AN INVINCIBLE ARGUMENT FOR THE AFTERLIFE (PART THREE)

Reply to felix dakat:

Actually becoming and being an immaterialist opened my eyes to what might actually be the true nature of existence. It’s not a matter of “seeming as though one is no longer living in the physical world”, but realizing that one lives in a world, but the world upon honest observation depends upon and actually consists of one’s experience of it as opposed to consisting of something that is not one’s experience of it. Immaterialism looks at existence as it actually presents itself.

Everyone starts off, I think, as a Naive Realist. But if one is lucky enough to have the metaphorical detective magnifying glass placed in one’s hand and told to look hard at one’s existence, this combined with the good fortune to have learned of the belief that the brain creates consciousness and the Process of Perception, Immaterialism falls into place when one performs the logic.

The materialist position: belief in unconscious matter, belief that consciousness somehow comes from and depends upon unconscious matter, and that outside the body and skull of conscious beings there is an unconscious world containing unconscious, non-living doppelgangers of the content of visual perception is the cornerstone of godless science and philosophy. When one looks hard at this belief “at the right angle”, one finds it is akin to the “D.A’s case” in this pivotal scene in the comedy-drama My Cousin Vinny:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHzOOMdhAhE[/youtube]

The materialist’s case “is an illusion, a magic trick” because…existence only shows up in the form of a person and that which the person experiences, and anything that is not a person or the experience of a person only shows up in the form of something imagined and believed by a person. Mind-independent objects and events are things that are not persons and as one discovers when observing the fiction of the Process of Perception, do not themselves create persons and their experiences and as such, save for the fiction of their signalling the brain due to its ability to create consciousness, are not needed to form persons or experience of persons.

The materialist position is therefore—like the “brick” in the movie example—“as thin as this playing card”.


[Note: The terms “you”, “your”, and “yourself”,as it appears throughout the remainder of this reply is purely rhetorical, as “you” is “a rhetorical person representing someone critically analyzing belief that brains create consciousness, the idea of mind-independent objects and events, and the idea that mind-independent substance is somehow capable of creating subjective experience.”]


As a Naive Realist, Direct Realist, Indirect Realist, or Materialist, when one visually experiences things, one’s mind informs one (in the form of intuition followed by belief) that one’s visual perception is of something (Indirect Realism and Materialism) or is something (Naive and Direct Realism) other than oneself.

Descartes…wrote a response to skepticism about the existence of the external world. He argues that sensory perceptions come to him involuntarily, and are not willed by him. They are external to his senses, and according to Descartes, this is evidence of the existence of something outside of his mind, and thus, an external world. Descartes goes on to show that the things in the external world are material by arguing that God would not deceive him as to the ideas that are being transmitted, and that God has given him the “propensity” to believe that such ideas are caused by material things.

-Wikipedia: Rene Descartes

But sensory perceptions, despite the fact they come to one involuntarily and are often unexpected and unwanted is subjective experience, and consists or is made up of subjective experience. In order to experience anything, or to know that something exists, something must actively appear to present itself before oneself having the substance of your experience of it. If something is not made up of the substance of “your experience of it”, you can’t experience it.

In terms of “your experience of it” and that which supposedly exists when you’re asleep and not having experiences (if dreamless sleep exists) existence may be divided into:

  1. Your experience of something

  2. Whatever there is when you’re not experiencing something and everything you do not experience.

Once so divided, one can pick up the playing card of the brain–its ability to create consciousness thought to be a brick (using the “My Cousin Vinny” metaphor) and explained as though it were a brick.


People balk at my statement that human sensory perception is essentially an artificial reality that is something completely different from and that is not the world in the absence of one’s consciousness, but this is true regardless of whether or not you believe the brain creates conscious experience when in absence of Immaterialism you believe that brain’s create consciousness.

How?

Well, your experience of the world (or “a world”) is believed to come from your brain. Nothing else in the universe creates your experience of the world (or “a world”), as it is believed that consciousness—subjective experience—does not exist unless it is create and generated by a brain and did not exist before there were brains.

Thus for those believing the brain creates consciousness, the only thing holding up or supporting experience of the world (or “a world”) is the brain. That’s it. Nothing else creates your consciousness. In the absence of gods, nothing knows you exist, as everything is non-conscious and as such cannot care that you exist or have any concern or plan for your survival. Nothing knows you’re here in a godless world except what’s produced by the brain of another person, if that brain has a neural circuit that can visually perceive your body and movement and produce the experience of hearing your voice and sustaining the idea that you are individually conscious.

Everything on our side of the existence-fence, then, depends upon lucky chance that the brain just happens to possess a neural circuit capable of producing the experience of that which one actually comes to experience. If there isn’t a neural circuit in your brain capable (before the fact, no less) of producing experience x, you can’t experience x.

Doesn’t matter if x exists in the external world in a form that is not your experience of x (as the x that exists in the external world is not created by your brain and isn’t affected in the least by the function or cessation of function of your brain), all that matters is your experience of x, and you have to be lucky enough that your brain just happened to have a neural circuit capable of producing experience x prior to your brain’s production of experience x.

(Note: That’s if your brain produces x. While your brain has the ability to produce x it may not have the opportunity to do so: think of someone who has the neurology to experience Japan and everything they would have seen and done in Japan, but never goes to Japan).

Given this, everything we think and believe about the world, including the idea that there are things that are not you that existed before you were conscious, while you temporarily are not conscious, and after you are no longer conscious comes from your brain. And get this: they only show up in the form of your idea of them, in the form of thoughts about them. They don’t appear in any other form, and they cannot show up as they really are (as they are believed to be): things you do not or cannot experience because they are not your experience, as everything that shows itself to you must appear in the form of and be made out of your experience of them.

Mind-independent objects and events are not created by your brain (as they are believed to exist outside your skull), thus you cannot experience them.

So when you do the detective work to figure out what’s happening, what’s really going on, you have to be careful not to delude yourself into thinking that things that are not you and what you experience, things not created by your brain, are one and the same as you and what you experience, which are created by your brain (for those believing the brain creates consciousness).

