Is there likely to be an afterlife?

Discuss any topics related to metaphysics (the philosophical study of the principles of reality) or epistemology (the philosophical study of knowledge) in this forum.
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Sy Borg
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Re: Is there likely to be an afterlife?

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Terrapin Station wrote: February 17th, 2020, 4:59 pm
Greta wrote: February 17th, 2020, 4:56 pm
Alas, such labels are nonsensical because each presumes to know what they don't.

We do not know yet if everything is scientifically interrogable. Researchers tend to suspect not because of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, physical constraints (eg. how large an atom smasher one can build) and the fact that the universe appears to be a closed system. However, we are obviously far from coming up against limits of possible knowledge.

However, it is perfectly possible that we do not notice certain perspective effects of reality, just as a microbe lacks the capacity to comprehend many aspects of its existence (darn good at finding food and avoiding toxins, though). It is still possible that any attempt to understand the absolutes of reality beyond relativity are hopeless. But we don't know that one way or another either.
Nothing about realism is suggesting that anyone is claiming to know "everything there is to know" about the real (extramental) world, or to know every fact of the real world. It's just saying that we propositionally and/or by-acquaintance know the real world. You could know just one fact and that would qualify.
Let's try it. You know one fact. Some birds have red plumage and some birds have blue plumage. Therefore, we can logically assume that the difference is purely a matter of pigmentation, yes? However, birds cannot produce a blue pigment and the colour is due to reflections from a particular arrangement of proteins in the feathers.

So, sure, we can attend the real world, but we cannot know how deeply the dynamic layers that create this reality go, or the extent to which they overlap and interact. All we can do is explore and see how far we can go. You will still run into the limits defined by Heisenberg and Gödel.

With this particular topic, there are a different angles. One question is how much subjective life is left in the objective three to six minutes of brain oxygen. Some might think this doesn't matter because it doesn't affect the real world. I would argue that, when your real world consists only of your ruined body getting cold on a slab, one's subjective existence is everything. If there is significant compression of thought processes leading to significant progressive time dilation, one might subjectively experience something akin to an eternal afterlife.

The objectively larger issue is that no one knows why qualia exists, why animals experience their lives. Highly complex and flexible behaviours are possible without any qualia at all (check out robotics), yet it's clear that even simple animals like insects experience their lives. The range of insect behaviours can readily be replicated with robotics without the entity feeling any sense of being. Ditto mice and other small mammals. They too very obviously experience their lives.

So we don't know whether qualia is an emergent property of matter in certain configurations, or if qualia is a basic property of matter that is amplified (exponentially) and then shaped by nervous systems. For many years, this question was not even permitted in much the same way as one was not allowed to ask what came before the big bang.

Consider the notion of logical positivists like Dan Dennett that subjective existence doesn't matter, that it's an irrelevance, just an accidental effect that so happens to emerge in certain configurations of matter. It is almost as childishly naive as the Sky Daddy and his coterie of angels. In terms of living a life, dismissing as irrelevant the things that are hardest to understand, makes sense. Black box it and move on. In terms of philosophy, it's a cop out.
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Re: Is there likely to be an afterlife?

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Greta wrote: February 17th, 2020, 7:59 pm So, sure, we can attend the real world
That's the sole difference. Whether we believe we can or not. Idealists say we can not. Epistemological idealists say we can not in knowledge. Ontological idealists say there isn't even a real world to attend (to).
The objectively larger issue is that no one knows why qualia exists, why animals experience their lives.
For that, it was simply evolutionarily selected, and it evolutionarily developed in conjunction with us being a sort of animal that needed a lot of assistance in order to survive to reproduction age. That's relatively unusual. Most animals can survive on their own much quicker, and have far more robust instinctual skills for survival.
yet it's clear that even simple animals like insects experience their lives.
I don't think it's very clear that insects have conscious mental phenomena.
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Re: Is there likely to be an afterlife?

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Terrapin Station wrote: February 17th, 2020, 8:17 pm
Greta wrote: February 17th, 2020, 7:59 pm So, sure, we can attend the real world
That's the sole difference. Whether we believe we can or not. Idealists say we can not. Epistemological idealists say we can not in knowledge. Ontological idealists say there isn't even a real world to attend (to).
The question is whether we are attending the real world as such or only relativistic perspective effects.
Terrapin Station wrote: February 17th, 2020, 8:17 pm
The objectively larger issue is that no one knows why qualia exists, why animals experience their lives.
For that, it was simply evolutionarily selected, and it evolutionarily developed in conjunction with us being a sort of animal that needed a lot of assistance in order to survive to reproduction age. That's relatively unusual. Most animals can survive on their own much quicker, and have far more robust instinctual skills for survival.
I wasn't speaking about humans. How about a frog, with its simple lifestyle? You cannot deny it has qualia, that it experiences its life.

