Life after Death? Or Life after Life?
Yes, it’s BIG question time again and this is one of the biggest. Is their any kind of Life after we Die?
This is probably one of the earliest philosophical questions asked by mankind. When we became self-aware at some point in our distant past we must have become almost immediately aware of our own mortality. We would have experienced the deaths of other creatures and of our fellow humans. There is a great deal of evidence to support the notion that early humans had burial rituals and some idea of an afterlife but just how reasonable is that idea and what are the alternatives?
It seems to me that there are 3 basic ways at looking at this question. They are:
1) That when we die something (the Soul) survives, is judged in some way, and is transported to another realm as a reward or punishment for actions undertaken during our lives
2) That when we die something (the Soul) survives and finds its way into the body of either another human or another creature to continue its earthly existence
3) That when we die nothing survives and that’s the end of it.
I shall call these the Heaven/Hell Option, the Reincarnation Option and the True Death Option.
Let’s look at these in a bit more detail.
Both the Heaven/Hell Option and the Reincarnation Option require that something (the Soul for want of a better word) survives the body after death. Now the existence of the Soul is a whole other issue (which I hope to address in more detail later) but lets look at it in a general way for now. The Soul has, so far, eluded detection by medical technology. It is in some way associated with particular bodies and in some sense both transmits and receives information to and from the body and yet is non-corporeal. It retains knowledge of a person’s life and is, in some sense, the indestructible core of a person’s identity.
Personally I have a great deal of issues with the existence of the Soul. As with so much else in this area the more I examine the subject the less sense it seems to make. What exactly IS the Soul? What is it made of? Where is it? How does it inform our actions? How does it send & receive information if it’s incorporeal? How does it survive the body after Death? The questions just go on and on.
As to Heaven & Hell, either these places exist or they don’t. If they exist are they natural habitats or were they created by God? This brings up another BIG question. Does God (or various Gods) exist and do we actually need to posit the idea of God(s) to validate any particular Life after Death scenario? I don’t actually think that God(s) is/are absolutely necessary to the Reincarnation Option, after all it could be a purely natural process. The individual dies, the Soul is released and wanders about until it finds a new ‘host’. In this scenario the addition of Godlike creatures is an unnecessary complication. The Heaven/Hell Option is a bit more complicated. Firstly the existence of either place would, unless they are purely natural phenomena, need a Godlike entity to create and maintain them. Second there is the judgment aspect. Presumably the final location for the Soul is based on its ‘Goodness Quotient’ or GQ. If the Souls GQ is high enough it goes to Heaven. If it’s too low it goes to Hell. There is, of course, a slight variation to this process where a Soul with too low a GQ to get into Heaven might have one too high to be consigned to Hell and will, therefore, be assigned to a ‘temporary’ holding area called Purgatory until such time as the GQ gets high enough to get promotion to Heaven.
All this is, of course, very complicated and rather unreasonable. After all for the Heaven/Hell Option to be credible we need:
A Soul that survives physical Death The accumulation of some kind of points system to determine the Souls final location The existence of Heaven & Hell (and maybe Purgatory) The (probable) existence of a God or Gods A Soul Judgement Mechanism
Personally I can’t really give any of the above much credence. Is the Reincarnation Option then anymore credible? I think it is – but only slightly for it still requires that something survives Death in a coherent enough form to move from a now dead body to a living one, though at least it does away with most of the rest of the arguments against the Heaven/Hell Option. One thing does bother me though, the fact that if Souls are moving from dead people to newborns (for example) then where are all the extra Souls coming from? After all the numbers of humans have increased considerably over the last million years or so, therefore many more Souls are required for the increased human population. Either these new Souls are created by some process or, possibly, they are elevated non-human Souls which previously resided in animals – which of course brings in a whole new raft of complications into the mix.
So although the Reincarnation Option is more credible than the Heaven/Hell Option it is far from problem free. So what about the last of the options – the True Death Option?
This option has nothing that survives bodily death, no extra realms to hold departed Souls, no God (or other process) judging, and no problems with the increase in population. Indeed it seems to have no problem at all except that fact that it is personally distasteful to many people. If there is no life after death, especially one without reward or punishment, there seems little point in being good. After all if we’re not being judged by any higher being for a place in the afterlife we only have to worry about rewards or punishments right here on Earth. Without an afterlife the life here and now can begin to look pretty meaningless – even pointless. It makes out that we are merely animals who happen to be self aware and have manufactured various belief systems to make us feel better about our inevitable (and permanent) demise. But at least in my opinion the True Death Option is the most credible by far of the 3 options presented. It is by far the simplest and most reasonable option and despite its ‘distasteful’ overtones I consider it the most likely to be true. Of course no one really knows but we’re all going to find out one day. I wonder what we’ll discover.
