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[The_architect]

I wonder if, after this life, our self-awareness changes to a physical sensation as a shell around our bodies. Imagine the next life as opposite this one: as if we are surrounded by water (note Genesis beginning of two oceans, I call them Will and Wisdom) without the pre-life senses. And our mind is not cognitive but receptive, a kind of renewal and gain of (Will and Wisdom) for the next life.

Know that what you don't know will come in time but be either an endless string of knowing or one with a ceiling, by which you start all over again. We live a cycle of lives as long as the life of the star we were born on.

[Jklint]

When you die you're as dead as a door nail; that's all there's to it. The universe, nature, has absolutely no conception of philosophy or whatever people imagine their worth to be having once existed yet is somehow supposed to continue in an advanced afterlife. But people being the corrupt greedy bastards they really are imagine a fool's gold version of an afterlife which only validates that the disease called humanity is least qualified for such a scenario compared to every species that ever lived.

[evolution]

I wonder if, after this life, our self-awareness changes to a physical sensation as a shell around our bodies. Imagine the next life as opposite this one: as if we are surrounded by water (note Genesis beginning of two oceans, I call them Will and Wisdom) without the pre-life senses. And our mind is not cognitive but receptive, a kind of renewal and gain of (Will and Wisdom) for the next life.

Know that what you don't know will come in time but be either an endless string of knowing or one with a ceiling, by which you start all over again. We live a cycle of lives as long as the life of the star we were born on.

What is this 'life', exactly, which you wonder about "after"?

[Angel Trismegistus]

When you die you're as dead as a door nail; that's all there's to it....

Well, in death your body is certainly "as dead as a door nail" -- but are you your body without remainder? That is to say, are we bodies and nothing more? And how do you know this?

To paraphrase something C.S. Lewis wrote in his meditation on grief: If in death the person we knew "is not" anymore, then that person never was in the first place -- we merely mistook "a cloud of atoms" for a person.

And to quote the Bard: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

[Jklint]

Well, in death your body is certainly "as dead as a door nail" -- but are you your body without remainder? That is to say, are we bodies and nothing more? And how do you know this?

To actually "know" this is impossible since that requires absolute proof. The probability of it however is penultimate to knowing since we know that nothing ever beyond this life manifested itself. The other half is contained in the question what purpose would an afterlife serve to which there is no real answer beyond wishful thinking?

To paraphrase something C.S. Lewis wrote in his meditation on grief: If in death the person we knew "is not" anymore, then that person never was in the first place -- we merely mistook "a cloud of atoms" for a person.

The meaning seems paradoxical on a number of ways but will mention only one. If a person "is not" anymore then it makes no sense to say that person never was in the first place. If something is not then it must have been something at some point...especially so in regard to something or someone that died. Memories aren't created by that which never was.

[Angel Trismegistus]

Well, in death your body is certainly "as dead as a door nail" -- but are you your body without remainder? That is to say, are we bodies and nothing more? And how do you know this?

To actually "know" this is impossible since that requires absolute proof. The probability of it however is penultimate to knowing since we know that nothing ever beyond this life manifested itself. The other half is contained in the question what purpose would an afterlife serve to which there is no real answer beyond wishful thinking?

To paraphrase something C.S. Lewis wrote in his meditation on grief: If in death the person we knew "is not" anymore, then that person never was in the first place -- we merely mistook "a cloud of atoms" for a person.

The meaning seems paradoxical on a number of ways but will mention only one. If a person "is not" anymore then it makes no sense to say that person never was in the first place. If something is not then it must have been something at some point...especially so in regard to something or someone that died. Memories aren't created by that which never was.

Why is "absolute proof" required? Is there absolute proof of anything outside mathematics? And even there, I believe, Godel put the kibosh on absolute proof. If we take "proof" in a more modest sense to mean simply "evidence," then there certainly is evidence that we are more than just material bodies.

If there is a paradox in the Lewis insight, the paradox exposes the oversight of reductive materialism. The "person" we loved and lost, if not more than "a cloud of atoms," was not a "person" in the first place. That', I believe, is Lewis's point.

[Jklint]

Why is "absolute proof" required? Is there absolute proof of anything outside mathematics? And even there, I believe, Godel put the kibosh on absolute proof. If we take "proof" in a more modest sense to mean simply "evidence," then there certainly is evidence that we are more than just material bodies.

Absolute proof is impossible which Godel formalized mathematically to the chagrin of Bertrand Russell. That’s the reason the truth of anything can only be ascertained by probability. If that encounters no exceptions or reasons for one then it conforms to a virtual certainty without being considered absolute.

