Consciousness and death

[MRKVL]

Hi there everyone,

I'm going to make the introduction short because I realize there is quite a long read a head of you.
This topic is about death and consciousness. We all know that we will die one day but what happens after death is the big question.
A couple of years ago I discovered a hypothesis which honestly blew my mind and it claims there is an afterlife. Now mind you this theory is purely based on logical deduction and is not at all comparable to (Abrahamic) religions and there (illogical) version of the afterlife.

I'm not the only one that discovered the theory as I quickly learned. Robert Lanza, a stem cell scientist came to the same conclusion and even wrote a book about it called biocentrism.

To give this read a bit more credibility I want to give some positive critiques on the book by other scientists:

“Like “A Brief History of Time” it is indeed stimulating and brings biology into the whole. Any short statement does not do justice to such a scholarly work.” —E. Donnall Thomas, 1990 Nobel Prize winner in Physiology and Medicine

“It’s a masterpiece — truly a magnificent essay. Bob Lanza is to be congratulated for a fresh and highly erudite look at the question of how perception and consciousness shape reality and common experience.” - Michael Lysaght, Professor of Medical Science and Engineering, Brown University and Director of Brown’s Center for Biomedical Engineering

“So what Lanza says in this book is not new. Then why does Robert have to say it at all? It is because we, the physicists, do not say it—or if we do say it, we only whisper it, and in private—furiously blushing as we mouth the words. True, yes; politically correct, hell no!’” —Richard Conn Henry, Professor of Physics and Astronomy, Johns Hopkins University

There are many other positive commentaries, but as I said before and don't want to waste your time.
You could read Biocentrism, which I highly support. Or you could read my own explanation of the theory below.


At regular points I will ask questions about thought experiments. The questions can mostly simply be answered by "I think so" or "I don't think so". Extra commentary is of course welcome.


The explanation:

Teleportation:
If we teleport a human, will the same ‘person’ experience the conscious experiences before and after teleportation?

Let’s say we have Bob, Bob is afraid to take a teleport but is forced to. He will travel from earth to Mars. When Bob steps out of the teleport on Mars the first thing he thinks is “Thank God it worked”. However a minute or so later he realizes that it might not have worked, and that he in fact just got ‘born’ a minute ago. He seems to remember his childhood memories, and remembers stepping into the teleport on earth, and the next thing he knew he as right there on Mars. But did ‘he’ actually experience that childhood? Was it ‘he’ who stepped into the teleport? Or was that simply somebody else?

Physicist Michio Kaku addressed this topic on the youtube channel Big Think:
“So it raises a question: Are we nothing but information? Is the soul, the essence of who we are nothing but information? Well I’m a physicist, we don’t know the answer to that.”

Question 1: When we teleport a human - by destroying there body, and recreating it exactly the same on a different spot - are will still talking about the same person? Are the conscious experiences experienced by the same experiencer?


Birth:

An American build conscious robot is in a philosophical mood and thinks about the ‘chance’ of being born. For example, what if the scientist who created him had made a different robot? Would he have experienced those experiences? Surely not. But what if they made him a tiny bit different? Like 0.000001 percent. Would it be ‘him’ still? Would ‘he’ experience those experiences?

Question 2: If the sperm or egg cell which created you was 0.0001 percent different, would it still be you? Would that person been you? Or somebody else?

Buttertfly:

In case you didn't know, in the cocoon a caterpillar doesn't "grow wings onto its body", but rather dissolves his body into a much of cells which then create the butterfly.

Question 3: Do you think the caterpillar and the butterfly are the same 'person'. In other words, do you think that the experiences are experienced by the same experiencer?

The following quote is from neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris:

“I’m not arguing that consciousness is a reality beyond science or beyond the brain or that it floats free from the brain at death. I’m not making any spooky claims about it’s metaphysics. What I am saying however is that the self is an illusion. The sense of being an ego an ‘I’, a thinker of thoughts in addition to the thoughts, an experiencer in addition to the experience. The sense that we all have of riding around inside our heads as a kind of passenger in the vehicle of the body.

Now that sense of being a subject, a locus of consciousness inside the head is an illusion. It makes no neuro-anatomical sense. The is no place in the brain for our ego to be hiding. We know that everything that we experience, our conscious emotions and thoughts and moods and the impulses that initiate behavior all of these things are delivered by a myriad of different processes in the brain that are spread over the whole of the brain. The can be independently erupted. We have a changing system. We are a process and there is not one unitary self that is carried through from one moment to the next unchanging.”

Question 4: Given the previous thought experiments we can conclude that the 'person'/ 'experiencer in addition to the experience is materialistically invisible. In other words, from a material perspective the human body does not contain a material 'self' or 'soul'.

