We all know what life is like while we are alive (nothing). It’s just not an answer they want us to find because of the consequences of believing that and acting on that belief.
Excellent question.
It is very likely that after we die our atoms etc.of which we are composed just return to what they were before we were born,just as plants animals etc..
Believing in an after life is a help to people, it eases the pain of their loss,the hope of living on and seeing loved ones again helps emotionally.There is no proof one way or the other as to what happens as far as the religious concept teaches. It is also a way of controling some people to teach them if they are not good they will be in eternal punishment,or happiness,depending on their behavior. There is no proof of a soul and I have never heard of an explaination of the difference between life and soul. Believers claim the soul lives on, but don’t say where the life goes, or why the body is responsible for the soul.
I personally do not believe a loving,caring,all knowing supreme being would create a being with a flaw, then punish them because they are not perfect Animals suffer some of the same things as humans, and It is hard to understand why they should suffer when they cannot sin!
How sad for you. That is certainly not my experience.
And who the hell are “they”?
NDEs are" near" death experiences, not actual death. There is a big difference in being able to be revivied and not. So Near Death is not actual death. Death is final as far as the body is concerned, and where the life went we don’t know, just that it no longer exixts in a person who is declared dead.
Unless you believe that in an NDE you are actually heading towards Heaven and your loved ones. God has determined that you shall meet your loved ones in the Hereafter, when suddenly…some Earthly physician overrules The Will Of God and brings you back. Apparently this happens hundreds, if not thousands of times, and there is absolutely nothing He Who Has Created The Universe can do about it.
Do religious believers ever think about this at all?
Too late to correct the word that should be exists. I guess this flawed mind shouldn’t worry about if( or not) there is life after death :o) .
And you don’t respond like that to FixMyIgnorance. :rolleyes:
They (parents, teachers, ect.) are here before we are born.
Because we have no evidence for life after death, but plenty of evidence for life before death.
I’m very much an atheist, and have some neuroscience background. But I don’t rule out an afterlife.
There are hypotheses that are quite plausible e.g. this is a very vivid virtual reality simulation. And when you die, you get dropped out into zion or whatever the uber-reality is. How could I rule this out?
And consciousness generally is quite wide open. People assume that we have a nice, neat, reductive model of consciousness but we don’t.
Yes it’s caused by the brain. But there are still quite significant questions about consciousness, and some of these do impact upon this question of an afterlife.
e.g. In what sense is consciousness continuous in the first place? Is the entity reading the end of this sentence the same entity that began it (and I’m using the numerical identity sense of “same”).
If we could stop all brain activity for 1ms, but then normal brain activity would resume, is that the same entity? And so on.
Huh? This is nonsense. Clearly life does not feel like “nothing” when we are alive. We know what it’s not to be conscious vs. unconscious. Death is basically a permanent state of unconsciousness.
It doesn’t make much sense to invoke a soul, either, because we know we’ve evolved from basic structures over billions of years. At what point between abiogenetic processes and current-day macroscopic humans did a “soul” enter the picture? Why does something’s function “exist” after its form has been destroyed? Do mammals have souls? How about bacteria? Single-cells? Rocks? A drop of water? The ocean?
Consciousness is continuous because the neurological processes that underlie consciousness are also continuous.
The entity reading your sentence by its end is not physically the same as the entity that began it. Our atoms are in constant flux all the time. However, even though the atoms are in flux, the ***function ***is still in continuous effect and so we don’t notice any difference.
It’s like how you hear about hypothetical scenarios of “human immortality” via transfer of consciousness into an equivalent machine require keeping the patient awake and functioning:
Consciousness feels like it’s continuous to us. We don’t know that it is.
If I made a duplicate of you, it would believe that its set of experiences “flowed” into its current state. When in fact its experiences had only just begun.
Perhaps this is what is happening to us at every instance. Many philosophers and neuroscientists indeed take this position.
Well I made it clear I was not talking about qualitative identity.
But I basically agree with you. Nonetheless, no particular conception of consciousness is problem-free.
What exactly needs to continue for my consciousness to persist? Would any brief, no matter how brief, kill me? So what about times where my brain activity is greatly reduced? Or simply, when I’m unconscious – yes, there is brain activity at this time, but not consciousness, so what makes us so sure that it is the same (numerical same) consciousness when I wake up?
I would dispute that it is possible to transfer consciousness like this at all. Consciousness is inherently first-person / subjective. At any given time, I am one entity (because I define myself as a particular consciousness, not a particular set of memories or appearance).
Because of the nature of this board, I don’t typically post about my beliefs. But I posted my story specifically to refute the idea that an afterlife is solely a “taught” concept and that if children were raised with no knowledge of it, they would just naturally understand that this life is all there is. I was told quite specifically by my parents at a very early age that there is no afterlife. Yet at that time I knew that they were wrong, and I have continued to believe all my life.
