Do you believe in life after life?

Good point, Kevn, but you'd have to believe in or think it possible that there might be some kind of vengeful judging god in order to have fear of being punished in an afterlife. Most people who'd fall into that category are likely to be CYAJIC (cover your ass just in case) believers rather than proclaimed nonbelievers.

Well, that was my point, about the occasional doubt in the belief there is no God.

I agree many who faithfully attend church do so as a form of fire insurance.

While not a proof of the locus of sentience, damage any other part of the body (that still allows it to live) except the brain and conciousness remains. Damage the brain sufficiently and consciouness disappears. True, the brain could be a conduit for the external soul to flow into the body, but there is a thought experiment that leads to a more parsimonious answer.

"Hempel's Ghost" is defined thusly: in the room, sitting right next to you, is a ghost. The ghost has the following properties: is has no effect upon the material world, no means of measurement or detection could reveal its existence, it cannot be sensed. The logical positivists claim that the query "is Hempel's ghost beside you?" is an ill-posed question. Put another way, by virtue of the definition of the ghost, asking questions about it is just silly. Understand that logical positivism doesn't necessarily deny the existence of the ghost, it simply claims that discussion of it is a waste of time. Add Occam's razor and the proposition "you are in the room" is to be preferred to "you and the ghost are in the room" as the latter adds premises that cannot - by definition - increase your understanding of the properties of the room. We could, indeed be surrounded by such ghosts, but it wouldn't matter much, pragmatically speaking.

As to my personal beliefs, I tend to believe everything I read on the SL forums, so I must mention Purgatory as it sounds more interesting than "worm food".

I understand Purgatory to be a place where the soul goes to be cleansed of sins. The way I understand it, it's a Catholic belief that if you die with too many sins, you must pay in Purgatory. Though this is contested by non-Catholics as being anti-biblical.

That's some mighty expensive insurance with really hard to measure odds.

Actually, it's a pretty good deal. If I believe in God, I have less stress, live longer etc, and if I'm wrong I lose nothing.

http://www.worldhealth.net/p/234,226.html

Ask any criminal if he believes in God. The vast majority will tell you they do. Belief in God doesn't seem to play a role in behavior, if it did the history of much of the world would have been very very different. People can rationalize anything, and since most monotheistic religions allow forgiveness, hey we can all do what we want and the minute we start to feel guilty, we can have God forgive us, then start all over.

If you believed in karma and rebirth, then you might be more inclined to behave better. There is no forgiveness, no washing away of sin, the only way to ameliorate bad karma is to create good karma. And even that can only do so much. Much of your bad karma you just have to live through. Makes you think twice about things.

I like how Occam's Razor is always used to justify the elimination of any possibility of a spiritual aspect to life. In this case, though, wouldn't it really work the other way? Memories of past lives have been related by countless thousands of people around the world, from the beginning of history to the present. Acknowledgement of them is ancient. By comparison the complete denial of any such spiritual anecdote is a recent phenomenon.

The simplest explanation of why so many people can be gotten to recall past lives is that they are in fact remembering having lived before. Anything else involves accusing someone of lying or being insane, which while a popular option, does nothing to really address the observed phenomenon.

Yes. Things I accept about the way the universe works tend to be shaped by science. As such, they are also adaptable, since one of the founding requirements of science is that it is adaptable to new evidence.



It is unscientific to speculate anything without any sort of observation to base it on. That's why I say it's unscientific to believe in the spiritual and in the afterlife. I do not claim that these things are impossible, but the realm of science does not leave room for them until they can show some form of observable evidence.



Actually, the simplest explanation given our understanding of the universe and the way the brain works IS that these recollections are either hallucinations or people seeking attention. People who genuinely claim to have lived as someone else in the past often also have mental disorders. People who claim past lives are a small minority, and rejecting such a claim without evidence is more scientific than to violate Occam's Razor by introducing arbitrary extra invisible characters and places to address the phenomenon.


Edit: More on Occam's Razor rebuttle:
The reason science relies so heavily on Occam's Razor is because the alternative would be to accept any and every speculation that explains a phenomenon.
For example, the afterlife. Without Occam's Razor, one must accept and equally entertain the idea of karmatic rebirth, Abrahamic judgement to heaven or hell, purgatory, the utter end of a life, 70 virgins and a beer with Allah, rebirth in a parallel universe, and ultimately the flying spaghetti monster's eternal dish in the sky as possible afterlives.
Occam's Razor restricts us to use current knowledge about the way the universe works to explain something in the simplest way possible.

