A Theory Of The Soul

[Shadow Knight 0]

How is an afterlife possible given that so many of our mental abilities (e.g., memory, emotions, alertness, etc) are found to be sourced in the neuron activity of the human brain? It would seem that after the brain stops functioning that whatever memories, emotions, collectiver personality, consciousness, etc would also perish with the brain of the deceased.
Philosophically, there is another problem for an afterlife in terms of identity. What does it mean to be 'you' or 'me' when throughout our lives we are many people. There is a 'baby' us, a young 'child' us, an 'adolescent' us, etc. Also, we have many moods and temperments, some of which are chemically induced and neurotransmitter induced at each point of our lives. What constitutes 'us' at those moments? For example, if you are a runner, your brain might release more endomorphines in your brain that affects your moods, temperments, and hence your personality. Has the effects of running become 'you'? What about 'you' before you became a runner, or 'you' after you stopped running? What about our physique? Does it not also affect who we are and how others perceive us? Our physique changes drastically throughout our lives. If we are extremely overweight, is that 'us'? If we lose that weight, what happens to 'us' are we a 'new person'?

Yet another issue is the nature of the afterlife itself. Is it just picking up where we left off here in this life? Do we live another 100 years, 500 years, 10,000 years, 1 million years, or does it just go on and on without any end? What prevents us from getting bored with life after say 100 billion years? Do we change throughout our existence? What happens if we meet new people, do we expand our number of friends and family? In short, it seems to be problematical if there is not something drastically different about an afterlife than this life. Otherwise it might not be such a pleasant thought after all, in fact it might be a little too much like the movie 'Highlander' (where the main character could not die since the Middle Ages).

So, any 'theory of souls' or 'theory of an afterlife' would need to account not only for the biological issues of how such information lives on past our biological existence, it would also have to account for any identity issues that are more complex than what we might imagine. The sense of 'us' is based on a temporal timeline, and our attitude of ourselves change throughout that timeline. And, finally, any theory would need to frame an afterlife in a new setting that we would find pleasurable, but not one in which we would find a need to start a business or wrote a novel so that we could explore our human need of self-actualization. Any needs for self-actualization would only cheapen the whole effect of an afterlife, and giving it that 'Highlander' after effect.

Finally, there's the whole question of why humans have believed in an afterlife in the first place. As we know, this belief is widespread even today, even in Western secular countries, and it has been so in human culture since recorded history. Which raises the serious question about Neanderthals and what is apparently their interest in an afterlife by placing objects of value in a grave. Maybe the evidence is not conclusive here, but from what we can tell Neanderthals believed in an afterlife, and that all makes the issue more confusing since it raises the legitimate question: which species gets an afterlife and which species don't? Do crocodiles get an afterlife? How about the mosquito that I swatted last night? Does belief in an afterlife play any role? Do atheists not get an afterlife because they didn't believe in one? What constitutes the threshhold for those who get one and those who don't? Is ones religious beliefs a factor? Does God care if you are Catholic or Protestant? Irish or British? Muslim or Hindu? Or, is reincarnation the correct 'theory' and that what constitutes getting an afterlife is simply being alive and being a 'good' mosquito or 'bad' mosquito determining if you move 'up' the ladder to become a bird or 'down' the ladder to become a creepy crawly insect?

Ultimately, what becomes evident in looking at human belief about an afterlife is that human beliefs are there to fill a certain need and at least some attempts have been made to answer questions such as these. The attempts of offering an answer sometimes lead to different interpretations (i.e., multiple interpretations) in even one religion (e.g., Christianity). There just is no single consistent view that everyone in a particular concept of an afterlife holds. For example, some Christians hold to a purgatory, some don't, some see Dante's elaborate afterlife scheme, others see something much more simplistic.

Therefore, we cannot look to any one religion to necessarily guide us into finding a 'correct' afterlife concept, but rather we must select from hundreds of religious possibilities, and then we have to decide if these are even philosophically sound or scientifically sensible. Reincarnation, for example, has problems for humans since there are more humans today than in the past. Does this mean new human souls are created each generation, or do chimpanzee souls get a crack at being human? For reasons such as these, it would seem the best means to approach an afterlife is to do so metaphysically (i.e., in a philosophical sense), and ignore religion for a few minutes. Also, even addressing this subject must be done so on the assumption that the main reason that humans believe in an afterlife is because it provides significant meaning to life and that it makes the passing of a loved one much more of an acceptable event if we have such a conviction. Thus, any 'theory' of an afterlife must be true to those convictions and the meaning it provides. For example, any afterlife such as what Frank Tipler introduced in "Immortality of Physics" is not true to the meaning that an afterlife provides. A future computer randomly simulating lives and possible lives and just hitting on the simulation that somehow 'identifies' our lives, is a little silly to suggest that somehow this is comforting to us. Who cares what simulations are run, it isn't us. We won't be there to enjoy the effects of the simulation. I think this response speaks for itself.

