Also please define “state of existence”.
Oregon.
I am pretty sure whatever definition is produced is going to undergo a lot of scrutiny and revision is going to leave us with something testable. In other words, all the goalpost are going to be moved before the kick.
More likely, it will result in a conclusion that no matter how many times the goalpost is moved, and how testable parts of the definition are, there will always be another goalpost, or else a claim that the result is no longer really a definition of afterlife after all.
una mas con sentimiento (blue indicates new material)
So, while I get how one can think that the afterlife doesn’t exist… on what basis (assuming Gould knew his shit, and I think we can agree he did) can we say it is a FACT that there is no afterlife? Has it been “confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.”? **if it has, I’m okay with that, **I’d just like to be educated as to how.
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To the extent that the majority of participation in this thread makes any attempt to actually respond to the OP, it has been to simply make declarations.
Using Gould’s view, I’d sum it up this way: the fact (“proven to such a degree it would be perverse to withold provisional assent”) is that we are indeed conscious. I will also agree that it is a fact that during our lives here on this planet, consciousness is inside the brain, which itself is flesh and will die absolutely.
Everything else that has been put forth regarding these particulars looks to be theories about the nature of consciousness, (with a serious collapse of understanding about whether consciousness and a post-earthlife existence of any kind are one and the same - making declarations about consciousness very suspect as proving anything about an afterlife)
Furthermore, I made it very clear that I was open to being educated. But Dopers just yammering at me about how things just are isn’t an education, especially when doing my own research of what they are saying demonstrates that they are making conclusions that are not supported. (Not to mention that the plain inability to undersand and respond to my OP calls into question the comprehension skills of those who would presume to notify me via their own declarations what** anything** means. They certainly couldn’t accurately report to an outside party what is contained in my lil’ ol’ OP, how in hell can I possibly rely on their reports to me of what science has and hasn’t determined to be a fact?)
So. If anyone has a link to a reputable source that shows that yes, science has established that there is no kind of continued existence post bodily death - fine. It won’t ruin my day, it will be great, because I will have learned something extremely interesting.
But if the best that anyone can do is to throw around some terms, often in ways that don’t make sense, and spend the majority of their time coming up with new ways to accuse me of being a hardcore afterlife booster and new ways to call it a stupid fantasy… I can only conclude that you are pushing your own beliefs and opinions as facts with the same close-minded intention of arriving at a particular result, entirely without proof, as any random religious believer.
It’s also a cosmological event. 
Deal with that.
There’s nothing that consciousness can’t do that the cosmos doesn’t already do. Right?
Gould’s view that you quoted is so woefully simplified as to be very dangerous for a the layperson to rely on it. How do you know if you are a layperson? If you don’t see what it is simplified and dangerous, then you are.
I dispute that a word, heretofore undefined, but in common usage, is a “fact”, or even “data” as your Gould quote demands.
That is a long string of suppositions including lots of undefined terms unsupported by data, or theory. Hence it is not scientific. What are “lives”? I will spot you “this planet” although question why you included it - do you hypothesize that when we leave the planet, as we have done, your data would change? How far do you have to leave the planet before that happens or doesn’t happen? What and how are you measuring? What does it mean “to die”? What is “consciousness” in this context, and how will you measure it?
Which is precisely what you just did, because you haven’t defined your terms.
Maybe, but that is not your history on this board. I was hoping this thread and your other one about rhetoric were a trial balloon towards a new Stoid, but the jury is still out on that.
It is you that yammers and lectures, each post full of more fantastical fallacies than the previous, same as always.
(Not to mention that the plain inability to undersand and respond to my OP
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And that is what makes this a typical Stoid thread! It always devolves into “but no one else here understands me, so it must be their fault”. We should have a betting pool on what post number your threads reach that point. Sort of a latter day “Hi Opal”, when you make an OP everyone can post a number (those posts don’t count towards the eventual winner!)
You can rely on their/our rhetoric, if you are able to apply it, you will find that out. We are trying to take you along with baby steps, asking for definitions for a reason. The exercise is ultimately to fight your ignorance, to get you to a point where you would go"Oh I see now!". But you sense that you would be taken to a place where you will have to admit an error (OMG YIKES!) and can’t seem to go down that path. I am increasingly skeptical that you really want to learn, even though as I said, with these tow threads, I was trying to keep an open mind about a new leaf turned, to mix metaphors.
