Life After Death: Does it exist?

[Jiggy_12]

Originally Posted by Lanny_McDonald

Now, about the afterlife...

Thoughts on quantum consciousness?

https://www.scientificamerican.com/a...really-be-you/

We experience so little of actual reality, the possibilities are astounding to think about.

I highly recommend “The Case Against Reality” by Donald Hoffman to anyone looking to go down this rabbit hole. Just a word of warning, you can’t un-learn or forget this once you do.

Many physicists believe that space-time itself is emergent as opposed to fundamental. We are just scratching the surface on what is actually taking place.

We know very, very little.

[Cali Panthers Fan]

Originally Posted by TrentCrimmIndependent

Thing with science is even theories aren't considered stone cold facts. Everything theorized is continually tested for holes or weaknesses. And time has yielded further insights, debates and controversies about many of them. So it's a fluid thing. Our theories are tentative, educated assumptions, but only on the basis of what we can see and measure within controlled environments here on earth. And we take them to be representative of everything else that exists in the known universe, 99.999...% of which we can't physically explore to validate firsthand.

We don't know what we don't know until we know it

To say we've scoured the universe and determined what's there already, in our tiny little window in which we've vigorously studied this reality with the scientific method, is being frankly obnoxiously bullish on our species actually having it all figured out with an infinitesimal sample size.

This isn't to say Jesus performed a bunch of miraculous acts and then rose from the dead. It's not to say the prophet Muhammad was actually approached by an angelic being. It's not to say Moses was actually spoken to by/through a burning bush

It means it is quite likely that there are forces and levels of existence at work in this universe (or beyond it) that we are entirely unaware of as of yet

To dismiss that distinct possibility is simply foolish, but that's my POV and I respect that others will approach the issue differently

I just contemplate a lot of things that many people find uncomfortable

First of all, I do have to confirm that the bolded is true, and people often don't realize that when discussing scientific knowledge. So it's fair to point out that people should be willing to change their understanding or acceptance when new evidence is presented.

However...

Just because we have to hold open the possibility of something because we don't understand everything fully, doesn't necessarily mean it's plausible. With certain topics like Dark Matter or Dark Energy, they remain widely unknown because we don't have the physical means to detect them, but they help to explain many observations of nature. Their existence is plausible because we have indirect observation of their reality. We just can't be sure of what that reality is.

With life after death conversations, there is literally no observation to explain with it. It doesn't actually help us to understand something we observe as a factual reality. There is no evidence of something that requires us to reconsider our scientific understanding.

If I may posit an alternative suggestion as to why these stories persist, it's in understanding how the human psyche deals with chaos and unpredictability...not well at all, to summarize. When people are presented with tragic events that come out of nowhere, they seem to be able to rationalize and cope with the tragedy better if it comes from a known cause (i.e. thousands dead in Turkey/Syria from an earthquake), but they have a terrible time coping with tragedy that comes from an unknown cause (10 or less dead due to active shooter events with no known reason or motivation), which is why we agonize over motivations for those events in the aftermath.

Belief in life after death is just a way for our psyches to control the chaos a little, or to rationalize a tragedy that we experience in the loss of our loved ones. It's pure intellectual survival to have an explanation for something that we will never have knowledge of until the end, and even then we may not technically have any knowledge because our conscious brains will cease to exist.

I don't have any ill will for those that wish to believe in it, but it doesn't come from a place of empiricism or rationality, which is what science is. As long as you are okay with that, believe what you will.

[GGG]

Originally Posted by Lanny_McDonald

I think it's more disinformation. There is intent with the information being pumped out there by certain communities and it is indeed having an affect.



No, you're making #### up as a means to try and discredit the work of an academic and a field you don't know much about and cast aspersions to make your position on the subject more palatable. You started with quackery and have now manufactured a narrative about a donation that you have zero proof of. The fact that this researcher headed a department at a major university is irrelevant, as is his long body of work on this and other areas of study in the field of psychology. It is part and parcel of the cynicsim that comes with today's disinformation age.



