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Do you believe there is some form of self-conscious life after death?

Do you believe there is some form of self-conscious life after death?

  • Total voters
    177
Comatose people aren't brain dead and there are many examples of people living several years in a comatose state, no cases for those that are brain dead.
 
Jodie said:
Comatose people aren't brain dead and there are many examples of people living several years in a comatose state, no cases for those that are brain dead.
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Are there clear signs of deterioration that indicate ‘lifelessness’ as opposed to ‘comatose’ ? I have read that there are comatose conditions that are all-but equivalent to brain dead ( ? ). Don’t know how long such conditions can prevail…but presumably, after a certain point, a body may provide signs that the brain is dead as opposed to merely comatose….?
 
annnnoid said:
.......I’m afraid I would have to qualify your compliment. It is ‘well said’ if you have yet to graduate from elementary school. But then again…even for someone in elementary school there are still rather glaring deficiencies. For example…the word ‘imperial’. Blatantly silly even by elementary school standards!
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You've never made a spelling mistake*. Interesting. I see it is standard fare for you to attempt to deflect from your lack of an argument by pompously correcting typos and spelling mistakes. Easier to do that than to acknowledge that you tried to shift the onus onto those saying there is no evidence for the existence of a soul.

Oh, and I can confirm that you did at least get one thing correct: I didn't graduate from elementary school. I never attended elementary school, for a start, because no-one in this country does, but just as importantly, the only institution from which one graduates is a University, and I have done that four times.

*You allow yourself the grammatical error of replacing commas with " ... " though, I notice.
 
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MikeG said:
You've never made a spelling mistake*. Interesting. I see it is standard fare for you to attempt to deflect from your lack of an argument by pompously correcting typos and spelling mistakes. Easier to do that than to acknowledge that you tried to shift the onus onto those saying there is no evidence for the existence of a soul.

Oh, and I can confirm that you did at least get one thing correct: I didn't graduate from elementary school. I never attended elementary school, for a start, because no-one in this country does, but just as importantly, the only institution from which one graduates is a University, and I have done that four times.
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Well congratulations. You should be well acquainted with the meaning of the word ‘empirical’ then. Perhaps you could educate your less fortunate brethren.

…and there is evidence for the existence of a ‘soul’. It is just not evidence that can be adjudicated by science. Since you have four sparkling degrees to your credit you should be well aware that there are a vast number of ‘things’ about which science has (and can have) precious little to say.

One of them being how any ‘science’ is ever created in the first place (or what an ‘epistemology’ is)! Quite obviously science DOES exist. I have to say…given this new revelation (4 degrees!)…that I have to wonder how attentive you may have been during your studies! Such a lengthy exposure to higher education…and yet you still manage to subscribe to such juvenile paradigms (“science ONLY explores the incontrovertible”…”only that which science can adjudicate is legitimate”…etc. etc.).

There are, of course, countless other examples. I already provided you with some. Funny that you had absolutely nothing to say about them. I would have thought with four degrees you would have at least something to say!
 
annnnoid;11533370..…and there is evidence for the existence of a ‘soul’. It is just not evidence that can be adjudicated by science. [HILITE said:
Since you have four sparkling degrees to your credit[/HILITE] you should be well aware that there are a vast number of ‘things’ about which science has (and can have) precious little to say.........
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Why would you assume that any of them are science degrees? I am an architect. Even an architect, however, can understand that evidence which isn't testable and falsifiable isn't evidence. If the evidence you have for the existence of a soul doesn't meet this very basic minimum, then the null hypothesis remains extant.
 
annnnoid said:
...... I have to wonder how attentive you may have been during your studies! Such a lengthy exposure to higher education…and yet you still manage to subscribe to such juvenile paradigms (“science ONLY explores the incontrovertible”…”only that which science can adjudicate is legitimate”…etc. etc.)........
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There's that pomposity again. You are directly lying by saying that I have subscribed to the "juvenile paradigms" you quote. I have made no such claim, and in putting in quotations in that manner you are not only being utterly dishonest, you are actually setting up a straw man. Congratulations on finding so many ways to be both wrong and scurrilous in the one post.
 
Jodie said:
If a "soul", or whatever term you want to use to describe a life force, didn't exist then you should be able to maintain a body until it dies from the natural aging process.
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As if aging was the only fatal condition. Quite aside the vitalism woo. Which part of your many billion cells is you?
 
Jodie said:
If you say so, but I think I have a point about the maintenance of a brain dead body, it can't be done for any great length of time. If a "soul", or whatever term you want to use to describe a life force, didn't exist then you should be able to maintain a body until it dies from the natural aging process.
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I'm no medico but I would think a brain dead body would have physical, (ie. material), damage to the brain, and not be brain dead because the soul has gone missing.