Given that things outside your skull and body, if they exist, cannot be one and the same as the conscious experience created by the 3-lb. blob of flesh inside your skull, it follows that your brain creates a virtual or artificial reality of a world that exists and appears as your experience of a world. Easy peasy. If you experience something, that something must something created by your brain and is thus part of the artificial reality created by your brain. Every object, environment, and body and behavior of every person you experience, if the brain creates consciousness and conscious experience can only exist if it is created by the physical brain, comes out of you, as they are part of the world that comes out of you, that is, your brain, as your brain is within your body (for those believing the brain creates consciousness).

The world you experience then, is actually a projected “movie” that comes out of the “movie projector” of your brain, that is inside you. Every object, person, and event you experience comes from inside you, if consciousness comes from the brain.

All science, every scientific fact of biology, geology, physics, and so on and your beliefs regarding them are part of an artificial reality composed of your experience of them comes from inside your body, from your brain.

While the artificial reality part is true, the idea that brains create consciousness makes absolutely no sense.


Long story short, once you realize there is no logical relation between non-subjective experience to subjective experience, and you realize there is no logic to the idea of brains not made of subjective experience producing from itself something it is not (subjective experience), and you realize that the world and every object, environment, and bodies and behaviors of persons within it actually comes from you and are made out of you (your subjective experience of them, without which the objects, environments, and bodies and behaviors of persons would not appear), and given that any external, “you-independent” analogs or doppelgangers of these objects, environments, and bodies of persons if they exist do not themselves create your experience of them (as they are imagined to exist outside your skull and cannot directly reach the brain or themselves form conscious experience independent of brains), you can logically remove the physical world to be left only with the existence of persons and the artificial realities or worlds that they experience, that come from them and are made of them.

An immaterialist, therefore, basically observes an actual fact of existence (the idea that worlds, as they appear within actual existence, are experienced worlds made up of the substance of the person experiencing them), realizes that anything outside this fact exists only in the form of an imaginary idea that must be accepted on faith (Kant), and observing that the latter can logically have nothing to do with the existence of the former abandons the latter, leaving behind non-embodied minds experiencing artificial realities believed to have the same content (though perceived from different perspectives) in other non-embodied minds (giving rise to the idea of consensus reality).

Thank you for your lengthy reply. Unfortunately you really didn’t answer my question. Rather you restated how you arrived at you’re metaphysical position. My question was whether in the end there are any practical advantages to holding such a system versus other metaphysical ones. Does it make you happier? And if so why? Is there some advantage to the immaterial world you claim to live in or to the other immaterial persons that you imagine occupy it?

I am not sure that’s true. On the one hand, babies are more like solipsists and what is out of view is not and there are unclear boundaries between self and other. But coming at it another way, I think you have to train naive realism. To some extent I would guess there will be aspects of naive realism in people, independent of culture. But we tend to view things in binary terms - a Western training result - and one can be a realist part of the time and an idealist other parts of the time. I think culture, that is training has a lot to do with being naive realists.

I’ll keep answering because it is good to think about, obviously for myself and not PG.
Yes.
if everything is a part of life/mind/spirit and you react to it that way, it leads to a more intimate relation. In Buber’s terms I/you, certainly, rather than I/it, and then perhaps I/thou. What practical difference does this make? Well, first off, I think, in my case, it allows for intimacy even when other people are not present. You are ‘in the woods’ but you are not alone. Or at least, you are not alone in the sense of a physicalist who sees trees as chemical machines with no conscousness. He or she will not be feeling responses and presence. While this is palpable, it might not pass muster for some as a practical result. An artisan may come close, in his or her realtion to what gets called physical materials, the kinds of I/you relationship involving in co-making something with the wood, for example. It is a dialogue, a collaboration. It is intimate. The more you consider everything alive, the more likely you will have an artisan or artistic relation with what a physicalist will call materials. In experiential terms, it is a wildly different process. In end results, I think the care and affection will even be noticable by others.

I think so, yes. Though how to measure such things…
Modern physicalism presents us as something akin to 'sentient strangers in a universe that does not give a shit about us, is mostly dead, and where any sense of meaning will be grounded out of existence as if it never existed. It treats conscousness as an epiphenomenon or as a impotent witness or an illusion. It presents perception as a series of steps: object there, light bounces off, enters the retina, is interpreted and so on down the line. Even you closest loved one is sending telegraph messages through mud…you are not in contact with them. Being immersed in life and not separate from it, where life/consciousness is everywhere is a completely different life. And I think a more pleasant one.

Now most modern physicalists do not look over at their spouses at the dinner table and think of them as bags of chemical machines. They let themselves get lost in the illusions. But their world is improverished and deader. I know, I know what that outlook feels like. You also to work hard to keep up the illusoin of physicalism in your mind, constantly denying the immersion. Its a metaphysics that requires work to maintain and that’s also a drain.

I think one other advantage is you don’t need to replace and control nature as much as the physicalists feel desperate to do. You don’t see nature as modular machines that should always be improved - via genetic engineering or whatever - or yourself as a faulty machine.

Metaphors lead to action. They also lead to emotional states and attitudes.

The modern physicalist, to the extent he or she is one, is a bringer of death in life.

Reply to felix dakat:

I’m so enamoured of my position I wander away to caress and whisper sweet nothings to it. Thanks for snapping me out of it.

Immaterialism has the same practical advantages as any other system, because sensory experience and the rules of nature seen by the materialist are also observed by the Immaterialist. Everything in terms of the rules of survival, economics, science, etc. works and behaves the same way because its the same sensory experience in a consensus reality between conscious beings experiencing “this” artificial reality. There are no practical advantages in one that do not exist in the other because everyone is seeing, hearing, etc. the same thing.

Yes.

