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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Full disclosure: I am a quantitative biologist, not a physicist. As a biologist, I am certain beyond doubt that what we experience as consciousness is an emergent property of the biochemical and electrical processes that happen in our brain and body. The "pilot" or "watcher" we experience--and with which our ancestors have posited the "soul" for millennia--is an illusion. I don't have time to get into the reasons why this must be true, but here is a question for you: when you go under general anesthesia, and you are put on a breathing machine because your brain is shut down, is your soul still around, observing and watching? For those who point to near death experiences, this is not what I'm talking about. In those cases, the brain is dying due to oxygen deprivation. The whole light thing is nice and all, but it's almost certainly just the experience of death. I'm talking about medically induced coma. There isn't anything there--literally, because it is shut down. It's pretty remarkable that we can now shut "consciousness" down and then restart it, by the way.

As far as life "after" death, my attitude sounds like a cheat, but it really isn't. We experience time linearly, but time isn't linear. It's a fourth dimension. Physics tells us that there's no reason it has to go in one direction. Our life is experienced this way by us, but the five-year-old you is no less real now than the you of today or the you the day you die. Nothing can take that away. In that sense, we are immortal--we just only get to experience life once... but it's always there. Well, not "always" because that implies time, but you get my drift. Dead you is the same as pre-birth you; it's just the universe where the cells that make up you aren't arranged in a way that decreases rather than increases entropy. Those blow flies that a previous poster talked about seem gross, but they're just little algorithms that are seeking to reuse the chemical energy in your cells to make other anti-entropy machines. That's what life is. Life is great. It's definitely a miracle. I just think eternal life is kind of silly. If there is a God, he almost certainly doesn't experience or care about human-experienced linear time.

When I think about my grandparents or others I have known that are gone, I know that the sunny days they spent in the park in their 20s, or the nights they spent loving their spouses in their 30s, or the laughter I shared with them when they were in their 60s, are all "still there." The bummer is we can't relive them. It's sad, but in a way, it's nice.[/quote]

Lovely -- thanks.  I don't believe in life after death - too fantastical and so obviously man-made.   the above makes me feel better about it.  I appreciate life and don't like the idea of it ending and disappearing, even if there are others still living to remember.  They will die too.   That's the way it is.  Making up a story about everlasting life doesn't change it.
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