Scientific possibility of an afterlife? ...of somesort

Zubeneschamali

nagirrac wrote: »

While Penrose is in a minority of scientists who attribute consciousness to quantum effects, to describe his hypothesis as "magical" is quite unfair to this brilliant man (who is also an atheist btw, and supposedly atheists do not believe in anything magical:)).

Being an atheist does not make someone immune to silly ideas.

shane9689

i believe zube is right on this one....... look at it this way.... someone walks in and says " i want the original zube who attended all his life events in person" .....the scientist conducting the cloning would have to hand over zube v1.0 because he is the only zube to have attended these events. zube 2.0 has not. zube 2.0 may believe he has, but he hasnt actually done it, those memories were implanted in him rather than created by him. thats the difference...its like wanting the guitar used by kurt cobain....yeah you can get exact copies...but theres only one original worth all the money regardless of how perfect the copies are....this is the same principle here.

Youre no longer talking about the transfer of consciousness (which was the original debate) but rather the duplication of one, which is slightly different. We want to move Zube 1.0's conscious over to something else, not duplicate it to create a second consciousness, which is what you are doing

nagirrac

Zubeneschamali wrote: »

Being an atheist does not make someone immune to silly ideas.

I fully agree with that, but what makes the Penrose/Hameroff hypothesis a silly one?

Zubeneschamali

shane9689 wrote: »

Youre no longer talking about the transfer of consciousness (which was the original debate) but rather the duplication of one, which is slightly different. We want to move Zube 1.0's conscious over to something else, not duplicate it to create a second consciousness, which is what you are doing

But if you allow that a perfect copy is not me, then all an upload/download machine is doing, or a Star Trek transporter, is killing the original me and making a copy.

shane9689

Zubeneschamali wrote: »

But if you allow that a perfect copy is not me, then all an upload/download machine is doing, or a Star Trek transporter, is killing the original me and making a copy.

pretty much

smacl

shane9689 wrote: »

i believe zube is right on this one....... look at it this way.... someone walks in and says " i want the original zube who attended all his life events in person" .....the scientist conducting the cloning would have to hand over zube v1.0 because he is the only zube to have attended these events. zube 2.0 has not. zube 2.0 may believe he has, but he hasnt actually done it, those memories were implanted in him rather than created by him. thats the difference...its like wanting the guitar used by kurt cobain....yeah you can get exact copies...but theres only one original worth all the money regardless of how perfect the copies are....this is the same principle here.

So say the scientist hands over Zube 2.0 instead. Neither Zube 1.0 nor Zube 2.0 knows the difference, and nor does anyone else. If there's no difference at a subjective level, and no difference at an objective level, what exactly is the difference?

If you start playing a game on a computer, save it to a USB key, and load it up and continue playing it on another computer, is it still the same game? Say some time in the future you play the game from the saved position again on the original computer, is that also still the same game?

The point here is that the game is no more than an ever changing state of play which can be considered independent of the hardware on which it is running. A saved game is a precise copy of the state of play, and you can keep playing just as well regardless on which computer you load your saved game from.

If you accept that a given mind is a state of play within a given brain, if you restore the state to a new identical brain, you have continuousness of subjective conciousness.

Zubeneschamali

smacl wrote: »

So say the scientist hands over Zube 2.0 instead. Neither Zube 1.0 nor Zube 2.0 knows the difference, and nor does anyone else. If there's no difference at a subjective level, and no difference at an objective level, what exactly is the difference?

Say the hospital switched you with another baby - my god, you're not you, you're somebody else!

If you have two humans who are exactly the same as each other, identical twins who have never been in separate rooms in their whole lives and that no-one can tell apart: they are still two separate people. It's kind of the definition of a person.

And in our example, one of those people went into the copier, and came back out, and the other is new. This is a physical fact.

Now, you are trying to say that this physical fact does not matter, and that if we hide it and confuse people they won't be able to work it out for themselves, but that is true of lots of physical facts.

And if you return Zube2 and stuff Zube1 in a wood chipper, you are a murderer.

tommy2bad

Zubeneschamali wrote: »

Say the hospital switched you with another baby - my god, you're not you, you're somebody else!