The feeling of the self:

Although we can not see the self. We can logically explain where the feeling of the self comes from:

Information:

‘Bob’ has an experience (A) in which he thinks about what ‘he’ ate yesterday.
(A) Is conscious experience that exists, in it is visual and other information encoded recorded the day before .(A) also knows that the recording of the information was coupled with conscious experience (B). Naturally (A) will think it also experienced (B) and the feeling of ‘self’ between the two emerges.

Question 5: Conscious experiences which share information will naturally have the feeling of a common self although this 'self' does not materialistically exist. Agree or disagree?


The body:

The most likely way for consciousness to be created in a law-based universe is in the form of life. Because of this, conscious experiences that share information are (basically) always found in the same body or evolution thereof. We are therefore inclined to identify with our bodies.

Question 6: Conscious experiences which are found in the same body or evolution thereof will naturally have the feeling of a common self although this 'self' does not materialistically exist. Agree or disagree?


The apartment thought experiment:

I want you to think a while about the following thought experiment:
We have drugs who are capable to regulate to which part of the brain memories are written and or read. We put Bob in the following building: It consists of a central room with a bed, and surrounding the central room are 10 different apartments. Each apartment is different and has different things to do in them.
We will label the apartments with numbers 1,2,3 etc.
Bob will live a day in apartment 1, then goes to sleep in the central room after which he spends a day in apartment 2 and again sleeps in the central room. He does this with all the apartments after which he starts again with apartment 1 and continuous this loop during the experiment.
Depending in which apartment Bob will live in the next day he will be given the correct drug so he can read/write the memories of that specific apartment.

Because of this, when Bob participates with the experiment, he appears to be experience the life of only one apartment. When he lives a day in apartment 1 and goes to sleep, the next thing he knows is that he once again needs to go to apartment 1. When Bob experiences apartment 5, it seems to him that he only experiences apartment 5. When apartment 5 is boring or has bad living condition, he can say it was just bad luck that ‘he’ ended up in apartment 5.

Also when Bob participates with the experiment there isn’t a chance that he is going to die doing it.
It is not that because there could’ve been 11 apartment, there is a 10/11 chance that he will live, and a 1/11 chance that Bob will end up in the nonexistent 11th apartment. In which case ‘he’ would experience absolutely nothing.

We can also expand the experiment:
Bob can communicate with the different apartments via email or sms and we could give Bob from each apartment a different job: Bob from apartment 1 could be a mailman, apartment 2 a cashier, 3 a taxidriver etc.
Each will have different salaries, coworkers and friend. In essence Bob from each apartment will have it’s own life.

Question 7: Each apartment clearly has the feeling of there own 'self' compared to the other apartments. Agree or disagree?

Now here is the big question (question 8 ): What happens when we stop giving a specific drug in the previous experiment? What happens with Bob from apartment 5 when we simply skip his apartment for the rest of the experiment? Will Bob from apartment 5 be 'dead'? Or will he be 'reborn' in a different apartment?.


Like Michio Kaku said; “Is the soul, the essence of who we are only information?”

Thanks for reading. Please answer below what you think.

[Atla]

Hello!

Question 1: When we teleport a human - by destroying there body, and recreating it exactly the same on a different spot - are will still talking about the same person? Are the conscious experiences experienced by the same experiencer?

Not the same person, you kill the first person on Earth, and then use materials to build an identical copy on Mars. More importantly, you aren't even the same person that started reading this sentence.

Question 4: Given the previous thought experiments we can conclude that the 'person'/ 'experiencer in addition to the experience is materialistically invisible. In other words, from a material perspective the human body does not contain a material 'self' or 'soul'.

You seem to have misunderstood Harris, the components of the "ego illusion" are materialistically part of the brain, but what they "seem to be", is, well, an illusion. Sort of how a mirage above a road on a hot day is real in one sense, and unreal in another sense.

Physicist Michio Kaku addressed this topic on the youtube channel Big Think:
“So it raises a question: Are we nothing but information? Is the soul, the essence of who we are nothing but information? Well I’m a physicist, we don’t know the answer to that.”

Like Michio Kaku said; “Is the soul, the essence of who we are only information?”

With all due respect he's plain wrong, information is merely physical information. Information is either matter itself, or human-made abstraction made about matter, however we want to look at it. But there is no matter and information, that's just a reification fallacy with no scientific evidence to back it up. The go-to 21st century pseudoscientific fallacy is to misunderstand the meaning of information (typically that of dimensionless Shannon information), and reify the concept.