Ananda - If you wish to accept all of those alternatives as viable, you may. But science cannot. And now perhaps you have a better understanding of Occam's Razor when applied to science, and why it is used to dismiss spiritual notions.
Further, bear in mind that science does not discount the possibility of an afterlife or spiritual matters. It doesn't address them at all, since they are not scientific in any way, shape, or form. It is entirely possible to believe in the afterlife, but one cannot defend it so from a scientific standpoint.

On the contrary, I reject every notion except the simplest. I remember various and sundry details of various previous lives, and the simplest explanation is that I remember them. Postulating any of the rest of that is not necessary. Nor is coming up with some facetious reasoning for why the brain would choose to make things up like that. It's possible to verify past life recollections, but hard to rule out any possibility of the data coming from another source. It poses the same difficulties as remembering and verifying what you did at two years old, except that of course you can more easily get corroboration of that since it happened with the same body you've got now. It is testable.

I don't know for sure why more people don't remember. Most people don't remember what they did at two years old either, though. I have theories, of course. The top of the list being that it's just one of those things that "everybody knows". Everyone knows that no one has past lives. Everyone knows that you can't remember anything earlier than 3 years old. That doesn't mean there's any truth to it. How long did psychoanalysts believe that people dreamed in black and white? There's no independent proof of that one way or the other, right? But having had a color dream, you would know better. It's the same with this, it's just that it takes some courage to go against something that's authoritively declared as "crazy".

You're confusing the matter on what is "truth" and "not truth". Those words are not things I am addressing. Science addresses what is scientific and not scientific. It is not something that is up for opinion.

What someone recalls or doesn't recall at 3 years of age is not a scientific issue. Nor is remembering something from a supposed past life. Science does not address these things, either to prove or disprove them.

Occam's razor is a heuristic and is not tied to confirmation theory at all. The heuristic implies that the simpler explanation is to be preferred stricly for pragmatic reasons. If you have an explanatory system with propositions {a, b, c, d, e, f} it is simply more cumbersome than one that contains {f} or one with {g} provided they all explain the phenomena under discussion.

For an example that I don't think ruffles anyone's feathers, the hyper-complex epicycles that were formerly used to explain the motion of the planets required huge numbers of premises in the form of wheels within wheels. The heliocentric model of the solar system replaces that large set of premises with one or two. This does not make it more correct, it just makes it easier to compute. As these are both mere models, there is no reason to believe that the heliocentric model is necessarily more "true", for given a large enough set of epicycles you could form an equally predictive model. However, the Copernican model has much more predictive power (e.g. moons of Jupier, galactic motion) which no amount of Sol-based epicycles say anything about.

As for rejecting the possibility of past lives, if Sir Occam says anything, it is just that explantory systems are more manageable without them - but I don't think even that is a particularly valid use of the razor. What the logical positivists say about the one or more past lives you have had is not they they don't exist, but rather since information about them is only accessible to you, there is no possibility of useful discussion on the matter. This is a far cry from denial that the phenomenon exists.

Thank you -- you explained it more eloquently than I've been able to. For some reason, words have all but failed me today.

This mostly works for me. It's true that there is no way for someone to independently verify such a recollection beyond all doubt. No matter how many names I named, photographs I mentioned, artifacts, graves, or whatever, there's no way to confirm absolutely that remembering the actual time and place is what I did.

Mal, I would take a closer look at the towering thunderclouds we call the mental and social "sciences" before concluding that they are more manageable without the spiritual component.

The most logical, natural, repeatable experiment one can do is this: interact with other spirits.

Like mine, as you read these words. Kevn's. Chip's. We *all* presume, and rightly so - that there is a spirit within that understands.

So what is this 'spirit'? Hard to say. Maybe it's eternal. Maybe it's just a flicker, darkness before and after. Maybe it's a natural part of everything to some degree - the only death being that of form, or memory.

Or maybe it's just a machine's illusion, a little accidental I AM that happens in all of us, totally impossible but incapable of resolving its own paradox, thus it continues.

Who knows, maybe we are all ghosts in the machine. But such ghosts there are, as sure as you are reading my words.

Once we understand spirituality we might be able to tackle a concept like 'afterlife'. I'm in no hurry to work it out though.

Speculation about "ghosts in the machine" is a favorite hobby of mine. Despite it being declared "off-limits" by most reputable scientists, the question of spiritual identity and sentience may become a crucial issue in the times ahead (like in the Ghost in the Shell animes). Would a computer posessing all the data and complexity of a human brain be, in fact, a sentient entity? Would a person who attempted to transfer their consciousness to a machine body really be the same person afterwards? If we really are spiritual beings, such a transfer might be more problematic, or it might be much easier than is usually imagined.