If you have two humans who are exactly the same as each other, identical twins who have never been in separate rooms in their whole lives and that no-one can tell apart: they are still two separate people. It's kind of the definition of a person.

And in our example, one of those people went into the copier, and came back out, and the other is new. This is a physical fact.

Now, you are trying to say that this physical fact does not matter, and that if we hide it and confuse people they won't be able to work it out for themselves, but that is true of lots of physical facts.

And if you return Zube2 and stuff Zube1 in a wood chipper, you are a murderer.

Indeed and if zube 2 commits a murder they cant charge zube 1 with the crime.
Agency is the important thing when defining a person or at least the potential for agency. If zube 1 is an agent in their own right then they are a seperate person. If however zube 1 and 2 act in synch, zube1 puts up his hand, zube 2's hand goes up as well, then zube2 is not a person.
The real question is to what extent zube 2 is a continuation of zube 1 if we eliminate zube 1 at the point of creating zube2.

sbsquarepants

Zubeneschamali wrote: »

You may be thinking exclusion principle. The uncertainty principle affects whole atoms and therefor molecules, not just electrons.
.

Possibly, my particle physics knowledge is somewhere around kindergarten level! I thought the uncertainty principle was only really apparent at sub atomic level.

shane9689 wrote: »

i believe zube is right on this one....... look at it this way.... someone walks in and says " i want the original zube who attended all his life events in person" .....the scientist conducting the cloning would have to hand over zube v1.0 because he is the only zube to have attended these events. zube 2.0 has not. zube 2.0 may believe he has, but he hasnt actually done it, those memories were implanted in him rather than created by him. thats the difference...its like wanting the guitar used by kurt cobain....yeah you can get exact copies...but theres only one original worth all the money regardless of how perfect the copies are....this is the same principle here.

But zube 1.0 hasn't attended all those life events - he merely has memories of them, so does zube 2.0. Go back a decade or so and zube 1.0 was no more there "in person" than you or I were - he just has an inbuilt recording that we don't have - but zube 2.0 has it, so again what is the difference.

To put it another way, say we make 2 copies, 2.0 and 3.0 then we incinerate 1.0 leaving 2.0 and 3.0 with all their memories and emotional attachments to argue over which of them is the real zube? Is zube dead, or would his missus and kids happily accept 2.0 or 3.0 (or both, we don't know what his wife is into:eek:). If nobody knows the difference, or could ever detect any difference, then what is the difference? My feeling is, of course there has to be one, but I'm damned if I know what it is?

smacl

Zubeneschamali wrote: »

Say the hospital switched you with another baby - my god, you're not you, you're somebody else!

Another baby, identical in every sense, all the way down to what they're thinking...

If you have two humans who are exactly the same as each other, identical twins who have never been in separate rooms in their whole lives and that no-one can tell apart: they are still two separate people. It's kind of the definition of a person.

Identical twins do not have identical minds or bodies at any point in there existence. Chaos theory thus leads them to be different people, i.e. they diverge.

And in our example, one of those people went into the copier, and came back out, and the other is new. This is a physical fact.

It's not a physical fact, nor is it ever likely to be. It's an abstract hypothesis. A what if...

Now, you are trying to say that this physical fact does not matter, and that if we hide it and confuse people they won't be able to work it out for themselves, but that is true of lots of physical facts.

And if you return Zube2 and stuff Zube1 in a wood chipper, you are a murderer.

Zube2 is happy, one zube seems like plenty for society at large, and we do need to get the raw ingredients for soylent green for the poor starving babies of Utopia from somewhere. Wood chipper. Mincer. Whatever works.

MaxWig

https://medium.com/the-nib/7f7b029ae71e

smacl

tommy2bad wrote: »

Indeed and if zube 2 commits a murder they cant charge zube 1 with the crime.
Agency is the important thing when defining a person or at least the potential for agency. If zube 1 is an agent in their own right then they are a seperate person. If however zube 1 and 2 act in synch, zube1 puts up his hand, zube 2's hand goes up as well, then zube2 is not a person.
The real question is to what extent zube 2 is a continuation of zube 1 if we eliminate zube 1 at the point of creating zube2.