[Angelo Cannata]

Given that the perception of ourselves as "I" can be an illusion, why shouldn't be an illusion any other thing as well, especially our ideas about reality, material objects, phisical object? So, what's the point of giving the possibility of an illusion and ignoring that all other reference points can be illusions as well? If we want to discuss about one kind of illusion, we can't ignore that everything can be an illusion. So, the reasoning, the research, cannot be based on assumptions treated as excluded from illusion.

[fionaimmodest]

Last night my family got into this argument and my Aunt and I came up with that your body and mind are like a computer. What happens to a computer that breaks? The hard drive is still still there. It's still useable.
It's kinda an answer but i'd like to see what you guys have to say.

[MRKVL]

Atla

Not the same person, you kill the first person on Earth, and then use materials to build an identical copy on Mars.

What do you mean by that? Is the person that is 'killed' before teleportation now in the void/eternal 'nothingness' (ea dead)?

You aren't even the same person that started reading this sentence

I agree 100% I'm just as much the person that started reading that sentence as I am Albert Einstein. There is absolutely no 'self'.
Do you agree with that or do you think there is more of a connection between me now and me reading that sentence in the past vs me now and Albert Einstein in the past?

[Pattern-chaser]

You aren't even the same person that started reading this sentence.

I agree 100% I'm just as much the person that started reading that sentence as I am Albert Einstein. There is absolutely no 'self'.

That may or may not be the case. But, in this case, I think the reason "you aren't even the same person that started reading this sentence" is change, as in 'the only thing permanent is change'. Having a thought changes the physical chemistry of your brain. In a small way, admittedly, but it changes. And so on.

Cratylus, my hero of Ancient Greece, opined that one can't even step into the same river once....

In Cratylus' eponymous Platonic dialogue, the character of Socrates states Heraclitus' claim that one cannot step twice into the same stream. According to Aristotle, Cratylus went a step beyond his master's doctrine and proclaimed that it cannot even be done once.

[AverageBozo]

MRKVL,

You began above saying that you had come across a logical theory about what happens after death.

You proceeded to say that humans can be disassembled and transported to another apartment or another planet, for example, and reassembled, either exactly or almost exactly.

You are not saying that a human can die and then be reassembled in the afterlife, are you? If that were the case, the theory would be presupposing an afterlife and what happens in it without explaining anything.

If possible, please state the theory directly.

Thanks

[MRKVL]

AverageBozo

We can do whatever experiment or thought exêriment we want, the 'experiencer' in addition to the experimience is at all time invisible. My conclusion is there simply isn't one.

Most people identify with their bodies/brain, I think we are neither of that, we simply are the consciouss experiences. The one our brains create.

My final conclusion is this:
If there is absolutly no experiencer in addation to the experiences, then the different Bobs of each apartment in the apartment thought experiment are just as much experienced by the same 'person' as the different lifes by humans on planet earth.
If there is absolutly no self then I experienced 'your' yesterday just as much as I experienced 'my' yesterday. Just like in the experiment.

Robert Lanza claims in his book that everybody is simply the same person. I believe there is a significant chance that is the case but I'm not sure.
What happens with Bob from apartment 5 when we start skipping his apartment for the rest of the experiment and never give him the correct drugs again?
It could be that although there is no material soul, the self is simply conscious information, and when the information ends a 'self' dies.

[Gertie]

@AverageBozo

We can do whatever experiment or thought exêriment we want, the 'experiencer' in addition to the experimience is at all time invisible. My conclusion is there simply isn't one.

Most people identify with their bodies/brain, I think we are neither of that, we simply are the consciouss experiences. The one our brains create.

My final conclusion is this:
If there is absolutly no experiencer in addation to the experiences, then the different Bobs of each apartment in the apartment thought experiment are just as much experienced by the same 'person' as the different lifes by humans on planet earth.
If there is absolutly no self then I experienced 'your' yesterday just as much as I experienced 'my' yesterday. Just like in the experiment.

Robert Lanza claims in his book that everybody is simply the same person. I believe there is a significant chance that is the case but I'm not sure.
What happens with Bob from apartment 5 when we start skipping his apartment for the rest of the experiment and never give him the correct drugs again?
It could be that although there is no material soul, the self is simply conscious information, and when the information ends a 'self' dies.

Welcome

I'd say that the sense of being an Experiencer Self is real, and manifests in humans as a discrete, first person, unified field of consciousness, correlated with a specific body, located in space and time. But this sense of selfness is itself an aspect of conscious experience. The sense of being an Experiencer, is just another type of experience.