I’m proud of Immaterialism’s invincibility. That makes me happy. I feel it’s the actual truth of things after doing the detective work to discover the logical tenuousness of materialism (in light of the trap it sets for itself in the connection between belief that brains create consciousness, the process of perception, and the existence of mind-independent events and doppelgangers of the content of visual perception not composed of subjective experience). Immaterialism, meanwhile, aids theology and lends greater logical support for the existence of God. If the external world contains minds rather than material objects and events, God (given that only minds exist) can easily be one of those persons. That makes me happy.

The only advantage I can think of is an interesting, adventurous relation between minds in the external world and the personally experienced consciousness (the battle between good and evil, the journey to eternal life, etc.). Beyond that, there’s no advantage the immaterial world possesses (in terms of sensory perception and how it appears and behaves) over the material world. Both appear and behave the same and follow the same experiential rules.

Reply to Karpel Tunnel:

Well put.

Well Naive Realism is the belief that what you perceive is the actual world. Most people think, for example, that when they see a tree, they are seeing the tree as it exists in the external world, and that this perception and the external world are one. But this doesn’t account for the schism that occurs when the person stops looking up the tree or should suddenly fall asleep in front of the tree. The person is no longer seeing the tree. The schism reveals the truer case that one’s sight or perception of the tree is something different and that is not the tree (if it exists) as it is when you or no one in existence is observing it (or a mental copy of it, given the fact that experienced trees disappear when one stops looking or falls asleep).

So Naive Realism graduates based on the existence of inattention or sleep (or death) into Indirect Realism, Direct Realism (which to me is indistinguishable from Naive Realism but go figure), Idealism, and Materialism. These all (or should) admit that perception of the tree is not one and the same thing as the tree in the absence of anyone’s perception of it, for, if the tree was one and the same as anyone’s perception of it, the tree would necessarily cease to exist when you stopped looking at it and fell asleep, and would return to existence when you began to look at it again. If the tree continues to exist and is unaffected by whether or not you are looking at it or conscious, the tree that remains is not your perception of a tree and must be something that does not depend upon and exists entirely independent of your perception.

However, the person-independent or consciousness-independent tree is entirely make-believe, as it only appears within actual existence as an imaginary idea of something that might exist outside consciousness. In actuality, one finds we don’t need mind-independent trees in order to have perception of trees, because mind-independent trees are not one and the same as perceived trees and do not themselves create perception of trees. Only the brain does that if one believes the brain creates consciousness, or existence exists in the conscious form of a person and that person’s perception of a tree or Someone (or Someones?) somehow places perception of a tree into a subordinate consciousness at a particular moment, if one does not believe brains create consciousness (but are a deliberately illogical symbol of what truly creates consciousness).

Almost everyone agrees that there will be very strong correlations between what’s in the brain and consciousness, … The question is what kind of explanation that will give you. We want more than correlation, we want explanation – how and why do brain process give rise to consciousness? That’s the big mystery.

David Chalmers

So, sure, it’s always possible that one or another rendition of the “afterlife” can yanked out of that. But only until we are able to move beyond largely autodidactic arguments and into more substantive discussion will the exchanges become more than just basically “worlds of words”.

It’s truly sad how much bias is in the brain is the seat of consciousness period position. At the very least how few seem (SORRY CAPS LOCK IS LOCKED) TO CONSIDER THE BIAS INVOLVED IN THIS.

CAN WE MEASURE CONSCIOUSNESS? nO. wE CAN HOWEVER MEASURE RESPONSES AND FUNCTIONS. MOVEMENT, MEMORY, REACTION…BUT THESE THINGS ARE NOT CONSCIOUSNESS, THEY HAPPEN WITHIN CONSCIOUSNESS. sO WE JUDGE THINGS THAT REACT, REMEMBER, BEHAVE LIKE US AS HAVING CONSCIOUSNESS. wITHOUT KNOWING HOW IT ARISES OR EVEN IF IT ISN’T EVERYWHERE.

eVERYONE WANTS OTHER PEOPLE TO HAVE THE ONUS. tHE CURRENT AXIOM IS, CONSCOUSNESS IS THE EXCEPTION AND ONLY CREATURES LIKE US MIGHT HAVE CONSCIOUSNESS. sO IF YOU DISAGREE, YOU BEAR THE ONUS, EVEN THOUGH THE PEOPLE HOLDING THAT POSITION HAVE NO THE SLIGHTEST EVIDENCE THAT CONSCIOUSNESS IS RESTRICTED TO BRAINS OR WHAT CAUSES ‘EXPERIENCING’

THEIR OWN BIAS NEVER SEEMS TO BEAR THE SLIGHETEST ONUS, DESPITE THE HUMBLING OF THAT BIAS OVER THE LAST CENTURY OF ANIMAL AND NOW PLANT RESEARCH, WHICH SHOWS ALL SORTS OF COGNITION, THAT IS FUNCTION, WE CONSIDERED ONLY OURS.

aND SO SINCE WE CONFLATE FUNCTION AND REACTOIN WITH CONSCIOUSNESS WE GRANT - HOW GOOD OF US - CONSCIOUSNESS TO ANIMALS AND NOW BEGIN TO CONSIDER GRANTING IT, IN SOME LIMITED VERSION TO PLANTS.

OF COURSE CONSCOUSNESS NEED NOT BE LIKE SMALLER AND SMALLER WATTAGES. tHE SEA LION OR THE TREE MAY EXPERIENCE JUST AS FULLY AS A HUMAN COUNTERPART, BUT LACK SPECIALIZED FUNCTIONS - LIKE CERTAIN KINDS OF SELF CONSCOUSNESS OR HIGHER PIAGET STAGES OR TYPES OF MEMORY OR RATIONAL REASONING OR WHATEVER. IOW THE CONITIVE PROCESSES WITHIN CONSCIOUSNESS. LIKE SAYING THAT SOMEONE IN A WHEELCHAIR DOES NOT LIFE A PHYSICAL LIFE OR DOES A LESS INTENSE ONE BECAUSE THE VARIOUS FUNCTIONS ARE LESS. hOWEVER THE EXPERIENCING MAY WELL BE AND i ASSUME IT IS JUST AS FULL AND INTENSE WITHOUT THE SURFING AND TANGO CLASSES.