In that context, evidence, or its complete lack, as a moderate measure of proof is perfectly sensible and logical. So where is the evidence that we are more than just material bodies? Evidence, not hypothesis, theory or wishful thinking! If you mean evidence in terms of NDE’s, that experience has already been long understood and explained by the medical profession as somatically ordered.

With everything understood so far is seems much more likely that all the mysteries we presume as ultimate emanate from the material and not something superimposed upon it as if it had little or no mystery of its own. Consciousness, to whatever degree, is a prime example of the power contained in the material whose multitudinous variations default to energy, the Material being its frozen aspect.

If there is a paradox in the Lewis insight, the paradox exposes the oversight of reductive materialism. The "person" we loved and lost, if not more than "a cloud of atoms," was not a "person" in the first place. That', I believe, is Lewis's point.

The only thing to say about that is that C.S. Lewis was a hard-boiled theist and the ONLY way a theist, brilliant or not, can defend thoroughly absurd beliefs is through absurdity itself; Lewis was certainly no stranger to it. The universe itself is a cloud of atoms and energy, possibly one in many. Are we to say therefore that the universe is not a universe!

[Angel Trismegistus]

Why is "absolute proof" required? Is there absolute proof of anything outside mathematics? And even there, I believe, Godel put the kibosh on absolute proof. If we take "proof" in a more modest sense to mean simply "evidence," then there certainly is evidence that we are more than just material bodies.

Absolute proof is impossible which Godel formalized mathematically to the chagrin of Bertrand Russell. That’s the reason the truth of anything can only be ascertained by probability. If that encounters no exceptions or reasons for one then it conforms to a virtual certainty without being considered absolute.

In that context, evidence, or its complete lack, as a moderate measure of proof is perfectly sensible and logical. So where is the evidence that we are more than just material bodies? Evidence, not hypothesis, theory or wishful thinking! If you mean evidence in terms of NDE’s, that experience has already been long understood and explained by the medical profession as somatically ordered.

With everything understood so far is seems much more likely that all the mysteries we presume as ultimate emanate from the material and not something superimposed upon it as if it had little or no mystery of its own. Consciousness, to whatever degree, is a prime example of the power contained in the material whose multitudinous variations default to energy, the Material being its frozen aspect.

If there is a paradox in the Lewis insight, the paradox exposes the oversight of reductive materialism. The "person" we loved and lost, if not more than "a cloud of atoms," was not a "person" in the first place. That', I believe, is Lewis's point.

The only thing to say about that is that C.S. Lewis was a hard-boiled theist and the ONLY way a theist, brilliant or not, can defend thoroughly absurd beliefs is through absurdity itself; Lewis was certainly no stranger to it. The universe itself is a cloud of atoms and energy, possibly one in many. Are we to say therefore that the universe is not a universe!

Science has not accounted for consciousness in material terms. It has found correlations between brain activity and mental states -- that's it. Subjectivity continues to elude science. It's the so-called "hard problem" for neuroscience. And consciousness is precisely what I was referring to as evidence of something more than materiality.

[Jklint]

Consciousness is less of a problem than that which produces it being a material entity. That's the problem; by what physical process in the brain does it happen. Again, it's the material which glides in a metaphysical groove. In that respect it's the material and only the material which has the means to create all our conceptions of soul, spirituality and after-life scenarios.

[Angel Trismegistus]

Consciousness is less of a problem than that which produces it being a material entity. That's the problem; by what physical process in the brain does it happen. Again, it's the material which glides in a metaphysical groove. In that respect it's the material and only the material which has the means to create all our conceptions of soul, spirituality and after-life scenarios.

Your assumption of material causation is a matter of faith in reductive materialism and as such worthy of respect, as is all religious faith.

[Jklint]

Consciousness is less of a problem than that which produces it being a material entity. That's the problem; by what physical process in the brain does it happen. Again, it's the material which glides in a metaphysical groove. In that respect it's the material and only the material which has the means to create all our conceptions of soul, spirituality and after-life scenarios.

Your assumption of material causation is a matter of faith in reductive materialism and as such worthy of respect, as is all religious faith.

Nicely put but religious faith is the opposite of what I wrote. It's indispensable to theists not materialists who are more likely to root out the absurdities faith relies on to perpetuate itself. Reductive materialism is simply a fancy way of saying let's look at the world the way it is, not the way we like to imagine it.

[Angel Trismegistus]

Your assumption of material causation is a matter of faith in reductive materialism and as such worthy of respect, as is all religious faith.

Nicely put but religious faith is the opposite of what I wrote. It's indispensable to theists not materialists who are more likely to root out the absurdities faith relies on to perpetuate itself. Reductive materialism is simply a fancy way of saying let's look at the world the way it is, not the way we like to imagine it.

Every religious faith believes itself the true faith, reductive materialism included. One's own dogma, like one's own feces, smells like roses.