In science fiction, I ran across one interesting afterlife scenario. It was in the movie "A.I.". The movie showed an artificially intelligent species in the future who had succeeded an extinct human race discovered the ability to 'resurrect' humans if they could find any trace of the human. The problem was, in this movie, if they resurrected the human, the resurrection was only feasible for one earthly day and then there existence would vanish. The premise behind the resurrection is that spacetime is an addressable medium that technology was able to access and somehow instantiate the lifeform located at that spacetime address.

This concept actually has some merit. One interpretation of General Relativity Theory (GRT) is that spacetime 'exists' and that just like you can travel to a specific point in space if you travel a sufficient distance, you can in principle travel to a point in time as well (hence the name 'spacetime'). If this view of time is correct, then objects continue to exist after the present and before the present, and any lifeform that is out there can conceivably be resurrected by accessing those 'data points' and doing something that we know not what. The only problem with this scenario is that if one 'pulled' us out of the spacetime location that we were in to some afterlife realm, it would be no different if someone grabbed an object after moving a certain distance, and taking it with them. All those around them would see the event and know that the individual just disappeared into thin air. Therefore, any resurrection wouldn't be a 'move' but a 'copy'. Copying someone's spacetime software code, for example, could do the trick. None of us would know that a person's spacetime address was accessed and the 'person' resurrected somewhere else.

Another approach, also scientific, is to think in terms of quantum cosmology. In this theory, quantum rules apply not just to quantum mechanical systems (very, very small), but to large size objects. Every object in the universe including the universe all have quantum wavefunctions that identify the object and each of those objects evolves as the wavefunction that describes that object evolves. Extending quantum cosmology to a metaphysical level, we could conceive of a 'person' as dying in say 1524 of the Black Death, but their wavefunction also points to them existing in another place and time far away from our present period. This is more understandable from a quantum perspective since quantum objects can undergo quantum tunneling where their location can 'jump' from location to another. Taken as a quantum cosmological basis, macro objects not only 'jump' from one location to another, but from time to another. In fact, this is the basis of the science fiction series "Quantum Leap".

More philosophically tinted afterlife theories don't so much look to a theory of science, but look to the concept of reality and what it means to exist. One concept that I favor is that approximate realities 'exist'. For example, a chair is an approximation of millions and millions of quarks arranged in a certain structure at a particular place in space, and this conglomerate of particles form our concept of a chair. The chair is an approximation of something else (in this case, quarks), but the approximation actually 'exists' in a certain context, therefore a chair 'exists' just like anything else 'exists'. Quarks themselves are just approximations of something more primitive (e.g., strings), which are approximations of something even more primitive and so on. Eventually, the thing that 'exists' is no longer an approximation of anything physical, but is an approximation of something logical (or is a truth). Those truths approximate more fundamental truths until you get to one holistic truth (God), and this is the source of all reality.

In this view, then, 'we' are not just one slice of ourselves here and now, but we are rather an approximation of 'something' that exists 'out there' (sorry for all the quotes but the quotes help to understand that each concept is not to be taken too literally). The most basic approximation of 'us' is some holistic definition of who we are (i.e., our real identity), and acts as a definition of who we are. One location of 'us' is right here, right now reading this. Another location of 'us' is what we did before this, and what we will do after this. Another location is where we will be beyond this life, whereever 'where' is.

Although the scientific explanations are always more tangible, I think when we talk about an afterlife we have to say that if such a concept is real, then we cannot limit ourselves to the purely scientific. We should look for fundamental descriptions of reality, and my view is that the last theory provides that kind of description.

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copied from http://www.astronomy.net/forums/god/messag.shtml?show=top
thanks to rvalkass for the report. quotes added, warning served.
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I was inspired by this from talkign to my freind abotu what happens when ya die, do you continue to live again? Well this is up to you to decide.

[rvalkass 5]

The title of this forum is "My Ideas..." Not "Ideas Copied From Elsewhere". For example, this website: http://www.astronomy.net/forums/god/messag.shtml?show=top provided you with the content for the above post. Take time to read the Trap 17 readme please.

Personally I believe that there is no afterlife or soul, but I'm not exactly a spiritual or religious kinda guy. I just find it very hard to believe that such a thing a soul exists, when it hasn't been seen or detected. The same goes for the afterlife, there is no conclusive proof of it's existence. People claim to have had NDEs (near death experiences) but often they are explained easily. For example they can be caused by drugs used during operations etc.

[Cerebral Stasis 0]

Some claim that they can prove the soul exists by showing it has weight through an experiment measuring the weight of a body right before and right after death. However, this test seems to be rather inconclusive.