That's because 99% of people are poorly educated. When reading and comprehension scores are down to 8th grade levels, that tells you how bad things have become. People are graduating from high school and can't read. If they can't read then they very likely going to be short on critical thinking skills and the ability to take in vast amounts of knowledge and distill facts,



Except it's not arbitrary. You ever try to explain algebra to a 1st grader? It's impossible because they don't have the foundational understanding of the math that goes into the equation. That's the point here. I never thought of this until I had opportunity to chat with a friend (an infamous physicist and cosmologist) and a friend of his (another famous physicist and cosmologist) for a few hours about their field of study. Even with them dumbing things down I struggled to keep up with some of the discussion. The reason was I didn't have the knowledge or underpinnings of their work and research, even when I would reference an article they wrote and thought I had understanding It was no fault of mine because I was that 1st grader to them. They were very cool and patient in explaining things, but at one point my friend's guest explained why I wasn't understanding something they were discussing - they had completed eight or more years in specific study on the subject matter and had gone on to do more research and learning as professionals, and much of what they were talking about referenced this foundations of this body of work without thought. They were speaking the same language as I but in a very different tongue. Least to say that moment really registered with me and made me understand how hard it is to "understand" the field of experts and the depth of their knowledge and work.



Prefer your methods all you like but acknowledge they don't give you the knowledge required to dismiss the work of experts. You can comment about them all you want but recognize you're the 1st grader approaching calculus. You can let disinformation and your own preconceptions frame the subject matter for you all you want, but it doesn't mean you are right and another person is years of research and expertise is wrong. You're locking in your bias and refusing to listen to anything that does not comply with your worldview, which is counter to what science is all about. I prefer to question and then drill down into the field and try to learn, filling in the gaps so maybe I can understand the things I don't know or struggle to understand. I try to make the effort rather than rely on my uninformed frame to dismiss and cast aspersions on the works of experts, like what is happening in climate science for another example.



And I will happily accept the title of cynic because it is mostly accurate. I am very cynical. Even in my own field I am very much a cynic of certain things and areas of research, but I continue to try and become a skeptic rather than allowing my cynicism to surface and discount the work of others. Trust me, positive psychology drives me insane and I think it's total horse#### and anyone associated with it is a fraud, but I continue to try and learn more about it and fill the gaps and blind spots I may have so I can speak to the topic as a skeptic rather than the cynic I would be perceived as. Even as a cynic I can still respect the research of others and not dismiss the body work because of my current frame.

Again you miss the point of funding bias. Funding bias is measurable. Funding for things is also always greater than disproving things. The person creating something will always have more access to dollars than the people evaluating. This funding assymetry means that cynicism and an evaluation of the critiques of peoples work is the only reasonable path for the information we face everyday. If you look back at my post where you start to say I read one paper and then dismiss what Stevenson and Tucker say you will find that is an incorrect assessment of what I did.

I asked someone with more knowledge of the work how the larger body of research answers these questions and if they in fact believe and how they go about weighing what they believe. It wasn’t until I received those answers I dismissed it. I also didn’t refer to the research as quackery at any point. I asked how you distinguish between quackery and science.

As I read these posts it is appreciated that you acknowledge that you suffer from all the same defects in information processing you see in others. Thanks for the discussion.

[GGG]

Originally Posted by Jiggy_12

We experience so little of actual reality, the possibilities are astounding to think about.

I highly recommend “The Case Against Reality” by Donald Hoffman to anyone looking to go down this rabbit hole. Just a word of warning, you can’t un-learn or forget this once you do.

Many physicists believe that space-time itself is emergent as opposed to fundamental. We are just scratching the surface on what is actually taking place.

We know very, very little.

I think people in general use this motherhood statement of we experience so little of actual reality the possibilities are outstounding to think about as a crutch to permit everything to exist.

The reality is that we can measure and explain the vast majority of physical phenomena at the level it interacts with us as people. This means that any of the affects we are talking about are at the edges of our reality. The requirement is that any phenomena that we don’t currently know to exist needs to at the statistically large level collapse into the classical physics equations.

We know how the world works outside of the very small and very large. So when people talk about an after life we need to be discussing a phenominia that produces no signal on the electro/magnetic spectrum that is measurable and that their is no statistically measurable intervention by the afterlife into todays life that allows for the violation of classical physics at the large level.