It should be easy enough in the future to replicate a frog's functions with technology (if not already), but would it have qualia? Would the machine experience life something like a fog does? We already have machines operating with far greater complexity than any frog, but we don't expect them to be conscious. So it's not just about complexity.

Next one might figure that it's complexity of a particular kind of system (a living one) that brings about conscious experience. But to what purpose? A frog could conceivably function just fine without qualia, but we don't doubt that they experience their lives.

It was not so long ago that the most credible scientific view was that only humans experience their lives, and all other animals were just biological robots. Since that time, with more knowledge, the bar has lowered and lowered. Insects, too, have been found to almost certainly experience their lives. Does experiencing a life help one to locate someone who has made ten hours straight, turn around, let them hump you, hop away and settle down ambush predation again?

It's quite conceivable that AI will achieve this level of complexity, and that will be the acid test for logical positivist materialists. Simply achieving human behavioural complexity should, if you are right, result in beings at least as sentient as we are.

Unlike most people here (and elsewhere, so it seems), I don't much care one way or the other about the answer. I'm just curious. If consciousness is fundamental, then that is incredibly interesting. If consciousness can be created in AI, then that is also incredibly interesting. Win win.
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Re: Is there likely to be an afterlife?

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Greta wrote:...It was not so long ago that the most credible scientific view was that only humans experience their lives, and all other animals were just biological robots. Since that time, with more knowledge, the bar has lowered and lowered. Insects, too, have been found to almost certainly experience their lives...
I think there is always a problem of arbitrariness whenever we decide to neatly divide the world into two classes. But we can't help ourselves from doing it. We just love binary divisions. In this case the division is between "experiences" and "doesn't experience", but it's often between such things as "conscious" and "non conscious", or "living" and "not living" or "human" and "non human".
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Re: Is there likely to be an afterlife?

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Terrapin Station wrote: February 17th, 2020, 11:43 am
Belindi wrote: February 17th, 2020, 11:36 am It's not that idealists think the world does not exist but that its existence depends upon minds.
It's that if they're ontological idealists. It's not that if they're epistemological idealists.

If they think that the extramental world exists, and we can know that it exists (either propositionally or by acquaintance or both), but that it's somehow causally-"bloomed" by minds (so that minds exist first as whatevers, then they causally produce an extramental world, which we can know propositionally and/or by acquaintance) then they'd actually be realists with a very unusual universal phylogeny.
But idealism is a theory of existence, not a theory of how we might know anything.

Certainly we know, all of us, the external world exists. The philosophical idealist(sometimes called immaterialist in America) claims the external world is external because it depends upon minds for its existence. That it depends upon minds for its existence does not mean the external world does not exist.
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Re: Is there likely to be an afterlife?

Post by Belindi »

Steve3007 wrote: February 18th, 2020, 5:13 am
Greta wrote:...It was not so long ago that the most credible scientific view was that only humans experience their lives, and all other animals were just biological robots. Since that time, with more knowledge, the bar has lowered and lowered. Insects, too, have been found to almost certainly experience their lives...
I think there is always a problem of arbitrariness whenever we decide to neatly divide the world into two classes. But we can't help ourselves from doing it. We just love binary divisions. In this case the division is between "experiences" and "doesn't experience", but it's often between such things as "conscious" and "non conscious", or "living" and "not living" or "human" and "non human".
Might the problem of arbitrariness affect what we call "damaged" minds and "not damaged" minds? In the context of 'altered' mental states such as hallucinations, peak experiences, NDEs, liminal experiences, premenstrual tensions, bipolar 'disorder', or autism all or any of those might have their uses within the frame of evolutionary changes by natural selection.

My personal criterion for a disorder and that of many other medically trained people is :a clinical disorder is that which causes a lot of pain/discomfort and or death. So according to that criterion recreational drug addiction would not be a disorder but for dramatically - reduced choices and earlier death.
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Re: Is there likely to be an afterlife?

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Belindi wrote:Might the problem of arbitrariness affect what we call "damaged" minds and "not damaged" minds? In the context of 'altered' mental states such as hallucinations, peak experiences, NDEs, liminal experiences, premenstrual tensions, bipolar 'disorder', or autism all or any of those might have their uses within the frame of evolutionary changes by natural selection.
Yes, in fact I was going to add the binary division on a spectrum condition like autism, but posted before adding it. It relates well to a discussion in another topic which I haven't yet got round to continuing.
My personal criterion for a disorder and that of many other medically trained people is :a clinical disorder is that which causes a lot of pain/discomfort and or death. So according to that criterion recreational drug addiction would not be a disorder but for dramatically - reduced choices and earlier death.
Fair enough. I'm not medically trained, but I presume some would disagree with that criterion? And it also, of course, leads to the question of what constitutes "a lot" of pain/comfort. Although I guess it's more clear cut with death!
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Re: Is there likely to be an afterlife?

