Is there life after death ??

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Everything is theoretically possible except what has been refuted by experience.

It’s not a scientific theory unless it makes predictions which can be tested by experiment. Beings purported to exist outside the realm of any possible human experience—like typical gods—can’t be studied by science; any claims about them are metaphysics. As long as your theory doesn’t make falsifiable predictions, it’s not just that science can’t tell whether the universe you talk about exists; the question itself has no meaning to science. There’s no way to determine a “percent chance” for it, either. If there’s no knowledge we can gain from experience about the matter, you just believe whatever you want, or don’t bother to believe anything, which is the parsimonious approach.



That’s wishful thinking. Just because you fear something, it isn’t any less likely to happen.

Logical contradictions are not possible in reality. Nothing is both A and not A in the same respects at the same time.

ruveyn

A singular experience, or an experience that only one person has had, does not refute any claims against it. Schizophrenics experience a lot of things - such as disembodied voices telling them what to do - but the mere fact that they've experienced something does not make their hallucinations and delusions real, and does not refute their state of non compos mentis.

Only repeatable experiences, with measurable properties, can be considered 'valid'. I often hear voices telling me what to do when there is no one else around. The fact that these voices can be heard by others as they emanate from various objects around my place of employment is demonstrable validation of the principles of electronics as applied to radio, telephony, and streaming Internet video.

Afterlife? Please demonstrate the alleged validity of a claim in favor of an 'afterlife'.

Faith proves nothing. Convoluted rhetoric proves nothing. Personal attacks prove nothing.

SHOW me.

Scientists believed the Earth’s continents were stable and did not move up until 1912, there was no such thing as continental drift.
Scientists also believed thoughts came from our heart and not the brain.
Let’s not forget the folk who thought the world was flat.

I could go on and on about the mistakes scientist have made over the years, yes they do get things wrong.

Fnord, you are right, we shouldn’t believe in most of what we read because it is packed filled with myths and legends, it is easy for us to be lead or even brain washed by it all.

When I saw myself sat on the edge of my bed at the age of four what should my thoughts have been?

I was fully conscience of everything, I still remember it as clear as a bell today. I couldn’t talk until I was about six years old, and didn’t learn to read or write until after the age of thirteen.
I never told my parents what I saw even when I could communicate with the world.

I did tell four people that my father would be dead soon in 1996, a week before he died from a heart attack, his first and only one.

In 1978 I felt the moment that my mother past away, I was 300 miles away from where she died.

I have continued to have what can only be described as Out of body experiences throughout my life, all from the age of four.
I have seen Doctors about my experiences many times, all of them intrigued, not one of them took the easy way out and said “It’s only an illusion”. (They were open minded)

There is so much mankind can’t explain, just because one person doesn’t believe in something, doesn’t mean it’s not true.

Scientists can’t work out for sure what the mind is, they can’t figure out what the conscience is. (Fnord maybe you can tell us)

Silly old me I believe that our mind is something else other than a bunch of neurons engaging in their environment, I believe we have yet to realize the true physics of our mind, and why not, we don’t know everything at this point in human history.

I don't believe in religion or everything scientest say, I think this is fair, but what about my experiences, is it OK if I believe in them?

I can't prove it, but there is a big YES from me when asked do I belive in the afterlife.

That's why LaVeyan Satanism is kinda stupid because they claim to be atheists that don't believe in the Christian beliefs of heaven/hell, but if they're wrong and Hell actually does exist they're obviously going there.

Did we forget about Schrodinger's cat?

I was answering this …

… and I think it’s better to state first the fundamental idea that science is based on experience before wading through the murky waters of defining more precisely what experience is and what we do with it.



This still depends on how strictly you define refuting. A very slightly less absolute version follows simply from Ockham’s razor. A schizophrenic’s experiences can be explained by at least two competing hypotheses, namely, that the events they think are going on are real, and that there’s something in their senses or their nervous systems that causes them to perceive a false reality. The former hypothesis is readily excluded by Ockham’s razor, because it’d require an explanation for how the rest of the people involved, with all the instruments they may have used, are in the wrong, and how the schizophrenic’s beliefs are compatible with existing scientific knowledge; therefore, it’s much simpler to conclude their beliefs are wrong and accept the second hypothesis.