This places significant real limits on how exciting the possibilities are. It becomes a God of the Gaps problem. So for us to discover a new plane of reality where all of our consciousnesses exist after we die that doesn’t have the current ability to interact with us until we find a way of generating enough energy to wrap the current space time to open a door is very unlikely.

I think the dumbing down of quantum mechanics and cosmology into analogy to explain reality to a group of people with no background in science is responsible for most of this reality can be anything perception.

Essentially as we become less religious people still have a longing to underhand how and why and so religion is replaced with pseudoscience.

[Lanny_McDonald]

Originally Posted by Cali Panthers Fan

First of all, I do have to confirm that the bolded is true, and people often don't realize that when discussing scientific knowledge.

Come on Cali, we know everything about the universe. You're just not sitting at the cool kids' table to be privy to their information. Don't worry, you sit in the faculty lounge with the rest of us dummies.

JWith life after death conversations, there is literally no observation to explain with it. It doesn't actually help us to understand something we observe as a factual reality. There is no evidence of something that requires us to reconsider our scientific understanding.

This is where you might receive some argument. Those who believe in or research NDEs might suggest they have observational evidence of such existence. Of course I think there are other explanations for such experiences and think we need further evidence of such phenomena.

What would make this more convincing would fMRI session data of someone having an NDE, showing that the brain was actually void of activity for a period of time after the heart stopping and the patient being considered clinically dead. The patient would then have to be resuscitated and brain activity returned to normal to prove this as happening and not a result of the dying brain. If this sounds like something right out of Flatliners, it pretty much is. I actually don't think this is possible as once the brain activity ceases you're toast and there's no coming back. But I would love for someone to prove this wrong.

If I may posit an alternative suggestion as to why these stories persist, it's in understanding how the human psyche deals with chaos and unpredictability...not well at all, to summarize. When people are presented with tragic events that come out of nowhere, they seem to be able to rationalize and cope with the tragedy better if it comes from a known cause (i.e. thousands dead in Turkey/Syria from an earthquake), but they have a terrible time coping with tragedy that comes from an unknown cause (10 or less dead due to active shooter events with no known reason or motivation), which is why we agonize over motivations for those events in the aftermath.

Belief in life after death is just a way for our psyches to control the chaos a little, or to rationalize a tragedy that we experience in the loss of our loved ones. It's pure intellectual survival to have an explanation for something that we will never have knowledge of until the end, and even then we may not technically have any knowledge because our conscious brains will cease to exist.

I don't have any ill will for those that wish to believe in it, but it doesn't come from a place of empiricism or rationality, which is what science is. As long as you are okay with that, believe what you will.

Agree with this for the most part. Sometimes the things we think are fantastic prove possible and the things we accept as being science turn out to be quackery. Good lord, there was a time when phrenology and bleeding with leeches was considered high science and good practice. Shall I poke you (pardon the pun) about acupuncture?

I think the secret to this conversation is to acknowledge there is a lot of spirituality involved which means and science is always going to be challenged because the very thought of proving this stuff one way or another conflicts with people's core beliefs, especially the ones who have to know the answer to everything or believe they have the answer to everything. Even with science, we don't know what we don't know, and we're not absolutely certain about what we do know.

[Cali Panthers Fan]

Right, but for most things that science tells us, the conclusions are based on very high probability of being correct. Absolute certainty is never possible because that would require omniscience.

My contention is that people shouldn't necessarily believe it because it's possible, because then every weird idea that cannot be definitively disproven is on the table. You must have some reason to believe in things, otherwise we're all just making #### up and there's no merit for any belief ever.

Now for those with NDEs, every one of those instances cannot be objectively measured or have any empiric observation. Until such time, any claim from that must be viewed with massive skepticism. I take your point on fMRI data, but it would only be the beginning of finding tangible evidence on this topic.

[photon]

Theseus's consciousness

[Lanny_McDonald]

Originally Posted by Cali Panthers Fan

I take your point on fMRI data, but it would only be the beginning of finding tangible evidence on this topic.

Think that's going to pass IRB?