Be aware that your personal consciousness interfaces with the physical universe through the eigenstates of the quantum systems of your cellular biology. Since quantum systems can be in any one of their states at random, then ... It's all very complicated and the physics community is still stuck on stupid. If you want personal evidence, you can get that. But convincing atheists-skeptics probably won't be possible.I do not care if dualism, materialism, or neutral monism are true or not. What matters to me is that given the empirical evidence the most likely is that there is a personal afterlife.
Be aware that your personal consciousness interfaces with the physical universe through the eigenstates of the quantum systems of your cellular biology. Since quantum systems can be in any one of their states at random, then ... It's all very complicated and the physics community is still stuck on stupid. If you want personal evidence, you can get that. But convincing atheists-skeptics probably won't be possible.
How can I get personal evidence?
Try booting into the biological BIOS of your eigenstate flux capacitor. That seems to work for most folks.
Understanding the implications of neutral monism has played a major part in disillusioning me of the idea of an "afterlife" over the years. First, monism of any kind is really the idea that only one world exists. It's pretty far fetched to try to shoehorn another into that picture, without getting into the new age fantasy of "vibrational levels" and all that jazz.
Secondly, and just as seriously, although the mind and personality may be made of different "stuff" under NM than under materialism, they are still almost certainly far-from-equilibrium, accretive structures. Such accretive structures will disintegrate as agents upon the death of the body, because the body itself will disintegrate, and in monism, the mind and personality are not something different from it.
However, as radicalpolitik pointed out, a continuity of some form of awareness can be the case without it having to be the fantasy of a "life" made in an idealized image of bodily existence. Possibly the most hopeful scenario is that the whole shebang is a tapestry of basic awareness, and when we "disintegrate" at death, this is synonymous with unravelling back to this basic or universal form of awareness. This awareness may hold all forms, information, and lives upon it, like waves on a sea, even if it is not a specific agency as traditionally conceived.
This is hinted at as well in chaos theory, where limitations on knowledge of initial conditions appear to be imposed by time-symmetry breaking, as well as complementarity / Heisenberg uncertainty in QM. Also if Bell's inequality & Aspects experiments hold, reality at root-level is non-local. The whole must be factored in, or the model ends up in absurdity. But how can a part "know" the whole? It probably is "impossible" -- but I think that also implies there are always new things to discover, so searching for a "absolute" is not without its merits in the proper context. But this also might imply that consciousness was "implied" in the creation process itself? Also if we're Copenhagenists or Many-Worlds types, and we take the Wheeler delayed choice experiment at face value, we should think that time is non-local as well, once again hinting at an "implied" element of consciousness.
This article points out a nonlocality of quantum mechanics that is significantly more radical than that implied by violations of Bell locality or Einstein locality. It consists in the fact that the spatiotemporal differentiation of the physical world is incomplete. The so-called parts of space only exist to the extent that they are physically realized, and arbitrarily small parts cannot be physically realized. Further it is shown that intrinsically all fundamental particles are identical in the radical sense of numerical identity. Hence it is impossible to model reality "from the bottom up," whether on the basis of an intrinsically and completely differentiated space or spacetime or out of a multitude of intrinsically distinct building blocks. Quantum theory's explanatory arrow points in the opposite direction — from unity to multiplicity. In addition to establishing these conclusions, the article examines their implications for the enterprise called physics, illuminates these conclusions and their implications in a quintessential Indian philosophical context, and points out that while the radical nonlocality of the quantum world renders intelligible the possibility of paranormal correlations, quantum mechanics offers no help in explaining how paranormal phenomena come about.
Understanding the implications of neutral monism has played a major part in disillusioning me of the idea of an "afterlife" over the years. First, monism of any kind is really the idea that only one world exists. It's pretty far fetched to try to shoehorn another into that picture, without getting into the new age fantasy of "vibrational levels" and all that jazz.
Secondly, and just as seriously, although the mind and personality may be made of different "stuff" under NM than under materialism, they are still almost certainly far-from-equilibrium, accretive structures. Such accretive structures will disintegrate as agents upon the death of the body, because the body itself will disintegrate, and in monism, the mind and personality are not something different from it.
