This question has little to do with LW-style rationality. The contrivance of postulating extra entities like souls becomes obvious once you accept that mind is a process in a living brain, affected by drugs, injuries, etc. You can, of course, postulate anything you want, but the odds are against you, and definitely not 50/50. See this illuminating debate, discussed here. More about the 50/50 fallacy you've fallen prey to.
Edit: fixed the debate video link to a better-quality one.
You don't seem to understand what it's really like to "have no data." A question with no data is something like: Will the Emperor of Alfa Centauri eat fried lummywaps or boiled sanquemels today?
On human consciousness we have lots and lots of data, more than enough to predict confidently that it's lost forever when we die.
The reason for thinking that consciousness is a physical process of the brain is the remarkable correspondence we find between injuries to the brain or the introduction of various chemicals, and variations of conscious experience. That leaves open the possibility that consciousness is a physically separate entity for which the brain is the interface through which it moves the body and receives sensation from it, rather than brain processes themselves being consciousness. However most of the ground for that is undercut by the fact that some brain injuries severing parts of the brain from each other also appear to sever the corresponding parts of consciousness -- split-brain observations. It seems that it is not only components of consciousness that correspond to brain regions, but also their interconnection. The more we find out, the less role is left for the hypothesis of a separate consciousness to do any work. Like the old "God in the gaps" argument to defend theism against science.
That is the argument, but it is important to note what it does not solve. It does not solve the problem of what consciousness is -- of why there is any such thing in the world as experien...
"We have a number of situations in which we can hear music in this world e.g. Hitting play on your laptop. However this is just the data we have; there are many situations we don't know about. Can we really say that when a song stops, it doesn't continue somewhere else? Personally I see no reason to believe this. At best we're talking fifty-fifty here."
The situations that cause music to be heard are exceedingly complex and are not likely to happen in other parts of the universe by accident. Similarly, the situations which cause consciousness are ...
Not much has been said cuz there ain't much to say about things that don't exist. Your mind is what your brain does. When the brain stops, so do you. This isn't even advanced rationality - it's reductionism 101. I believe there was a Intelligence Squared debate on it just a few days ago that rehashed all the same old ground if you'd like a refresher. Here we go.
Giving a prior of .5 is ridiculous. Something for which you have no evidence and which breaks several known laws of physics should begin with a seriously tiny prior. You're being heavily influenced by social traditions.
Personal identity is an illusion. It's often a useful illusion, but when you're dealing with something outside the normal usage, it can go way off. It results in asking meaningless questions like "Where did we come from?", "Where do we go when we die?", and "Is the guy who came out of the teleporter the real me, or just my clone?".
I don't mean to say that suggesting the existence of an afterlife is meaningless. I just mean that we're using a flawed model that implicitly assumes an afterlife, when there's no reason to believe i...
And finally, since we have no data, what can we say about the likelihood of our consciousness returning/remaining after we die? I would say the chances are 50/50. For something you have no data on, any outcome is equally likely
I don't think that's true. It's not that we have no data; we still have prior probability. And with that, all of our background knowledge that goes into that prior which function as data. Theories aren't argued in isolation!
Think about how many things need to be true in order for consciousness to "return" after we die, a...
There's a lot of very bizarre death-related stuff some people here take seriously: future simulations of you recreated from historical data, "quantum immortality", big universe with copies of you existing very far away, us living in a simulation, and so on and so forth. It's just that the atheists who believe in such can't call that "afterlife" otherwise they wouldn't be atheists.
edit: I think there's also a very serious case of inconsistency. If you ask someone about "afterlife", they're pretty sure there's no afterlife, but ...
People in the comments have just taken it as a given that consciousness resides solely in the brain without explaining why they think this. My point in this post is that I don't see why we have reason to reject the 3 possibilities above. If you reject the idea that consciousness could reside outside of the brain, please explain why.
Simply put: Occam's Razor, and lack of evidence.
More thoroughly: We have at best very weak evidence for an afterlife (non-verifiable near-death experiences, religious texts, and it being a generally common belief/hunch that i...
"Returning" and "remaining" (as you put it in your last bullet point) are very different things. The latter seems to require that we are, or have, something like souls that, despite their immateriality and apparent complete inaccessibility to any sort of scientific investigation, are the true bearers of our identity and consciousness. This is very, very hard to square with (e.g.) the copious evidence that "the mind is what the brain does" and I think it's reasonable to regard it as pretty much refuted.
"Returning" is ...
It is a simple case of parsimony.
The brain and the physical world in general are sufficient to explain consciousness, so therefore any assumptions beyond that get a complexity penalty.
And...that's the only reason. All your "possibilities" are indeed possible... but improbable. I don't reject the idea that consciousness could theoretically reside outside the brain, but it's much more parsimonious to assume it does not.
I've read a fair amount on Less Wrong
If so, I take it you already understand about parsimony and its importance for hypothes...
While I do still find myself quite uncertain about the concept of 'quantum immortality', not to mention the even stronger implications of certain multiverse theories, these don't seem to be the kind of thing that you're talking about. I submit that 'there is an extant structure not found within our best current models of reality isomorphic to a very specific (and complex) type of computation on a very specific (and complex) set of data (ie your memories and anything else that comprises your 'identity')' is not a simple proposition.
The OP is terribly confused.
"What happens to our consciousness when we die?"
The question makes no sense. The irreversible disruption of metabolic chemistry that for reasons of convenience we all call death implies also the irreversible destruction of consciousness. Asking what happens to consciousness when we die is like asking what happens to a bird flying formation when they land.
[N]euronal firing [only represents] the preconditions that seem to produce consciousness that can/do communicate/demonstrate its consciousness to us.
Any other ...
On your last point, no. To put it colloquially, the simpler answer is more likely.
In practical terms, saying that all binary choices without evidence causes conflicts. Namely, if there's a 50/50 chance that your consciousness dissolves when you die, and a 50/50 chance that a hidden FAI captures your brain state, and a 50/50 chance that a hidden UFAI captures your brain state. That implies that in every case that a FAI captures your brain state so does a UFAI.
People in the comments have just taken it as a given that consciousness resides solely in the brain without explaining why they think this.
And it's a neuroscience major who's asking this. For Skynet's sake, if you of all people can't see why consciousness requires a physical substrate several levels above the subatomic scale, then this whole thread is hopeless.
It may be magical thinking, but magical thinking is awesome!
"Anxiety reliefAccording to theories of anxiety relief and control, people turn to magical beliefs when there exists a sense of uncertainty and potential danger and little to do about it. Magic is used to restore a sense of control. In support of this theory, research indicates that superstitious behavior is invoked more often in high stress situations, especially by people with a greater desire for control.[7] It is proposed that one reason (but not necessarily the only reason) for the persi...
The problem with asking a question like that in this forum, is that most people here have been trained not to recognize the referent of the word "consciousness" and thus tend to confuse it with its correlates.
I've read a fair amount on Less Wrong and can't recall much said about the plausibility of some sort of afterlife. What do you guys think about it? Is there some sort of consensus?
Here's my take:
Edit: People in the comments have just taken it as a given that consciousness resides solely in the brain without explaining why they think this. My point in this post is that I don't see why we have reason to reject the 3 possibilities above. If you reject the idea that consciousness could reside outside of the brain, please explain why.