life after death

Say, for argument's sake, that your only source of information was a virtual reality headset linked to the output from a remote camera? Ok - humour me here! If, temporarily, that is your only source of information, you will believe yourself to be where the camera is and then if that information is messed up or shut out (as in sleep) then your awareness will be of confusion or of nothing. If you say 'death' is analogous to the headset being removed then you are simply no longer solely linked to that source of information, but revert to your usual perception. 8) Its an analogy, but it shows the kinda way it could work.

Yes, no and no.

How can there be another method of gathering, interpreting and representating information? I rely on an active brain for all of that. When it is gone, my conscious mind will no longer be sustained and I will be unconscious, just like when my brain becomes almost inert in sleep or anaesthesia, or before I was born and the brain didn't exist.

Your headset analogy is more like losing your eyes or ears. I can't imagine what that is like, but I know that when my brain is inactive I have no mind. When it dies and decays, the same will presumably apply, unless something magical happens.

Science has no explanation for how conscious awareness arises. Nothing about the brain allows for it, in fact information at the level of the brain is all in compartments, not unified at all - what neuroscientists call 'The Binding Problem'. There is some evidence that consciousness can still occur when the brain is shut down though.

The best book I've read about this problem for science is 'The Undiscovered Mind' by John Horgan.

It's true that we don't yet understand how conscious awareness is possible, but it is also true that people didn't used to understand how mobility was possible. They blamed that on magical, immaterial souls as well; were they right?

The brain seems to do all the organising for how to make us move, but the problem is what makes us want to - where is the motivation? It's like a car and a driver - you can make an argument like science does now that the car drives along the road because of the engine, the steering wheel, the pedals and so on - but the reason it chooses to go a certain way is because of the driver. All science sees is what it can measure - if the driver was invisible to us we'd say it has got to be because of the steering wheel, lol.

I don't know if motivations originate purely from the brain, but I presume they don't. In any case, I can use plenty of other examples of things which we didn't used to understand but do now. Blaming the unexplainable on magic is defeatist. I'm not going to assume that the destruction of my brain will be a magical event in which the usual rules do not apply. I'm going to permanently lose consciousness, that's all.

Hi, I'm Rebecka.
You know, I thought about that when I was once wool gathering, those times that I was trying to quit smoking. I ask myself, what will happen to my son, without me? What will happen to my lungs - and I could just picture it - when I choose to be stubborn enough not to quit?

How about you? What are your thoughts?

Hi Rebeca, I don't think anything will happen just like sleeping.

I think we return to the womb when we bite the dust. Not our biological mother's, of course, but Mother Earth's womb. Even if some people choose to be cremated, their ashes still return to the soil, where we came from.

That's a very romantic way of describing the nitrogen cycle.

I'm not blaming it on 'magic' lol - I'm saying the answer must be more complicated than just the brain. The brain seems to be a control system - nothing more. It gathers and sorts sensory information at a basic level but then where does that information go? There's nothing exceptional about brain cells - they are just cells set up to transmit signals. The activity in the brain is all over the place - nothing shows how we get our unified perception.

you use the word 'presume' - and that's all it is. Science 'presumes' because it wants a simple reductionist answer, but that sort of 'presumption' has already failed with physics. A lot of what happens in Quantum effects might be described as 'magical' lol - I just think we need to look up and not down.

There's nothing exceptional about any organic molecules or even cells themselves, but when you have millions of them unpredictable properties emerge in the system which are not apparent at the micro-level. This is the same with all kinds of materials and even people - put enough of them together and they exhibit emergent behaviour which the individuals are not capable of. The same applies with neurons.




I'm not presuming anything to be the absolute truth. I don't know the answers. But I think that the most likely answer to this question is the one that is most consistent with what I already know about what happens to my mind as the brain becomes inactive. To assume that my conscious mind would survive the death of my brain would require too many new and wild hypotheses which I am not prepared to substaniate, and I don't think you are either.

Emergence in physical systems is nothing like trying to say how so mysterious a thing as conscious awareness can 'emerge' from chemical signals. All you end up with is more complex information management, not awareness.

It seems quite easy to me to see that, while 'connected' solely to the information source of the brain, your 'mind' would have it's awareness governed by the content of that information - but that it could just as easily be aware of another source. The brain dies - end of interaction, not necessarily end of the mind. That's all I'm saying - we've got to be careful we aren't trying to solve a thousand piece jigsaw with only a few pieces.