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Belindi wrote: February 18th, 2020, 5:40 am But idealism is a theory of existence, not a theory of how we might know anything.
There is both ontological and epistemological idealism and realism. (As I explained above.)
Certainly we know, all of us, the external world exists.
That would make no one an idealist. But that's not the case. There are plenty of idealists around. They believe either that we can't know-by-acquaintance, that we can't propositionally know, or simply that there is NOT an external world.
The philosophical idealist(sometimes called immaterialist in America) claims the external world is external because it depends upon minds for its existence. That it depends upon minds for its existence does not mean the external world does not exist.
As I just explained, what you're describing would not be an idealist. That person would be a realist. Why? Because they both believe that there IS an external/extramental world, and they believe they can know the external/extramental world. It's just that that person would have an unusual ontology, which they'd need to explain (due to its unusualness), where they're saying something like "Minds exist first, and they causally produce the external world." (They could be saying something other than that, but they'd need to explain.)
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Re: Is there likely to be an afterlife?

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Man is nothing more than a smart ape. We are just the same as any chimp, horse, dog, etc. on earth. We all have eyes, a brain and a spinal column, we run on food, water, blood, oxygen, we eat, digest, we are all animals. You are either alive, with experiences, or you are not. All of your experiences in life, happen because you have a living brain and body. Any belief that you will experience anything, without a living brain, is fantasy.
Man created the concept of an afterlife, after he developed the theory of God. God was a great way for early man to explain everything. Think of earth, 2 million years ago, man was not much more than a wild animal, there were no laws, everything was about survival. Man needed food, shelter,water, and to protect his family, those were his main concerns. Over time, he learned how to make better shelters, better weapons, to make colthes and shoes. But when Man learned to make and use fire - that was the big one. Fire was so useful, for warmth, protection, eating cooked meat. It was then, when man could relax, feeling safe and warm, with a full belly, that he began to wonder about life, and his own existence.
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Re: Is there likely to be an afterlife?

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gater wrote: February 18th, 2020, 11:31 pm Man created the concept of an afterlife, after he developed the theory of God. God was a great way for early man to explain everything.
This is pretty much saying that the existence of any reasonably plausible anthropological explanation for religion debunks any reason for one to see this from a both/and perspective.
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Re: Is there likely to be an afterlife?

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Terrapin, I understand your explanation of idealism, but I hold it is incorrect. We will have to leave this now and agree to differ.
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Re: Is there likely to be an afterlife?

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Belindi wrote: February 19th, 2020, 6:51 am Terrapin, I understand your explanation of idealism, but I hold it is incorrect. We will have to leave this now and agree to differ.
Any source for holding it to be incorrect per conventions of using the term in a philosophical context?
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Re: Is there likely to be an afterlife?

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Papus79 wrote: February 18th, 2020, 11:51 pm
gater wrote: February 18th, 2020, 11:31 pm Man created the concept of an afterlife, after he developed the theory of God. God was a great way for early man to explain everything.
This is pretty much saying that the existence of any reasonably plausible anthropological explanation for religion debunks any reason for one to see this from a both/and perspective.
Umm, could you state that again in English? thanks :)
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Re: Is there likely to be an afterlife?

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gater wrote: February 19th, 2020, 4:35 pm
Papus79 wrote: February 18th, 2020, 11:51 pm
This is pretty much saying that the existence of any reasonably plausible anthropological explanation for religion debunks any reason for one to see this from a both/and perspective.
Umm, could you state that again in English? thanks :)
Are you a non-native English speaker? If so I can try figuring out which words or metaphors might be too far off your native structure.

Otherwise if English is your primary language then no, we're probably better off just not talking.
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Re: Is there likely to be an afterlife?

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Papus79 wrote: February 19th, 2020, 6:46 pm
gater wrote: February 19th, 2020, 4:35 pm
Umm, could you state that again in English? thanks :)
Are you a non-native English speaker? If so I can try figuring out which words or metaphors might be too far off your native structure.

Otherwise if English is your primary language then no, we're probably better off just not talking.
lol - of course i speak english, but i have no clue what you said. Communication should be simple, your statement seems like you purposely tried make it sound confusing. If you have a statement, or questions, I'll listen or answer your question.
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