What evidence of an afterlife would satisfy most skeptics?
I know evidence that the conscious mind continues after bodily death is rare and iffy at best. But what type of evidence would be reasonable to convince skeptics that an afterlife probably is a real possibility?
Comments (126)
For the scientific question to make sense, the concepts of "Persons", "lives" and "After-lives" must first be given definitions in terms of physically contingent types and/or natural kinds. At which point scientific evidence becomes relevant in so far as deciding whether a given "person" is now in the "after-life" state relative to the assumed ontology, which begs the entire metaphysical question.
Quoting Tom Storm
I can see no reason to accept the proposition that there is an afterlife. Stories and claims do not constitute evidence that might give us a reason to accept it.
Supposing that one is an atomist to the point of being a mereological nihlist. Then isn't even the idea of a "living person" also evidence-free?
"People are commonly swayed" – what more needs to be said? Okay, you & I are not (on this topic maybe), but I accept the (vaguely circumstantial) prospect of 'extraterrestrial intelligences' ... don't you?
To even ponder a question like that we need to agree on the definition of words that we use. Like soul, existence and mind.
Per wikipedia:
Soul or psyche (Ancient Greek: ???? psykh?, of ?????? psýkhein, "to breathe", cf. Latin 'anima') comprises the mental abilities of a living being: reason, character, feeling, consciousness, qualia, memory, perception, thinking, etc.
The mind is the set of faculties including cognitive aspects such as consciousness, imagination, perception, thinking, intelligence, judgement, language and memory, as well as noncognitive aspects such as emotion and instinct.
Existence is the ability of an entity to interact with physical or mental reality
There is plenty of scientific evidence that all of the mental abilities described above as a soul & mind have a biological basis and for all practical purposes it is accepted as a fact (at least within the vast majority of the neuroscientific community). And there is plenty of evidence that the soul & the mind seize to exist once someone dies. So the original question is already answered, there is nothing of the sort after death. If then someone argues that existence of a soul includes the memory of him within other people (e.g. my actions are influenced by what my parents would do) then the soul does exist at least partly beyond death, but never the mind or the consciousness.
It seems more than circumstantial to me, it also seems probable given the size of the universe, and also if we are right that the same general kinds and proportioning of elements would likely be formed in many other galaxies and stars, given their number, and that the right conditions in terms of sun-size, distance and planet size would also likely be common enough.
“Materialism is a beautiful and compelling view of the world, but to account for consciousness, we have to go beyond the resources it provides.”
? David J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory
And this from an atheist. You can see how it doesn't take much for someone to be led to a belief that if consciousness is remarkable, it might be a fundamental substance of reality (perhaps part of a higher consciousness) and thus, like the last train out of town, life after death arrives at the conversation.
Well while I agree that there are always many things that we don't know, as a neuroscientist I have to disagree that the mind is "merely biologically dependent" and "it does not logically follow".
And to answer the OP question, there is a way to prove that the mind & consciousness exists beyond death. The experiment should show that after the biological material dies, soul & consciousness can be somehow ( I cannot think of a way) transferred (and not copied!) to a new body. I am sure in the future computers will be able to model our cognitive capacities very well but that is merely creating a copy of what we observe of the mind and not proving that the mind exists independent of the biological material.
But I am not saying people shouldn't follow their intuitions or feelings in such matters, but merely that they should admit that is what they are doing. When doing that they obviously count their feelings and/ or intuitions as evidence, which is fair enough, but cannot be rationally argued for, in my opinion.
Even if my intuitions and feelings could be evidence for my believing whatever, they can never be evidence for you.
It's not clear to me what you are wanting to say here, unfortunately.
If you are after real possibility, any evidence is sufficient, or even the lack of evidence is sufficient, as the possibility, both real and unreal, and probable and unprobable, is there for any imaginable event.
If you ended your sentence with "real" and also took out "probably", then we would need to think like the other contributors to this thread have thought (that is, their thinking and opinions right now are superfluous).