However, as radicalpolitik pointed out, a continuity of some form of awareness can be the case without it having to be the fantasy of a "life" made in an idealized image of bodily existence. Possibly the most hopeful scenario is that the whole shebang is a tapestry of basic awareness, and when we "disintegrate" at death, this is synonymous with unravelling back to this basic or universal form of awareness. This awareness may hold all forms, information, and lives upon it, like waves on a sea, even if it is not a specific agency as traditionally conceived. Its agency, as it were, is potent in potential, but in reality is at a cosmic minimum. Whereas the agency of ourselves as specific organisms, is weak in potential, but is also focused to a cosmic maximum. An organism, if you like, is the universe's way of gaining or focusing agency.
Well Haruhi, personally I find any argument that principally has to lean on 'psychic research' as being extremely weak in character.
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Arguments that work on almost everything we *already* observe and know about the world, in contrast, bear realism with them.
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What I mean is that if an argument about the nature of the world is relying primarily, or even exclusively, on psychic research to prop itself up, then that argument is extremely weak. Anything that relies *only* or mainly on highly contested information disputed by the majority of science has that problem from the outset. We already know a great deal about the existence of mind that contradicts the case that it can exist independent of brain. Our minds come into existence with our brains. This is observed to happen in every child's life. If you prevent a child's mind from developing in interaction with the world, you will handicap them mentally and socially for life. Every single aspect of the mind we can name can be crippled by one or another kind of brain damage. There are no cases of brainless minds. Etc. These are all huge systems of observations that would have to be overcome plausibly to even entertain the idea that your personality could live apart from a physical system.Are you somehow segmenting historical knowledge, experience and evidence to two buckets: that which denies psi and that which doesn't? Or that which exists now vs that which has yet to be investigated? Just trying to understand the point you are making.
Anything that relies *only* or mainly on highly contested information disputed by the majority of science has that problem from the outset.
I prefer to look at as much evidence as possible and see if there is a theory that encompasses it all.
BTW: I didn't get the impression that anyone on this thread is "principally" looking at psychic data. Pointing to "psychic data" is not sufficient to refer to the poster as relying principally on it.
What I mean is that if an argument about the nature of the world is relying primarily, or even exclusively, on psychic research to prop itself up, then that argument is extremely weak.
We already know a great deal about the existence of mind that contradicts the case that it can exist independent of brain. Our minds come into existence with our brains. This is observed to happen in every child's life. If you prevent a child's mind from developing in interaction with the world, you will handicap them mentally and socially for life. Every single aspect of the mind we can name can be crippled by one or another kind of brain damage.
In addition, even if we accept some of the facts of psi (and I don't necessarily do this), I do not accept that any of the information it bears requires, or to my mind even particularly suggests, independent entities separate from ourselves, or a world separate from ourselves. In my view, though the proponents of dualism do not like it, even those assumptions can be accommodated more economically and more persuasively under monism.
What bothers me is relying principally on that kind of evidence, and ignoring much stronger kinds of evidence we already have, and which really isn't in dispute by any experts in the relevant fields. This is the main thing in that approach that makes it an implausible response to the world, imo. It is NOT possible to talk sensibly about the survival or supposed independence of personality by discussing only psychic research claims. One needs to address everything we already know about the formation and disruption of mind, and that is a huge body of knowledge. People who ignore all that in favor of the pronouncements of a certain spiritualist medium, etc, do not attract credibility to their argument.
Of course everybody wishes, to hold forever to the memories and to the people, and to the situations that he particularly loves. But surely if we think this through, is that what we actually want? Do we really want to have those we love, however greatly we love them, for always and always and always. Isn't it inconcievable in the distant future that we would get tired of it....And this is why the demon of impermanence is denounced, because it is through forgetting about things that renews their wonder. Just think, when you opened your eyes for the first time as a child, how brilliant colours where, what a jewel the sun was, what marvel the stars, how incredible the trees were. That's because they were new to your eyes...and so by the dispensation of forgetting, the world is constantly renewed, and we are able to see it again and again, and to love again and again....always with renewed intensity, and without the contrast of having seen them before before before, always, always and always