FUNCTION AND CONSCOIUSNESS ARE ALWASY CONFLATED.

JUST LIKE THE FUCKING CHRISTIAN COLONIALIST RACISTS COMING TO THE NEW WORLD. wE SEE NOT i AND FEEL SUPERIOR AND ABOUT THINGS WE HAVE NO REASON TO.

GREAT, WE CAN BUILD CANNONS, THAT DOESN’T MEAN THE NATIVES ARE ANY LESS HUMAN, WITH PROFOUND DEPTHS TO THEIR HEARTS AND AS MUCH EXPERIENCERS AS WE ARE.

THE PATIENTS HAVE TAKEN OVER THE PSYCH WARD AND THEY THINK THEY ARE SO FUCKING RATIONAL.

Reply to iambigous:

Chalmers believes the brain “gives rise” to consciousness (as he puts it). And yes he has spent years looking for an explanation as opposed to mere correlation between “when neural circuits (or as he puts it: NCC or “neural correlate of consciousness”) x, y, and z functions, the subject has a vivid memory of driving in the rain for a carton of milk on December 4th, 1987”.

This is the correlation. For some reason, when electrons play a game of “musical chairs” and march one behind the other in a direction going from axons to dendrites along the outer shell of atoms that currently make up every neuron collectively making up NCCs x, y, and z. For some reason, rather than have a visual experience of one rock climbing, a tactile experience of touching velvet in a clothing store, or one smelling pizza, etc., when these neurons function the person has memory of driving in the rain for a carton of milk on Dec. 4th 1987.

There’s really no reason, if brains give rise to consciousness, that those neurons should give rise to this particular memory. It’s entirely arbitrary they “just happen” to have that ability.

The neurons responsible for producing the memory look nothing like the memory of driving in the rain. You can’t mistake the image of someone driving in the rain for neurons, which are trapped in a skull.

Then there’s the question of where the memory was, and why it wasn’t experienced before NCCs x, y, and z functioned, and if the memory DID NOT EXIST or was in physical form in the form of biological material, how did NCCs x,y, and z “get” the memory in the first place, given that the neurons themselves are made up something that is not subjective experience and the memory consists or is made up of subjective experience?

I don’t think these things can be explained…because it leads to conclusions in which “we are got into fairy land” (Hume).


Reply to Karpel Tunnel:

Ummm…okay.

Still, however we differentiate the patients from the doctors in the psyche ward, it is necessary to differentiate what we think we know about conscious minds being rational about the afterlife, and what we can demonstrate that all rational minds are obligated to think is rational too.

And inherent in that is the mystery that Chalmers notes regarding the relationship between the human brain and human consciousness.

Until that is wholly grasped much of what is communicated here is reflected in one or another intellectual contraption going around and around tautologically in the “definition logic” of folks like James Saint.

Yes, there are all of these genetic/biological/chemical/neurological interactions that unfold inside the human brain whenever we think or feel or say or do anything.

And that includes contemplating and creating posts about the afterlife. But we still do not grasp these relationships going all the way back to an understanding of why anything exists at at all. And why it is this thing and not another thing.

Or, rather, no one has yet succeeded in convincing me that they grasp them.

And, as I noted on the part one thread, I appreciate your attempts to “think this through”. And then to offer up your own introspective conjectures.

But [to me] it’s still largely just an argument. There does not appear to be any substantive evidence for the afterlife here that can be integrated into an actual context such that flesh and blood human beings can go about the business of demonstrating that what they think is true about it in their head is in fact the way it is. The “come here, let me show you” kind of evidence.

That we don’t know the reason is not the same as there not being one. Only when we come to grips with all of the “unknown unknowns” embedded in the evolution of matter into mind, are all those things that appear to be entirely arbitrary likely to be seen as considerably less so.

Or maybe they are even entirely necessary reasons.

But these genetic/biological/chemical/neurological interactions are all percepts, or things consisting only of the experience of one experiencing them (in neuroscientific, medical, or criminal context). We don’t know if there are mind-independent analogs of brains and brain function outside the artificial reality experienced by the non-embodied mind (biblical spirit) calling itself or that is called a “human being”.

And there can never be “let me show you” evidence of the afterlife, because the afterlife if it exists lies outside the artificial reality that is human consciousness. It exists in human consciousness only in the form of an idea that a person believes has independent existence in the external world. I easily concede that “support” for the existence of the afterlife only consists of argument that may or may not successfully demonstrate its logical possibility. Multiverses are in the same boat, as are mind-independent doppelgangers of the content of visual perception.

But there is no evidence of the existence of matter or mind-independent doppelgangers of the content of visual perception, thus no possibility of ever knowing its existence or discovering its evolution into mind. Why? Because the only thing that appears within existence, the only thing that has ever appeared within existence, is a person and that which the person experiences (mind). Matter, that which is not a person and that which the person experiences, the imaginary substance that existed for eternity prior to brains producing consciousness (for those believing brains create consciousness) has never appeared within existence.

Why torture your brain to justify the course of nature
upon suppositions which, for aught you know,
may be entirely imaginary?

-David Hume

We therefore have no reason, based on the evidence of what actually shows itself to exist (a person and the artificial reality the person experiences), to suppose much less assert the existence of something that in terms of material substance is something other than the substance making up that which actually shows itself to exist (persons and that which persons experience).

Given there is no evidence of the existence of unconscious matter, there is no reason to place unconscious matter in the equation of existence as it is impossible to know it even exists (as we can only experience experience), much less use make-believe to assert its existence and its purported evolution into a subjectively experiencing person and that which the person privately and subjectively experiences. One must remember that unconscious matter, its evolution into mind, and whether or not the process is arbitrary or necessary is entirely imaginary. How do we know this? Because the only thing we have evidence of existing is subjectively experience in the form of a subjectively experiencing person and the subjective experiences of that person.

There will never be a time that it will be or can be seen or shown that unconscious matter exists and has anything to do with the existence of consciousness, because the only thing that shows that it exists is consciousness. We do not need to postulate or posit something other than consciousness to explain existence: consciousness is the only thing we need because in terms of empirical evidence of the existence of something, it is the only thing that demonstrates existence.