Skeptics don't argue that the possibility of afterlife is not probable. The argue that afterlife is not evidenced, and not supported by any evidence.
To me, if you reworded the question, the only proof would be personal. That is, I die, and I realize that my soul has survived. That's the only argument I'd accept at this point.
I think you are using an equivocation. There is the concept of soul-life; and there is the concept of bodily life. The two can be and are believed to be coincidental when the body is alive. The body can be alive without the soul being alive, and the soul can be alive without the body being alive. You, by calling both simply "life", are giving a perfectly shining example of what Aristotle called the fallacy of equivocation.
Quoting Janus
I think I understand Don Kotlos. He is saying, and please correct me if I am wrong, that there is an experiment that will prove the existence of afterlife, except we don't know what that experiment is, nobody has designed it yet. The experiment should show furthermore, that the soul survives the body, via a soul-transplant operation or process. Mr. Kotlos further states, that even if machines acquire the complexity, the structure, and the inner workings of the human brain, the machines will never have a soul, thus proving that machines will never have a soul, because their mind is a copy of the human mind, since their cognitive / emotive construction not a host of the human mind.
I don't fully agree with Mr. Kotlos, but I think the above is a reasonably enough close transliteration of what he said.
Mr. Kotlos is a neuroscientist by his own admission. What does a neuroscientist do? What activities does he conduct that he gets paid for? What's a professional neuroscientist's mandate?
Yes, and present arguments, not mere assertions of personal opinions.
Also even if there were such an experiment it. like any other scientific experiment could never constitute a proof.
I wish you'd read my post that came from my own thoughts, and commented on it. Nobody EVER comments on my posts. It's either because they think it's total gibberish or because they think it closes the argument properly, after which there is nothing to say, and that is not fun. Or else, like Banno, they have complete and utter, pure as hell disdain for me, and they would rather die than express an agreement with what I say.
The upshot is I feel like I am leaving posts for the fucking wall.
Many know, manier don't, that to believe is stronger than to know.
In my opinion human knowledge is based on belief. Not religion or in faith in god, but in belief, which COULD be religion or faith, but does not have to be necessarily.
This I arrived by believing Hume (everything could be only coincidental, and it's possible that no determinism exists as causation does not have to exist to experience the world as we do), and by believing solipsism; I think even if we experience the real world, and our senses give us true feedback, the overall effect is not any different from living in a solipsistic world. That is so because we are string puppets, either by the solipsistic director, or by reality, because then reality acts as a director that uses us as string puppets.
I mean it though - the notion of an afterlife simply has no conceptual coherence. After-life = life after the cessation life. This is no different to a square circle. The woo peddlers reckon they get get around this by cleaving life into two such that there is bodily life on the one hand and then - depending on who you ask because there is no precision here at all - mental, spiritual, conscious or soul-life. But no one has any idea what this last kind of 'life' is, or exactly how 'life' and any of these categories are meant to be conceptually articulated. Or how the 'life' that qualifies any of these latter things has anything in common with the 'life' of the body. It's complete wordplay. A grammar mistake that, because it is so obviously incoherent to anyone with a basic grasp of english ("life that is no longer alive that is alive but not"), must cover it up by conjuring - like a cheap magic trick - internal distinctions that have no purport at all, and fall apart at the slightest prodding because held together by nothing than pseudo-grammatical glue. A conceptual tromp l'oeil with nothing behind the curtain.
One doesn't need to 'argue' that square-circles don't exist: anyone who thinks they do disqualifies themselves as a speaker of english. So too peddlers of 'the afterlife'. The question of 'evidence' here is already seven steps too far.
That's true but it somewhat misses the point, given the flexibility of one's choice of grammar.
Chemists has no problem with the statement "Gold was destroyed on Earth, but later discovered in Alpha Centauri" - in spite of absence of information transfer.
Why are natural kinds such as gold and operating systems entitled to "after lives" , but not persons?
Consider the fact that a person isn't rigidly defineable as a type of object, due to an absence of essential criteria.