Once zube1 and zube2 are both revived, they diverge and become distinct. They are only the same prior to this point. Much like my saved game restored and played on two different computers will play out differently.

Zubeneschamali

tommy2bad wrote: »

The real question is to what extent zube 2 is a continuation of zube 1 if we eliminate zube 1 at the point of creating zube2.

I'm on the "not at all" side, if you eliminate zube1, I'm dead.

Wil McCarthy has some fun books with duplication in them (like The Wellstone). As well as being able to make copies at a distance, his tech is able to combine two copies memories into one later. Lots of fun with copies who don't want to recombine.

There's "Think Like a Dinosaur" by James Patrick Kelly. And the movie "The Prestige".

I think it might be in McCarthy's book, where he mentions that when fax machines were invented, people like me wouldn't use them, but a hundred years later, we're all dead and only people prepared to use the fax machines are still around. Or copies of them, at least.

We see a few people in "Star Trek" who don't like transporters, but I don't think we ever see anyone who believes that everyone who ever used one is dead.

smacl

Steel World also had a lot of this going on. Soldiers marching off into battle, getting killed, and revived back to their last saved state with memories only up to that point. Light and fun shoot 'em style sci-fi but enjoyable enough. Bit of it going on in Doctor Who too a few years back, and even Futurama.

MaxWig

smacl wrote: »

Once zube1 and zube2 are both revived, they diverge and become distinct. They are only the same prior to this point. Much like my saved game restored and played on two different computers will play out differently.

This whole thread raises really interesting questions about 'who/what' decides who we are/I am.

It's plainly not a simple definition.

I know the idea that the self existing outside the body has been rubbished in terms of neurological origins, but in truth, the self is inseparable from the environment.

But is is evident that we are more prone to external definition than we would like to think.

The world defines/tells us who we are

sbsquarepants

smacl wrote: »

Steel World also had a lot of this going on. Soldiers marching off into battle, getting killed, and revived back to their last saved state with memories only up to that point. Light and fun shoot 'em style sci-fi but enjoyable enough. Bit of it going on in Doctor Who too a few years back, and even Futurama.

Of course, if this kind of technology ever comes to be this will of course be it's main and possibly only use. The military would merely use it to churn out cannon fodder.

nozzferrahhtoo

nagirrac wrote: »

I think it is cautiously reasonable to assume that the brain cells that have to do with the experience of who we are, regardless of whether this is in any way related to truth, stick around throughout our lives and are not replaced.

And what would such a blatant assumption be based on? You appear to be simply noting that "some memories and experiences are persistent" and then noting that "some cells are persistent" and then simply adding 2+2 to get 5 and simply asserting that therefore there has to be a connection.

I can understand how the correlation would be attractive to lazy thinking on the matter, but I remain unimpressed by your leaps on the matter.

nagirrac wrote: »

All this ramble leads me to conclude very tentatively that the brain operates as a kind of quantum computer.

You got to this sentence from "spin"? Non sequitur much? Also you have completely dodged and ran away from my last post entirely. but in that post I asked how "spin" is a "mental" attribute? What does that even mean???? Or is it one of those MANY statements you throw out to sound good but entirely run away from any attempt to discuss and unpack?

nagirrac wrote: »

supposedly atheists do not believe in anything magical

As usual when you trot out one of your many generalisations about atheists, this is entirely false. Many atheists subscribe to some truely out there unsubstantiated nonsense, woo, and magical thinking. Atheists are by no means immune to ludicrous notions. Atheists are just people who have not bought into YOUR particular brand of unsubstantiated woo nonsense and ridiculous postulations and excretions.

tommy2bad

Zubeneschamali wrote: »

I'm on the "not at all" side, if you eliminate zube1, I'm dead.

