The Impact of the Natural Afterlife on Religion and Society
My article "The Theory of a Natural Eternal Consciousness: The Psychological Basis for a Natural Afterlife" was published May 2020 in the Journal of Mind and Behavior. The article claims a non-supernatural, i.e., scientifically supported, timeless, eternal consciousness, which can be a natural afterlife. For those who have at least read most of the article (you may skip some of the more technical parts) and are at least open to Hypothesis 2, as stated in the article, I would like to pose the following questions for discussion:
1) How does the natural afterlife impact various religions? Can it be seen as compatible?
2) Does the possibility of a natural afterlife benefit society?
1) How does the natural afterlife impact various religions? Can it be seen as compatible?
2) Does the possibility of a natural afterlife benefit society?
Comments (54)
That is the problem with the theory I think, you cannot conceive of experience that is static or timeless, because experience seems to presuppose some kind of passing of time. Without time there is no experience it seems to me... it's an unintelligible concept.
And so, if one cannot conceive of what it would be like to have a timeless eternal experience, how could one answer the question of what impact it would possibility have on anything?
I did read most of it... I just don't think the idea of static timeless experience makes sense. We may have a subjective experience of time that differs from real time passing, and we may loose track of time... but my experience is never actually static or timeless in the sense that nothing changes.
But alright, I didn't really expect you to be willing to engage.
Being forced to continue going but not do much let along experience anything (like in a sensory deprivation tank) would become sterilized and boredom would turn into anxiety. If you could still influence what you experience (that you experience anything at all) then in an eternity of existence you would everything you would be capable of doing and end up doing the same things over or over (given you even had such sufficient an ability to influence what you experience).
Your afterlife (however) is more equivalent to being in a single state of mind without the ability to have said conscious awareness change. You are not "thinking" but rather in a perpetual single state of "awareness" without change. You aren't really much experiencing anything anymore but rather just a single/few states of mind on repeat. . . are you still you anymore.
I'm not interested here in debating with those who don't understand or appreciate the essence of the natural afterlife. I've "been there, done that" on other forums often enough. The natural afterlife is an illusion that occurs only at death. I believe the article I reference does the best job I can do in explaining it, but the article needs to been read closely with an open mind. Admittedly, the natural afterlife's timeless and relativistic aspects make it hard to grasp and appreciate. Think about getting someone to accept the existence of a rainbow and to appreciate it when they've never experienced one.
While others can respond to substantivalism and tim wood and others who remain strong believers in (and perhaps wish to cling to) Hypothesis 1, I will only response to "those who ... are at least open to Hypothesis 2" and wish to answer and discuss the questions I pose.
Nevertheless, I have wondered about the idea of distorted time when near death. ( "HIs life passed before his eyes . . ." ) Here is a bit of nonsense I posted a couple of years ago, and it includes speculations about mathematical formulae comparing one's perceptions of intervals of time as one ages. I'll do a simple one later for the near-death interval that somewhat reflects what you describe. That could be tricky since the trend during aging is the other way.
As for the "timeless" notion, that is quite a conjecture. Something to ponder. :cool:
An Elementary Note: Playing with Complex and Distorted Time in C
When one is young ten minutes may seem like an hour, but when one is old one may think ten minutes have passed when, in fact, an hour has. In a perfect world the passage of time would be perceived accurately at all ages. Here is a simple function relating the measured passage of time, t, with the perception of that passage, T, according to age. Lamda is time of death and t=0 is the beginning of life. T=T(t) has meaning in this sense when differentiated: dT is perceived passage and dt, actual passage.
Very near the end of life the curve shoots up dramatically, representing that short period when one feels that conscious time goes on forever, while measured time is minute. This is only an elementary mathematical analogue of the metaphysical ideas in play on the thread.
[math]T(t)=t\left( 2-\frac{t}{\lambda } \right)+\frac{\varepsilon }{\lambda -t}[/math], [math]dT=\left( \frac{2}{\lambda }\left( \lambda -t \right)+\frac{\varepsilon }{{{\left( \lambda -t \right)}^{2}}} \right)\cdot dt[/math]
As to (1). My knowledge of religions is fairly limited, especially any religion that isn't Christian, though I read as much as I can about the religions of the pre-Christian Roman Empire. That said, I speculate that no Christian religion of which I'm aware would accept being frozen, as it were, in a moment, as a satisfactory afterlife. That afterlife would seem too haphazard. Possibly blissful, or as blissful as it may be when nothing takes place; possibly horrifying, all depending on what a person experiences in the moment prior to death. There's no redemption, no salvation, no reward for holiness, no punishment for sin, no judgment. Unless perhaps you accept the concept of grace as purely random, God (as a Christian would likely conceive God) plays no part.