Why must Elvis Presley be treated as a rigidly designating proper name as opposed to a universal?
Isn't it purely down to the qualities of his impersonators singing and the legal politics of his estate?
The most charitably I can put it is this: the afterlifer is after something so radically different from life that it would simply have nothing to do with what we understand as life. It would be something wholly different that one could not even call it an afterlife. But what, exactly, would that be? Once the afterlife becomes unmoored from anything recognizable as life, then what conceptual bearings do we have to even talk of it? And here, the concept needs to be defined, long, long, long before any search for 'evidence' would even be remotely contemplated.
Insert good reasons in my head.
Bravo! :up:
Quoting 180 Proof
I thought it was Play fair!
Quoting TiredThinker
Beats me!
Quoting Wayfarer
Immortal being the key word! Worms irrelevant unless one is being parasitized by eternal helminths. :vomit:
Quoting Wayfarer
That asterisk (*) sums up the thread to a T. Nice work!
Seriously, I miss her.
This reminds me of the first elk I ever killed. Even before I finished gutting, skinning and quartering, the flies were on it. Shortly there after, a motherless cub bear started in on the gut pile as I started to pack out the meat for consumption. I'm no biologist, but I was told that once death sets in, certain microbes inside the body started their work. I know for a fact there is an afterlife. Every time I perceive life I see it.
In ‘ Human Immortality: two supposed objections to the doctrine’, William James offered a creative ‘empirical’ hypothesis concerning the possibility of life beyond death.
“It is true that all this would seem to have affinities rather with preëxistence and with possible re-incarnations than
with the Christian notion of immortality. But my concern in the lecture was not to discuss immortality in general.
It was confined to showing it to be not incompatible with the brain-function theory of our present mundane
consciousness. I hold that it is so compatible, and compatible moreover in fully individualized form. The reader would be in accord with everything that the text of my lecture intended to say, were he to assert that every
memory and affection of his present life is to be preserved, and that he shall never in sæcula sæculorum cease to be able to say to himself: "I am the same personal being who in old times upon the earth had those
experiences.”
https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~drkelly/JamesHumanImmortalityTwoObjections1898.pdf
Point me to the post you are referring to and I'll be happy to comment on it. And don't worry about Banno, he's egregiously pompous and opinionated.
Quoting StreetlightX
This is a disingenuous strawman: 'afterlife' is taken to mean life for the individual after this life.
I'm not a believer, and I dislike the way belief in such a thing may lead to smug indifference and devaluation of this life, and consequent toleration of social injustice and exploitation, but it is good form to at least try to understand what proponents of views incompatible with yours actually believe instead of mischaracterizing them and rejecting them out of hand.
We have the cadaver farms that document each stage of decomposition, and archeological evidence showing a wide variety of methods of disposal of human corpses, all of which proves to us the extent of what happens to us after death.
Exactly what is different about what you said?
Quoting Janus
It would be good then, if these so-called proponents offered anything close to a coherent concept of the afterlife with which to discuss.
Quoting god must be atheist this starts with a pedantic analysis of the wording of the OP. If this post of mine was read and taken seriously, the thread would be stopped dead in its tracks. But that's no fun.
Quoting god must be atheist
Debunking a skeptic -- this is a bit more meaningful
Quoting god must be atheist my epistemological manifesto
I found this study interesting although I feel too much psychic research is done at University at Arizona to seem credible enough to my liking versus other colleges as well. I do know U@Virginia has a special department DOPS for such stuff as well, but two schools isn't enough. And I know this study doesn't show consciousness survival after death but does certainly insist that our abilities to acquire knowledge while alive has range.
Gotta fuck around (e.g. give encrypted passwords / messages to the dying) and find out (e.g. somehow receive unencrypted passwords / messages back from the dead). Or this.
True it must be fun in the sense of interesting, but don't you acknowledge a dimension of philosophy that may inform the living of life?
Quoting god must be atheist
Proof is always analytic or empirical (which means inter-subjectively decidable). It's impossible to see how any proof of an afterlife could be either. On the other hand a religious experience or intuition may be convincing enough, in a subjective sense, to count as "proof" for the individual; but it isn't really.
