Is life after death a possibility?

[QED]

A sub-debate started up in this topic about the best arguments for atheism With respect to keeping that debate on-track I have continued this theme in a separate thread. It started when I asked the following:

"Do [you] think there is life after death harvey1? I don't. A big part of life for me is the history in my brain called memory. I know this is physical because when damaged by a stroke, I lost some of it. Our memories define us - they are there as the basis for the formulation of our current opinions. They give us our reference for how we feel right now -- are we happier or sadder, in more or less discomfort. Without the history of music you've appreciated in the past, you are unable to appreciate new music in the same genre (a real eye-opener for me, but it instantly explains why some people can become engrossed in certain genres that seem utterly outlandish to others -- each new small, deviation is acceptable in it's own way to the aficionado but the sum total creates an insurmountable edifice to anyone lacking the history of the aficionado).

SO when I die completely, my memories will too and thus I know that there will be no life after death for me."

As I understand it harvey1 presented the possibility of quantum teleportation as being one mechanism we might know of already as being potentially capable of transferring the vital information that makes up a "me". While this might just possibly permit the transfer of certain states of memory it led me to wonder the following:

if your brain is damaged at some stage in life (maybe 10 years before your death, maybe 10 minutes) then at what point is all the vital information transferred?

Well, I have no way of knowing that. However, if I can offer a speculation, I would say that "you" are the final state of "you" at the moment of death, and at that point you are "resurrected" at Measurement Day (or Judgement Day) and then you are healed of whatever infirmities that are present, perhaps with a transformed "body." I'm only speculating of course.

I think this answer reveals an insurmountable problem with the concept of a desirable or meaningful afterlife: I have described how vital a role our memories play in defining our being. The destruction of neurons can map one-to-one with the destruction of information (memory) so "who we are" at a given time is contingent on our functional memory. Given that we can become re-defined through targeted damage means we can change -- maybe for the better, maybe for the worse. So which copy of us will reside in heaven? Our "final state" is likely to be one characterized by massive disruption (on both emotional and mechanical levels!) notice that previous back-ups" of us might well prove to be incompatible if we build a "new life" after such an accident.

Note that it helps to have the perspective of one who has "lost" part of his "soul" (as some would have it, others might more reasonably call it personality or identity) through mere mechanical means. I have no doubt that our defining qualities are bound to our physiology and this can change over time. No cutting and pasting that I can imagine could reconstruct the true essence of an individual.

[harvey1]

Does this not just tell us that once we posess a 'recording' of history, we are at liberty to redefine the meaning of past present and future? Nothing I have understood would allow such a recording to be made in retrospect other than the collection of retarded radiation from some suitably distant location along one or more dimensions.

Okay, let me provide this quote from the paper:

Could a robot be constructed that receives information from the future? Could one be constructed whose psychological arrow of time runs from future to past with the consequence that it would remember the future? Both of these possibilities are consistent with time neutral dynamical laws.

In this case, the P1, P2, P3 register would contain future events and P0 would be a present event. Life would be very uninteresting for such a robot since if the robot lived in our world, it would be able to tell you all of its experiences preceding into the future. However, such a robot might be entertained to hear about it's past since it would have no memory of the past.

Again, Hartle is not saying this can be done. He is merely saying that such a possibility is currently consistent with what we know about the laws of physics. Nothing prevents a four-dimensional interpretation of time.

This would simply seem to add the fact that possesion of a recording provides us with total recall.

Yes, however it is conceivable to construct a robot that receives information of all events (past, present, future) as if it were happening in a 'now' fashion. That is, if it is conceivable that a robot can receive information from the future, then such a future remembering robot existing as close as possible to the big bang and surviving the last 13.7 billion years would recall the entire history of the universe at the beginning of the universe. This suggests that all the events that happened in the history of the universe are still happening in a time neutral dynamical sense. If an NS robot had the same access to this information as our future remembering robot, then the NS robot would experience everything that occurred to it as if it was just happening. That is, the future and past and present would be 'now' for that robot, and technically there are no memories, just incoming data. Likewise, any normal constructed robot experiencing time as we do, could be conceivably constructed so that it becomes an NS robot as the scientists tinker with its internal circuits. If this robot had lost any memories that had recently occurred, it would recover those memories as it started to access the past as a 'now' event.

Again, this is not to say the future "exists." Hartle is not making that point. He is only saying that the future existing and being accessible by a robot is consistent with a time neutral dynamical law perspective. There might be philosophical issues that prevent such an interpretation, but from the perspective of physics, there is nothing that prevents this interpretation of time.