No one knows what to look for, because you have not defined your terms specifically enough. Be more specific about something that happens after death, and I am sure you will have better luck at getting cites.
I am starting to think that you are using us to argue on some other forum, just like you did in the law thread. Otherwise, you’d come to us with a cite and say “does this prove (or disprove as the case may be) life after death”?
The only one doing that is you. I have asked several times for you to define your terms, and you ignore my request while ranting on unabated.
I haven’t done that have I? I don’t know what you mean by those terms in sufficient detail for me to feel like you have communicated your intent, so how could I?
As for communication goes, I think yoru usage so far is merely inviting me or other readers to use our own imagination to fill in the blank, but that is not science. You can’t be sure you are communicating clearly and that you have left your correspondents with YOUR meanings, instead of OUR meanings. Maybe they are the same, but likely not. Why not simply go through the exercise of clarifying it so we all have a shared basis from which to proceed instead of tossing accusations out?
I think she has me might have me on ignore, because no way my posts are conveying that.
You really aren’t being clever. You’re just randomly asking questions. Do you actually have any input at all or are you simply going to reword things until someone yells at you?
Lobohan, you must learn to master your anger lest anger become your master. To learn Kozmik’s teachings you must first let him teach you how to learn. He who questions his training only trains himself in asking questions.
Deep, man. Deep. 
The purpose of life is to render inorganic molecules into organic molecules, which expands the presence of life in the Universe and expands the sentience of the Cosmos. When a sufficient proportion of the Universe is organic and sentient, only then can an omnipotent God finally evolve. An omnipotent God being unbound by Time, from the moment of that Incarnation, God will exist and will therefore have always existed. Rendering all religion valid, more or less retroactively.
Derp, man. Derp.
I like the cut of your jib, if you may. Nice posts…
About the above excerpt: I had to read the wikipedia article on afterlife to fully comprehend what was being talked about (as there are so many ways to interpret the term). Someone pointed out to me my literal interpretation of the term was not common usage, and sure enough, the wikipedia article has a very specific statement about what is meant by the term afterlife:
"The afterlife (…) is the idea that consciousness or mind continues after the death of the body occurs, by natural or supernatural means. "
So the term afterlife does not refer to life after life has ended (an illogical concept, which appears to be your issue with it?), rather it refers to life after the body (standard model matter) has died. I’ve proposed several mechanisms by which this could occur naturally, or artificially. Certainly none of them are testable at this point in time, which means absolutely nothing about their validity (portions of relativity could not be tested immediately, which did not make relativity unscientific or ultimately untestable- and please don’t take this as me equating my idle speculation with relativity, rather I’m just making a point).
Now I’ll state a logically possible, possibly true, yet completely untestable hypothesis. I’d think that the other ideas I mentioned would presumably be testable in the future, but this one would most definitely not be testable within our natural universe by its very nature. I’d also like to say that this is almost without a doubt total BS, even if it’s true.
The universe is simply a program. All data from each consciousness created by the program is recorded up to the point that the body_alive boolean variable=0 (false, in other words, the body is dead).
At this point the data from the consciousness is analyzed by another program that determines what should be done with the data: in other words the program decides what scenario (specific program) this consciousness should be sent to (I hope I go to hell… the idea of heaven is creepy as fuck). Note that the consciousness is not aware during the analysis faze.
Next, the consciousness is placed into the appropriate program, which to it appears to be another natural world with natural laws (the if statements, etc. of the program), which may be similar to or vastly different from the last program it experienced (earth prime’s universal program).
As to the other thread issue, certain individuals making positive claims (X is a fact) without backing them with either logic or evidence, I suppose the thing to understand is this:
Certain people ignore logic when it shows their beliefs are flawed. I’ve seen it in theists and I’ve seen it in atheists. It’s sad when you see someone who seems relatively intelligent completely ignore logic, but all of us can hope that they are simply going through a phase (at least while it’s not legal to kick their ass for being an idiot).
Everyone could believe that this life is real, except me, but that wouldn’t make my existence any less likely.
Huh?
What function does consciousness perform that the cosmos doesn’t already perform? The cosmos survives, but consciousness doesn’t?
Kinda, Boris. Somewhere in my travels I stumbled on a notion of “god” being quite real, of having evolved along with the evolution of life itself, a parallel evolution, created from life itself.