Quoting god must be atheist
To know just is to believe, unless it is direct. I see it is raining, therefore I know it is raining. I can be said to therefore believe it is raining but that belief is of a different order than secondhand beliefs like believing in the Big Bang. Of course the so-called "global" may question even the directly derived beleifs, by saying that they might be dreams or hallucinations. For me, that;s an absurd step too far.
Quoting StreetlightX
You characterized afterlife as a logical absurdity, like a square circle. But there is nothing logically contradictory about imagining that there might be continuance of an individual life in some different (obviously unknown) form, unless you make the definite stipulation that an individual life is inseparable from the life of the body. I believe the latter, but others don't and therefore their claims that there is or may be an afterlife are not logically inconsistent or contradictory.
The idea of an "afterlife" sounds like a very toxic ideology to motivate someone to the point of suicidal acts from the guidance of an unethical manipulator.
Or some kind of comfort in passing.
'Continuance' from what exactly. Go on. Spell it out. Which 'discontinious' moment is this 'continuance' meant to follow from?
ever been in a state of optical illusion, or normal delusion?
I don't think of philosophy in terms of it
- giving moral guidance
- providing a template for living
- teaching useful, applicable wisdom
at all. Many do, I appreciate that, but they are normally the morally superior, the religious, and the so weak and feeble, that they can't work out each problem on their own, so they will use "life philosophies".
I think of philosophy as a field of inquiry, to find answers to those questions that have not been answered by science, yet they can be figured out speculatively.
How about this: I die, I see my body buried by mourners. Empirical evidence, slam bang on.
What evidence of afterlife would satisfy a skeptic? I am a skeptic; it would statisfy me, one skeptic, that there is an afterlife.
But you're right, most skeptics would not be satisfied as my experience would be non-transferable.
Yeah you could say that would be experiential evidence for the individual who had died, but not empirical evidence for anyone else.
When I was younger I had the experience of seeing auras around people. That stopped around the time I went to university. I never had a decent explanation for it. To this day I'm open to there being more than just what we'd expect from what science would predict because if those experiences. As a result, I can imagine that at a personal level such experiences can be received as proof for those who had such experience.
At times, my own experiences, including those using substances and those which I had naturally do make me question, even though I do not see them as proof, of any potential life beyond this one. I have experienced a number of strange out of body experiences naturally, which can occur if I am under severe stress or haven't eaten enough.
The big experience which does make me wonder about life beyond the body was the one which I had on acid, which I mentioned in one of my threads. It was where I went to the mirror, expecting to see some kind of monster. Instead, I could see the walls around me, and the radiator but I was not there at all. It was as if I had got out of my body truly. The whole experience was one in which I knew that I had some connection with my body, but it did seem to have become unhinged in some remarkable way. I was able to walk, but I had the sensation of being able to walk through people. I spent the night lying down and having sips of water, and in the morning I felt that things had gone back to normal. When I felt that I wanted some breakfast, I felt that this was a sign that I was back in my body, and I felt safe to leave the warehouse and make my way home.
I wondered about your own experience of altered perception. I definitely find music to be one way of experiencing the numinous, and have some kind of natural affinity with psychedelic experience.But, I do have intense hypnagogic and hypnopompic experiences at times, in which I am floating around in the room, knowing that my body is lying on the bed, and these are a bit unnerving.
It also seems to me that some people are more inclined to have OBEs than others, and I think that comes into play when people use any kind of substances. But, I do think that Huxley's book, 'The Doors of Perception/Heaven and Hell' is so interesting too, especially how it points to the idea of the mind being a reducing valve for mind at large, which is based on Bergson's idea. I am not saying that I am sure that perspective is true, but I do see it as a possibility.