Indeed, the idea of unconscious matter and its imaginary relation to consciousness may fundamentally arise from disbelief that subjective experience is eternal.

But what does this mean “for all practical purposes” relating to the interactions of men and women out in a particular world? And then “for all practical purposes” how that is pertinent to the afterlife?

For me, it’s always about the extent to which someone is able to take their own assessment [however sophisticated it might appear as an intellectual contraption] “down to earth”. Something more substantive that I might be able to experience myself.

Always back to this:

Okay, fair enough. As an intellectual contraption this may well be in sync with a full and complete understanding of existence itself. But the reality produced by my own consciousness [whether autonomous or wholly determined] seems anything but artificial given all of the things [like my responsibilities to pay the bills] I either take seriously or risk truly calamitous consequences. Just consider the reality of all those federal employees here in America. How artificial do you suppose they think their own consciousness is here and now?

Here of course neuroscience would have to weigh in on what is deemed to be or not to be hard evidence of any number of things. And then how the dots are connected between that harder evidence and the afterlife.

Consider: dana.org/Cerebrum/Default.aspx?id=39143

Today, more than a century after the Society for Psychical Research was founded, a debate rages over the question of life after death, with science, including brain science, invoked by both sides.

Not much in the way of “hard evidence” to convince me of the existence of an afterlife. But clearly enough for others.

My guess is that there are any number of folks who might dispute this. But most of us [myself included] are simply not educated/informed enough to respond in any really sophisticated manner.

So it all comes down to someone being able to actually demonstrate what consciousness either is or is not in the context of what existence itself either is or is not.

It means that one’s experience and one’s experience of things that appear only in the form of one’s point of view of it is the only thing that appears to exist. There is no evidence of the existence of things not made up of one’s experience of them (say, mind-independent analogs of genetic/biological/chemical/neurological interactions that unfold inside mind-independent brains, for example, or even mind-independent chairs, buildings, mountains, galaxies, etc.). Thus for all practical purposes humans are non-embodied minds or biblical spirits: all interactions, environments, objects, etc. experienced by the spirit is an artificial reality or “Matrix” of the spirit’s experience of itself “in” or “having” a particular body, reacting with particular individuals, and experiencing a particular world (the world composed of the spirit’s subjective experience, that the spirit is forced to experience).

Well, it’s artificial in the sense that the things one experiences is entirely arbitrary in terms of the things that “just so” happens to exist in one’s experience, if there are no such things as mind-independent doppelgangers of the content of visual perception. If there are no mind-independent chairs, for example, the chairs you experience are arbitrarily existing objects composed of your subjective experience, that are participants in the particular world you are forced to experience; they exist for no other reason than that they are particular objects that happen to form form and appear within your particular consciousness. The same can be said for the arbitrary existence of bills and the consequences for not paying them, the predicament of federal employees in America thanks to the actions of that guy, and so on.

Interesting read with interesting information regarding G. M. Woerlee’s experiences with dying patients, the process of dying, and his conclusion that NDE’s involve some latent or minimal function of the brain with seems to support minimal consciousness, and therefore NDE’s.

In regard to Woerlee’s conclusion:

Woerlee concludes Mortal Minds in a confident but sober mood:

I had learned the true nature of death. I had learned what I will experience as I die. I had learned I have no soul. My mind is a product of the functioning of my body, so my mind will die with my body, and I will not live for eternity in a life after death… After all, the knowledge and analysis presented in this book finally does away with all the hope, and all the comfort afforded by uncertainty about the possibility of a life after death, as well as finally demolishing many ancient belief systems forming my upbringing.

These insights and conclusions may leave the author with a certain peace, but I am not so sure they will have the same effect on most readers. Clearly there is reason to agree with Woerlee that the visual and emotional elements of NDEs appear to correspond, often in a striking way, with changes taking place in the body during the last stages of dying.

There is no soul that separates from the body and leaves the body behind because the body is an aspect of an artificial reality experienced by the mind. Woerlee’s conclusion depends, ultimately, upon the existence of a mind-independent (albeit non-functional) body and brain that survives the ephemeral and immaterial mind, which purportedly ceases to exist when the mind-independent brain and body ceases to function.

But we have no evidence of the existence of mind-independent brains and bodies, and I have amply demonstrated how mind-independent brains and bodies, were they to exist, could logically have no part in forming consciousness or the things (like experienced brains and bodies) that appear in consciousness. Mind-independent doppelgangers of the content of visual experience in the process of perception only send mind-independent signals to mind-independent brains, upon whom they ultimately depend to produce conscious “copies” of themselves in the artificial reality that is human, animal, or insect consciousness (if animals and insects are not philosopher’s zombies).

But given there is no evidence of the existence of mind-independent brains, much less consciousness-creating brain function, there is only consciousness in the form of persons that appear to exist. A person dying before Woerlee’s eyes, then is simply his non-embodied mind experiencing an artificial reality in which his avatar, a POV experience of himself peering out from a POV experience of his (artificial) body, observes a body on a table (a body, mind you, composed of Woerlee’s consciousness as opposed to something that is not Woerlee’s consciousness) that has ceased to function, and thereby can no longer report NDE’s.

Woerlee’s observation that his mind will die when his body dies is based on the inability of patients to report NDEs when their brain ceases to function and they lie inanimate on the slab. But correlations between still-functioning minimal brain-states and NDEs (implying that NDEs despite their content are just creations of a dying brain) and inference of the non-existence of consciousness due to non-responsiveness to external stimuli of a dead body, ultimately depend upon the existence of mind-independent doppelgangers of the brain and the ability of mind-independent brains to create consciousness.

If there are no mind-independent doppelgangers of the brain and if mind-independent brains cannot logically create consciousness, inference of brain-function in a still-living individual reporting NDEs and loss of NDE report and inferred consciousness due to cessation of brain function are all part of an artificial reality experienced by Woerlee’s non-embodied mind or spirit.

