The Proof of What Happens To Us After Death and the Subsequent denial of it.

originally posted by: AllIsOne

originally posted by: Entreri06

originally posted by: AllIsOne

originally posted by: Entreri06

originally posted by: AllIsOne

How is the ability to think not "action reaction? You try and think of something (action)…

a reply to: Entreri06

I'm sorry for not being able to express myself clearly. The thing that you state so casually "… and think of something" is exactly my point. The human ability to think of something at will should not be possible in a world only governed by atoms, because there is no "prime cause" for that thought to occur.

Yes, neurons need to fire, but WHAT triggers those events? Are you saying that thoughts are just random events generated by the neurons themselves, or is there a "governor" in the system?

To answer your other question: There are plenty of clinical examples where a patient is brain dead with no electrical activity in the brain (no neurons are able to fire), but after she recovers there are vivid memories related to that time with zero brain activity.

The point of all that thinking is and has always been to get booty and create other little people who will think of awsome was to get more booty. Every thing else is over flow from over doing it. :p

And no there are no examples of nurons not fireing and people thinking. The brain is a crazy thing. Time is irrelevant to it. You could have had whatever experience you had at the moment of waking. Not during "brain death" which has never been truely confirmed with NDE's . Add that to the fact they are recreatable their Gforces ( pilots experience NDEs when passing out in training) and the divine experience can be recreated with beaming alpha waves into the brain. I think it's far more likely that our minds play tricks on us the the alternative.

I gather you can't answer my question regarding the "prime cause" of thought? It ain't always booty … ;-)

Yes it is... Every decision you make can be traced right back to a few base instincts. Sex, hunger and territorialism. EVERYTHING else is just by products of social evolution that sprang from those base few. I don't know what you mean by prime thought exactly (prob because it's some BS spiritualism stuff that isn't an actual thing).

I first thought that I didn't explain myself clearly, but I see now …

Bye, have fun in your world.

So it is some BS spiritualism thing that doesn't really exist! Thanks for clarifying! I figured it might have been a real term used in "evolution of Psycology" or something.

originally posted by: cipango
If we were the product of purely random and mechanistic processes, we would not even have a discussion about the afterlife, because it wouldn't even cross our minds (as a side point, it's debatable whether we would even have a mind).

We would be hard wired to do certain things only, that had to do with the strict necessities of life. Anything strange to that would simply not occur to us. We'd live our (relatively) short and very limited lives happily without any thought of the afterlife. Any philosophy as a matter of fact would be something very foreign to us, and if somehow ideas came to us, we'd brush them away not understanding what they mean.

To me however, this is a moot discussion: there would be no ideas, creative imagination, language, and not even the most basic form of human life (whatever that may look like in the absence of thought), because there's no such mechanism in nature that generates intelligent and orderly systems out of nothing. Evolution by random processes of highly organized life forms with all the information that they imply? Statistically IMPOSSIBLE. Zero is a high number to compare to.

That apart, the very fact that we have the notion of a soul, the afterlife

The afterlife would be the continuation of the soul's life. The soul is alive in us (it's the principle that forms or in-forms our body) but is a different substance than the body. The soul has the knowledge or intuition that it will survive the body, and that's where all its anguish is coming from. The drama is that the soul wants the body to be alive together with it, like it was intended from the beginning (ever wondered why people want to be happy and how many non-biological variables that involves? We should be happy with a LOT less). The very fact that the afterlife is a NAGGING idea even for people who say they don't believe in it, is a sign that there's something in that idea that resonates with us all, and that is a powerful argument. It's NAGGING, you like it or not, and it will nag you more as you grow older. You shouldn't be freaking bothered by the thought if you had no soul, because that would be an idea that wouldn't resonate with you (supposing you even resonated to ideas at all lol).

Every single scientist on the planet would disagree with EVERYTHING you said.....

originally posted by: TheConstruKctionofLight
a reply to: Entreri06

The definition of faith is beleiving in some thing against all logic

Not so oh wise one. Take this for what its worth.

en.wikipedia.org...

Faith is defined as belief, confidence or trust in a person, object, religion, idea or view despite the absence of proof.[1] Faith does not necessarily involve the abandonment of reason, but acknowledges more or less consciously the fact that a proof is not possible in a given context.

No need to abandon reason.

As to logic

en.wikipedia.org...

