Posted by:
Gay Philosopher
(
)
Date: April 07, 2012 02:17PM
Stray,
Your post was the best that I've seen on this topic on RfM. It's a powerful expression of the scientific viewpoint, said in a way that makes intuitive sense. Indeed, there is no doubt that the body is annihilated by the dying process. The self goes away under general anesthesia. Everything fits together neatly.
And then there are the rare, deep NDE's. The experiencers report detailed visual and other forms of perception far away from their bodies, and these are later verified.
I think that the idea that there is a soul isn't well-defined. We've got to get away from naiive religious conceptions about what a "soul" might be like, look at all the facts available to us, and draw the best inferential conclusions that we can. We are not allowed to truncate evidence.
The truth--whatever it be--must be able to withstand skeptical scrutiny. Do you or I have any reason to postulate the existence of consciousness after bodily death? No. We've had no experiences to suggest otherwise, and even if we had, we would be right to question their veracity and implications, because they wouldn't cohere with all of our other life experiences, thus making them suspect (but not necessarily false).
Other people--one is a neurosurgeon named Eben Alexander III, MD--swear up and down that we survive death. I can't personally imagine how. That must seem like a shocking statement coming from someone who has repeatedly declared, privately and publicly, that we survive death, but it's true. I can't imagine how we could survive death, but neither can I imagine many other things, such as how to prove a vast number of mathematical theorems. I am epistemically limited in my ability to comprehend and problem solve. But that doesn't mean that many mathematicians couldn't prove theorems that are--and always will be--beyond me.
Therefore, I think we err to look only at our own experiences, if we want a circumspect description of reality. But if we admit others' descriptions, we have to deal with NDE's. Even if we dismiss all of them except for a handful as REM intrusion, hallucinations, confabulations, lies, and so on, we're left with a number of them that remain quite mysterious, requiring us to come up with increasingly complicated theoretical explanations: "Well, that one just involved REM intrusion, which spiraled into a lucid hallucination, with a little bit of alleged remote perception explained by statistical coincidence, or sensory leakage, and a little dash of that Mike Persinger electromagnetic remote perception theory thrown in, but in any case, it's all physical, and therefore, we're annihilated at death--if not before!"
Perhaps. I agree that it's all "physical," but even the physicists can't seem to nail down just what, exactly, that means. I contend that "supernatural" is a dumb linguistic label, and that whatever truly goes on may be mysterious, but is ultimately explainable in physical terms, although our understanding of physics is incomplete.
Thus, we can't rule out the possibility that consciousness, motivation, affect, cognition, locomotion, identity, a new environment, and so on, could exist beyond death. Nor can we rule out the possibility that some random subset of "persons" survive death, while most are unceremoniously extinguished forever. How many angels fit on the head of a pin? Do angels exist? Which pin? Define "head."
In our reality, based on our (your and my) experiences, we have every reason to conclude that death annihilates us. But my little bit of philosophizing above shows that we're limited in what we know or can know. This doesn't give us license to make things up (as most people do--consciously or unconsciously), but it should get us to listen to others, evaluate all data in a peer-reviewed manner, try to make the best conclusion that we can, and be open to revising our conclusions should new data warrant it.
Meanwhile, we don't know. We believe. Belief doesn't turn into knowledge without truth, and truth on this topic might--just perhaps--be beyond our grasp. If so, and if all persons survive death, then we'll find out that the annihilation hypothesis was false after we die. If, on the other hand, it was true, we would never find out, because we would cease to exist.
Whatever happens, I believe that we don't have an answer yet--if ever--and that we should focus on these, the only lives that we know that we have. If we survive, consider it a bonus. Let's not focus so much on dying and death that we're distracted from living. We're all in this life together. Let's strive to be kind, creative, just, helpful, healthy, and happy.
A day will come when we won't be able to go on any longer. The life force will drain away from us. We will die--many in agonizing pain and immense fear. This is why I'm grateful that we have powerful anesthetic drugs, analgesics, and anxiolytics. We'll need them! Eventually, the struggle to live will end, and our lives will be over. There is nothing more to fear about death than there is about general anesthesia (in the worst case). It's the dying process that causes such suffering. It's often quite violent. Behind dead is easy, I suspect, but being alive definitely isn't.
Just maybe, at the end of our travels--whether as a child whose life was cut short by leukemia or an old man flickering out of life--to our great surprise and joy, we (if we are, in fact, a distinct and unified being outside of the confines of the body, and its vulnerabilities), too, will be embraced by the Light.
Yours,
Steve