This is still the stuff of religion and idle speculation now, but it might not always be.

Its wrong to ask the question in this way, it should be what you believe, not a yes or no question.

I'm not entirely sure, I like to think so.

If believing in such things makes the thought of death easier, why question it?

I believe in life after death, and other crazier things I'm sure.
I also believe that my (possible?) delusions are mine, and that no one else needs to share them for them for them to be validated. (Which means I think everyone can decide for themselves and enjoy the experience that is life. )

This reminds me of the friends episode where Pheobe says she doesn't believe in lots of proven things, such as evolution and gravity. But when you think about it, who knows?

I am somewhat of the belief in reincarnation, with it being a matter of choice whether we come here but not when, where, or as what.

In case you haven't heard of Searle's Chinese Room argument I think you might find it interesting.

Incidentally, thanks for taking the time to understand the point I was advancing. I can't help that I was raised by positivists!

*huffs*

I recently participated in a life altering event.
I was a member of the armed forces of the United States and was deployed in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
I killed people.
I assisted in killing people.
I saw friends die.
I felt friends die.
I survived to come home.

Since I have came home and attempted to continue my life as I knew it, I've failed.
I rarely sleep more than an hour and a half at a stretch.
I always wake up at 3:40 am and cut off the tv.
There is always a person standing at the end of my bed when this occurs. I turn off the tv and they disappear or I can't see them any longer.

Since my life altering event, I have vivid multicolor dreams (I suspect this is what wakes me up) of other soldiering events that in my conciousness I can't relate to.
There are people in these dreams who I relate to intimately but in my waking hours have no connection to.

I've found myself driving down the highway totally unconnected in a surreal isn't this lovely event, only to jar myself back to reality and save myself from plunging over an overpass. Many times.

Is this proof of afterlife? Is this proof of before life? My Inquiring mind would LOVE to know and how to deal with it.

I'm not sure what I believe in anymore but I do know that human beings are special. I do believe we have sentient powers that are as yet untapped. Am I reincarnated? I have no idea, but I do have suspicions.

I believe that our spirt lives on, in various forms (higher beings, reincarnation, a realm we could not imagine, etc). I think we pay for our bad deeds while still living (read karma) and that the only spirits that live on in agony are those that internally despised the life they led and never accepted that they were humans who could make mistakes.

And if I'm wrong, and there is nothing, well... I wouldn't know anyway so I'm not worried.

I believe you are smart enough to understand the difference between the religious and colloquial meanings of the word "believe". Even so, one of them was indicated in quotes for a reason
As for your weird metaphorical explanation of science, here is a better one:
Man does understand how the world works. His understanding was once narrow, but expands at a logarithmic rate, assymptotically approaching the "truth". If you don't know what i'm talking about, basically you get a "good enough" result pretty fast and gradually work out the little details later. So with every day that passes it is increasingly unlikely that a significant amount of what we know is wrong, and increasingly likely that what we don't know will not actually matter if and when we discover it.
Think of newtonian physics. They've been around for 300 years and it's still what most people use. Einstein came up with relativity, but in our practical daily use we hardly ever need it. If in the future it turns out that string theory is right, i don't think anyone but the theoretical physicists will care. Same thing for every other field... most people work well with a level of mathematical knowledge comparable to ancient greece, and in biology we're still usually working with a 150 year old evolutionary theory, and even though we actually have a better one now (punctuated evolution), that's just details - over long time scales they amount to the same.

My personal belief is that being "worm food" isnt really all that bad. It may simply be my personal definition of what an "enjoyable" afterlife entails, but it still warrents an explanation. When a human dies, oxygen-providing mechanisms have broken down. The bacteria that lived in simbiosis with you in your digestive tract, and depending upon where/how you are buried, in the environment around you, begin the process of decomposition, which simply changes the state of the atoms/molecules that previously composed you (forming bonds with new atoms, breaking previously held-together molecules). In essence, "you" are still there, just in a different state. (I have a very flexible definition of "me".)

You become the "fertalizer" for the continuation of life, by becoming a part of everything. I find this kinda pleasent, which is one of the reasons why I wish to be buried, in an easily decomposed box (no plastics) beneath a cherry tree.

The processes of life readily astound me, the fact that my body, without me needing to do anything, becomes a part of them just, well... blows my mind Of course, this all entails that we as a species havent screwed anything up that would result in the mass-extinction of everything on earth. Even then, the atoms and molecules composing a dead star system are what fueled the creation of the sun, so even if we do destroy it all, in the end, what remains will simply be recycled.
==Chris