However, what makes the OBE or NDE difficult to be seen as real 'proof' is that the person is still alive enough to return to life. But, I think that it may be the furthest proof. But, of course, it is possible to go into the real territory of 'woo'land, with people who claim to have been visited by spirits and I have a friend who speaks of having encounters St Augustine. However, all these ideas are open to critical analysis, and I of all people am aware of the need for this based on my experience of psychiatric nursing.
Why do you want to convince them?
For their own good?
For your own good?
But you will not answer this, will you?
Character assassination is a classical proselytizing method. It seems to work quite well on many people.
At this point, the seriously injured Valeen Schnurr began screaming, "Oh my God, oh my God!"[127][131] In response, Klebold asked Schnurr if she believed in the existence of God; when Schnurr replied she did, Klebold asked "Why?"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre
It can only be speculated how far the perpetrator's religious or spiritual quest went. But it sure is telling that at a critical moment like the one above, he wondered about the reasons for belief in God. We can speculate that he was wondering about these things for some time already before the shootings.
While I agree that belief in God might deter some prospective perpetrators from their actions, it's also worth noting that the despair and the social stigma resulting from a person's failure to believe in God can contribute to desperate actions (which might have been intended as attempts to force God "to show himself").
Both theists and atheists often underestimate the intense personal struggle of a person who makes an effort to believe in God but fails.
Maybe, but this is just a basic panpsychic position - if you're going to explicitly couple consciousness with the state after death, the implication is that not-living (=dead) things can have consciousness. And I'm not convinced anyone knows what that means.
But it's telling that the afterlife position can only be sustained by these kinds of word games that simply swap out one word for another, whichever is most convenient. It simply isn't philosophy. It's just some temporal extrapolation from one's present state to a state after death, and exactly how it's supposed to be given any coherent conceptual form is totally irrelevant. It's just ad hoc throwing together of terms - whatever it takes to justify this fantasy of extrapolation. The 'philosophical' content involved is wish fulfillment, nothing more. It doesn't respond to any problem, it doesn't illuminate anything - it's a vague notion aping at philosophical justification after the fact.
But imagination isn't reality. Part of the benefits of fiction is that you can ignore the gaps of understanding (to an extent) for the sake of the plot and it works out for entertainment purposes. That explanation of magic doesn't make sense? Who cares, I like watching wizards shoot things out of their wands at each other. But if you want to talk about the concept as it plays out in reality, you have to propose something on solid coherent grounds, related to things we're familiar with and have evidence for, and so on in a way that you can describe what it is and how it works. There can't be any gaps, that's my own take that I extracted from anyways.
Most religions believe in continued existence. It largely hasn't been cause of suicides compared to other reasons.
Who's "them"?
Multiple people corroborating evidence is the nature of science. If it wasn't necessary than my own subjective experience would be plenty to be sure that I won't get deleted. Lol.
The skeptics your OP is seeking to convince.
It would be good to have proof that all people, not just skeptics, could rely on as an alternative to blind faith.
If by "individual" what's also meant, indeed presupposed, is embodied, then this question makes no sense whatsoever. (Unless, despite given that death reduces a lived body to a corpse (i.e. supple flesh to rotting meat) there's evidence of 'disembodied consciousness', which, of course, there isn't.) We are each of us, in fact, individuated by our bodies which are always uniquely positioned in and moving through spacetime, incorporating our unique self-experiences in the biochemical continuity of memories, every moment until each body's irreversible brain-death, no? Thus, dead means your you – "self-consciousness" – ceases ... like a candle's flame flickered out or a symphony's final note fallen silent.
:clap:
Yes. Also had a bit over half a decade of such experience, powerful ones at that. The only thing they taught is how powerful the mind/brain is, but it did not offer me an iota of evidence of anything else. These types of experiences tend to support whatever you already tend to believe in.
So, it's not a matter of life after life per se, but a different form of life after physically embodied life. Not very plausible, indeed, but not logically contradictory or incoherent either.
Now we can ask something like “can biology be built with silicon instead of carbon” without observing the former. We can make sense of this because they both consist of atoms, a familiar bedrock of concepts, so there is a path to affirm the claim. But as for afterlife, you’re otherwise proposing an unknown concept that you just attribute life to. We don’t know how to make sense of a disembodied life because we never observed such a thing, unlike molecular constructions, the problem is not just lack of data.