28 comments:
You missed out the option that when we die something (the soul) moves onto another plane of existance. Not Heaven/Hell, no judgement/God(s) required, no physical detection available. Much favoured in Sci-Fi as our (humanities) natural evelotion route (The longest running Sci-fi series of all time; Stargate, calls it Ascending), or as the realm of the "Gods" - entities with vast knowledge & power.
Personally I think that when we're dead we're worm food, but I know I'm in the definite minority on this one.
I'm not sure if I think the concept of the soul was "invented" to explain the many untimely deaths & give hope to family/friends, or if it was invented to encourage people to live "good" lives. either way, I think we as a species have grown out of the need to believe it - although I am incredibly nosy & love the idea I can spy on all my friends/family after I'm dead:-)
I know lots of Atheists/agnostics still believe in the soul/that something of them lives on once their body has died. It's the nearest to immortality we ca get. Even the Gaia theory has the same basic concept.
Just because option 3 is the simplest, doesn't make it the most likely. The universe is not known for tking the simplest option, because, as you have said in previous posts, it is not self-aware!
Often there are some stupidly complicated processes involved in life - I can think of much simpler ways to run my world:-)
Thanks for pointing out a 4th Option - The Ascension Option - Mrs A. I hadn't forgotten but I thought that the posting on the subjuct was getting quite long enough, but thanks for bringing it up.
As to the simplest Option not always being the correct one - you could well be right. However, it 'feels' right to me. I don't think that human's are all that special. Basically we're self-aware animals frightened of our own deaths. The Soul & the Afterlife are comforts to reduce that fear of death - a cultural invention.
"The Soul has, so far, eluded detection by medical technology. "
Not quite true. Early in the 20th century Dr Duncan McDougall of Massachusetts conducting a series of experiments on dying patients. Basically, he rigged up a hospital bed to include a set of very sensitive scales and measured how their weight changed in the last hours of life. At the moment of death, there was a persistent, unexplained (once all biochemical processes had been accounted for) loss of weight averaging 21 grams a patient. The good doctor theorised that this was the weight of the soul leaving the body.
You may not think much of these experiments, but thay still happened and still constitute evidence. To say there is no medical evidence at all for the existence of the soul is therefore wrong.
Slightly more seriously, just because there is no scientific evidence for the existence of the soul doesn't mean it doesn't exist. There is no scientific evidence for the existence of beauty, justice or morality either after all.
Mrs. A - has Stargate now had more series than Star Trek or Dr Who then?
random said: You may not think much of these experiments, but thay still happened and still constitute evidence. To say there is no medical evidence at all for the existence of the soul is therefore wrong.
Has anyone reproduced this 'evidence'? Even if the body does suddenly lose 21 grams in weight at the point of death to conclude therefore that its the weight of the Soul leaving the body is a huge leap - for starters it assumes that the soul exists. Are you saying that there is no conceivable explanation for the 21 gram decrease apart from the Soul leaving the body?
random also said: Slightly more seriously, just because there is no scientific evidence for the existence of the soul doesn't mean it doesn't exist. There is no scientific evidence for the existence of beauty, justice or morality either after all.
Firstly there is a qualitative difference between the Soul & the other things you mention. As far as I am aware the Soul is supposed to be a 'thing' separate from us. If it exists at all it should be, at least theoretically, detectable.
The origins & explanations for things like the concept of beauty have been explained by science, as to a certain extent morality & justice, though they are more philosophical questions than scientific ones.
Are you suggesting that just because something cannot be explained scientifically (yet) that it must therefore be supernatural in some way?
random brought up Dr Duncan McDougall. Here's what I found after a quick Google search:
The doctor postulated the soul was material and therefore had mass, ergo a measurable drop in the weight of the deceased would be noted at the moment this essence parted ways with the physical remains. The belief that human beings are possessed of souls which depart their bodies after death and that these souls have detectable physical presences were around well before the 20th century, but claims that souls have measurable mass which falls within a specific range of weights can be traced to experiments conducted by Dr. MacDougall in 1907.
