Here is why life after death is impossible (faith, evolution, believers)
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
I wonder how someone can be an actual physicist but somehow not aware of a basic premise that energy cannot die, only change form?
And the "our world" phrasing indicates serious lack of awareness of teachings of various "world" religions.
And how can this person not be aware of the electrical field surrounding all living things. Some kooky people might call in an aura but it's really just a measurable B field.
The only impossible thing surrounding this whole article and thread is factual knowledge about the presence or absence of life after death. In truth, Mr. Physicist knows absolutely squat about the outcome of death.
1. The beloved Irkle is clearly living rent-free inside your head. I've asked the moderators to either admonish you or ban my account if there is genuine concern. Unlike you, apparently, this forum is of very little significance to my life.
Your use of identical phrases, long, tedious posts, and the same assertions and fallacies are a strong indicator. I could run some of your posts and Irkles through the relevant software, but it is not that important to me.
And Irkle can not be living in my head, someone else has also raised this suspicion.
Quote:
Originally Posted by O'Darby
2. I believe your knee-jerk response underscores my point. Wikipedia - really?
Not Wikipedia, the sources used by Wikipedia. Your desperate evasion of my actual point is noted.
Quote:
Originally Posted by O'Darby
"Poisoning the well" - really?
Yes, you used that fallacy in an attempt to make any accurate and relevant responses look like excuses before they were made. The fallacy is not often used, the only other person who used it was someone called Irkle.
Quote:
Originally Posted by O'Darby
"Shrieking" - really?
I was just echoing your ad hominem on Carroll. Now you are objecting when someone uses your methodology on you. That sounds like shrieking to me.
Quote:
Originally Posted by O'Darby
Your response is almost completely lacking in substance, unless someone regards the speculation and bald assertions of an internet goof calling himself Harry Diogenes as authoritative.
Ironically speculation and bald assertion completely lacking in substance. Not only can I support my claims, so can the scientists in that Wikipedia link you are desperately ignoring. Those are not speculations and bald assertions, that is over 50 years of actual scientific work you need to address.
But instead of doing any actual research, you throw a tantrum. Because that is all you have. But if you want to actually discuss the science, I invite you to the science forum.
Quote:
Originally Posted by O'Darby
3. Joshua Rasmussen is not a "philosopher of religion." He is an Associate Professor of Philosophy with a Ph.D. from Notre Dame "whose area of expertise is analytic metaphysics with a focus on basic categories of reality, such as objects, ideas and necessary existence." He is author of several books, including Defending the Correspondence Theory of Truth (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and Necessary Existence (with Pruss; Oxford University Press, 2015), He has published regularly in peer-reviewed journals since 2013.
Your characterization and dismissal of him as a philosopher of religion - obviously without knowing anything about him - underscores the knee-jerk, non-substantive character of your responses.
Sorry Irkle, I did the research. Google (actually DuckDuckGo) said he was a philosopher of religion. That is neither knee-jerk nor non-substantive, and the fact that you need to try and dismiss me with your usual ad hominems underscores the knee-jerk, non-substantive character of your responses.
Wikipedia called him a philosopher of religion, probably because he has written for the International Journal for Philosophy of Religion. But if he is not a philosopher of religion, then I made a mistake. People do. Perhaps if you thought about alternative possible reasons instead of your usual knee jerk ad hominems and non sequiturs.
I am also going through the Amazon book preview, which shows the first part of the preface and the conclusion. Try it. Have a look at page 1, and then tell me the obvious flaw in his logical argument. Page 1. And then tell me why I should rely on what he says?
As I have said before, there is a crisis in modern philosophy, because too many philosophers are ignoring the relevant logic, science and mathematics that refutes their arguments.
See, I actually research your claims. That is why I can shoot them down, every time.
Quote:
Originally Posted by O'Darby
You must be a very bored individual with a great deal of time on your hands - or perhaps you are the internet version of a bag lady, wandering the forum streets with your shopping cart, babbling inanities that no one takes seriously.
No, yes, no.
No, I am enjoying myself, pointing out your usual flawed methodology of assertions and fallacies, your lack of substance, and your inability to explain how life after death would actually function. I am not bored.
Yes, as an independent worker, I have time on my hands. Also, it is good practice for my English. Thankfully yours is also good, otherwise I would probably not respond.
No, I am the internet version of someone who researches things, and only talks about what he knows. Instead of your usual ad hominem, you could try and explain, with evidence, how life after death would actually function.
The academic - an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute and Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University - said that the 'the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely understood'.
Carroll is the bold, but we do not know the actual context, or what came before.
So yes, it could be.
And Googling that phrase, we find "The laws of physics underlying everyday life are, at one level of description, completely known, and can be summarized in a single elegant—if quite complex—equation. That's the claim physicist Sean Carroll, an SFI Fractal Faculty member and External Professor, makes in a recent paper."
So yes, out of context. See, I actually research these claims, you rely on knee jerk assertions.
What's wrong with Wikipedia. They provide more footnotes and references than say...you.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mensaguy
Wikipedia is fine so long as you check the references and sources. Some articles are certainly suspect, but most are well documented.
Last time I had somebody mock me for using a Wikipedia reference, the article had 68 references.
Yes, which is why I linked to the references, and not the page itself. I may have not read any of them myself, but they do indicate alternate positions that must be addressed, and not ignored.
