As well as the concept of 'disembodied life', @Saphsin also raises the prospect of what we might call newly-embodied life. A believer in afterlife doesn't have to believe in disembodied consciousness, they might conceivably believe that upon death, all your consciousness gets 'uploaded' to the matrix and placed in a new body for you in your 'afterlife'. Of course for your consciousness to be able to do this it needs to be able to be separated from your body, but one can imagine some logically possible system where consciousness needs a body to function, but can still be transferred without a body, in the same way that software needs an operating system to be executable, but the code can still be copied. Is this a completely scientifically illiterate stretch? Probably, but my very boring point is merely that such a state of affairs is logically possible.

That's functionalism. I've speculated on a (plausible?) technological 'continuance post mortem' scenario which may interest you.

I pointed out that the continuation of some form of life for the individual after the individual's body has died is not logically contradictory or incoherent, however implausible you might think it is. — Janus

The 'death of an individual's body' is the end of life. That's just how words work, and no amount of squiggling with psuedo-distinctions changes that.

But as for afterlife, you’re otherwise proposing an unknown concept that you just attribute life to. We don’t know how to make sense of a disembodied life because we never observed such a thing, unlike molecular constructions, the problem is not just lack of data. — Saphsin

Exactly. It's not even that we have never observed such a thing: we don't even know what it would mean to observe such a thing. So you're right: it's not a lack of data. We don't even know what data would correspond to a concept like 'the afterlife', because there is no coherency to to the very idea of it. It's a grammar mistake, nothing more.

It's only incoherent if you conceive of life as inseparably linked to the body, to physicality. This does seem a most plausible assumption, but it remains an assumption. — Janus

It's not an 'assumption', it's how words work. What would a disembodied life mean? We know life to roughly be a metabolic process that reproduces itself, or that at least has reproductive ability at a phylogenic level. What corresponding kind of 'content' can you give to the idea of 'disembodied life'? Or are you, like all the pseduo-philosohical charlatans, just playing with words? Just throwing words together because grammar allows you and then 'speculating' about it isn't philosophy. It's infantile.

But what if your body goes somewhere else when you die? Maybe the dead body is not your body in the sense that your new body is. Reincarnation happens when all the cells of your body are new. A resurrected body is the essence of your body as it passes through life and is in a new place. Think of Elijah on a chariot

A believer in afterlife doesn't have to believe in disembodied consciousness, they might conceivably believe that upon death, all your consciousness gets 'uploaded' to the matrix and placed in a new body for you in your 'afterlife'. Of course for your consciousness to be able to do this it needs to be able to be separated from your body, but one can imagine some logically possible system where consciousness needs a body to function, but can still be transferred without a body, in the same way that software needs an operating system to be executable, but the code can still be copied. Is this a completely scientifically illiterate stretch? — coolazice

Cool! Ok, at least this formulation actually has some conceiveable content rather than just mashing words together to see how they stick. But here the underconceptualized term is 'consciousness'. Is consciosuness the kind of thing that can be reified like this? Because as far as we know, consciousness is consciousness-of: it is a product of a process of self-relation that enables situating oneself in an environment so as to act within it. Or as certain phenomenologists put it: the 'I' of conscioussness is an 'I can... x' (within a differentiated enviornment with more or less stable invariants). It's not a 'thing'. What would it mean to 'upload' something like this? And even if my rough characterization is contestable - it toally is - what is the alternate schema? What concept of consciousness is at play? How how to 'connect' it's 'uploadability' with it's function as we know it now in currently existing bodies/lives/etc?

In any case my point about the necessity of conceptualization before asking for evidence stands: we need to know what we are talking about before we can admit 'evidence' for... well, what exactly?

But what if your body goes somewhere else when you die? Maybe the dead body is not your body in the sense that your new body is. Reincarnation happens when all the cells of your body are new. A resurrected body is the essence of your body as it passes through life and is in a new place. Think of Elijah on a chariot — Gregory

This does not deserve a serious response.

:lol: :up:

The ancients in both the East and West, thought in terms of disembodied life, or rather "subtle body" life after death. Of course that is considered by scientifically literate moderns to be implausible, but that does not entail that it is logically impossible, incoherent or contradictory like a square circle is. That's the only point Ive been making, and you've said nothing to refute it.

And I'm sure plenty of people have thought - through whatever linguistic shuffling - that square circles are possible on the basis of subtle circles and subtle squares or some nonsense.

Or are you, like all the pseduo-philosohical charlatans, just playing with words? Just throwing words together because grammar allows you and then 'speculating' about it isn't philosophy. It's infantile. — StreetlightX

That's it; when all else fails, resort to insult and mischaracterization of your interlocutor; it does wonders for your credibility!

And I'm sure plenty of people have thought - through whatever linguistic shuffling - that square circles are possible on the basis of subtle circles and subtle squares or some nonsense. — StreetlightX

LOL, that's arrant nonsense: you're clutching at straws now.

LOL, that's arrant nonsense: you're clutching at straws now. — Janus

You literally brought up 'subtle bodies' - the nonsense and the straws were yours to begin with - I just happened to extend its application. The fact that you find the one utterly ridiclious - as it is - and not the other - as it also is - speaks volumes about the arbitrariness of selection involved.

That's it; when all else fails, resort to insult and mischaracterization of your interlocutor — Janus

In what way have I mischaractered you? All you've done is to avoid questions and insist, without any further qualification, that 'afterlives' make total sense - by fiat alone.

Well it's much easier to see that squared circles are incoherent, you just try to draw it on the ground and it makes no sense. We didn't understand life (and still not fully) for over 2000 years after the Ancients. The fact that they shuffled some concepts together into a narrative doesn't make it coherent in light of modern understanding, even if it's less obviously so. People can think their concepts are coherent while it not being so when applied to reality. As for why disembodied life is incoherent, arguments have been offered why in the last couple of pages, it’s inherent in its description, at least the concept of life that we know of and found evidence for. You’re referring to something else otherwise.

A narrative about how history has changed our understanding of things does not equate to any idea which is not consonant with that understanding being a logical contradiction. Such an idea may not cohere with modern scientific understanding, but it does not follow that the idea is incoherent per se.

I don't know what you mean when you write "applied to reality". I have nor seen a single cogent or convincing argument that demonstrates that the idea of disembodied life is incoherent. All I've seen is assertion and aspersion. Perhaps you could reiterate the arguments you think are worthy of consideration.

Also note, I don't personally believe in an afterlife of any kind, so I have no dog in this fight; I just don't like seeing people get away with making as though they have good arguments for their positions, and yet failing to present any.

More special pleading ...

So, that's your unbiased view is it?

I have no[t] seen a single cogent or convincing argument that demonstrates that the idea of disembodied life is incoherent. — Janus

Analogy: legless walking. :roll: "Living" predicates "body" (not the other way around), and misuse of a predicate as a noun (i.e. reification fallacy such as platonic forms, essentialism, etc) yields conceptual incoherence such as "disembodied life" and "disembodied mind".

Analogy: legless walking. — 180 Proof

Not a good analogy. All this stuff about disembodiment is really a red herring. You haven't shown that the idea of disembodied life or consciousness is logically contradictory; asserting something that is logically contradictory is analogous will simply not get you there and nor will rolling your eyes (:roll: ).

Okay. You're just saying the same nothing (denials) over and over again so ... Cognitive dissonance. I get it.

In attempts to place linguistic shuffling aside: Sans the metaphysics of physicalism being a presupposed truth, what is the logical contradiction of ghosts occurring?

As to definitions, let "a ghost” be the disembodied consciousness, soul, or spirit - i.e., the disembodied psyche - of a deceased living being that interacts with this world.

Plenty of anecdotal evidence for ghosts interacting with living people both cross-culturally and historically, where this evidence again occurs cross-culturally (it can’t be physically replicable evidence because ghosts are not physical). Again, the *totality* of this evidence is to be considered hallucinatory, or else acts of charlatanism, without exception on what logical grounds when physicalism is not a presupposed truth?

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And to address the OP directly: None. Regardless of firsthand accounts, these can all be explained away as either hallucinations, delusions, or deceptions on grounds that the afterlife is not, or else cannot be, physical. This as per physicalism.

Is consciosuness the kind of thing that can be reified like this? Because as far as we know, consciousness is consciousness-of: it is a product of a process of self-relation that enables situating oneself in an environment so as to act within it. — StreetlightX

One of the interesting things about consciousness, though, is that its situating of 'itself' can be anything other than straightforward. The body transfer illusion shows that consciousness can be 'expanded' to include objects outside the body. Out-of-body experiences show that consciousness, or at least some version of it, can be felt to exist outside the body. Now as far as we know, switching off the body (dying) disables all of the above possibilities. But seeing as we can't talk to the dead, we cannot confirm this. We cannot observe consciousness, we can only observe actions associated with consciousness (For instance, you cannot really 'observe' the body transfer illusion, you have to communicate to confirm it). it is (again, logically) conceivable that upon death the consciousness continues to float without the body as in a OBE, latches onto some phantom limb, etc... with the original body remaining mute and thus unable to clarify the 'experience' of the consciousness. A strict assessment of what we know and don't know should probably consider this at least a possibility. It's not a good scientific theory in that it does not explain physical phenomena in the simplest means possible - in fact it doesn't explain anything. But it's a possibility which future scientists might be able to confirm or deny should they wish to explore experiments with consciousness further. (and no, I don't just mean taking shrooms, although why not, scientists gotta get loose once in a while too...) Schemas and concepts are fine, but they're no substitute for trying stuff out.

There is some study of "near death lucidity" which can be interesting. It is when a person with dementia or other mental handicap speak or behave clearly and with purpose right before they die even when it shouldn't be possible.

If someone died and that person's loved ones see the body and confer with the doctor and confirm that they are dead and proceed to cremate them. But later that week they meet someone that looks exactly like their past loved one in the flesh. After talking they find this individual to be indistinguishable from their loved one and they start to doubt that their loved ones life/existence ever really ended. But technically this is a different body and lets assume they have no memory a whole 48 hours leading up to the first bodies' death. This would still be secondhand information as we can't prove they are the same person. So if accurate and otherwise not knowable information is derived, could a psychics' testimony be valid source information beyond physical life? That is still different from running physical experiments on physical things, but what if human special abilities of perception are all we can have for proof provided of course that it is better than chance accuracy?

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/bering-in-mind/ian-stevensone28099s-case-for-the-afterlife-are-we-e28098skepticse28099-really-just-cynics/

Found this interesting, but has anyone ever reviewed the interviews he did?

The conversation ends here?

The most charitably I can put it is this: the afterlifer is after something so radically different from life that it would simply have nothing to do with what we understand as life. It would be something wholly different that one could not even call it an afterlife. But what, exactly, would that be? Once the afterlife becomes unmoored from anything recognizable as life, then what conceptual bearings do we have to even talk of it? And here, the concept needs to be defined, long, long, long before any search for 'evidence' would even be remotely contemplated. — StreetlightX

But nobody agrees, or even can agree in principle, as to what life "means", since everyone's use of a proper name contradicts with each other. Society's use of proper names is physically and psychologically indescribable in terms of closed type-token relations, for each and every person uses the same proper name differently and in an off-the-cuff bespoke fashion that does not conform to any a priori definition of "personhood". The concept of "another mind" is essentially a perspectival, dynamic and open relation, whereby to imagine, to remember or even to recognise a physically present person is in some sense to construct that very person.

Consider a funeral gathering. It is remarkable how the mourners focus almost exclusively upon the sense of the person remembered, and how they pay so little attention to the physical referent of their mourning that lies in the coffin. And yet according to any public truth criteria of type-token physicalism that insists upon making a hard subject-object distinction, the mourners have nothing to be upset about, for only the physical referent of a proper-name objectively matters; the proper-name the mourners associate with their grief is either meaningless due to it referring to nothing, or it refers to what is in the coffin. Either way, the mourners feelings and personal memories are irrelevant to the ontological status of living or dead persons, and their personal experiences never come into contact with other minds.

OK, and? Again, if you think afterlifers would be happy with this sense of 'sense of a person' that funeral gatherers employ then so be it, they can have it. But they clearly aren't. Otherwise, this is just dissemination.

It is (again, logically) conceivable that upon death the consciousness continues to float without the body as in a OBE, latches onto some phantom limb, etc... with the original body remaining mute and thus unable to clarify the 'experience' of the consciousness. — coolazice

I disagree. In all these, let's call them, pathological cases of consciousness, you can trace the hows and whys of their pathology back to the body itself. Phantom limbs, for instance, tell us very much about the inter-modality of sense-experience, the fact that consciousness is an end-result of a process of sense-making and habituation. Which is why things like mirror therapy works to lessen phantom limb pain: it reintegrates vision and sense and shows just how much consciousness is both environmental and bound up with a sense of the "I can" which I spoke about earlier.

Hell, we can even induce OBEs by means of setups which allow subjects to 'feel' their own body a few feet in front of them, and then by means of a HUD and some tactile experience, subjects can be made to 'identify' with the virtual body in front of them. The key in these experiments was 'synchronizing' what the subject sees and what they feel. Again: the integration of sensory-modality and exercise of bodily capacity is at work. So there are actual mechanisms at work here which do the work of explaining these pathological experiences, which explain why these pathological experiences take the shape they do. To simply go "herp derp but what if no body?" without any corresponding mechanism or explanatory principles is, again, not philosophy, but children playing with dragon toys pretending to do anything remotely like it.

Sure, but the latter part of my post was pondering why we should need philosophy to conduct scientific experiments in the first place? Children playing with dragons is much more in the spirit of discovery than thinking through principles, which historically seem to be quite subject to revision or even falsification.