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I find it odd that we doubt the afterlife.
This is a universe where nothing is ever truly created or destroyed, merely changing form from one thing to another.
And yet the view we associate with "Science!" is that conciousness is the one exception? What makes you think you're so special that the universe will only experience you for a limited time? You're not a happy meal promotion, you're as immortal as everything else.
Consciousness isn't a tangible thing. It's just a label we use for a type of brain behavior. Once there's no brain, there's no more behavior. Just like once your heart dies, there's no more heartbeat.
I dunno we still see things like Terminal Lucidity and NDEs all the time.
One of those is pre-death and the other is near-death. I don't see how either suggests that there's some ghost-brain that functions after death.
Saying "Oh that's just near death. Never mind that we are seeing active consciousness where none should exist."
Isn't that just moving the goal post at the end of the day?
No, both of those still involves some form of brain consciousness. What we don't have any evidence of is consciousness existing without a physical body.
I find NDEs fascinating because so many have tried to debunk them and they keep failing.
At first they tried to say they weren't real, but then they kept happening
Then they tried to say that were dreams but the effects were too profound
They tried to say it was oxygen starvation but people under an NDE tend to be lucid and those oxygen starved tend to be dizzy.
They tried to say it was a religious delusion but then a cursory glance over the NDEs show them to be too universal, the only thing that changes is whether someone sees Jesus or Buddha...
They even thought they had the smoking gun when the effects were replicated under DMT only to find that the human body doesn't have enough native DMT to trip on.
So they started doing things like the AWARE study and the data keeps piling up. Machines that detect no brain activity and yet people accurately recalling conversations and seeing sights despite being incredibly close to brain death.
Even related phenomena like the Shared Death Experience and Terminal Lucidity were found.
Typically when something is superstitious nonsense it goes away when investigated.
NDEs do not
The best skeptics have is trying to say that the person recovering from brain death must have not REALLY been brain dead. To say that it doesn't count as coming back from the dead if you came back from what is defined as clinical death.
This is moving the goal post, sure we can't summon Capser up and ask him what being dead feels like.. but.. the data is still pointing in the direction of conciousness where none can exist. Conciousness that is powerful and lucid despite the "source" of it not working properly. Not just "kinda lucid" but more so than normal.
There are people who are born blind reporting what the room they were in looked like because their NDE let them see for the first time ever.
The human equivalent of me frying my mother board yet somehow windows is still booting up.
So at this point saying "Oh well you can't point to a ghost so this means nothing." Is as absurd as throwing out astrophysics because we haven't found out how to make an FTL Drive.
Now I'm not saying this proves God or anything, but at some point you have to say "Oh well how about that." To the thing that continues to happen
Information is destroyed all the time, conciousness is just information, and will cease to exist in a meaningful form when the structure of matter hosting it (your body, and in particular your brain) ceases to function in a way that supports that.
The energy that motivated your body and acted as signals in your brain will disipate. Your actual matter will stick around in one form or another. After all, we are all "star stuff", and given long enough, our "stuff" will return to the universe at large.
You just angered all quantum physicists everywhere: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-hiding_theorem
I'm sorry, maybe I'm just dumb, but I didn't think information could be destroyed.
Black holes are a good example of information destruction. Matter and energy fall into the gravity well, and eventually are reemited as Hawking radiation, but as far as current theories go, there's no way to reconstruct the information that made up the original matter or energy from that radiation.
Information isn't a "thing" but the relationship between, and exact quantum state of, things. Once that state is disrupted, the information is gone.
Black holes are a good example of information destruction.
That was actually debunked https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-most-famous-paradox-in-physics-nears-its-end-20201029/
Unless I still misunderstand.
I recall reading about that research some time ago, thanks for reminding me of it.
I was perhaps being a bit slapdash referring to information being destroyed, as in the quantum sense, yes, it can be recovered. However the recovery posited in the paper is a theoretical simulation of the information that entered the blackhole, which, I suppose could be used as a direct analogy for the actual information that entered the black hole, or maybe somehow used to create an actual copy of it, but, as far as I can see, it also requires that the black hole completely evaporates to release all of the information. Without all of the information, the information you do have does not describe the initial state, as they put it in the article it is 'encrypted'.