I think this can be the only reasonable understanding. People seem to want to peddle the notion of consciousness as briefly inhabiting our body then, at death, flying off to heaven/next life/whatever - but it seems pretty clear that consciousness is what the brain does and we have zero evidence of any disembodied consciousness existing. And frankly, having seen many people with brain injuries and organic diseases like dementia, it appears clear that consciousness is a fragile thing entirely dependent on one's corporeal conditions or meat suit...
"A few authors have reported perceived behavioral changes, mostly after heart transplantation. Pearsall et al6 report heart transplant recipients who have experienced changes in their music tastes to match the donor’s tastes or who have developed aquaphobia after having received the heart of a patient who drowned, without any knowledge of the donors’ tastes or death circumstances. Joshi reports the case of an 8-year-old child who received the heart of a murdered 10-year-old girl. The recipient began having recurring vivid nightmares about the murder, and later described the crime scene to the police with sufficient details to allow them to find and convict the suspect. However, to our knowledge, there has been no systematic research on this population." https://www.dovepress.com/perceived-changes-in-behavior-and-values-after-a-red-blood-cell-transf-peer-reviewed-fulltext-article-IJCTM#ref8
And:
"Nevertheless, there are indications that organ transplants are metaphysically contraindicated, both for the donor and recipient. At issue is whether the consciousness actually leaves the body at the moment brain wave activity and vital functions cease or whether it lingers for hours or even days. Also, there are indications that premature removal of organs can result in the possession of the recipient by the donor, causing the donor to remain "earthbound" and the recipient to be negatively influenced." (Tymn, Michael. “Are organ transplants metaphysically contraindicated?)
Here are a few relevant links:
Memory Transference In Organ Transplant Recipients - Am I You?
Can a heart transplant change your personality?
My personality changed after my kidney transplant.
As well as the concept of 'disembodied life', @Saphsin also raises the prospect of what we might call newly-embodied life. A believer in afterlife doesn't have to believe in disembodied consciousness, they might conceivably believe that upon death, all your consciousness gets 'uploaded' to the matrix and placed in a new body for you in your 'afterlife'. Of course for your consciousness to be able to do this it needs to be able to be separated from your body, but one can imagine some logically possible system where consciousness needs a body to function, but can still be transferred without a body, in the same way that software needs an operating system to be executable, but the code can still be copied. Is this a completely scientifically illiterate stretch? Probably, but my very boring point is merely that such a state of affairs is logically possible.
The 'death of an individual's body' is the end of life. That's just how words work, and no amount of squiggling with psuedo-distinctions changes that.
Exactly. It's not even that we have never observed such a thing: we don't even know what it would mean to observe such a thing. So you're right: it's not a lack of data. We don't even know what data would correspond to a concept like 'the afterlife', because there is no coherency to to the very idea of it. It's a grammar mistake, nothing more.
It's not an 'assumption', it's how words work. What would a disembodied life mean? We know life to roughly be a metabolic process that reproduces itself, or that at least has reproductive ability at a phylogenic level. What corresponding kind of 'content' can you give to the idea of 'disembodied life'? Or are you, like all the pseduo-philosohical charlatans, just playing with words? Just throwing words together because grammar allows you and then 'speculating' about it isn't philosophy. It's infantile.
But what if your body goes somewhere else when you die? Maybe the dead body is not your body in the sense that your new body is. Reincarnation happens when all the cells of your body are new. A resurrected body is the essence of your body as it passes through life and is in a new place. Think of Elijah on a chariot
Cool! Ok, at least this formulation actually has some conceiveable content rather than just mashing words together to see how they stick. But here the underconceptualized term is 'consciousness'. Is consciosuness the kind of thing that can be reified like this? Because as far as we know, consciousness is consciousness-of: it is a product of a process of self-relation that enables situating oneself in an environment so as to act within it. Or as certain phenomenologists put it: the 'I' of conscioussness is an 'I can... x' (within a differentiated enviornment with more or less stable invariants). It's not a 'thing'. What would it mean to 'upload' something like this? And even if my rough characterization is contestable - it toally is - what is the alternate schema? What concept of consciousness is at play? How how to 'connect' it's 'uploadability' with it's function as we know it now in currently existing bodies/lives/etc?
