Christina Anne Knight provides a systematic, good-faith reckoning with the idea of life after death, asking fundamental questions about the meaning of having conscious experiences after the body has expired and examining the interplay of systems that would be required for such a thing to exist at all.
With questions that cut right to the heart of the matter, Knight reveals not only the weaknesses in arguments for an afterlife but gaping, systemic chasms that, once recognized, comprehensively demolish the possibility.
“If I am a product of nature and nurture,” she asks, “what good is an afterlife in which the physical context that shaped my personality is no longer relevant? After all, what is consciousness without sensory input to provide experiential context?”
Consciousness, says Knight, operates as a system atop the complex structure of systems that make up our living bodies. Upon death, the collapse of those systems from which our minds emerged has terminal consequences. “The conscious mind becomes just another impermanent system subject to physical laws.”
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post ('Meeting Our Extended Hominid Family' ) of February 23, 2010:
"As we all know, and can be grown-up enough to say, neither the descendants of apes, or apes themselves possess "souls". There is only a brain, but it is ample to generate consciousness as I already showed in my 'Materialist Model of Consciousness'. Thus, when a human (or ape) dies, that's it. He is gone and there is nothing left - nothing to "punish" and nothing to go on. This hard fact may be why so many evangelicals refuse to accept evolution: they don't want to accept: a) they have no souls, and b) when they're dead, that's it, finito."
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This is analogous to Ms. Knight's argument, i.e.:
"It is a safe assumption that most people do not believe trilobites or velociraptors are at present hanging out with 72 virgin members of their species in some species -specific version of paradise.....Therefore, if we accept that none of our extinct, nonhuman forbears or members of other contemporary species have attained an afterlife, why should anyone believe that Homo sapiens are destined for a different fate?"
She then answers the question by naming what most of us already understand as that manifestation of sentience known as consciousness, but pointing out "it is not exclusive to our species."
Adding:
"The emergence of consciousness occurred within a hierarchic evolutionary context. So does it even make sense to conceive of the conscious mind outside of systemic structures that supply it contextual meaning? In other words if I am a product of nature and nurture, what good is an afterlife in which the physical context that shaped my personality is no longer relevant?"
"The dying system decomposes into subsystem structures lower in the holarchic order that are sustainable within the systemic environment of the deceased system. A dead body becomes a nutrient source for other living systems and not a ghoulish distribution of functioning organs."
She notes that the term "holarchy" (first used by Arthur Koestler in The Ghost in the Machine) embodies the "interdependence, interrelations and interaction of subsystems which results in a form of self-organization from which a larger system is an emergent product". In other words, consciousness is not an epiphenomenon of the brain but this very emerged product. But the extinction of such a system (and emergent product) occurs when the system fails to retain stability. That is triggered when the key components die, e.g. neurons, neuronal sub-assemblies etc.
"If the conscious mind is located at the apex of this holarchic system , then the collapse of the substructure beneath it has terminal consequences."
In other words, there is no conscious personal entity that survives the dissolution of the neural system with its synaptic connections, neurons etc. As I pointed out earlier.
Is this plausible? As I've repeatedly observed in my several atheist books, it does represent - by the Ockham's Razor principle (simplest hypothesis is the most likely under several options) - the simplest answer for what happens when one dies. Thus, there is no "white light" waiting, no judgment of anything, just a big nothingness - analogous to what occurs with general anesthesia.
After 35 years of anaesthetizing patients and seeing the same results over and over Hameroff was led to postulate that small structures in the brain called "microtubules" are at the root of apparent "escaped" consciousness and that they hold the key to what happens. He also surmises that at putative death (or even "near death") essential energy associated with the microtubules disperses out from the brain and becomes "entangled" in a larger, undifferentiated whole.
Hameroff cites certain aspects of quantum mechanics to explain his reasoning though, he leaves some ends open. In the brain, information persists through a phenomenon called quantum coherence.
This means that a multitude of quantum wave states are stored in a multitude of microtubules. Precisely how this is done remains a speculative area but the point is that if one is aware and conscious there is a high degree of locality. When one dies, those wave states presumably evacuate and one's consciousness enters the domain of non-locality.
Essentially, I have more and more come to the conclusion there is no "self" in any afterlife. In the one case nothingness would preclude it, and in the (Hameroff) case, a self would not be distinguishable from an oceanic wave form. So what's the point? To me obsessiin over a self is a peculiar Western obsession and here we might learn a few things from the Buddhists, for example. (I.e. their 'Nirvana' is basically a state of transcendent nothingness)
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There is no "proof" as such that de Broglie waves can encompass consciousness, other than what Bohm has proposed in his assorted papers, book (Wholeness and the Implicate Order) But these are more in the way of reasoned conclusions than hard evidence. As for surviving death, if de Broglie waves are real - as experiments show - then yes by inference they'd survive death as a form of quantized wave energy. (I.e. "Energy cannot be created or destroyed only changed from one form to another")
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Do you think that there is any afterlife idea that we should fear, or that you fear?
Maybe - but fortunately no such "ideas" are real! They are concoctions of religious powers trying to gain control of one's mind and will.
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1_But do you think we should fear or do fear any afterlife ideas that are non religious, like quantum consciousness or any other.
2_Do you know of any other "scientific" theory of afterlife (besides the one you present in your blog of Hameroff's quantum consciousness)?
1) No.
2) The book I mentioned in another post comment:
'What Really Happens When You Die?: Cosmology, Time and You' - by Andrew McLauchlin
In the book Mr. Reilly concludes that we do not have free will, time does not flow, and you are not a unified body. He contends that understanding these three things will bring you happiness, since you will understand that you have no control over your life and that you should simply enjoy the ride.
Mr. Reilly does a nice job of showing just how difficult it is to demonstrate that we have any control over our lives. But having something be difficult does not mean it is impossible. It is very difficult to show how consciousness came into being, but we are indeed conscious. Similarly it is difficult to show how free will would develop from a physical parts, but I think we will understand how that happens given time. In the end, a machine that can modify its own programming in response to that machine's decisions would disprove Mr. Reilly's first hypothesis that we have no free will.
His second hypothesis, that time does not flow, is based on our current limited understanding of time from quantum mechanics. Mr. Reilly contends that all of time exists at all time, but I think we will shortly find that the problems with our creating a unified theory similarly creates difficulty with our understanding of time. I think it is highly unlikely that we will ever discover a way to time-travel, and that would need to be possible for Mr. Reilly's contention to be true.
His third hypothesis I believe is correct, but helps very little. Sadly, that we are all waves made of star-stuff does not keep us from abusing one another. While we are indeed one, the differences between the parts makes for conflict.
In the end, I find myself feeling sad that after all of our scientific findings people still feel the need to revert to religious ideas; still struggle with the essential pain we all must feel to make life better. I believe the goal of happiness is mis-guided and even dangerous. If happiness is the only goal, why not drugs and video games forever? To make a better life we must feel pain and work through difficulties so our children have a better world to live in.
It feels like this book simply exchanges philosophy for religion as the opiate of the masses. Neither is a good thing.
This book tries to persuade the reader to change viewpoints and this very concept is at odds with the conclusions of the book. If nothing can be changed, why write this book? Nothing matters anyway, since everything is written, all is done, and we have no free will.
While the book does offer a difficult challenge to the reader, it also offers a challenge to the author. If you believe what you have written, why did you write this book?
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