The joke is that there is no soul within a body but a body within a soul–in the form of a body composed of the subjective experience of the non-embodied mind or spirit the latter experiences as a particular object in the particular artificial subjective world (composed of its consciousness) the spirit has no choice but to experience.

We only have consciousness, so it is probably impossible for that which is not consciousness to appear to show that something other than a person and that which a person experiences exists. Everything that appears, it turns out, must appear in the form of something the person experiences. Unconscious matter is something that is not any person or anything experienced by any person, nor subjective experience itself. It seems that in order to exist or at least in order to appear, a thing must be composed of the subjective experience of someone experiencing it, which, given that only that person is experiencing in according to their perspective and point of view (Schropenhauer), proves the thing exists only as part of the person, in terms of part of the person’s consciousness and not something other than that consciousness or something apart from it.

You tell this to someone. And they say, “okay, but what does that really have to do with how you can in fact show me that I can in fact know what is in fact true about ‘I’ beyond the grave?”

Back again to “an invincible argument”. The invincibility of which seems predicated entirely on the definition and the meaning that you give to the words in the arguments themselves. You are unable to connect these words [more substantively] to the world we interact in. To the actual experience of living and then dying in it.

Or so it seems to me.

This sort of thing…

…is seen by me to be a “general description” of human interactions on this side of the grave. An intellectual contraption. How would you go about demonstrating it beyond a “world of words”?

As for what G. M. Woerlee learned about “the true nature of death”, are scientists or philosophers or theologians able to devise actual experiments/experiences that others are themselves able to replicate?

Either with respect to oblivion or “I” beyond the grave.

And would all neuroscientists concur regarding the extent to which your own conclusions about the dependence/independence of the mind/body relationship are in fact true for all of us?

It’s still just highly speculative. Eventually coming down to certain assumptions/premises that sustain certain conclusions.

This part in particular:

Until you [or others] are able to connect the dots between this particular assumption and the actual things we choose to do from day to day, connected in turn to the fate of “I” on the slab, I – “I” – can only see it as an “invincible argument”.

However intelligently articulated.

Thus:

This may well be a brilliant examination/explanation of these relationships.

But it doesn’t get me [and I suspect many, many others] much beyond conjecture itself.

Now, Arthur Schopenhauer may well be in the position here and now to explain this better.

Or not of course.

I would respond that I cannot show them what is in fact true about the ‘I’ beyond the grave. I can only conceptually show them that if consciousness does not cease to exist at death, it may continue in the form of an artificial reality that might be different than the one currently experienced.

Certain definitions can point directly to the world we interact in, such as “consciousness”, which in the case of discerning whether or not mind-independent objects exist, focuses primarily on visual perception. A person looking upon the world in which we interact will see that the world consists of the person’s subjective experience, as the world only appears when the person is awake and attends to it. The aspect or part of the interactive world viewed by the individual disappears when the individual no longer attends to it.

If a person touches a tree, the person discovers that the way the tree feels is basically only the experience the person has when he or she touches the visual object. This experience is distinct from the brain, which itself is another visual experience composed of the person’s experience of the experiential brain (if seen in medical and neuroscientific context).

If one believes brains create consciousness, the seeming existence of death and sleep indicates that the world in which we interact is an artificial reality created by the brain. Mind-independent objects and events are not created by the brain, do not depend upon the brain in order to exist, and do not cease to exist in response to malfunction or non-function of the brain. So the world in which we interact is an artificial reality regardless of whether or not the brain creates consciousness.

These observations define the world the individual actually exists and is involved in. They point directly to it.

A person demonstrates everything I have described in ‘the world of words’.

No.

No. But the fact remains there is no evidence of a mind/body relationship.

The assumption demonstrates the actual things we choose to do from day to day. So the dots are connected there. The assumption cannot demonstrate the fate of “I” on the slab.

The assumption demonstrates the actual things we choose to do from day to day. So the dots are connected there. The assumption cannot demonstrate the fate of “I” on the slab.

Everything other than subjective experience is conjecture supported by faith.

Okay, you are making what you construe to be an invincible argument. But so much is at stake with regard to death, many will inevitably want more than that. And if you are ever able to provide them with it, I hope you’ll start with us here.

That’s fair as many people, including those who think death is the eternal cessation of consciousness, are probably interested to know if there are adequate counterpoints that could or might make them re-think their position.

But as I say now and have repeated before, I can’t show you, or anyone, the afterlife, as we all only experience the current artificial or “virtual” reality of the world that appears before our eyes. So it is patently impossible for me to open a portal into the afterlife to show you or anyone and say: “See, there it is”.

The only thing I can do is like a defense attorney provide reasonable doubt regarding the logic and existence of the common objects, relations, and procedures of commonly believed godless mythology. And by that reasonable doubt induce an individual’s entertainment that the afterlife is possible if not probable. That’s it.

So here’s the thing. Those who do not believe in an afterlife do not just rest upon the belief: “there is no afterlife” without some sort of explanation as to why they believe this. To explain the belief, they must produce a mythology regarding the way things work and the way things are, and these deny the eternity of consciousness. In the typical or usual mythology of “what’s really going on”, there is an organ in the body called the brain that has been “pinpointed” or that is believed to be the source of our experience of the world and our experience of real consequences for doing this or that in this world.

But if the brain is behind the world we experience, the brain is producing an artificial or “virtual” reality that is the world of “the here and now”. Either way you cut it it’s an artificial reality. It’s gotta be an artificial reality because it shuts on and off during dreamless sleep and death (if there are such things). In commonly believed godless mythology, the artificial world beams out, like holographic Princess Leia from R2D2, from a mass of flesh trapped in a skull, to seemingly hover outside the skull and body.

But even so it would be sorta weird to think the external world only contains floating mind-independent brains that collectively beam out artificial realities in the form of different persons or first-person subjects of experience experiencing the same world from their own individual reference or point of view. Thus cometh not the Iceman, but the mythology of something to support the existence of the arbitrarily existing experiential objects and events appearing in the artificial realities beaming from brains.