Yes, so dead in fact that if it's discovered you were a horrible child killer the copy Zube could not be charged with any of your crimes.
However their would be a case for putting poor old zube 2 on a watch list. After all he remembers the crimes and has inherited the proclivity for that particular, shall we say indulgence.
However at the same time he never committed any crime and had no hand act or part in them. He is entirely innocent, as the proverbial newborn babe.
Or is he? would he feel guilt for what 'he' did? would he feel he got away with it?
Fun game and gets quite dark quickly.
It dose raise the question as to what 'we' are, what is the person if the atoms are changed but the personality and memories remain is it the same person? That's effectively what happens now, add the duplication process and because we have two sets of atoms we perceive two persons. The problem is that we think a person is more than the memories and personality, the information par if you will. We need them to be embodied in something that has a continuum of being. Any sudden jerk in this continuum and we start to question what we call a person. Where dose the agency rest? in the information or the hardware, or some combined both?

recedite

Taking this "saved game" analogy a bit further, it is reasonable to assume that there would be a very few elderly people in this future society. As their health deteriorated, people would keep on restoring themselves to some earlier version. But eventually, they might get bored with this endless replaying of the same (or similar) game, and want to start again as a completely new character. At this point, they have a further choice. They could choose to either let themselves continue living, existing in poor state of repair, kept alive artificially with various drugs and medical interventions, or let themselves die naturally. If you have been into a nursing home recently, you will know that we are already at the point where we have that grim choice ahead of us.
If you want to restart life as a completely new character, there can be no memory or connection to the previous character. On the other hand you might like the idea that some part of your "essence" is continuing on. But again, we already have that; its called human reproduction. Ok, the next generation is not actually comprised of the exact same individuals as their predecessors, but isn't that the point?

smacl

tommy2bad wrote: »

Yes, so dead in fact that if it's discovered you were a horrible child killer the copy Zube could not be charged with any of your crimes.

Poor old Zube, he started by punching his other self in the nose after being cloned, and has now deteriorated into some horrible child killer. I reckon someone inadvertently pressed the EvilTwin button on the WeFaxU machine

sbsquarepants

tommy2bad wrote: »

It dose raise the question as to what 'we' are, what is the person if the atoms are changed but the personality and memories remain is it the same person? That's effectively what happens now, add the duplication process and because we have two sets of atoms we perceive two persons. The problem is that we think a person is more than the memories and personality, the information par if you will. We need them to be embodied in something that has a continuum of being. Any sudden jerk in this continuum and we start to question what we call a person. Where dose the agency rest? in the information or the hardware, or some combined both?

To my mind, it has to rest in the information. What comprises the song? Surely not the plastic disc?
To put it another way, say you are very accident prone, you fall under a train and loose your legs - you're still you, you then catch your arms in a mincer - you're still you. It goes on and on until you end up a head in a jar on a shelf beside Nixon - you're still you. This new technology merely does away with the need for the head and the jar to store it in. The information is what is important, copy that accurately and you've copied the person - what you store them in is then just cosmetic really.

Electric Boobs

shane9689 wrote: »

hey, i'm going to take a giant leap out there with the scientific ideas of the afterlife and suggest we will have more life after death....i mean, if time is infinite, then anything that can happen will happen, right? because there is infinite time (thus opportunities) for it to occur, so statistically, if its even marginally possible, it will happen eventually right?
so mathematically, there probably is a very very very very very very very very marginal statistic for the chances of our bodies and mind being recreated in its exact form before our death once again as it has already been proven to be a possible form for us to take..... and since we have infinity for it to happen again, it has to happen again right? just as you roll dice, you eventually have to roll two 6's...eventually we have to take form again? and since we will be non-existent in the intervening time, we will simply become conscious again in our next form.... p.s i'm not a scientist, so if anyone here knows about chemistry or physics, any thoughts?

It sounds like you're just looking for attention posting this!!

magicbastarder

says the person dragging up a thread which is several months old, with a post which adds nothing to the debate.

SpaceTime

While I'm open to all sorts of possibilities, I wouldn't be holding my hopes up.

Human mortality freaks us out and I think one of the issues with a lot of religions is that you've people doing all sorts of things in the here and now with a notion that they're going to be rewarded in an afterlife.

