably possible that God or some being capable of causing consciousness to survive after death is the telos of evolution (not, initially at least, the intended purpose, but the natural result).
That raises the question, how many times has evolution run its course already? If there is no limit on how many times time can occur, then the number of times time can occur is infinite. We know of no limit on the number of times time can occur.
Consequently, the possibility of the existence of God or some similar being seems significant. We lack the experimental data to measure the probability. Accordingly, we lack the data as of yet to decide whether consciousness survives the body.
I suggest we wait and see for ourselves before we jump to consclusions.
I could suggest a wager: if consciousness survives death then, in the next life, I win and you promise to not be a sore loser which means admitting I was right if you can. If consciousness doesn’t survive, then you win and I promise not to be a sore loser which means admitting you were right if I can…
We know what happens to our consciousness (or that of others) when the brain is very specifically saturated with chemicals, or damaged by a stroke, confused by fevers; when lobes are separated by surgery, or high voltages are applied across it. Inducing electrical activity in parts of the brain can cause hallucinations, for example, and conversely localised brain death leads to the loss of faculties from our consciousness.
One can always sit behind a shield of Cartesian doubt and believe whatever one wants to believe - but I think it’s more philosophically honest to use such doubt to remove such beliefs-of-the-will and proceed on best evidence.
I don’t disagree with any of this, but that still doesn’t tell me conclusively what happens to us when we’re truly and permanently dead.
I don’t see how it’s dishonest to accept the fact that there are some mysteries that we’re unable to solve in our lifetimes. By it’s very definition, death falls into that category.
I believe it’s very likely that death is the final end of “me.” But during this lifetime I’ll never know that for sure, so to me it would be more dishonest to refuse to accept that, and go on to try to argue for one position over the other.
If brain death isn’t a reasonably close physical description of death, then presumably by that measure you don’t know conclusively that we die?
I take it back: as anon pointed out, it’s a case of pragmatism rather than honesty. Dishonesty only comes when (as often happens) one uses the doubt to defend a belief that otherwise has little to recommend it.
Your standpoint is that knowledge is only acceptable through direct experience? When one solves a mystery it’s usually through evidence and reasonable conjecture. Detective novels, medical research, suggesting where to look for the TV remote.
I certainly don’t mind saying I don’t know things. Philosophy has a habit of sanctifying “Knowledge” beyond any human experience of the word, though, and this is what I’m wary of. Epistemology leads ridiculous places… I don’t know for a fact that no humans have ever set foot on Venus. Do you? What use is the word “know” when you can’t say such things?
My thesis here is not that we should believe that consciousness dies with the body - there are many good reasons (psychological, egoistic, moral, emotional) to believe otherwise. My argument is that based on a philosophical reason, an intellectual honesty and rationality, based on the available evidence and experience we have, we can conclude that in all probability it is the case that consciousness in fact ends with death. But this does not need to stop us from “believing” in an afterlife, or at least keeping the question open-ended, if this serves some useful psychological purpose in our lives. Just as long as we do not confuse these two forms of belief, nor how and why we are using them.
Well, Lastie - since you define death as the cessation of the very physical processes that you state are responsible for consciouness, your argument here is circular.
Death leads to the cessation of biological physical processes
.: Death leads to the cessation of consciousness
I appreciate the attempt at humor, if that is what it is. If, rather, this is your form of mocking sarcasm and de-railing my topic, it is far less appreciated.
OH, I really don’t think we differ that much in our outlook. I very much agree with The Last Man that in all likelihood, death is the end. All empirical evidence points to that, and it is reasonable to believe that is the case.
But the fact of the matter is that it IS possible that something else happens when we die. Just for wild illustrative purposes, let’s imagine that due to quantum entanglement, when we die here our “essence” instantly comes to life in some other form and some other place. Could happen. Would I want to try to make a case for that? No. But the door remains open, if just a sliver.
And I get what you’re saying with the example of humans on Venus. [Although I guess I don’t see that as truly analogous. Whether that’s true or not seems insignificant compared to discussions about our ultimate fate, and if we don’t have much invested, then believing one position or the other is fairly inconsequential.] But no, I don’t want to go down that slippery slope and become for all intents and purposes intellectually paralyzed because I can’t really “know” anything. I’d agree wholeheartedly that that’s not a very useful way to live.
Death is defined as the end of the biological processes of the body. If we define consciousness as one of those processes to begin with, we have a foregone conclusion. And so we have a truism.
I think when we talk about the quantum level of things, we’re questioning our understanding of what consciousness (or death) is and how we define it. Like ants “define” death as the presence or absence of certain chemicals. I don’t think there’s much question about whether my consciousness could somehow be the same as it is now, after I die. Whatever I think of as “I”, obviously dies when what I think of as “I” is no longer.
If you accept my premise that death is the cessation of biological processes, and you accept that consciousness is a biological process, then yes my conclusion is inevitable. That is the nature of logical arguments. Of course these premises are by no means forgone conclusions - anyone can argue that there is more to life or consciousness than physical biological processes. But that is beside the point. Accepting my premises leads one necessarily to the conclusion.
You are trying to be smart here, in light of your own topic. I do not appreciate your cheap attempts to derail my topic here, and I ask you to please not post in this topic anymore, since your intentions are only to be sarcastic and demeaning, which I want no part of. You have chosen to ignore my posts and points to you in your own topic, that is up to you. Now I choose to ignore your obvious attempts at retaliation.
I do not want my topic deliberately derailed. Please post in this topic no further.