Thus cometh the mythology of mind-independent doppelgangers of the things we see in the artificial realities. These invisible, intangible objects (because they are outside and not part of the artificial reality beaming from our brains, as we are and can only experience the artificial reality beaming from our brain) are not part of the artificial realities but are imagined by us within the artificial reality (as they must be imagined as we can’t experience anything that is not the artificial reality beaming from the brain) as larger-than-the-brain-and-body objects and events that cannot and do not reside within the body or skull, but must somehow send signals to the body and brain that is routed to and strikes that part of the brain that luckily, just happened to have a neural circuit sitting in it that purportedly produces an artificial reality subjective image of just that object that just happened to send the signal to the body and brain at that moment.

What does any of this have to do with the afterlife or providing more than just an argument for the afterlife?

Well…if I can conceptually show how preposterous it is for this big, large world we see–which seems to hover in front of us and seems to hover in front of us outside our skulls and brains—to have once either not existed at all or to have been folded and curled up like an airbag years before the fact to suddenly spring like a deployed airbag from tiny neurons trapped in a skull; if I can conceptually show how preposterous it is that neural circuits in the brain happen to have the ability to beam out experience of the future before the future even happens—

(Yes ladies and gents in case you didn’t know it the brain, if brains create experience of the world, can predict the future, as the brain must have neural circuits sitting in the brain waiting years before the fact (as presumably neural circuits capable of producing the experience of what one will experience, say, 30 seconds from now cannot have the neural circuits responsible for this soon to happen experience forming in the brain in less than 30 seconds prior to the experience, as the experience is showing up in 30 seconds) capable of producing experiences of the future in order for us to have experiences of the near future. That is, neural circuits responsible for immediate and far future experience must “know” what future states the external world is going to come up with before the external world unknowingly and accidentally (because there are no gods) produces them.)

–if I can show how preposterous it is to hold that neurons, in the same way God caused light to exist ex nihilo in some interpretations of the Book of Genesis, can cause experiences that do not exist to come into existence, and for experiences to somehow go out of existence (rather than simply transform into new experiences); if I can show how preposterous it is for mind-independent doppelgangers of mountains, computers, chairs, stars, and movie celebrities to have anything to do with the artificial reality containing a person’s first-person experience of these things when they are not one and the same thing (as one is created by the brain and the other cannot fit within the brain in order to come forth from it)—

—I can cast reasonable doubt on the common mythology regarding consciousness and death…I can conceptually cause the listener to infer that the entire mythology is make-believe (as one can only experience one’s the artificial reality of one’s experience and not the mind-independent fictions purportedly existing outside the artificial reality). If the mythology is ultimately just a made up, consisting of made up objects that supposedly lurk behind the one existence we can and do see (one’s own consciousness)…consciousness is not necessarily produced by brains and does not necessarily come into and go out of existence. Rather, given that consciousness is the only thing that shows us it exists, rather than make-believe physical energy in the First Law of Thermodynamics being the thing that ‘is neither created nor destroyed but only changes it’s form’, it’s consciousness that does that instead, as it may be that consciousness is the only thing that exists.

In one can accept the possibility of that, and if one can accept the possibility that mind-independent doppelgangers of the content of visual perception do not exist and that brains do not create consciousness—

(The brain can be entailed in theological explanation to be a symbolic metaphor of what actually produces consciousness, with the brain, its function, and seeming correspondence with conscious states instilled by God as part of a game of logic or logic-game he plays with man, in which a human choosing to play discerns the illogical nature of the brain’s “relation” to consciousness and from this deduces that persons are actually non-embodied spirits)

—one may infer that if consciousness is eternal and only or can only form persons that do not cease to exist at death (as persons cannot can cease to exist but only transform into another person or a different version of their former self according to a ‘First Law of Psyche’ that replaces the First Law of Thermodynamics) an afterlife is possible, given the eternal and transformative nature of consciousness.

The upshot being I hope to provide argument for the afterlife that causes a person to discern its logical possibility and the logical impossibility of godless mythology.


(Note: Despite the logical inconsistencies of mind-independence and relation between mind-independence and consciousness, belief in godless mythology and cessation of consciousness at death may still be saved by Ernst Mach’s Phenomenalism, if one abandons mind-independence and materialism.)

Points, yes. But to the extent that the points are only about other points comprising particular definitions and meanings, it’s still just a world of words.

Consider for example the Manhattan Project: “a research and development undertaking during World War II that produced the first nuclear weapons.”

No doubt these folks exchanged many, many points regarding the science involved in grappling with the creation of atomic bombs. But sooner or later the points had to be connected to actual physical/material/phenomenal interactions such that someone could actually manufacture this bomb. The bomb itself confirmed the objectives truthfulness of one set of points rather than another.

But suppose another group of folks got together to discuss whether or not those killed by the bomb went on to exist beyond the grave. Lots of points in lots of arguments could be made here too. But one set of points either leads to actual hard evidence that they did in fact continue to exist beyond the grave or it doesn’t. And if the evidence isn’t there to confirm one or another rendition of consciousness/life after death that doesn’t necessarily mean that’s the end of. Down the road, others may come up with new points leading to new discoveries. But the new discoveries either demonstrate the existence of life after death [for any particular one of us] or they don’t. But will the evidence here be the equivalent of the actual existing bomb in the first project?

And, as in any number of criminal trials, “reasonable doubt” can become a particularly slippery slope. It’s not like the jury can hold it in their hands like a rock to confirm beyond all doubt what the objective truth is.

As for how the brain is to be understood here as mind or the mind understood as “soul”, we just don’t have a precise understanding of that. Or, rather, I certainly don’t.

What’s “weird” here goes all the way back to why there is anything at all. And why this particular something and not another one. Weirder still [perhaps] have been attempts to explain existence through “logic”. What is inherently logical about the existence of existence itself? To the best of our knowledge, the universe had been around for billions of years before matter evolved into life evolved into consciousness evolved into self-conscious entities. Like us. But we’re not even really certain if what we are conscious of isn’t all that we could only ever have been conscious of.

