The Impact of the Natural Afterlife on Religion and Society

Discuss philosophical questions regarding theism (and atheism), and discuss religion as it relates to philosophy. This includes any philosophical discussions that happen to be about god, gods, or a 'higher power' or the belief of them. This also generally includes philosophical topics about organized or ritualistic mysticism or about organized, common or ritualistic beliefs in the existence of supernatural phenomenon.
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Krisaaaaeeeeeeee
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Re: The Impact of the Natural Afterlife on Religion and Society

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BigQuestioner wrote: November 28th, 2020, 11:07 am How nice to get feedback, even a rebuttal, on my theory from someone who shows they have read the NEC article and have understood the theory. I do have a rebuttal to this rebuttal. However, before I give it on this forum, I would like to make it first in a specific way to Krisaaaaeeeeeeee. In doing so, I would like to quote from my newest article on the NEC that I am close to completing. This would make my rebuttal easier write and allow for a scholarly discussion wherein I could gain some valuable feedback on my draft. (I do not want to quote from my unpublished article to an anonymous person on a public forum.) I am not allowed to send a private message here. (I tried.) So, to Krisaaaaeeeeeeee: my email address is given in my NEC article. If you are willing, and I hope you are, please email me.
I emailed you. I'm just sending a message here to ensure that you see my email as I assume your email inbox is constantly flooded with random crap. I know mine is, and I'm not a philosopher with several peer-reviewed articles in some scientific journals, so I assume yours is even worse than mine.
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BigQuestioner
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Re: The Impact of the Natural Afterlife on Religion and Society

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Krisaaaaeeeeeeee wrote: November 27th, 2020, 5:19 pm ...
So what's my argument against the theory? Easy. A lack of awareness a dream or NDE has ended just does not imply continued awareness or experience of the last dream image. Unawareness does not require awareness of nothing as Bryon seems to think. When we die and our awareness of anything ends, nothing ever changes our awareness that we are in "heaven," sure, but so what? Awareness is SECONDARY to, a BYPRODUCT of consciousness and experience. Not the other way around. If consciousness and experience end, so does awareness. Awareness doesn't remain stuck in our final moment, it simply ends. Awareness is irrelevant to consciousness and experience's end, as it happens BECAUSE OF the other two, and ends with them. We observe this every single night, when we go to sleep. When we fall asleep, we cease to be aware, so nothing ever changes our awareness of being in our bed, lying awake. Regardless, sleeping isn't experienced as an instant jump from your final awake moment before you fall asleep to your first waking moment in the morning. We might not experience 8 hours of nothingness, but we experience a sort of gap, we know there was something in-between, and we experienced a sort of "darkness" in-between sleeping and waking. Why? Because awareness is irrelevant to continued experience or consciousness! ... Further proof of my claim that a lack of awareness changing is unimportant is the accounts of people who have temporarily clinically died to cardiac arrest, and had no NDE. ...
Here's an analogy which might help: You are playing a video game on some videogame console, let's say Super Mario Bros. on the NES. You hit the pause button, and the game freezes. Videogames run in frames which can be seen as parallel to perceptive moments for the sake of this analogy. Now, the videogame program still exists, but no new moments are being made, thus it freezes in time. ...
You begin “A lack of awareness a dream or NDE has ended just does not imply continued awareness or experience of the last dream image.” The key word here is “continued.” The NEC does not assume any “awareness or experience of” one’s last conscious moment (dream, NDE, or awake) continues after death. It does not! Not in reality. It only seems to continue within the frame of reference of the dying person.

You go on to state “If consciousness and experience end, so does awareness." True. After the last conscious moment, the dying person, is (and can be) aware of nothing new! (That is, unless some supernatural consciousness emerges.)