Dr. MacDougall, seeking to determine "if the psychic functions continue to exist as a separate individuality or personality after the death of brain and body," constructed a special bed in his office "arranged on a light framework built upon very delicately balanced platform beam scales" sensitive to two-tenths of an ounce. He installed upon this bed a succession of six patients in the end stages of terminal illnesses (four from tuberculosis, one from diabetes, and one from unspecified causes); observed them before, during, and after the process of death; and measured any corresponding changes in weight. He then attempted to eliminate as many physiological explanations for the observed results as he could conceive
MacDougall repeated his experiment with fifteen dogs and observed that "the results were uniformly negative, no loss of weight at death." This result seemingly corroborated MacDougall's hypothesis that the loss in weight recorded as humans expired was due to the soul's departure from the body, since (according to his religious doctrine) animals have no souls. (MacDougall's explanation that "the ideal tests on dogs would be obtained in those dying from some disease that rendered them much exhausted and incapable of struggle" but "it was not my fortune to get dogs dying from such sickness" led author Mary Roach to observe that "barring a local outbreak of distemper, one is forced to conjecture that the good doctor calmly poisoned fifteen healthy canines for his little exercise in biological theology.")
Out of six tests, two had to be discarded, one showed an immediate drop in weight (and nothing more), two showed an immediate drop in weight which increased with the passage of time, and one showed an immediate drop in weight which reversed itself but later recurred. And even these results cannot be accepted at face value as the potential for experimental error was extremely high, especially since MacDougall and his colleagues often had difficulty in determining the precise moment of death, one of the key factors in their experiments
What to make of all this? MacDougall's results were flawed because the methodology used to harvest them was suspect, the sample size far too small, and the ability to measure changes in weight imprecise. For this reason, credence should not be given to the idea his experiments proved something, let alone that they measured the weight of the soul as 21 grams. His postulations on this topic are a curiousity, but nothing more.
Has anyone tried to reproduce the experiments with modern technology? Although I think the general belief is that the soul is etherial & therefore would have no weight anyway:-)
Stargate has just been signed for it's 10th consecutive series (26 weeks each), making it the longest running Sci-Fi of all time according to SFX magazine - just beating the X-Files to the post. I think Dr Who do9esn't count due to the stop/start/15 year break & star trek due to the different shows.
CK,
"Has anyone reproduced this 'evidence'? "
I'm not aware that anybody has even tried. The logistical and ethical problems in finding somebody prepared to use their death as part of a scientific exeriment are not trivial after all.
"Are you saying that there is no conceivable explanation for the 21 gram decrease apart from the Soul leaving the body?"
I'm not saying anything, merely offering this curious story as a rebuttal of your claim that no evidence at all existed. Dr MacDougall was satisfied that he had excluded all known biochemical phenomena, and his paper was published in a peer-reviewed journal, which makes me think nobody else could see any obvious holes in it either, for what that is worth.
"Are you suggesting that just because something cannot be explained scientifically (yet) that it must therefore be supernatural in some way?"
No. I'm saying that just because something cannot be explained scientifically is not evidence that it does not exist.
By the way, that's quite a nice picture at the top of the post. Is it Hindu?
Mrs. A - I don't know what baseline SFX used, but Dr. Who certainly ran for more than 10 years when it was on originally.
random said: I'm saying that just because something cannot be explained scientifically is not evidence that it does not exist.
True. But the evidence presented by the good Doctor is questionable at best (peer reviewed or not) and represents more of a cultural curiosity than anything concrete.
random also said: By the way, that's quite a nice picture at the top of the post. Is it Hindu?
I think so. I got it from Google images searching on the word reincarnation. It is nice isn't it.
I think Dr Who ran for nearly 20 years, but only with 12 week series, so altogether less episodes written? I don't know the SFX guys are usually right & paid enough to research things properly, but they have been known to be wrong before:-)
Mrs. Aginoth said: "Just because option 3 is the simplest, doesn't make it the most likely. The universe is not known for taking the simplest option"
Actually, Occam's Razor, while just a principle, would indicate otherwise:
From Wikipedia:
In its simplest form, Occam's Razor states that one should make no more assumptions than needed. Put into everyday language, it says, "Given two equally predictive theories, choose the simpler."
For example, after a storm you notice that a tree has fallen. Based on the evidence of the storm and the fallen tree, a reasonable hypothesis would be that the storm blew down the tree — a hypothesis that requires you to suspend your disbelief very little, as there exist strong logical connections binding what you already know to this solution (seeing and hearing storms tends to indeed indicate the existence of storms; storms are more than capable of felling trees). A rival hypothesis claiming that the tree was knocked over by marauding 200-metre tall cossacks requires several additional assumptions, with various logical weaknesses resulting from inconsistencies with what is already known (concerning the very existence of aliens, their ability and desire to travel interstellar distances, their ability and desire to (non-)intentionally knock down trees and the alien biology that allows them to be 200 metres tall in terrestrial gravity), and is therefore less preferable.