As to (2), I see no benefit resulting to society. Accepting there is a natural afterlife as seems to be described, it strikes me people may become morbidly concerned with trying to arrange to have a pleasant moment before death and avoid an unpleasant one. People wouldn't even have the consolation, so to speak, of non-existence or dissolution. There looms before us a potentially good or potentially bad moment after death that would be unending (though you may not know that while in that moment).
First off, I think you’ve provided a plausible theory but not a proof for it. Until we can “see” or “experience” what death feels like and come back to tell the tale we can’t really know if this is what happens. Maybe death IS like a “lights off”.
1- I don’t think it’s compatible. Most religions describe a chain of events leading to ascension to heaven. That chain can’t happen if you only experience a single moment frozen in time. And since you keep claiming that no further events are experienced after the moment of death then you rule out any forms of reincarnation. I don’t know why you keep claiming that though. Since you’ve already disconnected brain activity from consciousness would it be so weird to claim that your consciousness continues to have experiences? You claim it can have a SINGULAR experience even with a dead brain so why not multiple in succession?
2- I’m not sure they would actually. Because although you call it “natural life after death” there isn’t really much life happening. It’s more like “natural freeze frame after death”
You state "Most religions describe a chain of events leading to ascension to heaven." You need to describe this chain of events more specifically. I know of no such chain, at least in Christianity.
Regarding reincarnation, a quote from the referenced article:
Who or what states that an afterlife must be time perceptive, i.e., filled with happenings, rather than timeless?
A timeless and infinite openness which is the so called "emptiness" of existence that is the nature of reality. Apologies for all the obvious mistakes in my description of such a deep concept.
I have yet to read the article and look forward to any potential comparisons with this Buddhist philosophy.
I don’t know about Christianity either but at least in Islam there is an event where everyone who ever existed is packed into a “room” and judged individually by god and his angels
Quoting Bryon Ehlmann
Well at the start of your paper you said there is an orthodox interpretation which implies that consciousness ceases to exist when the brain stops functioning and another where their functions are separated. You picked the latter view. That’s what I mean by no proof for the theory. You started off of an arbitrary assumption that the second view is the correct one when we can’t know for sure unless we somehow “record” the subjective experience of dying. I commented based on that alone as I haven’t read the rest of the paper
No offense but this just sounds like an attempt not to offend or put off anyone to the theory even though it doesn’t mesh well with other religions at all. “Default afterlife” would imply that based on our beliefs we either get a freeze frame death or we literally ascend to heaven. As if somehow our deeds and beliefs can change the experience of death so drastically from being a timeless singular frame to a perceptive one.
Quoting Bryon Ehlmann
Islam at least. And reincarnation implies that another event happens after death and one is reborn as a result. Both of which shouldn’t be possible by this theory.
Considering the potential infinite nature of existence, unless the arise of everything came from some mysterious godhead pulling all the strings, there seems a reasonable argument that such conditions are available for any suitable aggregate to provide the mechanism for the expression of the consciousness.
AI may be a natural progression of the aggregates for the sustainment of expressible consciousness beyond the narrow constrictions of a biosphere.
We may be the conduit for a much more "immortal" consciousness than our fragile biological state.
It seems futile to speculate that our ID, our soul, or our memories would survive the dissolution of our aggregate reservoir of consciousness being our organic brains and associated sensory organs.
However the open ability of awareness seems to be indispensable to cognition to arise within a material structure, whether organic or inorganic, the key may be the accumulation of the correct aggregate structure.
These aggregates are extremely rare and precious.
Even the most elementary particle or quark like structure must have some awareness to have any interaction with another particle, wave, whatever.
The stream of infinite consciousness may be a bit difficult to divert to an AI.
NOT a ‘concept’. Even if there is such a state - not saying there is! - the ‘mind that entertains concepts’ will never know it. (And that’s mainstream Buddhist doctrine.)
So is this related to the process described in the Bardo Thodol (Tibetan Book of the Dead)? Which also deals primarily with experiencing and/or transcending certain illusions at the moment of death?
I don't have that much experience with academic publishing, and none in this area. If anyone knows more about this - what's the deal here? How common are such journals?