More derp.
But we’re probably going to wake up one day in a black & white world with some giant kid running things overhead…do dee do dee do dee do dee…<Tzone theme, best I could do.
Consciousness is necessary for humans and animals to survive. Humans and animals are not necessary for the cosmos to survive. Consciousness is an evolutionary trait some living organisms have developed as a means to ensure their survival on this planet.
And consciousness provides plenty of functions the cosmos doesn’t on its own. The cosmos doesn’t, by its mere existence, allow me to type this out or pick out food at a supermarket. Consciousness is needed for that. But me typing this or picking food or anything else humans use consciousness to accomplish makes no difference to whether the cosmos exists or not. The cosmos is necessary for our existence; our existence is not necessary for it. What is the question here?
I don’t find any of those assertions to be true without experimental evidence. See Dawkins, R for alternate explanations for all of it.
See this post.
I can confirm (in case you were wondering) that you can communicate. It’s not you. Really.
::bows, blushes, enjoys the ego stroke::
Reasonable response. OK let’s do some unpacking.
Consciousness kind of sort of has to inhere in something. Or at least that’s how we think of it. If consciousness persists, there must be a conscous SELF that persists after the death. Because how the heck could consciousness persist WITHOUT a self?
Now having said that, I think we should consider the possibilities that
a) We intuit wrongly in this case and consciousness could persist, somehow, in the absence of any self; or
b) That the surviving self is problematic and far from straightforward and may not directly coincide with what “self” meant before death.
For me, possibility a doesn’t lead anywhere that resonates with me. There’s something really basic to consciousness that, to me, requires there to be a self. It may not be a conventionallly constituted self but I can’t easily bend my mind around a truly selfless consciousness. A consciousness is simply inclined to ask “who AM I?”, sooner or later.
But the other possibility is compelling. Upthread several people have said that the spirit of the board could persist as long as surviving people remained who had known the board. What if I reformulate that proposition as a plural sense of self? “We were the board.”. The board might have its plug pulled by Creative Loafing but there would still exist a self, in the plural, that can answer the question “Who are you”. Being plural, the answer begins with “We” rather than “I”. But it’s still a valid answer to consciousness and its location. (The board itself in this scenario was an abstraction tied to an electronic venue, so there was never an “I”).
OK how about Martin Luther King? Does the “spirit of what he stood for” persist in ongoing struggles for equality, parity, fairness? Unlike the board, MLK was an individual. Had an individual self. Those who have been inclined to hero-worship him might say that while he was alive he lived for more than just his individual self; that the “we” sense of identity was more compelling for him than for the typical person. Not that everyone is required to hero-worship him, but he does make a good example, doesn’t he? Self can be plural.
And what is this plurality? For consciousness as we know it, as we conceptualize it, it would seem to be limited to sentient beings. Homo sap. Others are hypothetical or arguable extensions but we can see the possibilities for consciousness to inher in a plurality, yes? Oh sure, some will say that the intercommunicative intimacy of that plurality is very thin and that “real” consciousness can only inher in an individual. Such people would be OH so wrong. Actually the overwhelming vast majority of the ideas, perspectives, beliefs, axiomatic starting points, and whatnot that are inside the head of individuals are shared and expected to be shared; damn little of it is original in the mind of the individual. I would go so far as to say that the majority of serious thinking, while manifested locally in individuals (of course), is actuallly the species (or the culture at least) mulling an idea over for a couple centuries; that the MORE meaningful locus of the thought process is at the plural level. Sociology teaches us how much of our thoughtstream is collective instead of individual-specific. And a sufficiently thoughtful consideraton of communication processes will reveal that excessive creativity and uniqueness of thought on the part of an individual would mostly result in isolation and inability to convey those abstractions and concepts and insights unless the individual is really really gifted at bridging communications gaps.
I am capable of (and tempted to) go farther. There is something beyond the plural. I do not believe consciousness is emergent. I believe what we comprehend as consciousness is a subset of something larger that inheres in the whole fabric. It would be an oversimplification to say that the universe in its entirety is conscious but not because it is less than that. Consciousness is a local manifestation. OK enough about that for now.
If I told you that this I’m tearing up, would that make me pathetic, or you awesome? :*
It could also be that the two of you share a fundamental misunderstanding.
Just sayin’.