I'm pretty sure I could be convinced of an afterlife pretty quickly. Obvious things would be allowing me to see my dead body and funeral, and the other events surrounding my death. I'd also like some evidence that I'm talking to a being with powers that humans generally lack. The most obvious ways to test that is to pick some list of statements that probably have proofs (e.g. the Riemann hypothesis, whether there are infinitely many Mersenne primes, possibly a few substantially weaker statements thrown in) and to have it pick one and present a proof or disproof to me. It is possible that it is wrecking with my brain to think that I'm seeing a valid proof when it isn't but I don't assign that a very high probability. I'd also be interested in seeing personal information that no human has an easy way of knowing (and I have a few obvious examples ready on hand). This all wouldn't make me certain that I'm in an afterlife- a sufficiently powerful alien force could duplicate this sort of thing, but it would be assigned a pretty high probability.

Incidentally, I'm not sure I agree with the statement that the situation demonstrates a failure of Pascal's Wager by itself. Nothing in the hypothetical says that there's an afterlife where one is rewarded iff one believed in the right deity. By itself, finding out that there's actually an afterlife might even be a pleasant surprise. If for example we're in a simulation and the simulator cares enough about intelligence that all intelligent life is not only backed up but gets to keep processing, that would be a good thing. Even if the afterlife is due to a more classical theistic universe where it turns out that we really have "souls" or some other ontologically irreducible portion of our consciousness, that seems not obviously bad.

Well, one question is to define specifically what death he wishes me to accept before I leave the room. So when he says "You are dead." And I ask "Which kinds of dead am I?" If he says:

"You are information theoretically dead. You're also brain dead and clinically dead." then that leads to an entirely different kind of much more confusing discussion. (What exactly is he arguing with? If the answer is my soul, what is the nature of my soul? An 'Elan Vital' style answer doesn't clarify anything unless learning to accept an 'Elan Vital' is the point of locking me into a room, in which case that will cause me to consider the room in an entirely different light.)

"You are information theoretically alive, but you are brain dead and clinically dead." (Your pattern of experiences has been teleported by some means to a locked room. You can resume experiencing things that are not the locked room when yoou have seen sufficient evidence that you accept you are brain dead and clinically dead.)

Or perhaps, "You're information theoretically dead, brain dead, but clinically alive." (You are a comatose vegetable with irreversible brain damage.)

Or perhaps even, "You're information theoretically dead, brain alive, but clinically dead." (It might be more accurate to say you've suffered massive trauma, exploding your body and head and throwing your intact brain from it's body. There is no state of affairs where you don't die, but technically your brain is still oxygenated for a few seconds and is producing a few last gasp hallucinations.)

Also, another question is "Do I even WANT to 'cross-over?' " I mean, he says he is here to help me in that endeavor, but I don't know if every rationalist would even necessarily be endeavoring to do that. Particularly not if told that by someone who also told them they lost Pascal's wager. If I HAVE been transported into something similar to the Christian afterlife, accepting what might be the Devil's implied axioms without double checking them seems likely to be a mistake.

Another pertinent question is "Which religion on earth is this situation in this afterlife closest to and how close is it?"

If the answer is "Catholicism. Mostly accurate with a few details wrong." That may also lead to an entirely different approach from "Atheism. And really, not even Atheism is that close."

I also want to note something else about your original post:

Is there any thing which, while actually true, could never be demonstrated in this manner?

Gödel's first incompleteness theorem talks about things that relate to this concept. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_theorems for details.

In order for this to make any sense, you have to taboo some words and expand out the metaphysics, and in particular what's meant by the word "death". The scenario you've described sounds more like "teleported into an alternate universe" (or copied into the new universe after being destroyed in the old one), with the destination universe being an afterlife. The scenario says that you're having a conversation, and you can't do that without a working brain, which is my definition of being alive. But the "teleported into an alternate universe" hypothesis isn't very hard to test; you could look for differences in the laws of physics, or look through a portal into the original universe, for example.

The way to convince me that an afterlife exists would be to negate the evidence that currently convinces me that there isn't one. This is essentially that :

• Physics is pretty well understood and there's no evidence that following the laws of physics from the starting conditions of the universe would create an afterlife.
• There's not a clean cut between "brain damage" and "death" nor is there a clean cut between "brain damage" and "experience". How would an afterlife know when to scoop someone up from this world? How would it know what personality to give them in the afterlife? Especially if someone dies gradually of a mental illness.

If I were shown why these reasons were wrong or confused then I might be convinced.

Even is there was something that I couldn't become Bayesianly convinced of, this still wouldn't show it to be false. If such a thing existed it would be a problem with Bayesian reasoning.

Logic stays true, wherever you may go,
So logic never tells you where you live.

From the Parable of Hemlock.

I think this is some kind of absurd hypothetical situation that is not relevant to practical decision making.

I would ask the deity what computational substrate it was running on. Then the conversation would branch depending on its answer.

I feel that some of this hinges on the meanings of "dead" and "afterlife".

Since "dead" means I cannot experience anything, there is absolutely no way I could be convinced that I am dead -- the mere idea is self-contradictory and logically impossible. No one can ever convince me I am currently dead.

"Alive, but in an afterlife" is different. This I think I could be convinced of, in principle, but I'm not yet sure how I would go about distinguishing this from the dream hypothesis.

For me, the entity would have to give evidence which makes his explanation more likely than other hypotheses, one of which being that I clinically and brainically but not information theoretically died, suffered some retrograde but no anterograde amnesia in the process, was cryopreserved and then woken up again in the future by a post-singularity society, while the AI extrapolated my volition that I'd rather believe I was dead and in some sort of afterlife. That, for example, has a far higher prior than some sort of genuine afterlife.

Convincing me that I was clinically (and to a slightly lesser extent also brain) dead would be quite possible, though.