But where is the recording? If it only existed in the chunk of brain that was totalled, then the information is lost. I still don't understand what allows you to resurrect it. Hartles conclusions relate to an IGUS and its own personal organisation of temporal data. I cannot see where it goes beyond the perceptions of localised individuals.

Obviously if a robot can be constructed that remembers the future, then where is that memory? It was brought in from what is "out there" and the robot is able to access it. The idea behind the gathering of data is that it doesn't have to exist in the present (or acquired in the past in the guise of a memory). It can be acquired at any subjective time in our history or future if we use a time neutral dynamical law interpretation of how events occur in the universe. Hartle demonstrates further the reason that we do not access such information of the future isn't necessarily because it is not there to access, rather it is because remembering the past and discovering the future and experiencing the present is the most efficient way to organize data from an evolutionary perspective. This is my interpretation of that paper.

You seem to be in this with your emotions turned all the way up to 11.

That's not true. I'm very relaxed and enjoy for the most part these discussions. Sometimes I get peeved because it's hard for me to believe that some people honestly think the way they do, so much so that I suspect that some are just giving cavils just to obfuscate the issues at hand. But, maybe that's just my own distorted perception.

The use of the expression "con-trick" was never directed at you or Hartle, it was simply the subject of a practical application for time-shifting in the real world. I was trying to think-up an example that other readers might readily understand.

I apologize for jumping to that conclusion. When I say "con-trick" I rolled my eyes and shook my head. But, I take it back.

[spetey]

Hi folks!

Harvey, if your claim is that God can copy us into heaven and leave a copy of us back on earth, then again we confront head-on the problem of personal identity. Why think the thing in heaven is me, when intuitively I remain right here? (Okay, maybe I don't get to go to heaven anyway, because I'm a horrible Unbeliever, but you get the idea.) Remember there was a reason you brought up the no-cloning theorem--to protect God against the problem of potential duplication of "one person". You now deny that the no-cloning theorem insulates God against this problem.

Again, on any plausible going view of personal identity, the very coherence of life after death is hugely problematic, even if something that looks like life after death--someone with a spirit-body like mine saying things I might say--is physically possible. (Of course I agree that its physical possibility is also in serious doubt, since I don't see how a person could be instantiated immaterially.)


spetey

[harvey1]

Hello Spetey,

if your claim is that God can copy us into heaven and leave a copy of us back on earth, then again we confront head-on the problem of personal identity. Why think the thing in heaven is me, when intuitively I remain right here?

If our quantum state changes by dying and at the moment of death our wavefunction is teleported, then it our identity that is teleported. Our physical body could remain unchanged since it is no longer "us." Rather, it is a quantum state that shares resemblance with our alive state, but it is significantly different such that the no-cloning theorem is violated.

And, as I mentioned, this is not the only physical possibility, nor is it--I imagine--the only possibility that God is capable of doing as ST88 pointed out.

[spetey]

If our quantum state changes by dying and at the moment of death our wavefunction is teleported, then it our identity that is teleported. Our physical body could remain unchanged since it is no longer "us."

This is a very strange claim: "our physical body could remain unchanged since it is no longer 'us'." If our physical body remains completely unchanged, then how is it no longer us? If it's physically unchanged, I will continue speaking and thinking and feeling just as I was before, right? So why is that not me? And how is this in accordance with the no-cloning theorem, which says that the thing scanned is seriously disrupted? If the no-cloning theorem allows for in-effect physical duplicates (where the quantum states are undetecably different) to be left behind, then again we have the same problem as before. If they don't leave in-effect physical duplicates, then we should expect observable changes to the physical body upon the moment God takes the person to heaven.

Whatever method God has for transporting us elsehwere while somehow also leaving us here violates serious conceptual matters about what it takes to be a single person through time.


spetey

[QED]

I apologise for repeating this here, but I fear it was lost in the scuffle over the paragraph that preceeded it and I feel it has an important bearing on the topic I started:

So with regards to the issue I raised concerning split personalities it has not been made clear how the much cherished personality of, say Phineas Gage, is reserved for its place in heaven even though most of it was turned into meatpaste and all the while, Phineas goes on to lead a new life, with a new persona -- that might be just as cherished and worthy come the day of his final departure.

It has not been described how a single human might be reconstituted in the afterlife bearing two different and distinct personalities. It is not sufficient to merely dismiss this as being an atypical example. If there are additional caveats to getting into heaven other than the one usually mentioned, then we all darn well ought to know about them.