I agree with Wayfarer
As Wayfarer states..
clear light of reality is not a concept.
Clear light is described in Buddhist philosophy. Call it what you like but in the calling it is missed.
So very true.
My initial post extends my apologies for my poor and fragmentary summations on the deep Buddhist philosophy of emptiness and clear light.
The clear light of awareness is not knowable.
From the texts I have studied it appears that beings will experience the clear light awareness briefly in the Bardo of dying between life and life.
Without proper training and meditation the glimpse of the infinite clear light will be quite a confusing and perhaps frightening experience.
Do I know this with certainty. No I do not.
Nothing needs to be "done" as all of existence is within the openness of awareness.
We are already there.
In death our conceptions are stripped away.
Thirty years ago a colleague at the University of St Andrews and I created something similar as a means of communicating new information about certain mathematical topics. For some time we accepted abstracts and research notes, lightly "peer reviewed" or refereed by the two of us. For about ten years we published the journal once a year, supported by our respective institutions and sent free of charge to participants. After I retired the journal was taken over by another colleague at another university as an on-line only format. The journal still exists, but the generation of mathematicians who contributed is depleted to such an extent that its existence is marginal and inconsequential.
These publications may exist as means of communicating material that is fairly speculative, and not suitable for the more rigorous and formal journals - those that print more for popular academic pursuits.
Another journal comes to mind: Foundations of Physics Letters. A bit more sophisticated than the efforts I have described. Nevertheless, even with putative more stringent refereeing some real doozies are printed, like Peter Lynds' article on the nature of time: Peter Lynds and Time
The journal passed away. :cry:
Publishing in a well-accredited refereed journal in math takes more effort by the author to conform to specific requirements, and the refereeing process is usually more rigorous. Also, the topic should somehow fit into the general areas of interest at the time. But this does not preclude questionable refereeing. I have seen this up close.
I know little about journals in the social sciences, but my impression is that levels of rigor may be less. Fake Papers in the Social Sciences
The author can correct me if necessary.
I do not find anything like what I would consider a "proof" of this phenomenon. Having an interest in the nature of time I find the concept intriguing, but nothing beyond rather bizarre philosophical speculation.
As for questions 1) and 2), I don't subscribe to a religious after-death existence, so I'll not comment on a possible correlation. And I don't see any value for society unless the hypothesis becomes a belief and the comforts of a supportive cult emerge.
In my statement regarding the NEC as a default after-life, I'm explicitly now raising the possibility of some supernatural afterlife.
Second, I can't offer "an explanation as to how our beliefs can so drastically change the experience of death." After all, such change would be, admittedly, supernatural!
Third, I agree that an "AFTER-death type of NEAR death experience is a contradiction." I have argued the same with those who believe that the NDE occurs after death. My article assumes it does not (see top of p. 58.) Here, I am just stating that if it does (something I don't believe), such an after-death experience would override the NEC.
Finally, I can't offer such explanation. Again, such overriding would be supernatural and thus a matter of faith.
It seems in reading my article, you sometimes misinterpret what I'm saying and by doing so, jump to some wrong conclusions about what you think I believe. Perhaps my writing is not making clear the subtleties.
It just seems weird to me that you would do that then. It’s like if newton was coming up with the laws of physics then suddenly said “but of course these are the default laws of physics and it is possible we can change them through faith”. Then that sort of puts a whole dent in the argument. Now the theory is just incomplete unless it can explain how our beliefs alter our experience of death/the laws of physics.
Quoting Bryon Ehlmann
Huh. It just seems weird to me to build up a theory off of some crucial premises then in the same paper say “But of course this is compatible with religion because my theory could be wrong though I don’t believe that”. That’s essentially what I’m hearing.
Quoting Bryon Ehlmann
Then that makes the theory INCOMPATIBLE with any form of traditional afterlife. Again sounds to me like you’re saying “My theory is not incompatible with religious views because my theory could be wrong or incomplete”
Newton's domain was the observable universe, my domain in the article includes the after-life, quite a difference. The after-life is not observable and thus cannot be restricted (via laws) by science. Thus I cannot state in the article that the NEC (possibly a natural afterlife) is indeed the only after-life that is possible. Science does not support this, and I want to make this clear to my readers.
