shokwave comments on What do rationalists think about the afterlife? - Less Wrong

-16 Post author: adamzerner 13 May 2014 09:46PM

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Comment author: adamzerner 14 May 2014 03:59:51AM *  0 points [-]

Brain damage empirically causes damage to consciousness, so that pretty clearly indicates that the brain is where we get our consciousness from.

It causes damage to our ability to communicate our consciousness. For all we know, people with brain damage (and who are sleeping, unconscious, dead etc.) may be conscious, but just unable to communicate it with us (or remember it when they wake up

A concrete example might help. Consciousness could exist on some small quantum or string level, or other small level we haven't even discovered yet. It's possible that this level is undisturbed when we die, and that we continue to be conscious.

Comment author: shokwave 19 May 2014 08:47:32AM *  -1 points [-]

An extreme form of brain damage might be destruction of the entire brain. I don't think that someone with their entire brain removed has consciousness but lacks the ability to communicate it; suggesting that consciousness continues after death seems to me to be pushing well beyond what we understand "consciousness" to refer to.