I have mentioned this before but many have significant brain damage, but not be totally brain dead as a result of accident or disease. They keep on living without being maintained. So what of the soul then? Has it partially abandoned ship?
 
I understand soul as software of the brain. I think that was the original intended meaning, even if people didn't understand the concept well. I see no problem in saying your soul vanishes after the computer is switched off.
 
Dr.Sid said:
I understand soul as software of the brain. I think that was the original intended meaning, even if people didn't understand the concept well. I see no problem in saying your soul vanishes after the computer is switched off.
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Interesting way to look at it, although I wonder at the idea that it is the "original intended meaning", given that computers haven't been around that long.
 
I think it's funny the way some mix ghosts and souls together. They see a ghost and assume it is the soul of the departed as they recognize the apparition.

In a mischievous mood I have challenged those making these claims with - "What does a soul look like when it's brand new and just been attached to an embryo?"
 
Dr.Sid said:
I understand soul as software of the brain. I think that was the original intended meaning, even if people didn't understand the concept well. I see no problem in saying your soul vanishes after the computer is switched off.
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As I was saying both the Greek "pneuma" and the Latin "Spiritus" were originally quite literally "breath", even if some metaphorical extensions were added later. In fact both made a quite clear distinction between those and mind, e.g., pneuma vs psyke for the Greeks, and spiritus vs anima for the Romans.

The Greeks also weren't very convinced that you need a brain. (And the Romans pretty much left such matters to the Greeks anyway.) Aristotle thought the brain is what you'd nowadays call a radiator for the water-cooling system that (he thought) is your circulatory system. I still think he has a point, and some people only use it about that much :p

Earlier than that, the Egyptians were pretty sure that you totally don't need a brain to go to the afterlife. (Which I guess also seems a pretty good point, looking at some fundies;)) That was the only organ they never embalmed. They'd just push a rod in through the nose, give it a good stir and pour it out.

On the other hand, the mummies and other suitable supports for the soul (seriously, it could also reside in statues and paintings) were prepared with the Ritual Of The Opening Of The Mouth. You know, quite literally so they can BREATHE. There's that breath connection again.

So as I keep saying, it was not about software running on the brain, but literally about that last breath. The pneuma or spiritus were literally that breath. The question it was supposed to answer wasn't if you're still thinking when the brain died, but the more brain-dead question: when that guy exhaled for the last time, when he stopped breathing, where did the Breath go?

Which, as I said before, strikes me as about as stupid as askling: when the clock broke, where did the Ticking go?
 
Thor 2 said:
I think it's funny the way some mix ghosts and souls together. They see a ghost and assume it is the soul of the departed as they recognize the apparition.
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I'd say that ship has long sailed. I'm pretty sure they called it the "spiritus sanctus" since day one, for example. But yeah, the same word that was the soul of the dead (as I was saying, that last breath) was one of several words that could be used for a ghost.

And ditto for the greek "pneuma". The same word for "breath" as in "last breath" was also a term for both soul and ghost.
 
Thor 2 said:
Interesting way to look at it, although I wonder at the idea that it is the "original intended meaning", given that computers haven't been around that long.
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I mean .. the realized there is a process happening inside body, or even brain .. which they called soul. Not just consciousness, cause person can be alive and unconscious. Not just life, cause person can be alive, and brain-dead. That there is some essence of person present inside a body, which doesn't go away if you go to sleep .. but which does go away when you die.
Obviously people would wish such process would continue forever even after death of the body, that the soul is immortal .. but that's another problematic.
As for software and computer, we have an advantage .. we know the inner workings. We know software is informational process based on changes of internal state of the computer, and that those changes can be governed by a program. We, at least some of us, can imagine consciousness is just the same. Old thinkers couldn't possibly bridge the gap in concepts. So they came up with word soul. But IMHO the meaning translates quite well to 'software'.
 
Dr Sid, seriously, the ONLY ancient belief I am aware of that aligns somewhat with your idea of ONLY continuing some kind of thought process after death is buddhism. Which incidentally had to come up with a name for it meaning basically "non-soul", to distinguish it from the kind of soul that the rest of the guys in the area believed in.
 
HansMustermann said:
Dr Sid, seriously, the ONLY ancient belief I am aware of that aligns somewhat with your idea of ONLY continuing some kind of thought process after death is buddhism. Which incidentally had to come up with a name for it meaning basically "non-soul", to distinguish it from the kind of soul that the rest of the guys in the area believed in.
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What ? Don't basically all religions believe in afterlife ?
 
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