Again, the NEC theory assumes:
So, essentially what the NEC theory claims (and can only claim) is that IF no supernatural afterlife follows death, then you will never know that your last experience is over. Moreover, the theory can claim this scientifically only because the NEC (possibly a natural afterlife) takes place before death and nothing happens at death (known to science) that will change your "never knowing"--i.e., the NEC is a lifetime phenomenon, a psychological illusion, that happens in this material universe. Bluntly speaking, what happens after death, science still cannot answer and still cannot rule out some faith-based, heaven, hell, or reincarnation.
This seems interesting. Can you dumb this down for me a bit? Im not exactly a math person. Do you actually believe that time perception slows down seemingly infinitely just before death or is this is just interesting speculation? With regards to your post about time perception distorting near death.
This makes sense.
To extrapolate this phenomenon when one falls asleep, or goes under general anesthesia, into going into death, that is, detachment from the physical world, I find unsupported in my mind, in my speculative creative thougths. But the article may say something deep that proves that the extrapolation is valid.
Please, @Bryon Ehlman, could you say in a sentence or paragraph or two what it actually is that logically enables you to claim a similar perception-consciousness structure at death as at falling asleep?
I can't give you a critical response that is worthy of reading until such time as I find the answer to this. And unfortunately my ability to read is not so vast as to read through 26 pages in order to find a specific answer to this very specfic quesiton.
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Assuming that after the life comes a state similar to being asleep or under general anesthesia, would indicate to me that in that state there is no perception, no thought, no consiousness, IF we take the example of general anesthesia (GA) as the state similar or same as the state after the life. The article rightfully mentioned that under GA the person has no memory of being in it, no perception of being in it, no conscious awareness being in it. So in a way that is how most people imagine death. Absolute nothingness for the consciousness, since either it does no longer exist, or else it goes -- accroding to your claim -- into a timeless perceptionless existence.
I ask you: if there is no difference between how some imagine death, and how we experience anesthesia, then what is the significance of the life after life? I believe your thesis is that we go into the same or similar state, as time stops, experience stops, and consciousness stops. How is it different from consciousness getting expired? This is another thing I need to know, and am too occupied otherwise to read through the article in search for its answer.
If there is no difference between loss of consciousness and an expired consciuosness for the person whose consciousness is lost or expired, then how can you or anyone else claim that it's this way or that way? Furthermore, I find it curious, until you show me otherwise, barring the reading of the entire article, that you find it so obviously true that the experience of the consciiousness IS so-and-so and NOT such-and-such (I mean, different from so-and-so, so to speak). Without any evidence reported of state of consciousness after death, any and all theories are equally suspect, and on the same level of acceptability as every other. To make a point, which I think you are making, that after the life something is definitiely so, you need more evidence than the other theories, and I am not sure if you do supply that evidence.
So it is even more important for me to know on what ground you think it's valid to claim that the experience of the conscious after the death is the same as in GA, because you need to show two things now: 1. The logical inevitabiltiy that after the life experience and GA are equivalent or nearly so; and 2. The evidence you need to supply why we should rather believe this than any other theory of consciousness as it presents after death.
Not sure how familiar you are with Internet forums. Very few forum users will read academic articles linked to on other platforms, especially when those platforms are not very adept at presenting text in an easily read form, which with academia is usually the case.
You'd probably have better luck at achieving engagement on forums by breaking your thesis down in to more bite size pieces and then summarizing the key propositions one at a time here on the forum.
This theory has no "evidence" for this theory in the sense that there is any reason to believe it over any other theory or any empirical evidence verifying it. It has proof in the form of logical reasoning, though I don't find it to be particularly convincing reasoning. It's an interesting hypothesis but not much more than that. See jgill's post above.
(Kidding! In reality I sleep for 10-20 seconds, and in my sleep I perceive it as having slept for 5-10 minutes. Precise timing is hard to establish, as I don't carry a watch in my dreams. I am talking pure impressions, that is, how it "feels".)
I don't find it curious, as I have no personal evidence. I've almost died several times in my life, and in one such instances I passed out due to lack of oxygen in my brain and I came back some time later (period uncertain, as I had no perception of time when I was passed out.) Despite these experiences and this passing-out experience, I don't think I have ever had a near-death experience. So I have no data to rely on, in lack of evidence, to say whether time stretches or shrinks as perceived when near death.
On the other hand, perhaps I WAS near death and I experienced neither stretching nor shinkage, so there is that too.
Maybe so. I haven't looked at his article in a long time. Perhaps I extrapolated an infinitesimal time period from what he said since it makes a little more sense to me.
Time flies as you age . . .