My own personal view is that's not very likely / scientifically possible so, you might as well make the most of the only life we definitely know we have and that's very time limited. Your afterlife is your legacy that you leave here be it your genetic material if you have kids or some kind of contribution you've made to society that will be remembered. It doesn't have to be a big one, but it does really leave a strong incentive to do something positive.

I think when you start abstracting stuff to the level that it's all about the afterlife you end up getting situations like you are seeing in the Middle East with various flavours of Islamic extremism now or in Christianity in the past.

I just think it's sort of a potential waste of a life to spend it worrying about what's going to happen after you die. If you just blink out of existence, well if you still had the biological systems in place to support your cognitive processes and were able to think about it you'd probably be pretty annoyed.

My view of it is live like there isn't an afterlife and if there is, well that'd be a 'grand bonus for you altogether' but certainly based on known scientific fact, it seems highly, highly unlikely.

Electric Boobs

SpaceTime wrote: »

If you just blink out of existence, well if you still had the biological systems in place to support your cognitive processes and were able to think about it you'd probably be pretty annoyed.

I didn't grasp what that meant! Sounded interesting??

SpaceTime

Electric Boobs wrote: »

I didn't grasp what that meant! Sounded interesting??

Well, assuming that there isn't an afterlife. If you had lived your entire life on the basis that there was one and saved up all your brownie points for whatever rewards your particular belief system had told you about and then you died and realised that there wasn't one at all.. you'd be pretty annoyed!

But, because your brain would have ceased functioning, you'd never realise that so you'd probably just drift off into nothingness.

I just think about it like this:
I have no memory of anything before I was born / began to exist. So, I would assume that's just how it's going to be after my biological systems stop and my brain eventually switches off.

Scary enough, but at the same time not THAT scary either. It's just a huge motivator for making the most of what time I do know I definitely have.

I suppose I don't go on but whatever little impacts I may have had in terms of what ideas I generated, who I am etc are my 'afterlife' I suppose. So, that's pretty much the core of the philosophy I live by. Probably would seem a bit weird to very religious people, but that's me.

I know it sounds a bit daft, but that's what kinda drives me to do stuff like write a thesis or a book before I die that kind of thing.
Also just experience life as much as I can.

I guess it's just that I would like someone in a hundred years from now could pick something up even if it's just a collection of holiday photos and say, so that's what he was like. I think that's kind of cool and keeps me a lot happier than worrying about an afterlife tbh.

But, each to their own, I'm not preaching ... just how I do things myself.

hinault

SpaceTime wrote: »

While I'm open to all sorts of possibilities, I wouldn't be holding my hopes up.

Human mortality freaks us out and I think one of the issues with a lot of religions is that you've people doing all sorts of things in the here and now with a notion that they're going to be rewarded in an afterlife.

My own personal view is that's not very likely / scientifically possible so, you might as well make the most of the only life we definitely know we have and that's very time limited. Your afterlife is your legacy that you leave here be it your genetic material if you have kids or some kind of contribution you've made to society that will be remembered. It doesn't have to be a big one, but it does really leave a strong incentive to do something positive.

I think when you start abstracting stuff to the level that it's all about the afterlife you end up getting situations like you are seeing in the Middle East with various flavours of Islamic extremism now or in Christianity in the past.

I just think it's sort of a potential waste of a life to spend it worrying about what's going to happen after you die. If you just blink out of existence, well if you still had the biological systems in place to support your cognitive processes and were able to think about it you'd probably be pretty annoyed.

My view of it is live like there isn't an afterlife and if there is, well that'd be a 'grand bonus for you altogether' but certainly based on known scientific fact, it seems highly, highly unlikely.

Science hasn't been able to explain many aspects of this life therefore it is no wonder that science has not reached the capacity of proving, or disproving, whether or not there is an afterlife!

All of the monotheistic religions subscribe to the notion that there life after physical death.
Even religions such as Buddhism say that a person does not die upon physical death.

Zubeneschamali

hinault wrote: »

All of the monotheistic religions subscribe to the notion that there life after physical death.
Even religions such as Buddhism say that a person does not die upon physical death.

