What Do You Believe Will Happen To You Once You Die?

[Coffee Jesus]

Without a physical brain, there is no mind.

All the evidence available points to the mind, including all that is you, ceases to exist once there is no brain.

Please point to one example of a mind existing absent a physical brain.

I wouldn't be able to give examples even if there were some. By "mind" I mean phenomenal experience, or qualia. I can test the idea that you have similar qualia by asking you about your qualia. If you lose the power to communicate, however, then I cannot test. If the ability to communicate entails [edit] some particular phenomenal experiences that are necessary for comunication, then I can never test for them individually with this test. or could I infer from the particular impairments in their communication? I'm kind of pulling this argument out of my ass. sorry[/edit]
A neuroscientist may be able to rule out phenomenal experience for coma patients and such, but I wouldn't count on it, for we still don't know how the mind maps onto the brain, or how it supervenes on physical reality.

[truthBtold]

No more hearing the bullshit that Christians spew

[Coffee Jesus]

Realize that your brain doesn't just make more mind, it also differentiates the mind into different types of experience—different senses, different colors, different ideas, etc.. Death could just be a return to an undifferentiated state.
I won't advocate pan-proto-experientialism, the idea that everything has protoexperiential qualities, because I think it leads to the conclusion that all things are actually part of one giant mind, which we intuitively know is false. However, I'm open to the idea that proto-experiential qualities are present at a very basic level of organization.

[Brian37]

Realize that your brain doesn't just make more mind, it also differentiates the mind into different types of experience—different senses, different colors, different ideas, etc.. Death could just be a return to an undifferentiated state.
I won't advocate pan-proto-experientialism, the idea that everything has protoexperiential qualities, because I think it leads to the conclusion that all things are actually part of one giant mind, which we intuitively know is false. However, I'm open to the idea that proto-experiential qualities are present at a very basic level of organization.

Or, lets not fill in gaps like they do. The science is in on what happens to our bodies after we die, including our brains. There is absolutely no afterlife to us at all, we decay, and our atoms move on to other things. Just like the atoms that were in us when we were conceived are not in us now.

We are a living ongoing fractal, but once that structure gets destroyed it does function as if it were not destroyed.

Right now science only says that evolution can manifest into cognition. Our cognition is merely our brains in motion. What causes that does not change that once broken up, it will not work anymore.

You are more than welcome to correct me if you think I am wrong. But this is coming across to me as merely a si fi attempt at justifying reincarnation.

If we find out what causes cognition, certainly not impossible, we still would not be reverting back to a state only to become a future cognition somewhere else. If a lion were to eat an antelope's brains, it would merely make the atoms and molecules energy for the lion, it would not transfer cognition from the antelope to the lion.

[Coffee Jesus]

It's not reincarnation. As you already explained, it makes no sense to identify oneself with the atoms that compose them, for we are constantly losing and acquiring atoms. Nor does it make sense to identify with whatever mental properties your body might have as worm food. You are a cognitive system that, with its capacity for perception and memory, is constantly incorporating new information.

I'm inclined to doubt my claim, for I don't see any science writers talking about this interesting possibility. But I need to see some better arguments for that claim that all mental properties arise after nervous system development.

[Brian37]

It's not reincarnation. As you already explained, it makes no sense to identify oneself with the atoms that compose them, for we are constantly losing and acquiring atoms. Nor does it make sense to identify with whatever mental properties your body might have as worm food. You are a cognitive system that, with its capacity for perception and memory, is constantly incorporating new information.

I'm inclined to doubt my claim, for I don't see any science writers talking about this interesting possibility. But I need to see some better arguments for that claim that all mental properties arise after nervous system development.

Um if you are having doubts about your own claim, then maybe it is a claim not worthy of defending in the first place. Before you go making claims it would be best to conduct experiments based on prior science and build upon that. Then, if you have anything you will quite easily be able to hand it over to your peers and let them kick the shit out of it.

Nothing wrong with brainstorming, but in science that brainstorming has to come with testing and falsification, not simply leave it at mental masturbation.

[Rahul]

Very true. We replace most atoms in our body every year or two. So really what are we?

The best explanation I have found is to compare ourselves to a whirlpool in a river. Sure if you take a snapshot of any moment of it's existence you can identify water and dirt and whatnot that forms the whirlpool at that moment but shortly after the whirlpool is composed of completely different molecules.

We are best described as self-sustaining patterns. Whatever that pattern is, it is not the material stuff it is composed of at any one point in time.

[Coffee Jesus]

ABBA fan, my claim is that we don't know. I'm waiting on someone to convince me that we do know.

My proposed possibility posits nothing extra. It is no more complicated than the alternative.

[Minimalist]

[LastPoet]

I think afterlife is a concern of the dead, not me. I'm rather well as it goes and further thought about is as futile as a teenager morning jerk.