Oh man, I got scooped!
Quick, how many fingers am I holding up? 
Whats the most (closest to) concrete evidence for the existence or non existence of life after death
I don’t think it’s always wishing and hoping. I think it has more to do with the difficulty of imagining nonexistence. The Christian heaven certainly does involve wishing and hoping, however, the various other religions in which the vast majority of souls are damned or reincarnated or simply mope around doing nothing seem to me to be the product of “well, life has to go somewhere when it’s gone, so it either gets recycled or sent to the landfill.”
I’ve noticed that early religious systems seem to have afterlives of the mopey variety and only evolve the idea of separate areas for reward or punishment later.
A question I’ve always wondered is: Does the nature of the universe (or existence) reach beyond the human brain’s capacity to understand?
In other words: Is us trying to understand the nature of existence like trying to play a Playstaion-4 game on an Atari 2600?
All of us were dead for billions of years before we were born. I don’t remember any of it.
My sister has four cats, and they’re WAY beyond my ability to understand!
Seriously…we’ve made almost miraculous advances in understanding the world, from quarks to quasars. No one in, say, the sixteenth century could ever have predicted the mere magnitude of what we have learned, let alone the deep profundity of quantum physics, evolution, plate tectonics, and Big Bang cosmology.
And that said…not only are there still discoveries still awaiting us, for which we can’t even work out the most general descriptions, there are probably mysteries beyond those which no one will ever, ever solve.
(Not metaphysical ones, like souls and heaven, but honest, serious, hands-on physical riddles.)
That’s the best answer so far IMO, but still seems to set up the straw man that belief in some dimension to human consciousness other than the physical brain is something lots of people are asking science to prove. IME it’s only thinkers of pretty low sophistication on either side who are relying on science to prove or disprove something like that (yes I know there are TV shows about it…they’re TV shows).
I stated it more generally than ‘life after death’ because the question also exists in terms of explaining what consciousness ‘really’ is when a person is alive. Showing different regions of the brain changing color on a CT scan is a long way from proving there’s a way to explain what you feel as ‘you’ only in terms of chemical reactions, comprehensively in every way at every level. Any ability of any part of that that is not physical to exist separately from the body is a subset of that question.
But I guess OTOH you can’t absolutely say what science will or won’t ever be able to explain.
I have mulled over this sort of thing ever since i first heard of the hypothesis of the multiverse. Unfortunately this will probably never be provable one way or another so we’re confined to wishes (yes I believe) or pragmatic skepticism (no I don’t believe).
How about all those spooky ghosts?
How useful is a computer that’s so damaged that all the memory is corrupted and can’t run it’s operating system or software?
By the same token, what does it matter if, when you die, your “soul” goes somewhere else where you can’t interact with or possibly even remember your old life?
It’s like people who talk about “past lives”. If you can’t remember your previous life as Genghis Khan or some random blacksmith, how is it “yours” in any meaningful way?
To defend the concept (in which I absolutely do not believe!) the idea would, rather be that the soul is the individual, and all the incarnations belong to it, as in an actor playing a bunch of different roles. Each local individual “me” is only a facet of the broader, grander, sequential existence that the soul partakes of.
(You’re putting Descartes before the horse…)
That’s what I don’t get about reincarnation or other philosophies that separate memories from souls. From my perspective, if you’re composed of different memories and different matter you’re a different entity altogether. In fact, I’d skip the different matter. If my memories were completely wiped out I would no longer be “me”. If I uploaded myself into a software version of myself which worked exactly the same, that copy would have more of a claim to be “me” than the memory-wiped-but-same-body “me”.
So even if there is some metaphysical soul that follows us around from body to body, that still isn’t “me” without the memories.
I would assume so. After all our brains aren’t designed to understand reality except as it relates to our survival in the savannahs of Africa. Quantum mechanics makes zero intuitive sense to people.
I would guess so, but how would we figure out how reality actually works?
But, again, you’re reversing the causal order. The soul doesn’t follow the various “mes” around; the soul is the “me” and the various incarnations are just suits of clothing it puts on and takes off.
Sure, you, as Ludovic won’t exist any more – but neither does six-year-old Ludovic. He’s gone; he grew up. He “continues” in you, via memories.
So…maybe the soul has memories. Maybe the immortal soul remembers the lessons learned from each of its lives, just as you remember your six-year-old self.
(Again, I emphasize that I think this is all a heap of horse-poop; I’m just playing Karma’s Advocate.)
From my perspective, the hypothetical higher-level entity that remembers what “I” did and learns from it is not the same as my current self. It’s true that I am not the same person as my six-year-old self, but I have some continuity of memory whereby, by the Ship of Theseus argument, once could make the claim that we are the same entity. Not so for such an abrupt change in hypothetical amnesiac reincarnation.
I also don’t want to reify the self such that I make the positive claim that I am the same person as the six-year-old me, since I think the definitions of self are vague enough that I don’t want to stake that claim since I am not completely sure what one’s self is to begin with. But reincarnation is on less solid grounds.
R.A. Lafferty wrote a lovely parody of this, entitled “Old Foot Forgot.” In the story, there is an amorphous sort of amoeboid alien, that moves by extruding a foot, then absorbing it again, over and over.
But, one day, the alien realized that one of the feet was an “individual” and didn’t want to be absorbed. The alien was very troubled by the “personhood” of the foot, the foot that did not want to be forgotten.
Much depends on one’s point of view!
I have consciousness. Just pitch black oblivion afterwards makes no sense to me. That’s really all I got. A hunch. Sorry.
I don’t believe in Hell. I give it a good 25% chance I’m either God or this is all some sort of Sim I’m in.
Reincarnation seems quite possible. I’m fairly certain there’s some kind of mostly benevolent higher power that keeps my hubris in check.
That’s about it.
That’s because “pitch black oblivion” is a thing, that would be sensed. For what your perceptions be like after your death, imagine what your perceptions were like before your conception.
I once heard a physicist say, “Nature knows how it works. Soon, we will too.”
If a something is ruled by physical laws, we will (eventually) understand it.
If the thing is not ruled by physical laws, we either need to admit that it isn’t actually a phenomena at all or that it is governed by a different set of rules (such as social phenomena).
The simplest way of thinking about ghosts and NDEs is first to decide whether or not your mind is a product of your brain. Believe it or not, there are a lot of people who aren’t clear on this point.
The dualists see the brain and mind as separate. For these people, the brain can die and the mind can live on.
Monoists, on the other hand, see the mind as a product of the brain. If one dies, the other dies. If one is disabled, the other is disabled.
It’s just not all that complicated once you get to the real issue at hand.
They were just the janitor the whole time!!!