These religions contradict each other, so at most one is true.

Since we know for a fact that most of these religions are untrue, we know that billions of people sincerely believe in a kind of afterlife which we know for a fact cannot exist. For example, either you go to Heaven/Hell, or you are reincarnated. Not both. Yet both can produce a billion sincere believers, so that is not evidence that either are true.

You need some other sort of evidence to establish that any kind of afterlife does exist.

Frank Lee Midere

sbsquarepants wrote: »

To my mind, it has to rest in the information. What comprises the song? Surely not the plastic disc?
To put it another way, say you are very accident prone, you fall under a train and loose your legs - you're still you, you then catch your arms in a mincer - you're still you. It goes on and on until you end up a head in a jar on a shelf beside Nixon - you're still you. This new technology merely does away with the need for the head and the jar to store it in. The information is what is important, copy that accurately and you've copied the person - what you store them in is then just cosmetic really.

All very theoretical. This is the mind as software argument which I am not convinced about. I think the mind and brain are more tightly coupled than a CPU and software.

To model a person you would have to model the brain in software rather than the software running on the brain.

swampgas

Zubeneschamali wrote: »

These religions contradict each other, so at most one is true.

Since we know for a fact that most of these religions are untrue, we know that billions of people sincerely believe in a kind of afterlife which we know for a fact cannot exist. For example, either you go to Heaven/Hell, or you are reincarnated. Not both. Yet both can produce a billion sincere believers, so that is not evidence that either are true.

You need some other sort of evidence to establish that any kind of afterlife does exist.

What is weird is how religious people aren't bothered by this. For me it was the first step on the path to atheism. Realising that Catholics and Protestants could have sincerely held but contradictory beliefs simply demonstrated to me that most people most have a sincere yet false belief. I.e. most people are wrong about God, therefore I'm probably wrong myself.

tommy2bad

Zubeneschamali wrote: »

These religions contradict each other, so at most one is true.

Since we know for a fact that most of these religions are untrue, we know that billions of people sincerely believe in a kind of afterlife which we know for a fact cannot exist. For example, either you go to Heaven/Hell, or you are reincarnated. Not both. Yet both can produce a billion sincere believers, so that is not evidence that either are true.

You need some other sort of evidence to establish that any kind of afterlife does exist.

The fact that religions contradict each other (some are self contradictory) doesn't mean any of them are untrue. Lots of things contradict each other, communism/ capitalism, democracy/ dictatorship, yet both are true. Most of the problem being how we use words, true and right are not the same thing.
The other thing being your last point, you need evidence, never mind how hard it is to gauge evidence for the political opposites, evidence for a religious 'truth' is often no more than gut feeling. However that feeling is enough to make it true for the believer.

SpaceTime

The common thread I see is that humans like all life is hardwired to survive.
Mortality isn't something that our brains can cope with because it means permanent loss of loved ones and that life is finite. So we come up with really straw clutching theories to avoid that reality.

The common theme in all religions is an afterlife and an accepted explanation of death.
That's comforting but to a degree dangerous too in some ways where someone has no fear of death or dedicates their life and behaviours to accumulating brownie points for an afterlife that may be fiction.

Many very strange and deadly human behaviour patterns seem to stem from notions that someone will either be better off in an afterlife or that they will be rewarded in an afterlife. They stop living in the here and now.

Such beliefs can also be used to control populations because in order to access the afterlife you have to comply with the T&Cs set down in a religion. This can lead to a lot of self sacrifice in terms of giving free labour, complying with punishing work ethics, fighting wars, or in the case of religious extremists carrying out atrocities justified by a theoretical reward after death.

My view is that you do need to understand the finality of death or you risk not understanding how absolutely amazing being alive and sentient actually is.

smacl

Frank Lee Midere wrote: »

All very theoretical. This is the mind as software argument which I am not convinced about. I think the mind and brain are more tightly coupled than a CPU and software.

To model a person you would have to model the brain in software rather than the software running on the brain.