In any case my point about the necessity of conceptualization before asking for evidence stands: we need to know what we are talking about before we can admit 'evidence' for... well, what exactly?
This does not deserve a serious response.
That's it; when all else fails, resort to insult and mischaracterization of your interlocutor; it does wonders for your credibility!
Quoting StreetlightX
LOL, that's arrant nonsense: you're clutching at straws now.
You literally brought up 'subtle bodies' - the nonsense and the straws were yours to begin with - I just happened to extend its application. The fact that you find the one utterly ridiclious - as it is - and not the other - as it also is - speaks volumes about the arbitrariness of selection involved.
Quoting Janus
In what way have I mischaractered you? All you've done is to avoid questions and insist, without any further qualification, that 'afterlives' make total sense - by fiat alone.
I don't know what you mean when you write "applied to reality". I have nor seen a single cogent or convincing argument that demonstrates that the idea of disembodied life is incoherent. All I've seen is assertion and aspersion. Perhaps you could reiterate the arguments you think are worthy of consideration.
Also note, I don't personally believe in an afterlife of any kind, so I have no dog in this fight; I just don't like seeing people get away with making as though they have good arguments for their positions, and yet failing to present any.
Analogy: legless walking. :roll: "Living" predicates "body" (not the other way around), and misuse of a predicate as a noun (i.e. reification fallacy such as platonic forms, essentialism, etc) yields conceptual incoherence such as "disembodied life" and "disembodied mind".
Not a good analogy. All this stuff about disembodiment is really a red herring. You haven't shown that the idea of disembodied life or consciousness is logically contradictory; asserting something that is logically contradictory is analogous will simply not get you there and nor will rolling your eyes (:roll: ).
As to definitions, let "a ghost” be the disembodied consciousness, soul, or spirit - i.e., the disembodied psyche - of a deceased living being that interacts with this world.
Plenty of anecdotal evidence for ghosts interacting with living people both cross-culturally and historically, where this evidence again occurs cross-culturally (it can’t be physically replicable evidence because ghosts are not physical). Again, the *totality* of this evidence is to be considered hallucinatory, or else acts of charlatanism, without exception on what logical grounds when physicalism is not a presupposed truth?
---------
And to address the OP directly: None. Regardless of firsthand accounts, these can all be explained away as either hallucinations, delusions, or deceptions on grounds that the afterlife is not, or else cannot be, physical. This as per physicalism.
One of the interesting things about consciousness, though, is that its situating of 'itself' can be anything other than straightforward. The body transfer illusion shows that consciousness can be 'expanded' to include objects outside the body. Out-of-body experiences show that consciousness, or at least some version of it, can be felt to exist outside the body. Now as far as we know, switching off the body (dying) disables all of the above possibilities. But seeing as we can't talk to the dead, we cannot confirm this. We cannot observe consciousness, we can only observe actions associated with consciousness (For instance, you cannot really 'observe' the body transfer illusion, you have to communicate to confirm it). it is (again, logically) conceivable that upon death the consciousness continues to float without the body as in a OBE, latches onto some phantom limb, etc... with the original body remaining mute and thus unable to clarify the 'experience' of the consciousness. A strict assessment of what we know and don't know should probably consider this at least a possibility. It's not a good scientific theory in that it does not explain physical phenomena in the simplest means possible - in fact it doesn't explain anything. But it's a possibility which future scientists might be able to confirm or deny should they wish to explore experiments with consciousness further. (and no, I don't just mean taking shrooms, although why not, scientists gotta get loose once in a while too...) Schemas and concepts are fine, but they're no substitute for trying stuff out.