The demand that experiences be repeatable is, thus, a practical way to implement a consequence of Ockham’s razor. It works neatly in the usual cases where almost everybody would agree someone had a deceptive experience; but it’d break down if the difference in the complexity introduced by the competing hypotheses weren’t so readily apparent. If half the world’s population were to get from an experiment with measurable properties (to me, this just means “not vague”) a result wildly different from that of the other half, no matter how many people in both groups performed the experiment or how many times they do it, the choice of which hypotheses have been falsified would basically depend on which half you’re in, since the hypothesis that the other half of the world’s population is wrong introduces a little less complexity than the one stating both that your are being given wrong information by the rest of the members of your own half and that you yourself are being deluded, no matter how hard you may be trying to do things right—which nobody knows better than you do. There’d be no progress in universally accepted science, and the results of the experiment would create two conflicting branches of science from that point on.

A more drastic case would happen if only a relatively small group of people agree with you, after rigorously and repeatedly performing the experiment, while the rest of the world, including highly regarded authorities, claim to get different results. Then, your group would be considered a bunch of cranks by the rest of the world, but, to you, your version of science would be the correct one, and the rest of the world would be intellectually corrupted in a very dire way. At some point, before reaching the extreme case of what the schizophrenic themself perceives, the hypothesis that you’re wrong and the rest of the world is right should trump its opposite, but it depends on how rigorously you follow the scientific method and how much evidence the other side provides that they’re doing it.

I’ve already said I don’t believe in an afterlife, but here’s an idea about how an attempt could be made to study the matter scientifically.

Last edited by Spiderpig on 06 Jun 2013, 7:28 am, edited 1 time in total.

Schrödinger’s cat is not a contradiction. Quantum physics postulates a quite unintuitive reality, which causes apparent contradictions when you try to describe it in familiar terms. It is logically sound, however, and its predictions agree with experiment so far.

I obviously forgot to add the “and logical contradictions” tag to my statement.

I admit I don't know enough about quantum physics, but from what I've read, it always looked to me like it was suggesting that contradictions do occur in the form of superposition or whatever it's called.

I know logically that my consciousness will end on death and that I'll cease to exist. But I can't accept that, if I did I'd be far too depressed; I believe I'll not stop existing after I die because I can't live with the possibility of nothingness. (That's actually one of the main reasons humanity tends to believe in religions.)

I think the problem right now is I'm struggling to find words for my thoughts.
Realistically speaking it's likely that we still know little of the universe and how it truly works. Every time we've assumed we know it all something is discovered that can change everything. (which brings me back to the 'flat world' point, at that time we didn't have the means to know we were wrong yet we called it 'logical' and 'fact'.) We can make predictions of the unknown based on the known, until we discover more to enlighten us. It's possible in the future we'll look back on ourselves and say 'REALLY, we thought that!?'

So what about the possibility of other dimensions, another realm where the conscious mind might continue to exist?

Bi-location out of body experiences, as well as quantum physicist seem to suggest that we can be in two places at the same time.

Q: Is their life after death?
A: I don't freaking know. The only way anyone might find out is to die. I certainly hope there is life after death, but realistically there is only about a 50% chance of that being the case. However, I highly doubt that any afterlife that would likely exist would reflect any religions. Chances are people all go to the same place, regardless as to what we do in life.

[img][800:496]http://sci-ence.org/comics/2011-01-14-Blinded.jpg[/img]

No we did not. The Cat is 0.5 alive and 0.5 dead. He is not 1.0 alive AND 1.0 dead. Once the cat is observed it is either dead or alive but not both.

The quantum state is potential. The observation which "collapses" the wave function produces the actual state.

ruveyn

The point with Shrödinger's cat is that the cat can't be 0.5 alive and 0.5 dead.

I always thought that, do to the fact that there was no definitive way of knowing, the cat could be considered as alive or dead, but with neither claim having more weight in reality than the other. Thus, due to the fact that both claims are equally true (or equally false), the cat can be considered both alive and dead. But, once the box is opened, one answer is right and the other is wrong. Hence, the entire idea is more novelty than anything else.