But note too, that a specific sense of selfness is always (as far as we know) attached to a specific body. There is some kind of mind-body correlation which operates in terms of discrete mind-body units. So if my body dies, my sense of self apparently stops, along with all conscious experiential states. The specific experiencing of being Me is correlated with what my specific brain processes are doing at any particular moment.


If that's true, and we bear that in mind when we look at your scenarios, then I wouldn't step into a transporter which destroys this body and duplicates a new one, because my Selfness is correlated with this specific body. So a new person would come into existence with a sense of self correlated with the new duplicated body. This new person might have my personality and memories, because their neural structures have been duplicated, but the Me correlated with the old dead brain processes has died.

And the sense of self which calls himself Bob will be experiencing being Bob according to whatever Bob's brain is doing at any particular moment.


So while we don't understand the nature of mind-body relationship, the evidence we have suggests to me immortality isn't on the cards.

And Kaku is wrong imo, because information doesn't exist independently, it's an abstract concept which describes the stuff which actually exists. And it's the experiential states which actually exist.

[CIN]

Question 1: When we teleport a human - by destroying there body, and recreating it exactly the same on a different spot - are will still talking about the same person? Are the conscious experiences experienced by the same experiencer?

Depends on what consciousness is. Currently, despite a lot of people being sure they know, we actually don't (collectively) know. If I was going to bet on which theory is correct, I would bet that it's some version of physicalism: only the physical exists, and consciousness is an emergent property from brains that reach a certain kind of organisation and complexity. I opt for this mainly because that's the way it looks, but also because in split brain patients the two halves of the brain appear to be linked to two separate consciousnesses.

Based on this assumption, I would say that it's not the same person. The physical entity that entered the teleport is destroyed by the teleport process, so the person that emerges at the other end is not the same, but a copy.

Birth:

Question 2: If the sperm or egg cell which created you was 0.0001 percent different, would it still be you? Would that person been you? Or somebody else?

This is not a philosophical question, it's merely a question about language use. It depends how we decide to use the word 'person'. If we decide that two people have to be 100% identical to be considered the same person, then that slightly different person would not be me; if they don't, then it could be. There is nothing of philosophical interest here.

Question 3: Do you think the caterpillar and the butterfly are the same 'person'. In other words, do you think that the experiences are experienced by the same experiencer?

Same answer as above.

The following quote is from neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris:

“I’m not arguing that consciousness is a reality beyond science or beyond the brain or that it floats free from the brain at death. I’m not making any spooky claims about it’s metaphysics. What I am saying however is that the self is an illusion. The sense of being an ego an ‘I’, a thinker of thoughts in addition to the thoughts, an experiencer in addition to the experience. The sense that we all have of riding around inside our heads as a kind of passenger in the vehicle of the body.

Now that sense of being a subject, a locus of consciousness inside the head is an illusion. It makes no neuro-anatomical sense. The is no place in the brain for our ego to be hiding. We know that everything that we experience, our conscious emotions and thoughts and moods and the impulses that initiate behavior all of these things are delivered by a myriad of different processes in the brain that are spread over the whole of the brain. The can be independently erupted. We have a changing system. We are a process and there is not one unitary self that is carried through from one moment to the next unchanging.”

Harris is confused. For one thing, while it is true that there is no evidence available to an external observer for the existence of an immaterial self, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. For another, an immaterial self would not need a place in the brain to hide, because it would not be spatially placed at all. Ex hypothesi, an immaterial self is not something that can be externally observed, so our failure to detect it from outside is entirely consistent with the hypothesis that such an immaterial self exists. The trouble with people who try to be both scientist and philosopher is that because the two jobs are quite different, they end up doing at least one of them badly.

There has to be 'an experiencer in addition to the experience' because experiences cannot experience themselves. My bet is that the experiencer is the brain.

(A) Is conscious experience that exists, in it is visual and other information encoded recorded the day before .(A) also knows that the recording of the information was coupled with conscious experience (B). Naturally (A) will think it also experienced (B) and the feeling of ‘self’ between the two emerges.

Question 5: Conscious experiences which share information will naturally have the feeling of a common self although this 'self' does not materialistically exist. Agree or disagree?

As I've said, an experience cannot itself experience, so (A) cannot know or think anything.

The body:

The most likely way for consciousness to be created in a law-based universe is in the form of life. Because of this, conscious experiences that share information are (basically) always found in the same body or evolution thereof. We are therefore inclined to identify with our bodies.

Question 6: Conscious experiences which are found in the same body or evolution thereof will naturally have the feeling of a common self although this 'self' does not materialistically exist. Agree or disagree?

Again, I don't think experiences can have feelings. A feeling is an experience, and how can an experience have an experience?