There is some study of "near death lucidity" which can be interesting. It is when a person with dementia or other mental handicap speak or behave clearly and with purpose right before they die even when it shouldn't be possible.
Found this interesting, but has anyone ever reviewed the interviews he did?
But nobody agrees, or even can agree in principle, as to what life "means", since everyone's use of a proper name contradicts with each other. Society's use of proper names is physically and psychologically indescribable in terms of closed type-token relations, for each and every person uses the same proper name differently and in an off-the-cuff bespoke fashion that does not conform to any a priori definition of "personhood". The concept of "another mind" is essentially a perspectival, dynamic and open relation, whereby to imagine, to remember or even to recognise a physically present person is in some sense to construct that very person.
Consider a funeral gathering. It is remarkable how the mourners focus almost exclusively upon the sense of the person remembered, and how they pay so little attention to the physical referent of their mourning that lies in the coffin. And yet according to any public truth criteria of type-token physicalism that insists upon making a hard subject-object distinction, the mourners have nothing to be upset about, for only the physical referent of a proper-name objectively matters; the proper-name the mourners associate with their grief is either meaningless due to it referring to nothing, or it refers to what is in the coffin. Either way, the mourners feelings and personal memories are irrelevant to the ontological status of living or dead persons, and their personal experiences never come into contact with other minds.
I disagree. In all these, let's call them, pathological cases of consciousness, you can trace the hows and whys of their pathology back to the body itself. Phantom limbs, for instance, tell us very much about the inter-modality of sense-experience, the fact that consciousness is an end-result of a process of sense-making and habituation. Which is why things like mirror therapy works to lessen phantom limb pain: it reintegrates vision and sense and shows just how much consciousness is both environmental and bound up with a sense of the "I can" which I spoke about earlier.
Hell, we can even induce OBEs by means of setups which allow subjects to 'feel' their own body a few feet in front of them, and then by means of a HUD and some tactile experience, subjects can be made to 'identify' with the virtual body in front of them. The key in these experiments was 'synchronizing' what the subject sees and what they feel. Again: the integration of sensory-modality and exercise of bodily capacity is at work. So there are actual mechanisms at work here which do the work of explaining these pathological experiences, which explain why these pathological experiences take the shape they do. To simply go "herp derp but what if no body?" without any corresponding mechanism or explanatory principles is, again, not philosophy, but children playing with dragon toys pretending to do anything remotely like it.
Having said that, I'll take some time off to read the article more closely, and think some more about induced OBEs.
Have I? Because I mentioned that while you at least offered something others didn't, even what you did offer feel into conceptual incoherency once you actually pried at it a bit - i.e. it had an underdeveloped concept of 'consciousness' at work. And frankly, don't talk to me about 'possibility'. 'Possibility' is a sham used by every half baked shaman wishing to defend aliens and cow mothers and square circles. The modality of 'possibility' simply does not excuse this trash. Anyone even entertaining the very idea of an 'afterlife' needs to minimally answer the question: what kind of thing is consciousness that it could be detached from a body, and how does or can this relate to what we know of consciousness as it pertains to bodies (i.e. everything we know of consciousness now)? What explanatory mechanism could be, even in principle, be at work here? The second part being the most important issue here. Because with out this, it's word games. That's it. It's not that anything 'outside my paradigm' is ipso facto nonsense. It's that without an articulated alternative paradigm, then I absolutely reserve the right to dismiss it as utter trash. Because then literally no one has any idea what they are talking about.
Many people are too wedded to their ideology to entertain serious questions about life after death.
Some commit the mistake of assuming conciousness is the brain. Zero evidence for this. Others falsely claim conciousness is non physical,also false.
Many people have physical and verbal contact with "departed" Loved ones,I don't see you how you can disprove this,despite some cases being fraudulent.
It's like proving that your wife loves you to a dogmatic scientist. How would you do that? And why would you care about a strangers dogmatic opinion?
Quoting StreetlightX
:100: :fire:
Still waiting for an answer.