Our initial discussion was about whether conciousness can be destroyed. Given that there is a period of time between information entering the black hole and having sufficient information back to create a simulation of it, and that conciousness arises from the detailed structure and working of our brains, I would say that a consciousness that falls into a black hole has, indeed been destroyed. Whether the mooted simulation means that said conciousness can be reconstructed at a future point is a different question, and rather resembles the Ship of Theseus question.
There also seem to be significant questions about the exact conclusions of the paper as it is very theoretical and based on a number of simplifying assumptions. I've tried to find the original paper, but it looks like it may be spread over several, and I really don't know where to start with sentences like 'We reformulate recent insights into black hole information in a manner emphasizing operationally-defined notions of entropy, Lorentz-signature descriptions, and asymptotically flat spacetimes. With the help of replica wormholes, we find that experiments of asymptotic observers are consistent with black holes as unitary quantum systems, with density of states given by the Bekenstein-Hawking formula.'
So, in summary, yes, information is not actually destroyed when if falls into a black hole, it's just mangled beyond recognition, entangled with all the other information that has, and will, enter the black hole, and can only be reconstructed by theoretically entangling all of the radiation the hole emits over it's entire lifetime with a suitable simulation!
No, you understand correctly. Notabot just doesn't know what they're talking about
How do you define consciousness?
If it's any kind of complex system, then of course it can be permanently destroyed. The same way that a computer or a building or a car can be destroyed and not exist anymore, even if its physical components still do.
And if consciousness is a material or an energy or something real, what's the evidence that it even exists? Why do you believe it exists?I believe it is something simple we do not yet have the capacity to measure and that which can not be recreated as an AI.
Why do I believe it exists? Because I experience it constantly.
I am going to tell you something based on a true story about a spring in Rome believed to cure disease. For centuries even after the fall of the Empire fell people flocked to it believing the Gods blessed it with healing properties.
The scientific minded said bad to the whole thing and assumed it nothing but a legend that fools took stock in. However people continued to come and be healed, no one could explain it.
Until the invention of the Geiger Counter and the discovery of radiation.
The legend had been true all along. The spring had been mildly radioactive! It was killing off what was killing the patrons!
No one had anyway of knowing until suddenly they did.
I believe conciousness to be a similar story that we haven't seen the end of. Perhaps free will is one as well.
The thing is your story seems more to confirm the scientific consensus around consciousness as connected to the physical existence of the brain. You describe how ancient medicine functioned through trial and error. Some times they came up with stuff that worked, more often than not they didn't, and they had no way of knowing why a cure worked until scientific progress had discovered the underlying explanations for it. So when they found a cure that just happened to work on a certain disease, they would apply it for all sorts of diseases, or lacking proper diagnosis, would mistake other diseases for the disease it worked on and so forth.
It was blind chance without any actual useful theory behind it. Now we have useful theory which explains why consciousness would be linked to the physical cognitive functions of a brain, and less and less that would explain how it could exist without it.
What we have are correlations, not causation. We still cannot point to a part of the brain and say "There it is, there's conciousness."
One theory is the idea that if enough brain power is gathered together it makes a conciousness as an emergent property.
Except, why can't we make an AI? Why is it that putting a bunch of processors together doesn't give us skynet? Why are chatbots that spew regurgitation the best we can do?
Where is the emerging conciousness in the AI?
We will never have it, because we are still missing what makes humans concious. At some point we need to stop laughing at the idea that it could be in some way quantum or undetectable and ask why neurology can't answer the hard question.
I don't know about "afterlife" as in heaven or hell. I do think that there's some sort of energy not yet possible to measure with current technology. Some energy that goes on and form a part of a different living being. Not as in "reincarnation" where its based on some sort of "diety" or "karma", but just pure randomness. Now you're a human, maybe later your energy (or "soul") goes into an insect, or a cat (oh I love to become a cat). Humans couldn't see radiowaves for millions of years, perhaps the "soul" is just something we haven't developed the technology to see yet.