You go on to state “If consciousness and experience end, so does awareness.” Again true! Ah, but then you state “Awareness doesn't remain stuck in our final moment, it simply ends.” Remember the NEC is timeless (delta t = 0) and relativistic (i.e., it must be seen from the perspective of the dying person). At a point in time something was happening and the dying person was aware it was happening. Not only that, but the dying person was, at that point in time, aware that they were aware that it was happening, i.e., self-awareness. What is going to ever change that? You can only be aware of what you perceive in your discrete conscious moments. Now you must answer the two questions posed in the NEC Theory article, framed as follows:
Simply put, your NEC is you believing you are experiencing all that is within this moment and never knowing otherwise. If one still protests “But you can’t believe you’re experiencing anything because you’re dead,” one must answer two questions: “When did you stop believing?” and “Cognitively, precisely what made you do so?” with a big emphasis on “you,” the dying person.
So, what made the dying person aware that their last experience had ended?

Then you state the following, into which I insert my comments:
When we fall asleep, we cease to be aware, so nothing ever changes our awareness of being in our bed, lying awake [My emphasis here because this is true! This is analogous to the NEC. You’ve got it!]. Regardless, sleeping isn't experienced as an instant jump from your final awake moment before you fall asleep to your first waking moment in the morning. [It sure is if you don’t dream and remain dreamlessly asleep.] We might not experience 8 hours of nothingness [Yes we do if dreamless, but more precisely, we encounter timelessness], but we experience a sort of gap [Yes, however we’re not really experiencing anything.], we know there was something in-between [No we don’t! Not until we wake up.], and we experienced a sort of "darkness" in-between sleeping and waking [We most certainly do not! If we did, then we would be experiencing a thing (the darkness) and thus not nothingness.].
The remainder of your argument adds nothing new. Your discussion of the “accounts of people who have temporarily clinically died to cardiac arrest,” does not because 1) these people did not die, i.e., did not attain brain death, 2) your description mimics that above having some of the same problems, and 3) your statement that "these experiences have been frequently explicitly stated [as] to NOT have been a gap in memory or a jump from their last conscious moment to the next" flies in the face of cognitive science. If not such a gap, what was it? (Answer: It was a timelessness gap as perceptively to the dying person no conscious moments occurred.) So, I will skip to addressing your analogy by simply quoting below some text from an upcoming article I am currently writing:
A few people have tried to refute the NEC theory via analogy. They have likened the human mind to a video projector, TV, computer, or computer program and essentially claimed that like the mind, once the device or program crashes, either by malfunction or loss of power, it loses all functionality and its final state, both of which can only be restored if and when it comes back to life and its functionally is restored. These are false analogies. The problem is that these devices and the program are not like the human mind in two very important aspects. First, they are not self-aware. They have no knowledge or awareness of that which they are aware, i.e., their current state. Thus, with failure they are not left with the illusionary knowledge, or belief, that they are still experiencing their final state like a dying person is left in the illusionary state that they are still experiencing their last conscious moment. For example, if a program is generating the next digit of ℼ, it does not know it is doing such and thus when it fails it does not believe it is still doing such. Also, a device or program lacks the feelings and emotions, e.g., pain and love, that are present in the human mind and likely stem in part from self-awareness.
A valid analogy would essentially involve imagining that the computer program runs in an OS environment having an indestructible storage media that is internal and private to the program and eternally stores data on the program’s present state, the metadata, and some more data (i.e., a "self-awareness") about of the task (i.e., experience) that is ongoing. Then when the program dies, the “self-awareness” of the present state remains forever as it can never be destroyed--i.e., overwritten by another change in state (i.e., conscious moment). I quote awareness because it still really doesn't match human self-awareness.
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BigQuestioner
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Re: The Impact of the Natural Afterlife on Religion and Society

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I posted the questions regarding the impact of the natural afterlife to get some feedback for an upcoming article I had planned to write. I have now written it and in it answered the questions I posed. A preprint copy of my article, Death’s New Reality: Challenging Orthodoxy and Dealing With Our End-of-Life Illusion of Immortality, can now be accessed on ResearchGate.
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