What happens after death?

I have met a few atheist that do believe that there is an afterlife. The one I met that struck me the most was (I think) an FBI supervisor, she was adamant about theism being foolish but when I moved the topic towards death she abruptly changed her demeanor. Most likely because she supervised people who have death as a real consequence in their line of work.

You are straining to call atheism a faith, and my question to you is Why Bother? People who do not believe in God are done with the issue, they have no questions about what God wants them to do. But as a theist you do have those questions.

Do you think God wants you to prove atheism is a religion?

If so, why give atheist organizations an extra tax break?

 

Liberal version of "Heaven"

No more millionares, CEOs, or 'evil rich people' - then when the liberal goes to the store he realizes his EBT card no longer works, because there's no one left to pay taxes for him.

 

Well, ya, that's true...but not much fun....I like to make up stuff about it like religions do.


One of my thoughts : You don't know you died...you go right on thinking you're alive.. but things are much better and happier, as if you've picked the best part of your life and just kept it going......it's just a thought and I don't intend to make a religion of it

 

Ya need an EBT card in heaven!? Then I ain't goin' !

 

I agree with you, but at the same time I don't. I regard the mind as an emergent property, a side effect of physical activities. It isn't possible to have a mind without a body, but it IS possible to have a body without a mind. So I distinguished between the process and the side effect, since as I understand it this distinction is commonly drawn.

 

What happens after death? Not sure. I don't think we can know for sure. It seems like when we die, our life ends, and we become fertiliser.

 

I have to call BS on that article.

 

How can your conscience become fertilizer? I never knew that conscience was physical.

 

An interesting question. I liken it to the difference between 'data' and 'information'. On my hard disk is a huge amount of raw data - entirely physical elements, composed of ferromagnetic material. The magnetic orientation of any given section of the disk is a physical property, and these physical properties are what make up the data. However, for that data to be considered information, it has to have meaning to somebody.

In a similar way, our consciousness is a physical thing, analogous to the information on the hard disk. Instead of cobalt oxide strips, we have neurons. And instead of it's magnetic state, it has an electrical state, a chemical state, and other states.

 

I was referring to the body, not the mind.

 

I find cremation more appealing. Besides, it'll be a good warmup if I end up in the lake of fire.

 

Roger Penrose argues that the effects of gravity are ignored in the experiment and it is gravity that affects the experiment and not observations.
"On Gravity's Role in Quantum State Reduction"

To me, it seems the most logical explanation.

 

What I find interesting is that "Christians" seem to believe that their "beliefs" are unique when, in fact, they are really very common with the beliefs held by others historically.

Virtually every society has had a fear of death and have created beliefs in an afterlife. It is the goal of immortality that they seek. It is the "fountian of eternal youth" that the seek. It doesn't matter if we look at the ancient Chinese, Egyptions, Greeks, native-Americans, or Christians they all had similiar beliefs in an afterlife. It is ironic that all of these societies believed that they held the "true belief" while all other beliefs were heretical.

The commonality of all is a fear of the fact that death is eternal and not life and people are "deathly" afraid of that fact. The want to believe they are eternal beings because that gives them a false sense of security in living their lives. It is the one common denominator of all beliefs in an afterlife.

 

OK, I skimmed the paper, and while I'll be the first to admit the math, while not necessarily being above my head, is nonetheless more advanced than I've bothered to study to date, so I can't make any intelligent comment on it. That said, I'd offer a couple of observations, as well as what I think is a relevant quote from it. First, gravity effects are not changed by moving the observation point from the back screen to the slits. Second, if I understood what they were trying to say, it seemed they were saying only that sometimes would gravity account for a spontaneous collapse of the wave function that accounted for deviations of the wave pattern from Schrodinger's equation, which would most certainly not explain the consistent results of the double slit results based on where the observation point is. Indeed, occasional deviations from the predicted pattern would likely go unnoticed unless one is specifically looking for them if they are occasional and not radical.

Finally, here's I think the most relevant quote from the article:
It should be made clear, however, that this proposal does not provide a theory of quantum state reduction. It merely indicates the level at which deviations from standard linear Schrodinger (unitary) evolution are to be expected owing to gravitational effects. Indeed, it is this author's personal opinion that the correct theory uniting general relativity with quantum mechanics will involve a major change in our physical world-view -- of a magnitude at least comparable with that involved in the shift from Newtonian to Einsteinian gravitational physics.

My comment: That "major change" is for science to realize once and for all that our reality is not objective. But such an idea is still too radical for the mainstream. However, the idea of a round earth was once too radical as well, so that gives me solace.

 

But they all did believe in an afterlife, maybe it's not just a coincidence.

 

Proof of an afterlife (which I believe exists in abundance, but as it doesn't suit the agenda of various religions, it is discounted) does not constitute evidence that your, or any other, religion is the One True Religion. In fact, as I already alluded to, the evidence of reality of life after life is often labeled "lies of Satan designed as trickery" because it does not conform with the "believe our version and repent or suffer for all of eternity with but a single life to pass the test" dogma.

 

If by "observation points" you mean the detectors, then gravity effects are changed because the gravitational effects of the detectors has moved.
I know Penrose's view is pretty much still on the level of "opinion" and not science, but it does fit in with Occam's Razor, as his explanation is simpler than speculating on the existence of "many worlds".

 

How so? The experiment has been done with the detectors physically in place and not detecting (and, I believe, with them in place and detecting, but without recording what was detected) and the results were an interference pattern.

I don't ascribe to MWT, nor did my post to which you originally responded resemble MWT in the slightest. My interpretation, which explains not only the double slit, but many other scientific mysteries such as quantum tunneling and entanglemant, Fermat's Principal, and a whole host of others, including why light speed is the speed limit of the universe, is that our universe is not objective and it is not physical. Rather, it's a calculated simulation that's being fed to our consciousness to APPEAR as objectively real.

 

You ask "what happens after death", and then only actually care about it to the extent you can use it as a cudgel against atheists.

What happens after death? Nobody knows. Even if somebody *did* know, having died and come back, they wouldn't be able to provide objective proof of their claim.

So as far as I'm concerned, my take on "what happens after death" is this:

"Don't know. Don't put a lot of thought into it because it's impossible to know. Guess I'll find out when I'm dead."

 

Unless death really IS the end of existence. Then you won't know diddly. And you won't know you don't know.

 

Nor will I care.

If you press me on it, I'd answer that "I doubt there's an afterlife, but I hope there is." So I don't want to die, but I don't fear death. If there is an afterlife, it's the next big adventure. If not, no big deal: I won't know and won't care.

 

And they all believed the Earth was the center of the universe as well. Ignorance and fear was the common denominator.

 

It's like prep for hanging out with Satan, I guess.

 

Not familiar with those. An info on the specifics?

I did not mean to imply that you did ascribe to MWT. I just added my opinion on MWT.
So you're a Buddhist?
Will increasing processor speed increase speed of light?
Penrose also has speculates on QM and consciousness.

 

Not offhand, but Google is your friend.

I've been told that my philosophies are very close to Buddhism, but I honestly don't know enough about it to say whether or not I agree.

Speed of light is directly tied to pixel size (planck length) and delta-T (time increment, AKA planck time). Altering either of those would alter the speed of light. I can't say whether or not it's tied in to compute capacity (used metaphorically), or whether or not it was an arbitrary decision. I DO think the fact that our physical environment is in fact a non-physical simulation is something that was intended to be discovered when an intelligent species reaches the maturity level that they can discover it. A simple change to the algorithm that calculates the motion of particles would render the double slit experiment to have performed as initially expected, and I don't think it was just sloppy programming. It is an easter egg that was inserted intentionally.