But for now, we can't prove it, so its just philosophy at this point, not scientific. Maybe we'll become some other living being again, maybe not, who knows...
I personally believe we're just energy that drifts when we die, and inhabit something else, over and over again. Kinda depressing when you really think about it. Forever cused to just die over and over again.
Imagine that energy leaves Earth and you become something higher than man
Like a giraffe?
I find it odd that we doubt the afterlife.
Most people don't, unfortunately.
How do you define consciousness? How do you define "you"?
I believe that consciousness is simply an emergent property of our brain. Without the brain, there is no consciousness. A brain can be destroyed, just like a hard drive can be destroyed. Sure, the atoms are still there, but the "you" inside of them is as good as gone.
The problem with Emergentism is that it doesn't really have evidence beyond throwing our hands up and going "We can't find anything in there that causes it but we see there's conciousness. So... it just emerges somehow"
It's just "spontaneous generation" (what people believed before Germ Theory) for the brain. It's very "God of the Gaps" in a way.
I'd sooner put stock into the Orch-OR theory than take emergentism too seriously.
I can see why you'd draw those comparisons to "spontaneous generation" or "God of the Gaps" -- it's a common misconception when people first encounter the idea of emergence. However, that's not quite what Emergentism, especially in the context of consciousness, is suggesting.
The key difference is that emergent properties aren't truely "spontaneous" or without a basis in the underlying components. Instead, they arise from complex interactions between those components, often in ways that are not easily predictable from studying the individual parts alone.
Think of it like this:
- Water's wetness: A single H2O molecule isn't wet. Wetness emerges from the collective behavior and interactions of many water molecules. We don't say wetness is "spontaneous generation" of a property, but rather a property of the system.
- A hurricane: A hurricane is a complex, self-organizing system with emergent properties like its destructive power and eye. These properties aren't found in individual air molecules or even small air currents; they emerge from the large-scale interactions of atmospheric conditions.
In the context of consciousness, an emergentist perspective suggests that consciousness isn't located in a single neuron or even a small group of neurons, but rather emerges from the intricate network activity and complex interactions of billions of neurons in the brain. It's not about throwing our hands up and saying 'it just happens.' It's about recognizing that complexity can give rise to novel properties that aren't reducible to the sum of their parts.
The challenge isn't a lack of evidence that something is happening (we clearly observe consciousness), but rather the difficulty in fully understanding and mapping the incredibly complex mechanisms that lead to this emergent phenomenon. It's an active area of research, and while we don't have all the answers, it's a far cry from "God of the Gaps" because it proposes a naturalistic, albeit complex, explanation rather than invoking something supernatural.
While theories like Orch-OR offer a different approach, many neuroscientists find the emergentist framework more consistent with how complex systems behave in other areas of science.
It's not similar to "god of the gaps" at all, as I'm not inserting anything inside of that gap. I have no fucking clue what's causing it to emerge, and I probably never will. Rather than saying "I don't know what's causing lightning so it must be Zeus," I'm saying "I don't know what's causing lightning, but I can see it's coming from the sky." Or in this case, I have no idea what's causing us to experience consciousness, but it seems to be a result of our brain.
And I see no evidence for the idea that consciousness can even exist outside of the brain, nor that an afterlife exists.
As far as I see there are correlations with the brain, but until I see a smoking gun I don't feel it appropriate to say causation.
However I don't think anyone out there, even the most diehard believer in whatever mysticism you fancy would go as far as to say there aren't correlations.
That said correlations appear to be all there are.
Edited for clarity
It's 50/50 for me. I think with what we know about science it seems pretty clear that we end when we die. And with all that we DON'T know about science it seems just as possible that consciousness is eternal.
It took me a while to find, but stuff like this research from Yale, reviving organs and brain function long after the point of death, makes it apparent that what it means to die is just as complex a question as what makes us us.