TVCL
32
↪Frank Apisa That is a redundant observation. What was addressed from the first paragraph of the OP is that the argument is addressed to those who currently regard an afterlife as impossible or, at least, do not recognise the possibility. — TVCL
Unless a thing is established as impossible...IT IS POSSIBLE. — Frank Apisa
TVCL
33
↪Frank Apisa
Unless a thing is established as impossible...IT IS POSSIBLE.
— Frank Apisa
I'm not contending this. I am contending the relevance to this post and it is irrelevant. It does not, by itself, demonstrate that an afterlife is possible by definition. Some do regard an afterlife as impossible.
Even if an afterlife were defined as something which is possible or has not been established as impossible, your observation would be tautological: "an afterlife must be possible because it is not impossible" the question would remain: "how do you know?" — TVCL
↪ChatteringMonkey
That's a fair contention.
Of course, the wedge that we could drive here is to appeal to the "hard question of consciousness". If consciousness was proven to be tethered to biology, there would be a way to prove that consciousness comes to an end at the point of biological death. However, we seem unable to demonstrate the exact connection between biology and consciousness and where, exactly, one is tethered to the other.
What are your thoughts on this? — TVCL
ANYTHING that is not established as impossible...is possible.
You do not have to prove it. By definition, it is. — Frank Apisa
we could still posit that life possibly carries on after death — TVCL
Which is why I would put my money on consciousness arising out of and ending with our biological life. — ChatteringMonkey
I'm conceiving of life as conscious awareness, in the sense that a subject can only know that it is "alive" if it has conscious awareness which may be related to biological life, but not the same as if. Consider for example how you and I, for example, were living organisms in-utero but life as we know it did not begin until some time after birth.
Admittedly, this isn't an exact definition, but life as conscious awareness is used in contrast the conception of non-life in which many commonly presume that there will non-consciousness after death. Admittedly, even in biological life we are at time consciousness and then non-conscious but what I am arguing against is that this non-consciousness will be final at the point of biological death and that conscious awareness will not occur again afterwards.
Does that make sense? That might have been a bit messy. — TVCL
Respectfully, I'm not sure whether the position requires an assumption of panpsychism and we may be speaking at odds if two definitions of life are being conflated.
The biological definition of life accounts for biological process, but says nothing about whether life is present for the subject. For example, if a fly is biologically alive but is devoid of consciousness, in what sense could the fly regard itself as alive? Or, another way to put it is that if you or I were biologically alive, but our consciousness came to a final end, in what sense would you or I, as subjects, know that we are alive? This is why we can remove consciousness from the definition of biological life but, when we do so, we are merely describing a process and an organism becomes just as "alive" in some sense as an engine.
Moreover, panpsychism posits that mind is more fundamental than matter to the extent that it permeates the entire universe. Admittedly, the OP leaves that possibility open but it does not appear to be an assumption that is required for the OP. It could well be the case - as you hold - that matter is more fundamental and that conscious life must arise from biological life. The case being made is simply that this is an open question and we cannot presume that - say - conscious life will come to a Final End once our biological life does. — TVCL
but it isn't clear to me why you wouldn't just call 'life as awareness', consciousness. Why the need for an additional concept for life when we already have a word for essentially the same thing? — ChatteringMonkey
as far as we know, consciousness only occurs in biological life. — ChatteringMonkey
This is where we might be tripping over one-another because this is essentially what I'm trying to say. But you have my apologies if I've not made my writing or intentions clear enough. I'm using the definition of life as consciousness. The idea behind using "life after death" in the OP is simply because when I hear people commonly refer to life after death, they do not imply that their biological life continues after death but that there will be a continuation of their 'mind' or their 'soul' at some point, even if this requires a new body. In brief - when they say that there will be "life after death" they imply that conscious awareness will occur again at some point after their current, biological life has come to an end. Hopefully this explains the rationale for my use of terms. — TVCL
might not be what it seems. We may not, in fact, strictly know that consciousness either occurs in biological life or only occurs in biological life. We presume that it does because we see physical behaviours that we assume are connected to consciousness, but we lack a scientific way of getting a metric for measuring the subjective experience of what it is "like" for a subject to be conscious. Without which, we may be unable to demonstrate where consciousness does or does not occur. — TVCL
but isn't that essentially a religious rationale then, — ChatteringMonkey
If you mean by "strictly know", knowing with absolute certainty, then yes we do not know... but I don't think that is a standard science or I should necessarily aim for, as it probably is an impossible standard to attain. — ChatteringMonkey
I am not religious, but I am also not an Atheist. So, I'm not prejudiced against the idea of life after death. To the contrary, as a child, I was taught to bank on an afterlife, despite the paucity of evidence outside the Bible. But that "karmic" reward was contingent, and making the wrong choice would be horrible beyond imagination. Yet, many semi-religious afterlife proponents discount the possibility of eternal punishment, when they imagine a do-over in a new Body, or as a bodyless Soul. When we are imagining future possibilities though, it would be unreasonable not to take into account the equally important negative prospects.I would contend that all of us, whether we are religious or not, can know at least two things about death:
First, we know what it can be like to not be alive (which is the state we were in before we were born) and;
Second, we know what it can be like to not be dead (which is the state that we are in now). — TVCL
ANYTHING that is not established as impossible...is possible. — Frank Apisa
By changing the meaning of the terms... — creativesoul
No... not necessarily. Although, it may depend on how broadly we define "religion". The case that I was/am trying to make is that one need not appeal to a given religion such as Hinduism or Christianity in order to accept the logic of the OP. The idea would be that one need not have faith in a given religion to recognise the possibility of life after death. If the logic of the OP works, one might have to posit the existence of a 'soul' to explain the possibility, but I'm not sure if that alone makes it religious. — TVCL
That's fair enough, but that isn't quite the argument. The argument is not that we cannot know about subjective consciousness with absolute certainty, it's that we might not have any knowledge of it at all outside of our own direct, personal experience of consciousness. In that regard, it is unlike other scientific conclusions that we make based on good but incomplete data.
Consider the matter in this way:
Let's say that you put a man in a machine that maps his body down to the atom. Now, you stab the man in the hand, exciting the signals there that go up to the brain. Now, let's say that you track this signal minutely from the nerves in the hand, through the body, to the neurons in the brain... the question is: at what point could you say that you have observed the conscious, subjective experience of "pain" and have not simply tracked an biological-electrical process? — TVCL
Banno
9k
ANYTHING that is not established as impossible...is possible.
— Frank Apisa
That's wrong. There may be impossibilities that have not been established. — Banno
Unless a thing is established as impossible...IT IS POSSIBLE. — Frank Apisa
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