Theli

There has been alot of 'fights' over this question, and I would like to gather your thoughts on this thread.
Are there any good arguments for, or against life after death?
Or is it completely unknowable?

I guess I'll start off with a simple argument of possibillity. Just to get things started.
C1. I exist (a self-evident claim)
C2. I can exist (based on 1)
C3. I can be created/start existing (based on 2)

Q4. What am "I", what is needed to seperate me, from not-me?
Q5. Must this be a onetime-event?

[ December 05, 2002: Message edited by: Theli ]</p>

Beoran

I quote the analects of Confucius, chapter 11.

Chi Lu asked what is due to the spirits of the dead. The Master said: "We fail in our duty to the living; can we do our duty to the dead?" He ventured to ask about death. "We know not life," said the Master, "how can we know death?"

That answer is all I need. Wisdom, yeah! ^_^

flatland

First, I would question C3. Perhaps you are eternally existing, or atemporal, or pantemporal. But given your claims, I would answer:

Q1: You are the sum total of your experiences as imprinted on your mind. Whether or not your mind requires a physical component seems relevant, but an entirely complex issue that I don't feel I can do justice in one post. Regardless, I would still say that your identity is comprised of your total experiences as interpreted by the tools you have and acquire throughout life.

To separate you from yourself I would use the criteria of action. If you act upon something, then it is external to you. Likewise, if something acts on you, it too is external to you.

Q2: This question again seems to depend on the mind/body relationship to even open the possibility of life after death.

It seems like the question of life after death has a precursor question; is the mind capable existing independently of its place in a body/brain?

Theli

Flatland...

The point I was trying to reach was that the awareness (let's just call it soul), doesn't need to survive the death of the body.
As that would imply that the soul would have existed before the body's birth.
But that an awareness is an effect and can be recreated. From a third perspective everything looks logical, there is no big uniqueness outside our bodies/memories. But if we dive into a first person's view, the difference is huge. Even as we chance as human beings (grow older), our unique soul remains "trapped".

Ofcourse I use the word "soul" lightly as awareness/consciousness, and should not be confused with any religious dogma.

flatland

I tend to agree with you, but for the sake of argument...
The survival of the 'soul' post-death does not imply existence pre-birth. Perhaps the soul exists in the body as a type of gestation, but later becomes independent, in the same way animals are dependent on their parents for a time, but later independent. The body may well be ontologically prior to the soul, but the soul could exist after death.
Even if the soul did exist prior to its incarnation in a body, what's the problem? Awareness can still be an effect; perhaps not one based on body, but on some other physical process. With the deterministic tendencies of this board, there would be nothing preventing a Leibnizian conception of the soul as having existed from the moment of creation. Not created by god, but as an independent effect.

sweep

time = transformation

immortal body impractical

I is touching the environment and formed BY the environment, yielding the self.

links between lives, that I don't know

crocodile deathroll

Answer to Q4
When matter is reduced down to the level of quarks and electrons, there is nothing that separates the you from the not-you, as the physical properties of a quark in you body is identical to the physical properties of a quark in a dead rock. But at a higher level of neural configuration then the only thing that separates the you from the not-you are your life's memories, but after you die you will lose all those memories and forget that you were ever born at all, and it would be subjectively identical to never been born at all in the first place. So when you die it would be like a cosmic reset button has been self activated on you.

Answer to Q5
If there is a reason why this life should be considered a onetime-event, then nobody has found it yet.

[ December 06, 2002: Message edited by: crocodile deathroll ]</p>

Rousseau_CHN

Does it really matter?
So what if there is life after death?

What is important is here and now!

Sherlock Holmes said something about troubling yourself first with simple matter before troubling with big matter like life after death.

I guess life after death is something that should trouble us when we're dead, not before.

Victor Drake

I have heard it said that humankind is the only animal species that is capable of understanding and appreciating, while still young and healthy, that they will someday die.
Yet, it seems many humans cannot bear to acknowledge this fact, and eagerly grasp at any belief system that allows them to go on thinking they will be around forever. Belief in heaven/hell, reincarnation, or the hucksterism of 'spiritual mediums' such as John Edwards are all examples of this basic inability to confront the fact of one's own mortality.
This (by me) is called Living In Denial.

The sad truth is that these very belief systems encourage people to waste much of their precious (finite) lifespan in non-productive activities such as attending weekly religious services, time which could have been spent earning money, playing with their kids, engaging in intellectual debate, having sex or otherwise LIVING LIFE.
This (by me) is called Cruel Irony.

crocodile deathroll

For thousands of years humankind became aware that it is going to die long before it understood why?

why? Humanity just filled up the "why" with its own half baked epistemological putty.
"It was a punishment by the gods for our disobedience" or that only the gods were to be blessed with the virtues of immortality and if we were mortal then we rise to the same stature of the gods.

This answer why has only just been answered by evolutionary biologists. We die our of evolutionary necessity and not due to say a punishment by God for original sin. If there was no death there would be no natural selection. The Earth would be just a colony of immortal microbes.

So from our own evolutionary perspective:
Death is good