Logic (from the Ancient Greek: λογική, logike)[1] is the use and study of valid reasoning

As to "valid"

(of an argument or point) having a sound basis in logic or fact; reasonable or cogent.

Your claim that the definition of faith is believing in some thing against all logic doesn't really hold much water.

I would say that the reason the definition NEEDED to mention that "it's not ALWAYS the abandonment of reason" is because most of the time it is.... If faith was believing in something reasonable that's prob true. That would have been the definition....

originally posted by: TheConstruKctionofLight
a reply to: Entreri06

All the "crystals are magic" y"you just gotta uncalsify your adrenal glad" garbage comes from one book in the 60s or 70s.

Do you have a name for this one book or the name of an individual from the 60/70's that bothers you so much

He doesn't bother me :p it's just the truth. I'll see if I can find it real quick.

originally posted by: TheConstruKctionofLight
a reply to: olddognewtricks

I am talking about hard rigorous science like what is done in a lab

Somebody utilizing the scientific method every day in a lab, however, is another story

So these "hard scientists" dont take a break to have a # in the toilet like us mere mortals? They dont get swayed onto what to study or what is allowed to become "mainsteam"?

You do realize that studies are started after going through committees and that these labs of yours are funded by profit driven corporations who want results that can be turned into a commodity. Or do you think they have your best interests in mind or are searching for that ever elusive cure for cancer?

And take us one step closer to what? A more effective nuclear weapon or weapon delivery system? Remember that scientists are not mandated to study ethics 101 before pursuing whatever hard science they major in. I think you secretly like to put your scientist on some pedestal, much like religionists do to their god of their own choosing.

No scientist do not....

All science is, is comming up with ways to make sure you are not fooling yourself. The human mind is infinitely flawed. Our brains are designed to notice patterns and our brains fill in the blanks. So science was people coming up with ways to ensure their personal biases and brains pattern recognition didn't interfere with the data.

Science could literally be defined as "experiments to make sure your not fooling yourself".

originally posted by: TheConstruKctionofLight
a reply to: Entreri06

Science took us to the moon in less then a century of belief. What did 100k years of religion and mysticism get us? Wars, atrocities,

Not that Science is useless but, how in all honesty do you ignore that its science that gives warmongers the tools to fight war and commit atrocities? Its not some miracle coming out of a holy book that creates the deadly effect of a bomb or bullit.

Science isn't good or evil. It's the fundamental truths of reality revealed thru mathematics. How you use it was up to the religions who ran society in the past and politicians who run society today. That's like calling a hurricane evil, when a hurricane just IS.

a reply to: LesMisanthrope

I'm kind of into the whole Chi, Qiqong, Prana and Kundalini views of life energies and such but these could be called Crack and Smack for all I care. And they are often considered spiritual practices in life but in no way do they seem to have any impact on the after life though, and if they are, it gets poorly explained as to how they could go hand-hand.

Sure there are plenty of stories of when people die, some ghost like substance moves out of the body, going somewhere the living cannot imagine. I had my second cousin say something about seeing my grandmas spirit leave when she passed away, which kind of made believe in something at the time back then.

Also, it not like these concepts of conscious energies have proof that they are real, where one could manipulate some form of matter and use it for some practical use in this life, to even start worrying what goes on after death.

I understand where your personal preference is coming from on the subject, where the whole anticipation of living to die a better life when one is dead, more or less an oxymoron in its depiction of ideals. Although knowing or thinking death isn't the end, does give a reassuring feeling at times. How ever we all know, seeing the POV on ATS of humans lying or attempting to give their own brand about spirituality can be more destructive in life, but does such tactics become futile when moving on?

Where the idea of "Life flashing before the eyes" becomes something of instant where the whole human mind or soul experienced in the span of decades? Where the energies one puts out into the universe come full circle or such? That when the souls moves from a body, does all the mind and bodies experience's, try to form kind of grand conscious some for the individual soul to try to understand or formulate? Like the idea of "Blam" universal knowledge at the instant, that it becomes useless or hopeless in the after life, where it would of been useful in life, like regrets?

And if so, would that be just a Monday, where life and death seems like a giant processing plant in some grand scheme?

From my experience at my quarter of a life span, death can wait, after I lived. After all, I'm not going anywhere far.

originally posted by: Specimen
I'm kind of into the whole Chi, Qiqong, Prana and Kundalini views of life energies and such but these could be called Crack and Smack for all I care. And they are often considered spiritual practices in life but in no way do they seem to have any impact on the after life though, and if they are, it gets poorly explained as to how they could go hand-hand.