I understand the principle of Occam's Razor, but it doesn't apply when dealing with life, which is ridiculously complicated & often "unecessarily" so.
I'm not much of a biologist, but I know the Eye is often posited as proof of the existance of God, as it is absurdly complicated! So I thought the same may well apply to the afterlife:-)
Mrs A - I wouldn't say that the eye was "absurdly complicated" but it is baddly 'designed'....
Being the basically simple soul that I am.... I have a preference for simple solutions/answers. The True Death Option fills this criteria for me. It is a simple 'answer' and I think the correct one. Or at least it doesn't cause me any problems - as the other Options do.
Hey CK - I've seen you around on the Jewish Athiest, figured I'd pop in.
My problem with the "soul" is the monotlithic way in which it seems to be understood. I tend toward the Buddhist and Indigenous side with this one. All things contain energy - even "non living". We know this because energy can be extracted from just about anything.
Energy cannot be created nor destroyed. So when you die - your energy must go somewhere. Now, whether it goes someplace as a whole, or whether it disperses and becomes parts of many other things, who knows - but I tend toward the latter. Just like part of my dead dog is now living on as part of the shrub we buried him under, when I die, the energy in me will disperse elsewhere.
I have trouble buying reincarnation because it assumes that the "soul" is a concrete and fixed collection of this energy that stays in tact after death. I find that highly improbable.
My problem with the whole heaven/hell thing, is that it takes your energy out of the total equation. That would be tantamount to the destruction of energy - the removal of energy from the equation, which is not physically possible according to the laws of thermodynamics.
Cyberkitten said "What to make of all this? MacDougall's results were flawed because the methodology used to harvest them was suspect, the sample size far too small, and the ability to measure changes in weight imprecise."
Also I have to ask - were these results published in a peer reviewed medical, psychological, or scientific journal? If not, I wouldn't give them much weight (pun intended) since any schmoe can rig up an electronic widget and say it measures something. Similar machines used to detect "aura's" have been debunked as well.
Hey Laura... Thanks for the visit.
You said: All things contain energy - even "non living". We know this because energy can be extracted from just about anything.
Actually all thing 'are' energy - matter just being a solid representation... and from what I was reading last night both matter and energy are just manisfestations of space - but I know what you mean.
You also said: So when you die - your energy must go somewhere. Now, whether it goes someplace as a whole, or whether it disperses and becomes parts of many other things, who knows - but I tend toward the latter.
Me too. Just like a warm room with the door left open.
You said: I have trouble buying reincarnation because it assumes that the "soul" is a concrete and fixed collection of this energy that stays in tact after death. I find that highly improbable.
Agreed. If the energy pattern was that coherent it probably would've been detected by now.
I found your idea "with the whole heaven/hell thing, is that it takes your energy out of the total equation" to be an interesting one. I never thought of it in those terms before. Again if energy were being taken out of the system to that extent it would probably be detectable too as would the location of such vast energy stores.. Interesting....
Laura said: Also I have to ask - were these results published in a peer reviewed medical, psychological, or scientific journal?
In March 1907 accounts of MacDougall's experiments were published in the The New York Times and the medical journal American Medicine
The major problem I have with the MacDougall 'experiment is that it was undertaken in 1907. That a century ago.. If the results haven't been replicated anywhere since then... it's lost most of the credibility it almost certainly never had to begin with.
CK said: "Basically we're self-aware animals frightened of our own deaths. The Soul & the Afterlife are comforts to reduce that fear of death - a cultural invention."
Laura said: "Energy cannot be created nor destroyed. So when you die - your energy must go somewhere. Now, whether it goes someplace as a whole, or whether it disperses and becomes parts of many other things, who knows - but I tend toward the latter."
I tend to think we did create religions and various beliefs about death as a comfort. I also believe the law of thermodynamics. Let me also state that I personally am a bundle of contradictions and have learned to live well with myself in spite of all that. ;-)
I tend toward the reincarnationist bent just because I was a freaky child in an antheist, illiterate family that knew and "remembered" things I had no way of knowing and generally freaked out my family quite a bit. Years later, my niece did the same thing. At one point her mother considered taking her to a doctor because she was so frantic about where her children were and that her husband would be furious if she didn't have dinner on the table in time. She was 3 years old at that time. I told her to just be patient with her and reassure her, she would forget about her last family soon. *queue creepy music* ;-)
Welcome back Voyeur.