I would like to clarify that I am on this board because I am a skeptic about all of the things that science can determine. I do not believe in ghosts or in near-death experiences of the “bright light” type (other than to understand the scientific explanations for them). I do not believe that anyone has “gone to heaven” and come back.
I understand that (the ins and outs of NDEs, lack of oxygen to the brain, and the very similar experiences between pilots pulling huge Gs, etc.), what we don’t really know, in situations like this, is according to the doctors (and their professional diagnosis) the patient was “dead”.
Death, we are learning is a process, not so much an instant shut off switch, unless you die in an explosion or some other practically instant catastrophe. It seems likely to me that the experiences reported by those who were, for all intents and purposes, dead for minutes (3 or 4 mins up to 12 to 15), are the results of the higher functions of the brain shutting down, one by one. If my last moments are similar, sounds like a pleasant way to go, really! A sense of timeless bliss… then you’re gone.
OR ARE YOU? Dumm dumm Duuuumm!
Another reason the question “is there an afterlife?” is a valid one, is simply because it’s a philosophical issue:
• We don’t understand consciousness and it continues to remain under the umbrella of philosophy, until we can have a complete hypothesis and a testable theory to start modeling it and making predictions about every seemingly mundane, odd, anomalous and truly profound experience reported.
• The evidence accrued by the scientific method tells us what happens up until that moment of death, but so far, no data as to when exactly this moment is, and what our consciousness is experiencing in tandem with this moment.
• If you truly understand the scientific method, you’ll understand that the practical answer according to any evidence up to this point is, “You most likely wink out of existence,” and the more accurate answer is “science can’t say anything beyond the moment of true death, whenever that is.”
Why would you say this? Do you not feel or experience anything? Do you not feel some sapient, self-aware “I”, the essence of a “you-ness”? 
Agreed, and I’ve already accepted it. I’ve experienced dreamless sleep, general anesthesia, and blacking out due to injury. Not even black, just nothing.
It doesn’t erase the philosophical issues of the nature of consciousness, however, it only shows it can “pause” and “play”. Is death a “pause”, or even a “stop” in our consciousness identical to the evidence we have? How can we be sure?
To be sure: I’m not arguing with you. I’m merely challenging you’re assurance that this absolutely must be the case.
I’d like to point out that nobody really knows if Santa Claus exists, is just as true as the the quote in the thread title.
No one has absolute knowledge, of course, but based on what we perceive, there is no reason to suspect consciousness surviving death.
I never made any assurance that it was “absolutely” the case. I said “we have a pretty good idea” of what death will be like.
As an aside, it really irks me when people fall back to the “Well, I can’t rule X out” response.
There are INFINITELY many things you can’t rule out. That doesn’t mean any one of them are going to be true.
Right now there’s no reason to suspect anything other than pure nothingness when we die. Yes, there are many fascinating questions pertaining to the “hard problem of consciousness” such as subjective experience/qualia/and so forth, but none of that really applies here.
We know from firsthand experience what life was like pre-birth. Nothing. We know what it’s like (in many ways) to be unconscious. Nothing. There’s no reason to assume death is any different, and there’s especially no reason to assume that there’s an afterlife or that there’s a soul (for reasons I mentioned earlier).
Nothing’s “absolute.” That doesn’t mean we can’t know how likely something is to be true or false. It’s overwhelmingly likely that death = nothing.
Is it possibly something else? Sure. It could be argued that existence is infinite in duration. After all the galaxies move away, after all the stars burn their fuel out, after black holes evaporate and all activity grinds to a halt, it is possible that some unknown mechanism of physics kicks off another law-generating incident such as the Big Bang until we get another universe that ultimately fulfills the Anthropic Principle and creates another realm of existence that we all become a part of again.
Death may not be so scary. At least that’s what I tell myself. I hope that when I die someday, I might be reincarnated purely in the form of a new entity in a future iteration but obviously with no memory of the previous.
Might not be reasonable or even possible but I do think it’s a very cool idea (it does have a fair share of problems though). I don’t necessarily believe this will happen.
Right on. Which is, of course, all I’m saying myself.
However, the notion of rounding up overwhelming evidence from highly unlikely to absolute, is just that. Which is how we move on, not only in most things science, but our day-to-day.
The question the OP puts forth, is that is it just BS to say “we don’t know?” I say, absolutely not, because of the realization that there are no guarantees on the gaps in our knowledge and understanding. It may irk some, but from a purely philosophical point, it’s interesting, despite being unanswerable in that regard, but for me, philosophy isn’t about answers, it’s about the questions.
Admit it, despite the comfort we’re able to take in the scientific evidence and logic we have the luxury of employing, the fact there’s anything at all, and conscious beings to boot, is an astonishing, profound and uncanny realization. If all this is possible, what else might be possible as well, as crazy as it seems? It could certainly be, there’s far more to reality we haven’t even touched on yet, or ever will. Like it or not, we’re in a rabbit hole.