They are part of the body's life-current, but generally are associated with structures below the brain core (e.g., the spinal chord).

But if that life-current is turned upward in the brain core then the third eye may be seen as a brilliant five pointed star and as the "gateway" to the Light infinitely above the mind. This is also the subtle structure that may be experienced during the death transition.

Spiritual traditions often assume such experiences of the brain core are enlightenment, but really represent a freeing up of attention from the physical plane into sublter ones. However, the root egoic effort of attention is still active.

So Chi, Prana, Kundalini, etc. are connected, but what you are speaking about is because these are usually associated with the physical body, not the subtle body-mind above the physical. But yes, they are connected.

a reply to: LesMisanthrope

Les,
I know you post plenty head scratchers and posts up for debate, basically many that are troll posts, to tickle the ego od others and get responses. Been watching you for a while.

But with this one here, I feel like deep inside, you are begging for truth, wanting to know if there is a God and something after and that you are unhappy with your paper tiger wet bag systematic belief systems you've built around what you believe reality to be. The materialists are dying out, quantum physics proves everything is united via space and that space is One space.

Are you a single person, or a system of trillions of cells united, or all the atoms that make up all those cells, or are you the space in between the vibrating atoms?

absence of evidence is evidence of absence in this case.

That's pure B.S. (bravo sierra) and you know it. Know one in science uses that anymore. It's no loner the late 80s early 90s. Absence of evidence in no way what so ever represents evidence of absence. You are forgetting predictive modeling in mathematics, statistical analysis, philosophical possibility, and the list goes on and on. Just the ability to propose something to exist, that proposition itself is evidence of possibility, and that possibility can then be broken down into a number of different branches of thought and statistics.

List of Cognitive Biases

You are filtering what you believe to be true via a vast array of unconscious, subconscious, and conscious cognitive biases as in the link above.

Whatever you believe to be true, even scientifically, is just a belief system.

Not sure if you are aware of this or not, but there is a huge schism going on right now around the EM Drive:

NASA suggests impossible EM Drive will work in space

There's SO MANY scientists arguing that the EM Drive can't and shouldn't work according to the Laws of science. They're so used to "believing" that what they think they know and what they believe to be true, can't possibly be any other way.

The EM Drive may be warping space and time around it and instead of acknowledging that the evidence is proving this to be so and will require the rewriting of previous laws, some hard nose skeptics, like yourself, are clinging to old dusty views that will all eventually fall apart.

There was always absence of evidence for the EM Drive, but that never meant that the "absence" was itself evidence 100% confirming that EM Drive does not, will not, and can not exist.

It isn't that laws should tell us what is and isn't possible, but that results should tell us what is and isn't a law.

And there are plenty of results of people having NDE's, or remembering, like me, existing prior to being born as a body.

You'll see when you're meat suit dies. But until then, you've been brainwashed to construct a very weak belief system that is one scientific discovery away from destroying everything you believe in.

But hey, keep trying. I feel like you are looking for something, while simultaneously imprisoned by your own over-skepticism.

To actually be fully convinced that there is life after death, reincarnation, etc., one must find out if this is true. Two obvious examples would be to either experience the subtle world(s) beyond this physical one or by recalling a past life.

The former has been discussed often, so I will focus on the matter of recalling a past life. This involves more than just recalling some kind of visual image of somewhere or someone you may have been prior to this life. It requires a real recollection with a full sense of your actual individuality as the person in that place.

Otherwise, it could be any number of kinds of brain imagery - some romantic notion of being in a distant place, something you read as a kid, something someone told you, etc.

If and when you recollect such a past lifetime for real, you will be convinced that you do survive death, no matter how many arguments are put forth to the contrary. Of course, this is little consolation if you consider the actual implications of reincarnation, but that is not the subject of this thread.

I think this thread does prove, or at least demonstrates, something - that our own experience of a higher world beyond this physical body-mind and/or our own real recollection of a past life - trumps all the mental logic that point to the contrary, and even all the mental logic that supports the argument that we survive the body's physical death.

originally posted by: bb23108

The former has been discussed often, so I will focus on the matter of recalling a past life. This involves more than just recalling some kind of visual image of somewhere or someone you may have been prior to this life. It requires a real recollection with a full sense of your actual individuality as the person in that place.

