Is Eternal Life Even Desireable?

[Pyrrho]

... Explanations that don't include a causal mechanism are usually considered unscientific. Yet the privacy aspect of consciousness seems to make it impossible to find a mechanism for it.
...

The "privacy" is being worked on.  Here is an article to get you started:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/articl...eds-ahead/


Primitive people thought that fire was a thing or substance.  The modern idea is that it is not a substance, but a process.  It is the rapid oxidation of a material (called "fuel").  Stop the process, and you stop the fire.  There isn't any nonphysical part of it, but it isn't a substance; it is a process.

When one thinks, one thinks about something, and there is, for want of a better expression, constant movement, rather like a fire.

The best idea at present for consciousness is that it, too, is a process (or processes), and not a substance.  It appears to be a subset of the processes of a brain.

If, on the other hand, thinking were some non-material thing, how could it possibly interact with physical stuff?  Why would it be that, when alcohol is in the brain, one's thinking is affected, if one had an immaterial mind?

Of course, alcohol in the brain affects the processes of the brain, and so if thinking is a brain process (or processes), then it makes perfect sense that alcohol in the brain would affect thinking.

Examining people with damaged brains helps further this idea, that one's mind is a subset of the processes of the brain, rather than some immaterial substance that is magically connected to a physical body.

So, at present, the best idea for what happens when one dies is that the processes of the brain stop, and so one no longer has consciousness and so one does not live forever.  It is 'lights out,' giving one the same thing one had before one existed, or in other words, nothing.

The fact that people don't like this causes many to believe something else, but wishful thinking is a form of fallacious thinking.