Argument: Death is the end of life. Therefore, "life after death" is a contradiction in terms.
Response: So far, I agree. However, it is at least logically possible that memory and sense of identity are preserved in some other medium, even if a philosopher insists that what is preserved is a copy, not the original. Alleged spiritualist phenomena should be assessed, not dismissed as contradictory.
Different groups of people believe in three alternatives:
(i) No survival.
(ii) Reincarnation/rebirth with continuity of neither body nor memory.
Comment/Question: How does this differ from (i)?
(iii) Continuance of individual consciousness after bodily death.
Comments: I, or at least the copy of me, will be very interested if this happens. However, (iii) is logically odd because, if it does not happen, then we will never know. Don't say: wait and see. We might not see anything. But how to settle the matter before death?
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
as regards (iii), I agree a believer can only assent to faith in belief in survival after bodily death. A Christian might argue that the life, Passion, and Resurrection of Christ is the supreme proofs of his faith. A Catholic Christian could also argue that the miracles at Lourdes, the Zeitun apparitions, and the Shroud of Turin, etc., should at least make secularists more unsure of themselves.
Again, Anderson's story "A Chapter of Revelation," touching on such issues, comes to mind!
Ad astra! Sean
Kaor, Paul!
I should have added that the famous "magician," Harry Houdini, investigated and debunked many Spiritualist claims.
And the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, the dicastery of the Holy See which investigates alleged miracles and apparitions of the saints, deliberately takes a skeptical view of such reports.
Ad astra! Sean
As for an 'upload' being a copy rather than the original, I think that's a distinction without a difference -- a semantic null set, assuming that the personality is a pattern of interacting information, which seems to be the best guess at present.
In other words, a really identical copy is not meaningfully different from the original.
Poul brings this up in the HARVEST OF STARS series, when the people on the doomed planet are recording themselves to be "decanted" into cloned bodies on the new world.
A child is distressed, understandably, when told the bodies from which the recording was taken "won't wake up".
But in terms of the continuity of consciousness, what happens from -their- perspective is that they go under sedation, and then wake up sometime later.
This is an abstract (Sf-nal) concept now, but I suspect within the next century it will be very real.
For another take on it, assume that the process of "recording" destroyed the original body as an inherent part of the process. Would this be as distressing?
NB: Philip Jose Farmer dealt extensively with these issues in his RIVERWORLD series.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Very cool, these comments of yours, no matter how skeptical I might be of some of the things Poul Anderson speculated about in his HARVEST OF STARS books. I had to read those books more than once before I could get my noggin around concepts like sophotects, or the downloading of human personalities into new bodies.
I admit to not really believing AIs a la those sophotects or the downloading of human personalities into new bodies LIKELY.
But I can see GOD behaving analogously to the personalities of those who die.
Ad astra! Sean
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