Life After Death Is Impossible, Says Scientist

[AFTT47]

I think the good Dr. Sean Carroll is not being very scientific. I might agree that we have enough evidence to confidently say that consciousness is manifested by the brain. The problem is that we are absolutely clueless as to how this happens. Information storage, sure. That's easy. But how does electrical and chemical activity manifest consciousness? We are no closer to understanding that than a cave man is to understanding general relativity.

It can still be argued that our lack of understanding doesn't matter. A brain which quits working means no more consciousness. But what of something recording that consciousness?

I've pointed out before that there is nothing in theory which prevents life like ourselves from evolving to the point where we would be indistinguishable from gods. We've gone from the stone age to today in just tens of thousands of years (perhaps hundreds of thousands if you want to get nitpicky). Where could we go in the hundreds of millions we have left on this planet? Perhaps to the point of understanding consciousness and figuring out how to preserve it after the death of the body. If so, other beings could do it too. Perhaps some already have.

The best I would grant Dr. Carroll is that our current understanding of physics shows us no way for consciousness to survive beyond the body. But his claim that we fully understand all physics which governs consciousness is absolutely absurd. I'm surprised any serious scientist would even make such a statement.

That's not what he is claiming. He is claiming that the laws of physics that govern our REALITY are completely understood and he is correct.

For rest of the post, see my previous response.  There is no fundamental property called "consciousness" at particle level - the leavel at which our reality is transformed from underlying quantum fields. Since all biological system eventually decay into particles, the consciousness, which may exist at emergent biological brain level, stops being existed back at particles level. He is making the claim informed by scientific facts. He's being scientific.

I don't agree.

Gravity is certainly a part of physics that govern our REALITY. And clearly we DON'T fully understand it. It has been clear for quite some time that general relativity is coming up short. It doesn't work at the quantum level. The behavior of the Pioneer probe doesn't gel with predictions. Now there is the dark energy thing - which we have no idea of the nature of. Is it real? Or is our understanding of gravity incomplete? Might general relativity be an approximation in the same way we now know Newtonian mechanics is?

It is almost always a mistake to make absolute statements of the type Dr. Carroll is. It's also counter productive. What's the point of it? It's impossible to defend.