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.)