Nothing wrong with Wikipedia. I use it extensively and have been a financial contributor for years. If I want the scoop on Elizabeth Taylor's marriages, Wikipedia is my go-to source. Neuroscience, not so much.
Insofar as religion, politics and anomalous phenomena are concerned, Wikipedia (more accurately, the contributors to W) is well-known to have and has been demonstrated to have a definite bias or slant. Even with these subjects, some of the articles are excellent - but discretion is advised.
I merely find it comical that someone would purport to be educated about the current state of consciousness studies, would dismiss a cutting-edge scholar like Rasmussen while mischaracterizing him as a philosopher of religion, would chide me for my own supposed lack of expertise, and then reference, in support of his own position ... Wikipedia. Ho-kay, whatever.
Rasmussen (who I had not heard of before you promoted his book) does not appear to be cutting edge, nor does he appear to be a relevant expert; whereas I linked to 145 actual papers by relevant experts, not to the Wikipedia article itself, a mischaracterization of my post.
You are confusing bodily awareness and objective measurability of consciousness with the ontological reality of consciouness. No one disputes that if I whack you over the head with a hammer, you will be unconscious by any objective standard and most likely as you subjectively experience this state. This does not necessarily mean that your consciounsess has "completely disappeared." In the Pam Reynolds NDE case and others like it, she was clinically dead - and yet her consciousness was intensely active.
Allegedly conscious while clinically dead.
Quote:
Originally Posted by O'Darby
Does TV programming "completely disappear" when the set is turned off? Does the TV generate the programming? Does the programming exist regardless of whether the TV is on or off or smashed to smithereens? An imperfect analogy, but that's basically the question. Does the brain generate consciousness or is the brain more of a transmitter and filter of consciousness?
Perhaps a different analogy, a neural network who's data has not been saved will lose the knowledge it created should the computer be turned off.
Quote:
Originally Posted by O'Darby
This scholarly article at least touches on the flaw in your thinking. You are basically confusing "measurability" with "existence."
Empirical research is based on the ideal of objective (observer-invariant) measurements and observations of phenomena. Studying consciousness, i.e., subjective experience, or “what it is like to be…†(Nagel, 1974), is a special case, since the phenomena of conscious experience are essentially subjective (observer-variant), i.e., only directly observable from “within†by the individual having the experience. As directly investigating the internal perspective of a system from the outside is believed to be epistemologically impossible—an issue often referred to as the “Leibniz’s gapâ€â€”empirical consciousness research depends on inference from objectively observable properties and events, including behavior. From such research, the common-sense view that our brain is essential for our conscious experience, is supported by a range of empirical studies (Koch et al., 2016; Northoff and Lamme, 2020; Sarasso et al., 2021). Essentially, conventional empirical consciousness science is based on the physicalist presupposition that “there can be no change in the mental states of a person without a change in brain states†(Pinker, 2003).
The reference to "“what it is like to be…†(Nagel, 1974)" in the above quotation is to the seminal article by atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel, "What is it like to be a bat?" See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_I...to_Be_a_Bat%3F (I cited Wikipedia!). Nagel is also the author of the influential 2012 book, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False.
that's funny. the soul doesn't need to defend anything or grasp at anything. because it is eternal.
it is only the mind and the ego that grasps, because the ego, and for some the intellect, believes itself to be only a physical body, a physical brain, a physical thinking mind. and yes all of those yes do wither and disappear when the physical body "dies" and decomposes.
Perhaps a different analogy, a neural network who's data has not been saved will lose the knowledge it created should the computer be turned off.n
The better analogy is that the living neural network output exists at a higher energy level (faster frequency) than the "living computer and storage unit" where its output is "saved" and used in a lower energy venue (slower frequency environment).
I wonder how someone can be an actual physicist but somehow not aware of a basic premise that energy cannot die, only change form?
I'm confident that 100% of physicists understand that energy doesn't cease to exist, but only changes form.
They also understand that this is not the question.
You and I are a particular organization of matter and energy. To maintain that organization, it must be constantly repaired and defended from, e.g., disease. When the body ceases to function, the organization decays. That is why skeletons don't come out of graves, except in horror films.
The energy in my body will still exist when I die but not in any form that is recognizable as "me", because it will no longer have that organization.
What someone claiming I'm immortal has to demonstrate is not that my energy is conserved upon death, but that it is conserved in a very particular manner such that it is still conscious, aware, and possess exactly my memories and intent. They would have to demonstrate a mechanism and advance a scientifically valid and defensible theory of how that would work and and then show conclusively that it does work. They would have to explain how I would be converted from a biological organism to a discarnate sentience and how in so doing I could even be the same person, given that I am an embodied consciousness rather than a being of pure thought. All of that is a MUCH taller order, by some orders of magnitude, than simple conservation of energy.
Another important point is that not all religions even teach or claim or promise that our individuated awareness will survive death. Some, for example, teach that we are like a drop of water returning to / subsumed in some sort of oceanic universal consciousness. That letting go of individuality and duality is the point. So not even all religions believe in this "life after death" in the sense you're probably speaking of it. To them the "higher level" of "vibration" is still a kind of death, not a re-do of this life minus the suffering or something. So even some people who believe in life after death have a very different notion of what that even means. I'd argue that the notion of the death of self is closer to what really happens, but is just a semantic patina over the fact of our mortality. If upon death I'm eternally oblivious or become something akin to an individual neuron in some "greater consciousness", it's kind of a distinction without a difference.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