Agreed entirely, in that brains state is going to include physical neural connections, electrical states, chemical states, etc.. and it is extremely dubious that we would ever be able to model it with a level of accuracy that would confer continued conciousness.

I do think we will be able to create artificial consciousness that is fully self aware in the not too distant future, which may well have an order of magnitude greater potential than ourselves. As Feurbach put it, Man makes God in his own image, so nothing new there.

Zubeneschamali

tommy2bad wrote: »

The fact that religions contradict each other (some are self contradictory) doesn't mean any of them are untrue. Lots of things contradict each other, communism/ capitalism, democracy/ dictatorship, yet both are true.

You are using some definition of "true" with which I am unfamiliar.

SpaceTime

Living organic systems are highly complex and can grow/modify structures to suit needs. So unlike a computer, the brain wrote its own software and the processing infrastructure is built around it as needed.

Neurones also seem to have much more nuanced communication and states than just on/off binary digital systems that computers rely on.

We also don't really understand how brains encode or physically store data yet either. Even if we understood the biology of memory, decoding it would be an incredibly difficult task.

Building our own AI rather than reverse engineering organic brains would seem more likely to happen.

hinault

Zubeneschamali wrote: »

These religions contradict each other, so at most one is true.

Since we know for a fact that most of these religions are untrue, we know that billions of people sincerely believe in a kind of afterlife which we know for a fact cannot exist. For example, either you go to Heaven/Hell, or you are reincarnated. Not both. Yet both can produce a billion sincere believers, so that is not evidence that either are true.

You need some other sort of evidence to establish that any kind of afterlife does exist.

You've arrived at the conclusion that most religions are untrue. It is interesting that you don't conclude that all religions are untrue. Does this mean that you conclude that one of those religions is the truth?

The various religious belief systems accept that there is an afterlife. Whether or not these religions contradict one another about how the afterlife is reached doesn't contradict the observation that most religions hold that there is an afterlife.

Zubeneschamali

hinault wrote: »

You've arrived at the conclusion that most religions are untrue. It is interesting that you don't conclude that all religions are untrue. Does this mean that you conclude that one of those religions is the truth?

No, at most one of them is true, but they could all be false (which is what I believe, but not based on this contradiction argument).

The various religious belief systems accept that there is an afterlife. Whether or not these religions contradict one another about how the afterlife is reached doesn't contradict the observation that most religions hold that there is an afterlife

We know billions of people firmly believe things about an afterlife which are untrue. So saying billions of people believe X about the afterlife is not evidence that X is true. I think this includes the idea that the afterlife is real.

And this is before I point out that some Buddhists, Christians and Jews (I don't know about Hindus or Moslems) actually do not believe in any afterlife.

hinault

Zubeneschamali wrote: »

We know billions of people firmly believe things about an afterlife which are untrue.

No. You have arrived at the conclusion that the afterlife is not true and that billions of people are wrong to hold views about the afterlife.

Zubeneschamali wrote: »

And this is before I point out that some Buddhists, Christians and Jews (I don't know about Hindus or Moslems) actually do not believe in any afterlife.

Buddhists do believe in a life after this life.

Tell me which Christians and which Jews do not believe in an afterlife?

Zubeneschamali

hinault wrote: »

No. You have arrived at the conclusion that the afterlife is not true and that billions of people are wrong to hold views about the afterlife.

Through simple logic. Feel free to point out my error:

1a) A billion Christians believe that this is our first lifetime, and that afterwards, we all (including non Christians) will go to Heaven (or Hell, Purgatory, Limbo etc).

1b) A billion Buddhists and Hindus believe this is just one life in an long (possibly infinite) series of reincarnations for all of us, including the folks in 1a.

2) These ideas contradict, so at least a billion people believe in an afterlife which is not true.

Buddhists do believe in a life after this life.

Tell me which Christians and which Jews do not believe in an afterlife

Secular Buddhism is now a thing. There are lots of liberal Christians who don't take this stuff literally. And while traditional Judaism suggests there is a life to come, it doesn't actually specify what it's like or worry about it, the focus is on this life.

hinault

Zubeneschamali wrote: »

These ideas contradict, so at least a billion people believe in an afterlife which is not true.