In the interim being able to think yourself into believing in life after death can only be that much more comforting and consoling than thinking yourself into believing the death of “I” equals oblivion.

Unless of course you no longer wish to exist at all. And then finding out that, to your horror, “I” really does continue on for all of eternity.

And this is an excellent metaphor of what you seek behind mere “argument for an afterlife”. The physical, material “bomb” or actual, “look it’s there” proof of the afterlife is not one and the same as argument for an afterlife which is comprised of just words expressing an idea without immediate or eventual connection to a hands-on “bomb”. Got it.

When it comes to the afterlife, unfortunately, there is no “actual existing bomb”, so all we have on this side of the grave are words, thoughts, and ideas for and against.

There are certain things, like bombs, for instance, that by the very premise of the idea of a bomb is an idea of something that can present itself to human sensory perception. Then there are things that are ideas of things that cannot present themselves to human perception. The afterlife, the Multiverse, and mind-independent doppelgangers of the content of visual perception are of the latter.

The Afterlife in terms of the idea of what it looks like is usually thought of from the third-person, but any third-person idea is seen from the point of view of the person having the idea. But the true idea of the afterlife should be considered in regard to the existence or non-existence of the person who died and may or may not be experiencing it.

Why?

Because the afterlife is an idea derived from and is an extrapolation of the “actual existing bomb” of an actual first-person subject of experience. You have an “actual existing bomb” of your first-person subjective experience and I have an “actual existing bomb” of mine, as I sit and type at 5:10am in the morning on a keyboard in Austin,Texas.

But from my point of view (solipsism be damned as it makes its point), your consciousness to me is simply an idea or “point” that may or may not exist for all I know, as I can only experience my own consciousness. I cannot render the objective truth of your consciousness or anyone’s consciousness save mine, there can be no connection between points given in support of the existence of your consciousness and the actual, hard evidence of it, as it is something I cannot experience and can only believe objectively exists.

The afterlife, if it exists, comprises the consciousness of everyone that has deceased from the beginning to end of man. In the same way I cannot experience your consciousness, the living cannot experience the consciousness (if they exist) of those that have “gone on”, and can only have and express ideas for or against the survival of these consciousnesses that we can never experience. The point being, there can never be any new discovery that can demonstrate to oneself the consciousness of another person (one could make an argument for isomorphism, in which two beings share the same identical experience, but this would be “identical twin” experience from two separate perspectives and points of view, not one person intermittently becoming another person, such that only one experience between persons exist).

Thus any connection between points and the objective truth concerning the afterlife may never manifest in sensory perception. Why? Because the metaphor between the bomb and the idea of the bomb does not apply to the idea of the existence of the consciousness of another person and the ability to see another person’s consciousness from your consciousness. One will not be able to produce or objectively demonstrate the consciousness of another person, living or dead.

Thus the metaphor fails, and will continue to fail, when asking for a demonstration of the afterlife because when asking for a demonstration of the afterlife one is asking for demonstration of the subjective experience of other persons, whose subjective experiences are commonly believed to have ceased to exist. But this is the same, really, as asking for a demonstration of the subjective experience of a living person.

The bomb is a sensory object that presents itself in the (believed to exist) artificial realities of several persons who have built the bomb and are looking upon the sensory object. The afterlife is the idea of the first-person experiences of persons and what they invisibly experience in the afterlife if consciousness continues after seeming cessation of the brain, itself another aspect and event of the artificial reality that is human consciousness. Asking if the evidence of the bomb is equivalent to evidence of the afterlife is like asking if evidence of a bottle of water is equivalent to your evidence of my consciousness.

Ideas are ideas, but what do ideas represent? Do they represent things that can appear to the senses, that can appear before an observing first-person subjective point of view and reported by other first-person subjective points of view as the thing observed by the first? Or is the idea about the first-person subjective point of view itself, and what that point of view experiences for itself that cannot be reported as observed by other first-person points of view? The afterlife is of the latter.

Does this mean the latter cannot or does not exist because the experience of a first-person subject of experience in the afterlife, if the person and afterlife exists, is incapable of demonstrating its existence and experiences to those still inside the artificial reality of having a biological body in an artificially contrived world containing experience of the body? No. To deny the existence of persons surviving death and their experiences following death is akin (in principle) to denying the existence of the consciousness of another person.

Existence just is. It exists for no other reason than that it happened to exist. Things exist for no other reason than that, out of everything that could or might have existed in its place, the thing that exists happened to win the “lottery” of existence.

As consciousness is an artificial reality with nothing behind it to ground it (according to my belief), the age of the universe is an imaginary fiction invented or placed in the mind by something, other persons, or a Person outside the human mind. I don’t think matter can evolve into consciousness, as it involves a magic in which that which is not subjective experience suddenly stops being what it is to magically transform into something it previously essentially was not. I don’t think that sort of magic exists, nor do we need that magic or the magic of creation ex nihilo to arrive at consciousness.

I think subjective experience doesn’t have to come from something that wasn’t subjective experience, and that we don’t need subjective experience to start from something or have anything to do with something other than itself. It can simply be eternal, and can easily eternally exist for all time in the form of a Person that imagines other persons, that themselves while residing in the mind of the Person bear the substance of this naturalistic Novelist* (borrowing the Novelist’s own subjective experience which inwardly forms their own).

Those imagined by the Novelist come into existence when the Novelist happens to invent them within the mind, with the substance of the Novelist forming a “consciousnesses within a consciousness” (as it is commonly believed that the people we imagine or dream about are philosopher’s zombies without an inner consciousness of their own) that have their own private experiences within the Novelist and die when the Novelist closes their individual stories and stops thinking of them. An afterlife in this simple scenario of the eternity of consciousness would entail the Novelist ceasing to think of certain persons as punishment for the person’s evil within the mind of the Novelist, and to eternally think of a joyful existence for those who please the Novelist within the Novelist’s mind.

(*Novelist=Judeo-Christian God)