Skip to contentWillowOne's PositionsTagsWhat’s newMediaStatisticsSearch
WillowOne's Positions

Life After Death

My Positions

  1. There is no credible empirical evidence to support the existence of an afterlife.
  2. There is no reason to believe that consciousness exists without a brain (see Mind-body dualism and Consciousness).
  3. Death is the permanent end of the individual. I find this neither frightening nor depressing. It is simply the condition under which life is lived.

Notes

  1. Consciousness appears to arise from brain activity and ends when brain function ceases. Everything we know about the mind, from the effects of injury, anaesthesia, dementia, and drugs, shows that mental states are dependent on physical brain states. There is no component of the mind that has ever been shown to operate independently of the brain, and so there is nothing left over to survive it.
  2. Near-death experiences are reported by people who did not die. They are experiences of a brain under extreme stress, and their features (tunnels, light, a sense of peace, out-of-body sensation) can be reproduced by hypoxia, ketamine, and direct stimulation of the temporal lobe. They are evidence of what a dying brain does, not of where it goes.
  3. The belief in an afterlife is near-universal across cultures, and this is best explained by the fact that humans find it very hard to imagine their own non-existence. We cannot picture the absence of the thing doing the picturing. This is a limitation of imagination, not evidence of survival.
  4. While the idea of an afterlife may offer comfort, I hold that meaning must be found in this life, not deferred to a speculative beyond (see Meaning). We should live ethically and purposefully precisely because this life is finite and irreplaceable. A life that went on forever would, if anything, have less urgency and therefore less value.
  5. I agree with Epicurus: "Where death is, I am not; where I am, death is not." The state of being dead is not a state one experiences. I was absent for the thirteen billion years before my birth and it caused me no distress.
  6. The claim that this life is a mere prelude has real costs. It has been used to justify the deferral of justice, the acceptance of suffering, and, at the extreme, the killing of oneself and others in the expectation of reward (see Atheism on 9/11 and 7/7).

Also see