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.

[Apollo]

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.

Right. So we don't fully understand it or more precisely have its quantum counterpart (graviton) discovered that we predict should exist based on our understanding of nature so far but we do have hypothesis BASED ON that very understanding of laws of nature that may (or may not) result in verification through observation/prediction/experimentation. But regardless, the key point remains, we have some basis on which we are able to posit hypothesis.

We do not have any such basis to posit there is a fundamental property called "consciousness" that excitations in quantum field manifest. We can make up all kind of stuff and say that could be a fundamental property of particles but it would just be a made up stuff without any BASIS.  e.g. I can say, each electrons have tails. Nothing stopping me saying that. But what are my basis for saying it? Tails are legitimate emergent biological phenomenon but do they exist at particle level? There is no manifestation of a tail-like behavior at particle level that either has entered our observation space or answers some tail-dependent questions that we could hypothesize to say, we theorize tail to be a fundamental property so let's go do some experimentation to detect particle tails.

We do not have any such BASIS to see "consciousness" is being fundamental property.

---

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.

Sorry forgot to address the dark energy part.  Right. So not only dark energy (although most physicists agree it's vacuum energy and mathematically is the same as Einstein's cosmological constant that he had when he thought universe is static but now we know for sure that it's actually expanding and accelerating), but there is also dark matter that we don't know what it is. But we have some BASIS to theorize what it could be.

But dark energy and dark matter still DO NOT govern our reality - they manifest at galactic and intra-galactic/cosmic levels but not planetary or smaller levels. So when we are talking about galaxies and galaxy clusters, we can talk all about dark energy and dark matter but when we are talking about planets or us on earth, dark matter or energy don't mean squat to our reality as they don't interact at that level. Dark matter, whatever particle it is made of, passes right through us without any causal activity.

So just because we don't know some stuff does not mean it chalks out the stuff we know for sure.

[GUBU]

Agreed. Why should we listen to physicists about physics?

He's a physicist speaking on neuroscience and biology—that's strange. The article is rather short; perhaps he makes a better argument elsewhere.

Less strange than a preacher claiming expertise on anything. Yet they constantly do it.

[The Grand Nudger]

So just because we don't know some stuff does not mean it chalks out the stuff we know for sure.

That's the heart of it.  Anytime that someone says they know something, either something that is or something that can't be, someone's bound to pop up saying "but you don't know everything!".  Not a problem for knowing something.

If we really wanted to run with the objection from the unknown unknown, then we can't know our own name...unless we know everything. An afterlife is very much like a master race, world peace, and the destiny of china to rule the world. Claims made in ignorance and contradiction to facts intended to support a political ideology.

[brewer]

Seems appropriate―it falsifies your claim that consciousness requires life. That is not something we know and IIT rejects it:

"A corollary of IIT that violates common intuitions is that even circuits as simple as a ‘photodiode’ made up of a sensor and a memory element can have a modicum of experience" (Tononi, 2015, p. 11).

Reference: Tononi, G., Koch C. (2015). Consciousness: here, there and everywhere? Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.

That's a pretty flimsy claim of consciousness. As far as I'm concerned it falsifies nothing I've said.

And if we're going to cherry pick, this is from Tononi's abstract: "IIT explains a range of clinical and laboratory findings, makes testable predictions, and extrapolates to unusual conditions. The theory vindicates some panpsychist intuitions - consciousness is an intrinsic, fundamental property, is graded, is common among biological organisms, and even some very simple systems have some. However, unlike panpsychism, IIT implies that not everything is conscious, for example group of individuals or feed forward networks. In sharp contrast with widespread functionalist beliefs, IIT implies that digital computers, even if their behavior were to be functionally equivalent to ours, and even if they were to run faithful simulations of the human brain, would experience next to nothing."

My take, imitation of consciousness is not consciousness. So much for photodiodes.

[Brian37]

Life After Death Is Impossible, Says Scientist

one scientist thinks he knows the answer: life after death simply isn’t possible.

Dr. Sean Carroll, a cosmologist and physics professor at the California Institute of Technology, earlier said his finding is based on physics. ‘The laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely understood,’ he said, as per the Express, explaining there is no facility for life after death.

‘Claims that some form of consciousness persists after our bodies die and decay into their constituent atoms face one huge, insuperable obstacle: the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely understood, and there’s no way within those laws to allow for the information stored in our brains to persist after we die.’

More specifically, he’s based his claims on Quantum Field Theory, a mathematical and conceptual framework for contemporary elementary particle physics – in extraordinarily simple terms, it means there’s one field for every type of particle, whether it’s photons, electrons or anything else.

However, there’s no ‘spirit particles’ or ‘spirit forces’ for consciousness being separated from one’s body, he says. ‘If it’s really nothing but atoms and the known forces, there is clearly no way for the soul to survive death. Believing in life after death, to put it mildly, requires physics beyond the Standard Model,’ Carroll added.

https://www.unilad.co.uk/science/life-af...ntist/amp/

Your brain is you, nothing more. Once your brain dies, you die. You cannot skip steps from the wave function, to the atom, to the molecules to organs. When the organs die, the atoms no longer function as the in tact organ. It would be akin to your car engine blowing up, the car will not run. The piston by itself cannot act as the entire in tact engine. 

A single atom cannot act as the entire organ as a single atom.

[John 6IX Breezy]

That's a pretty flimsy claim of consciousness. As far as I'm concerned it falsifies nothing I've said.

You might think it's flimsy; but the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, which is the oldest and arguably most prestigious scientific journal in existence, apparently disagrees with you enough to publish the paper.

[brewer]

That's a pretty flimsy claim of consciousness. As far as I'm concerned it falsifies nothing I've said.

You might think it's flimsy; but the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, which is the oldest and arguably most prestigious scientific journal in existence, apparently disagrees with you enough to publish the paper.

Operative word, arguable. And the Tononi submission does not support what you want it to.

[John 6IX Breezy]

Yes; being published with the likes of Newton, Darwin, Turing, Maxwell, and so on, is arguably a good day for many scientists (to put it mildly). The paper is open access; you're welcome to read more than the abstract.

[The Grand Nudger]

IIT doesn't allow for a resurrection or afterlife of any kind. This is a function of how it defines consciousness as fundamentally individual and intrinsically actual. When the underlying physical substrate, in it's individual specificity - again a product of definition, ceases to be - that consciousness does as well. If another physical substrate like it is made, even down to the most minute detail, it's not the same object, so it's treated as it's own individual and intrinsically real consciousness.

The YouV2 that now exists may have all of your memories - but you have none, as you're incapable of possessing or apprehending memories - being dead.

The best part, ofc, is that if IIT were true, then the number of times one object shook it's pecker before it ceased to be determines whether some other object gets cake and punch with The Big Guy.