Well, I won't type all that again, I have other things to do. If anyone is interested in carrying on the conversation in private, post your wish to do so here and along with an email address and we'll do it that way. This thread is getting too long anyway although you can cut and paste our email exchanges on the subject here if you wish. I have no objections to that.
josep
Here's your post, Josep. Please remember that every time you post, you are expect to put the name "Josep" in the "from" box.
-Joe Offer, Forum Moderator-
BS: The God Delusion 2010
RE: BS: The God Delusion 2010
11-Sep-10
//From a scientists perspective, there is as much probability that consciousness continues after death as there is that God exists.
In scientific terms = 0//"
The above is not my statement, Lox, I was responding to someone else. Please pay attention to the brackets. I always put other people's statements in brackets so people won't think I said them but apparently it doesn't do much good.
Ok, moving on--How much time has passed between the beginning of time (and we're assuming there was one even if there wasn't) and the moment of your birth? Empirically, a huge, perhaps incalculable amount. But to your consciousness the answer is zero. Why? Because you weren't conscious during that period.
If you had been conscious, you would have remembered something from that period. You are the person you are because of the accumulation of your experiences, your reflection of them and the reactions you developed as a result. Suppose you stole something from a store when you were a teen and got caught. Your parents kicked your butt and you got into all kinds of trouble. After that, you decide you will never again steal something. The experience was the theft and everything that ensued as a result. The reflection of those events caused a reaction to those events--you will never steal anything again. You learned your lesson. If that event had never occurred, you would not be the person you are now.
Likewise, you will never forget that incident. It had an impact on your life. You not only can remember the incident, you can remember it as many times as you want-- an infinite number of times theoretically. In fact, if you are ever prevented from remembering, if it is wiped clean from your memory, you would once again be another person--a different consciousness. If you've ever watched someone you know well contract Alzheimers, you know the truth of that. The incident wiped from your memory now simply becomes missing time of which you can remember nothing.
An Alzheimers patient who is 90 and suddenly forgets her grandchildren becomes someone else--a stranger. All the memories she had of her grandchildren now become missing time. Now this is not an alteration of her consciousness per se. It is an alteration of her brain due to cellular deterioration. If those cells could be restored, she's be the person she was before. But what a true, permanent alteration of consciousness itself such as its being wiped out by death?
So let's suppose death extinguishes consciousness. You are born at T0 live 90 years and die at T1. During that period, you were conscious as we define it--you had experiences, you recalled them. Now you die. What becomes of your consciousness? T0 to T1 becomes missing time, total unconsciousness. Since you were conscious between T0 to T1--contradiction. Conclusion: death does not extinguish consciousness.
We'll pause here, we're not done yet. Mull this over and post your questions or counterarguments.
One toher thing--someone on this thread expressed the opinion that consciousness arises from the material brain. This is not only wrong, it is a rehashing of dualism which is discredited. Quantum physics has proven experimentally that consciousness collapses the wave function of a wavicle into a particle, into matter. So to hold that consciousness arises epiphenomenally from matter (i.e. it is a by-product of matter) is like saying the child gives birth to the mother. It's one of those weird things that science does--it tells the public something that scientists themselves do not actually believe.Matter is not the building block of the universe. DNA does not determine who you are and how you act and react. Homo sapiens sapiens did not descend ladder-like from H. erectus, H. ergaster, H. habilus, Australopithecus--in truth there is no evidence these left any evolutionary descendants whatsoever. These are things scientists in those fields know perfectly well and yet we are taught in school the opposite.