[harvey1]

This is a very strange claim: "our physical body could remain unchanged since it is no longer 'us'." If our physical body remains completely unchanged, then how is it no longer us?

There's a few possibilities. One possibility is that death is a physically significant change in our entire quantum state (i.e., assuming that there is a wavefunction to describe us physically). Another possibility is that our minds are actually the quantum-mechanical wavefunction, and in that case, death is the cessation of the mind, therefore the entire wavefunction that describes our mind is destroyed.

And how is this in accordance with the no-cloning theorem, which says that the thing scanned is seriously disrupted?

The no-cloning theorem prevents an exact copy being generated of a quantum wavefunction. If the wavefunction to be copied does not exist after the scan (i.e., the scanning happens at the moment of death), then the no-cloning theorem wouldn't be violated since the original quantum state of the body does not continue at the moment of death.

If they don't leave in-effect physical duplicates, then we should expect observable changes to the physical body upon the moment God takes the person to heaven.

There could be microscopic changes at death and that might be enough to allow the physical body to remain while "we" experience a teleporting or tunneling experience. Again, this is all speculation of the wildest kind, but it demonstrates that if this issue is not a problem from a physical point of view, it is certainly not a problem from God's perspective.

Whatever method God has for transporting us elsehwere while somehow also leaving us here violates serious conceptual matters about what it takes to be a single person through time.

I don't see that as the case...

[harvey1]

It has not been described how a single human might be reconstituted in the afterlife bearing two different and distinct personalities. It is not sufficient to merely dismiss this as being an atypical example. If there are additional caveats to getting into heaven other than the one usually mentioned, then we all darn well ought to know about them.

Here is a detailed description how such a process is possible: Total Recall

[QED]

I'm deeply suspicious that I might have presented you with a genuine problem here harvey1. Of course I may be entirely wrong and might instead have earned a flippant reply from you because of the naivety of my argument -- if so you could do with making it a little clearer why it is so naive.

[harvey1]

I'm deeply suspicious that I might have presented you with a genuine problem here harvey1. Of course I may be entirely wrong and might instead have earned a flippant reply from you because of the naivety of my argument -- if so you could do with making it a little clearer why it is so naive.

Reincarnation is just one example of how people can be imagined as undergoing massive personality changes and still somehow find themselves as being just one soul in the universe having had these various identities throughout their lives. And, when you think about it, we are never really one person throughout our lives. Sometimes we are entirely different people (e.g., infant, toddler, young child, older child, young teenager, older teen, young adult, mid-late twenties adult, early-mid thirties adult, and so on...). This is not to mention the different mind-states that we are in throughout our life (drunk, sleeping, busy, mad, etc.).

Just looking through a bunch of photo albums I can experience all sorts of past moments and come to remember them and the kind of individual I was then. It's even a bigger shock when we meet someone again from our past. We might see a whole new realization as to what we were and what we have become.

But, here's a problem for you. Let's say that we do not have something that makes us "us," then in that case how is it that we persist through time as though we are the same individual? Afterall, I don't have any of the atoms in my body as I had as a child. That person with those atoms is gone. Am I still that person? If so, then how can I be that person since nothing physical remains of that person?

[QED]

Reincarnation is just one example of how people can be imagined as undergoing massive personality changes and still somehow find themselves as being just one soul in the universe having had these various identities throughout their lives. And, when you think about it, we are never really one person throughout our lives.

Well, I would like to poll a few more impressions of this with other readers if at all possible... I totally disagree with your take on this. I have often wondered at the constancy of my inner-self. I am probably getting on for three-quarters of my life now (if I'm lucky) and yet I still "feel" as I did at the time of my earliest memories. I look at those old photos and recall a remarkable unity of being. However I will concede that this may be an individual property -- hence why I would be interested in a straw-poll on the matter.

But, here's a problem for you. Let's say that we do not have something that makes us "us," then in that case how is it that we persist through time as though we are the same individual? Afterall, I don't have any of the atoms in my body as I had as a child. That person with those atoms is gone. Am I still that person? If so, then how can I be that person since nothing physical remains of that person?

Now I thought that I'd presented a problem for you. Oh well.

You say that if you were to go along with me and agree that we do have a constant "inner self", you want to know how this is expressed despite a constant turn-over of cells? Alzheimer's and Huntington's diseases are disorders characterized by personality changes (among other things) and are directly attributed to abnormal cell death in certain neurons. So if "abnormal" cell death causes personality changes we know that "normal" cell death is managed in such a way as to maintain personality.

Without going into any further technicalities, this should provide ample evidence for the existence of personality within the material structure of the brain.