I told her to just be patient with her and reassure her, she would forget about her last family soon. *queue creepy music* ;-)
Interesting... There do seem to be lots of tales of children convinced of previous lives and even those who have apparently provided detailed (and verified) information about their 'past' lives. Despite that I remain to be convinced. It might be an area worthy of proper study though.
I think that the soul and our memories have some sort of physical substance, so that even if we don't survive, traces of what we thought, lived, experienced, do survive. It might explain ghosts and ghostly feelings, it might explain children who know things they shouldn't, they might just be picking up on the physical traces of someone else's memories left behind. Who knows.
If you treat the soul as being an arrangement of energy waves its not that hard, staying within the rules of science to imagine that:
A) Such energy is transferrable between one form and another
B) In line with the laws of thermodynamics, it isn't destroyed but can be modified.
C) Karma is a real thing - if your energy is 'positive' it will effect 'neutral' energy and interfere with 'negative' energy, in the same way that different wave frequencies interact/alter/clash
I am a big fan of I beleive it was theory 3 - Reincarnation, as I am of the Buddhist principle of the cycle of reincarnation that how we live our lives this time does effect what happens next time - in terms of energy a literal positive marker rather than a negative marker on your energy pattern.
Do we have measurable energy patterns? I suppose there are Thermic patterns, neurol patterns... has anyone examined these to see if they are 'unique'??
(Disappears onto vague scientific tangent)
And Vancouver - my Mum fondly tells o of the life in which she was a tree... so it doesn't sound that strange...
"Energy can not be created"
By us. at this moment in time. Many "definitive" scientific truths have been debunked over the years.
your life energy dispersing & becoming part of many other things is the Gaia theory I mentioned. It also assumes that some aspects of your memories/experiences will be retained within the world as a whole, and tends to be carried through into the world as a whole having a consciousness.
The Dalai Llama has recently repeated his often quoted opinion thathe Dalai Lama often repeating that if science can prove a Buddhist assumption wrong, that assumption should be discarded, so maybe Buddism is the way to go for all Agnostics:-)
As I said originally, I am as certain as I can be that when we die, we are dead. Nothing survives, only remains remain (ha ha). Our essence is inside our minds, which is part of the brain. without oxygen, the brain stops working, the mind shuts down. I am baffled as to the grip religion still has on the world really. But I like to argue all sides:-)
Oh yes. If re-incarnation is real, and some people remember their previous lives, why can't we all do it?
RCA said: If you treat the soul as being an arrangement of energy waves its not that hard, staying within the rules of science to imagine that....
The problem is, of course, that we're not just talking about energy transfer but information transfer. The energy carrying the information has to maintain a coherent enough form for long enough to be passed on to a new generation - even in part. If such a coherent energy source exists it should be fairly easily detectable, either whilst in the body (if it lives inside) or near the body (if it doesn't). Why has this Coherent Energy Matrix (CEM) never been detected?
Mrs A said: Oh yes. If re-incarnation is real, and some people remember their previous lives, why can't we all do it?
Maybe for quite a few people its their first time here?
Mrs A said: I am baffled as to the grip religion still has on the world really.
Me too. I'm coming to the opinion that its something to do with us being (apparently) the only self-aware creature on the planet with a quite pronounced fear of death.
Cyberkitten said "The problem is, of course, that we're not just talking about energy transfer but information transfer. "
Well its Stephen Hawking's problem as well - the information loss as associated with black holes threatened to undermine his view of the universe as according to certain branches of physiscs information can not be lost, every cell that existed at the Big Bang exists now and every cell that exists now came from the big bang (therefore black holes eating matter undermine the whole theory).
As for the CEM I don't know - maybe it is there and we can't measure it, rather than assuming that as we can't measure it it can't be there...
And I wouldn't call the idea of energy reincarnation and transfer relagion so much as it is science or even applied spirituality (BIG GRIN)
I really love this topic.
I dont know what happens after death (i mean, it's all about making a choice involving not only 3, or 4, but infinite options, and i dont know for sure which one is my choice)
It is a fact that nobody can really prove his/her point of view.
So, those who think that death its the end, are just having a very strong and intuitive feeling that this is the truth of the question.
I think that that feeling qualify as faith, or religious feeling, rather than science.
But, who knows...
Im just trying to figure out new options in that infinite field for making my own and personal choice, but i will be very happy when science bring new facts to clarify this dark point of human beings.
(excuse my english, is bad, isnt it?)
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