You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

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

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

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (99)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: ete 14 May 2014 02:56:39AM *  2 points [-]

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 it may exist), plausible explanations for why each of those weak sources of evidence would exist without a real afterlife (psychological effects of almost dying and general unreliability of minds in extreme situations, the fact that an afterlife makes a religious meme more powerful, and flat out hope/unwillingness to face the end respectively). All descriptions of a true afterlife conflict massively with the testable and prediction giving knowledge that science has found, and trying to make the two work together, if it is even possible, would give a much less simple theory.