What if you had dreamed another life? What if you were dreaming that there was another dream?

What if you are the dreamer and you just get to dream? This present dream may feel 'real' and it is but it is just dreaming happening.
Can the dreamer and dream ever be separate - is there anything other than dreaming?
'We are such stuff that dreams are made of.' William Shakespeare.

a reply to: bb23108

I have always been " A Doubting Thomas"
Yet have paid attention to my inner feelings or gut feelings

For myself some things are very important to glean an understanding of
Past life's for one indicate or indeed confirm that the soul (the essence of what we are) is Eternal
Also there are other realms in which the soul resides

Proof of such things can not be read in books or bought or sold or obtained from Priests, Kings or Queens
They are not second hand ... they are a personal confirmation of the questions we ask of ourselves
Of course one can read another's words and find they ring true or not
But to show one's own understanding requires one to put that understanding in one's own words
One can only do this through one's own efforts and experiences the counter proof gained of the subject in question

I have paranoid schizophrenia and having been through severe psychosis I came away from it with a new understanding of what conciseness is. My conciseness became severely altered at one point. I saw and heard things (hallucinations) that didn't exists. My own mind had turned against me in a way most people will never know.

Most schizophrenics have normal healthy brains before they get the illness. The illness usually hits men in their late teens early twenties for women it usually hits in late twenties early thirties. I know what reality is because until my early twenties I was quite normal.

I've been to the furthest reaches of insanity and back. One thing I came away from it all with is a new perception of reality and what reality is. What we perceive as reality is governed how our minds interpret the world around us. Our minds are what give us conciseness. When we die our minds die with us when the brain quits working we cease to exist.

I would really like to believe there is more to life then dying from the day we are born. Unfortunately I've come to the conclusion there is no soul that lives on after death. When a person dies and their brain quits working that is the end of that person. There is no proof otherwise.

a reply to: wantsome

If your conclusion satisfies you ... then that is your conclusion
However other's reach their conclusion based on their own personal proof

Of course it is true that once the brain ceases to function that is indeed the end of that individual's life on Earth
But what is it that makes the brain function
I conclude it can only be thought ...

Yet in a way we are we not our thoughts ... we observe thoughts independently
For example ... I write down my thoughts to describe an idea
Yet I feel they do not describe the idea clearly
Further thoughts follow from that feeling ... that may or may not refine my idea

What is that feeling that fore runs thoughts/ideas
That sense of self ... that sense of being

If you think when the brain ceases to receive thought that that is the end
Then what of the being that feels beyond the senses and prior to thought

We can receive many types of thought but that does not describe the being that exists prior to thought
Thought is like the petrol/power in a car
Like a car we are the driver by way of thought

What happens to the driver once the car becomes worn out or is involved in an accident
The car is sent to the scrap yard for recycling
And I suggest that the driver then has another form of transport which I call the soul body

Visitor2012:

It's oscillating energy created by the magnetic fields of the electrical wires, either that or corona discharge. If it's rain on them, the sound can be micro droplets of water boiling off the insulators as a result of the micro paths created for the energy to travel through . Among many other reasons. The Bottom line, it's energy. And is the worst analogy to use when discussing the consciousness I'm referring to.

The hum is caused by mechanical vibrations due to the alternating current. Electromagnetic energy is causing it, but the hum itself, like consciousness, is not the energy, but an emergent by-product of it. Your problem is a lack of depth to any analysis you apply to what you call 'your concept of consciousness'. The analogy may not fit your conceptual framework, because your framework and concept are entirely false.

You believe, so you tell us, that consciousness underlies everything, when in fact it is magnitudes below such a position. You are not on your own with this erroneous type of thinking, many posters here equate consciousness as the be all and end all of reality. They treat it as if it is its own energy, but as I keep having to state, it is not an energy with any form of interactive force.

Let me put it another way. Let's assume that when we die we do indeed continue a post-mortem consciousness. What I am saying is that there will be no difference at all between embodied consciousness and disembodied consciousness. We know that the biological body and all its inner functioning provides an environment wherein it acts as a power source by which the body becomes imbued with a dynamic interactive sentience. With the evolution of memory into the system and looped feedback mechanisms, the construct of person-hood arises, and is held in memory.

When we die, memory (which contains the person-hood) has to somehow remain cohesive and accessible, but by what body, and by what mechanisms, and supplied by what power. People mention 'spirit' or 'soul' as if it explains everything, they explain nothing because they are only fabrications. Don't get me wrong, there really is a 'ghost-in-the-machine', but biological death obliterates it utterly, because their is no power source to keep it altogether and to keep it going. We really arte nothing more than a random concatenation of molecules and electro-chemical reactions.

I am ready to accept post-mortem consciousness as a reality, if someone can provide me with a plausible hypothesis on how it would transpire. I'm not seeking evidence, just a plausible hypothesis will do.

You see the thing is, 40 years ago I was a firm advocate of life after death, and I set out to provide such an hypothesis for myself, but sticking to scientific fact. I even arrived at a plausible hypothesis for how consciousness arises in the human body, and have presented it here on ATS, but what it cannot do, is extend consciousness beyond death, not until we surmise the power source. For me the issue is two things...the power source problem, and Chalmer's 'the hard problem of consciousness'. Until those two problems are resolved, I think it is premature to talk in terms of there being an after life or post-mortem consciousness, regardless of our want for such things, and regardless of the countless anecdotes and claims of experiential proof.

There is now evidence that the so-called out of body experience (oobe) is nothing more than processed feelings of spatiality.

www.livescience.com...

a reply to: LesMisanthrope
All dogs go to heaven.

All humans go to an endless state of bingo night in Valhalla, or are recycled again in this existence, or others, as various versions of there data in whatever physical universe they incarnate into.

And all cats go to that great mountainous pie in the sky were they can chase endless lights on the ground without being made fun off, and the fancy feast is on every other corner, and all curbs streets and gardens are sunny cozy little outlets for them to take a cat nap on, in, or just to lay about, and all couches and tableware are created to be clawed and renewed for fresh reclawing each and every time they wake up again.

Any more questions?

a reply to: elysiumfire

Nice post, but I think you went the wrong way to search for proof. I think you should start your search closer. You should begin with daily meditations without any formed ideas or expectations and everything would be revealed to you peace by peace from within.

Instead you searched outside, not believing in your own being. But that today is normal, there are many people who are searching your way. It is really a mystery to me how come it is so hard to try experimenting on yourself with daily meditations for about let say, a month.

Meditation has many benefits (mental and on the body!) other than the quest for the truth. For one, you will notice the difference in your own being. With time all of bad emotions will subside and your mind will be a lot clearer. And after your mind will be come and tranquil then you are ready for some bizarre experiences which many of practitioners who meditates describe.

And to think it would only take a few weeks of doing nothing, thinking nothing, just sitting for half an hour a day... for everybody to know for himself.

if the universe is infinite energy that creates every single thing imaginable even in our Brains. And science teaches us that energy never dies only changes would that mean consciousness just changes?

a reply to: christophoros
The mind goes infinitely inward and the universe goes infinitely outward both demonstrating infinite possibilities.

The Scientific Method can be used to confirm that thoughts do not exist, and yet they exist. Obviously, there are other methodologies that must be developed to examine and confirm existing "things" like thoughts. Physicists have declared that information does not and cannot cease to exist once it has emerged as a result of action or being, and yet no one can "find" this information either.

The materialist, reductionist, empiricist demand for proof is mired in the 19th Century show-me scientism that gave us such hits as dissecting Einstein's brain to see why he was so damn brilliant and believing that just because you can trigger a memory with an electrode to a portion of the brain that the actual memory itself is somehow stored in the tissue itself. Of course, no neuroscientist actually believes that foolishness anymore, but it wasn't that long ago that this sort of stuff passed for settle science.

The brain is the key to whether there is or isn't an afterlife for the brain equipped corporeal organism. Not that "all dogs go to heaven" or anything silly like that, but then sentience isn't the capacity for conceptual abstraction either. One thing is certain; information that is materially created to actively address the kinds of material survival demand that simple DNA obviously cannot address is not your normal, environmentally emergent data set that reacts by default to the occurrence or being of change within an environmental confine. It's authored, and that has to mean something. If this information knows that it exists (which it does in the case of the human brain if these are bursts sets of DNA-supplementing survival-ensuring information) then this self-aware information certainly has the physical properties to survive the death of the authoring brain.

"Energy" is a catch-all term that literally means nothing at all anymore. That's terminology from the steam age of the industrial revolution that refuses to retire. It's embarrassing to still hear it tossed around as if it means anything other than the release of kinetic potential.