For a contradiction to exist, one side must hold the truth.

Which billion holds the truth is the real issue here.

Zubeneschamali wrote: »

There are lots of liberal Christians who don't take this stuff literally. And while traditional Judaism suggests there is a life to come, it doesn't actually specify what it's like or worry about it, the focus is on this life.

Christ teaches that there is an afterlife. If a Christian claims that there is no afterlife then they're not Christian (follower of Christ).

Judaism advocates that there is an afterlife.

Zubeneschamali

hinault wrote: »

For a contradiction to exist, one side must hold the truth.

Nope.

A. I have exactly €1000 in my pocket.

B. I have exactly 20c in my pocket.

C. These statements contradict, and at most one of them is true.

Statement C is true. It doesn't matter if A is true, B is true or both are false, statement C is necessarily true.

Similarly, at least a billion religious people believe in an afterlife which does not exist.

hinault

Zubeneschamali wrote: »

Nope.

A. I have exactly €1000 in my pocket.

B. I have exactly 20c in my pocket.

C. These statements contradict, and at most one of them is true.

Statement C is true. It doesn't matter if A is true, B is true or both are false, statement C is necessarily true.

Similarly, at least a billion religious people believe in an afterlife which does not exist.

Nope.

It is a fact that, in your example, you have separate amounts of money contained in separate pockets.
There is no contradiction in that case.

A contradiction would only exist if you claimed that you have only €1,000 in one pocket and separately you only 2 cents in the same pocket.

Only one claim can be truthful in that case.

Zubeneschamali

hinault wrote: »

A contradiction would only exist if you claimed that you have only €1,000 in one pocket and separately you only 2 cents in the same pocket.

Only one claim can be truthful in that case.

No, at most one claim is true. They could both be false (and in fact, they are).

Just like Heaven and reincarnation.

And no saying the Buddhists get reincarnated while the Christians go to Heaven - neither of them believe that is true, so in that case all 2 billion of them are wrong.

hinault

Zubeneschamali wrote: »

No, at most one claim is true. They could both be false (and in fact, they are).

No.

You either have only €1000 in one pocket, or you only have 2 cents in the same pocket. Only one of those claims can be true.

The example you cited earlier isn't a contradiction.

Zubeneschamali

hinault wrote: »

You either have only €1000 in one pocket, or you only have 2 cents in the same pocket. Only one of those claims can be true.

But I just looked, and I actually have €85 in my pocket, so both are untrue.

They contradict, and neither is true.

hinault

Zubeneschamali wrote: »

But I just looked, and I actually have €85 in my pocket, so both are untrue.

Which goes to prove that you lied the first time around:p

smacl

hinault wrote: »

No.

You either have only €1000 in one pocket, or you only have 2 cents in the same pocket. Only one of those claims can be true.

The example you cited earlier isn't a contradiction.

But religions such as Christianity make statements about the fate after death of those people who do not subscribe to their religion, such as Buddhists for example. Specifically, that they will spend an eternity in Hell or perhaps purgatory. This contradicts the Buddhists' own beliefs, who believe that everyone, including the Christians, get re-incarnated. These are contradictory statements, such that one set of people must be wrong. Similarly, Islam states that all the Christians and all the Buddhists are bound for hell.

It is clearly unreasonable for any religion to make statements about the fate of those people that do not subscribe to their religion, yet most religions do so and hence necessarily contradict one another.

hinault

smacl wrote: »

It is clearly unreasonable for any religion to make statements about the fate of those people that do not subscribe to their religion, yet most religions do so and hence necessarily contradict one another.

Or it is perfectly reasonable for a religion to advocate on behalf of what it holds to be the truth.

It is very ironic that a whole bunch of people who claim to not believe in an afterlife are as exercised as they are about something which they claim is untrue!

Zubeneschamali

hinault wrote: »

Which goes to prove that you lied the first time around:p

No, statement C was still true.

hinault

Zubeneschamali wrote: »

No, statement C was still true.

shure.:rolleyes: