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Kiss Your Afterlife Goodbye!

You can only hope to achieve an afterlife if you have some sort of immaterial or non-physical soul or essence or personality or spirit, etc. which carries on carrying on after the demise of your materialistic and totally physical body. When you die your physical body and your material brain go nowhere, so if a part of you goes anywhere after death, it has to be a non-physical or an immaterial part of you.

But in a really real reality world, the concept of an alleged afterlife is pure nonsense since the egg and sperm that conceive multicellular beings (like you) have no encoded immaterial or associated non-physical aspects to genetically pass on. Since your mother's egg had no mind, no essence, no spirit, no personality, etc. and ditto that for your father's sperm, at conception you had no immaterial essence or non-physical mind, no knowledge, no creativity, no spirit, and especially nothing in the way of a soul that you could possibly have had genetically passed on to you by your parents.

Of course at conception you also had no brains, no heart, no lungs, and no sensory organs of any kind or even any real body yet to speak of. All of that material stuff flowed on by the materialistic nature that was built into your genetics and the physical additions to your newly conceived 'body' (heart, brain, etc.) came via nutrients supplied via your mother's body; and post birth via your own feeding and breathing.

So any 'soul' or any 'mind' or any 'essence' that you acquired are material in nature just like your body / brain and thus its tough luck for any hoped for duality and the sort of benefits that might have resulted in, like say evidence of an afterlife. You are entirely 100% material at the end of your term since that's how you started out.

johnprytz 7 Nov 22
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6 comments

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I do not give a rat's ass about some supposed "afterlife", because I will be peacefully taking a loooonnnng dirt nap, thankyuvurrymuch.

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Yup, we are material beings and when our homeostatic processes fail that's it; game over.

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“You are entirely 100% material at the end of your term since that's how you started out.”

That depends on the definition of “you”. What evidence do you have for a materialistic reality? There is no such evidence, and in fact evidence points toward matter as being nothing but an artificial human concept with no actual reality.

According to quantum field theory time does not exist, so any question about afterlives is meaningless. IMO “WE” are in heaven right now, always were and always will be. Of course our bodies along with our separate identities are essentially nothing.

I am reading “Spiritual Science”, by British psychologist Steve Taylor. Taylor presents strong arguments for panspiritism, the idea that consciousness is primary in reality. The idea seems to suggest answers to several deep questions about existence.

Taylor is not religious and he is not suggesting anything supernatural. I highly recommend the book.

I've listened to Rupert Shelrake and Iain McGilchrist talk about a return to animism, now referred to panpsychism, if I have it right. McGilchrist spoke about matter as perceived through the lens of quantum mechanics as a process, or one aspect of consciousness, in the way ice, ice, steam are all aspects of water.

@johnprytz Sorry, but my body’s instinct, and learned behavior refuses to proceed with the experiment, and our shared consciously aware self is totally disinterested because the proposed experiment would be meaningless. Consciousness, in fact, creates pain specifically to train and discipline the body and prolong its survival.

The movement of matter in space and time is an artificial, symbolic human concept that helps us survive. There is Ultimate Reality, but it is of a wholly different category of existence.

What you are proposing is for thoughts to control the physical body in setting up a bowling ball ten feet up and releasing it to fall on the foot. Have you stopped to consider what you are proposing? You are proposing that mind exert primary control over matter. It’s called telekinesis.

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The hypothesis would fall apart if the mind is not housed in the brain. That would place consciousness outside the body and the brain would be a tool to access and process thoughts, then storing them at this external location. It may well be that when we die, our processor dies but it wouldn't matter since we would be existing on the same plane as consciousness.

Quite agree. When your hard drive croaks it you carry on with the back ups you’ve made. And those pesky apple trees keep giving apples every summer even after their comatose state in winter. I think I see a thread!

@johnprytz The idea that the mind is housed in the brain is unproven too. They have looked for so-called memory traces in the brain and haven't found any yet. If you think of the brain as a processor rather than a warehouse, then the mind breaks down if the processor is damaged, similar to a TV receiving poor or no signal from the content provider.

@johnprytz I get the impression you're not really reading my posts.

@johnprytz No, your post shows all the signs of reading just the bit that disagreed with your hypothesis and skimmed over the rest.

@johnprytz I'll keep it in mind!

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When I came to this site I was an avowed Atheist. After I joined and read even more on the subject as well as many, many posts by people here... I realized that I actually needed to claim being Agnostic. Here's the reason why... I cannot prove the existence of any god... But I cannot disprove it either! So even though I don't "believe" in god... I'm all about the proof and it cannot be proven either way.

I look at any sort of afterlife in much the same way. I don't believe in the big Pearly Gates and god opening up a huge book of life to see if a person qualifies to float on a cloud and eat grapes all day. But I also have a hard time believing that the wonderment of life ends with death. So many things in the universe turn into something else. Yes, I know my atoms will eventually become a star somewhere... Or a mountain... But we are electro-chemical beings... Who know what may happen.

One thing I know for sure! If it does turn out that I can manifest something physically after death... I am going straight to my ex-wife's attic and making all sorts of funky noises to freak her shit out!

Ahhhhh... I feel so much better now for getting that all out!

I'm an atheist. Atheist means without god(s). If there is no proof of god's existence and god's existence cannot be proven; then even if it exists, god has no measurable impact on the physical world. It doesn't do anything if it does exist; so either way, we are without god.

Beyond the hypothetical though, you seem to be weighting the lack of evidence for either claim equally and forgetting where the burden of proof lies. If I tell you that there are invisible dragons flying overhead, the fact that you cannot prove there aren't doesn't mean our positions are of equal validity.

@JimG I understand your comment something along the lines of 'if a tree falls in a forest'. My take on it is that the tree exists despite being unknown by some and if a god existed, it wouldn't matter much as regards its existence whether people believed it did or not. I think if a god created a universe, that would necessarily imply an impact. As regards measuring, I guess the morality of the effect of an alleged god's influence was always in the realm of the religious and spiritual, and the physical in the realm of science.I'm not sure proving comes into it if all we want to do is understand what is going on.

@brentan I was speaking more in terms of a personal god than a deist-type creator. You make a good point if deist beliefs are correct.

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It sounds as though you are trying to convince someone of something. A couple of academic references to support your hypothesis would be good.

@johnprytz just thought it would be useful to share the roots of the hypothesis. It is, after all a piece that explores quite a lot of detail and so worthy of some supporting documents.

@johnprytz just a couple of insights would be good. If it’s your own thinking that’s the best! Just a bit of grounding that the hypothesis is based on would be good then we could get into robust discussion. At the moment it’s only opinion.

@johnprytz this is true but if a statement is made a modicum of erudition helps the argument along otherwise it is merely opinion. To start with when did you first come to this conclusion?

@johnprytz it just seems that there are a string of conjectures here with nothing to refer to other than opinion. That is fine but at the commencement of these postings you were stating conclusions which must come from evidence if they are to be considered seriously. I understand where you are going with your Samuel Johnson/Bishop Berkeley reference but doesn’t work as a refutation in this context as I understand that pain in an acquired survival response. It’s intention is to keep ‘you’ alive whoever the ‘you’ or ‘l’ that we refer to is. We always seem to consider everything in terms of possession, ‘my head, my heart, my life’ so where is the possessor?

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