Out of curiousity, what percentage of likelyhood would you give to my cow dung theory for being the case of what happens after a person dies?
Description of Afterlife?
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Out of curiousity, what percentage of likelyhood would you give to my cow dung theory for being the case of what happens after a person dies?
There isn't really much to suggest that the brain is just a receiver/store for consciousness. No indication of transmission method and evidence that serious damage to the physical has a corresponding damage to conscious. Obviously current knowledge doesn't preclude your hypothesis but it doesn't really support it either at which point we are adding a level of complexity for no real reason.
The cow dung hypothesis can at least be investigated. We have cow dung here on Earth that we can examine in order to assess the validity of the hypothesis. To the best of our knowledge, cow dung does not contain any electrical impulses or anything approaching what we would interpret as a consciousness. A "cosmic cloud" that contains all the consciousnesses isn't even a hypothesis we can test.
In a nutshell, I would say the cow dung hypothesis is unlikely to be correct. I don't even have a method of calculating the likelihood of the cosmic cloud so there's no way to compare the likelihood of the two hypotheses.
Not to much as it has very little form or reason other than the statement itself. The point I think you are missing is that I am not trying to make you believe anything, neither am I offering any belief of my own...I simply do not know what happens and nothing in my personal experience has yet convinced me of any particular concept or hypothesis that offers any definitive insight.
I know you have this abject hatred of anything you feel is related to or akin to religion, or philosophical thought so I really do not understand why you consistently spend so much time in threads that discuss such topics.
Just to be clear, ideas of an afterlife can be either of a supernatural or naturalistic in nature and have occupied mankind since we formed the ability to think for ourselves.
Isnt an untestable hypothesis really just a fancy way of saying complete BS?
Well, to me the topic of consciousness falls into Neurology, not religion or philosophy. Although you can surely feel free to debate the topic from a philosophical viewpoint, doing so is simply inferior when we already understand so much about the human brain.
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Current knowledge doesn't support or preclude any hypothesis, and that is the point...it is really a question of philosophy and perhaps interpretation of experiences and/or investigation of subject matter like NDE rather than pure science at this juncture. But physical or more expansively, transcendental ideas of an extant soul are myriad and interesting to discuss.
You do not have to have definitive proof in order to forward an idea.
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No, an untestable hypothesis is one that you can't test the validity of. I would argue that there is no rational reason to believe that an untestable hypothesis is true as by its very nature, you can't test it and as such there is no evidence in its favour. That doesn't mean that an untestable hypothesis is incorrect, merely that we have no way of knowing if it is correct or not.
If a hypothesis is untestable, yet also not complete BS, then there would also be a 10-20,000 word thesis to go along with it describing with clear rational thought how that hypothesis may and may not be real. The entirety of both the pro and null hypothesis would be covered in the thesis in a completely neutral and unbiased manner, and if the thesis provides a valid rational understanding of a new hypothesis, it would gain a lot of discussion within its academic field.
Simply throwing around any random idea that you just came up and claiming it to be a hypothesis is not really a hypothesis. Thats just obsolete philosophy.
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I agree that Neurological science has some interesting hypotheses of its own, however, like almost all hypotheses on Consciousness they do not explain or give any definitive insight in the Mind-Brain problem. Another interesting idea Is the one regarding Quantum Theory and the Quantum Consciousness Model or Penrose-Hamerhoff Model, although again that has significant issues as well.
The point is Bhavv, that as much as we know about the mechanics of the Brain, we still know very little overall, we are still in our infancy regarding Neuroscience and the Mind-Brain relationship is simply not understood on any fundamental level.
That may change and I would be fascinated to know how.
I like that idea of the brain being a kind of antennae for our consciousness, rather than the seat of consciousness Castiel and have heard of it before. Though I would like it, with my belief in a Creator.
Believing that the brain creates consciousness has become kind of a dogma, with nobody having any idea how this happens or could happen and so science comes up with those little bits of magic, "emergence".
“Nobody has the slightest idea how anything material could be conscious. So much for our philosophy of consciousness.” Jerry A. Fodor
Then with no proof apparently scientists come up with the idea that the brain itself is consciousness, therefore avoiding explanation of how it was produced and the magical "emergence".
Paraphrased from this source.
Believing that the brain creates consciousness has become kind of a dogma, with nobody having any idea how this happens or could happen and so science comes up with those little bits of magic, "emergence".
“Nobody has the slightest idea how anything material could be conscious. So much for our philosophy of consciousness.” Jerry A. Fodor
Then with no proof apparently scientists come up with the idea that the brain itself is consciousness, therefore avoiding explanation of how it was produced and the magical "emergence".
Paraphrased from this source.
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Try studying brain disorders / damage / loss of consciousness / vegetative state.
Can I ask you where do you think a persons consciousness goes if they become a vegetable, or if they develop full permanent amnesia with or without loss of memory storage?
You can claim anything you like to be a hypothesis. It might be proved nonsense in seconds but it's still a hypothesis.
Well, maybe, but I'm thinking of scientific hypothesis only:
Loss of human consciousness can already be observed and tested through people with brain disorders. The same theories and scientific knowledge behind loss of consciousness / brain function in such people can be applied to what happens when the brain is not only damaged, but also when it dies.
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A scientific hypothesis could be a completely blind guess as long as it is something that is testable. A scientific hypothesis could be that the sky has turned red. A blind guess. I look out of the window and see it is blue. Hypothesis is incorrect. But it was scientific because we could test it.
Maybe a facility of the brain has become damaged/lost the ability to hook up with those memories/consciousness which are not stored in the brain as generally thought.
*Edit.Please excuse me for answering a question directed at Castiel, never stopped anyone butting in in GD before though I thought to mention it.
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I have read quite extensively on such topics as they apply to various hypotheses and none so far have given any indication of understanding the Brain-Mind relationship....any kind of damage to the Brain doesn't really give any indication to the veracity of any particular idea on how consciousness is formed, or its relationship to the Brain in any way other than the Brain being a conduit for our consciousness.
What happens to consciousness in a vegetative state is quite interesting in light of the advances in how we look at "locked in syndrome", where the patient appears to be totally uncommunicative and effectively in a vegetative state, yet is fully aware of their surrounding...and again with Coma patients...I being one of them, I have a rather muddied but accurate memory of much of what was said to me while I was in a coma for a short time, not to mention the rather strange experiences I had on two occasions when I was very severely injured. I make no claims or acknowledgements other than I simply do not know, and objectively neither does anyone else.
The point is that we cannot yet explain the issue of the Mind and the way it relates to the Brain or Body, either in science or philosophy. The term, as I am sure you must be aware is Neural Correlate, and so far we have yet to prove such a correlation other than theoretically.
Cognitive science which is probably more apt in this kind of field is multidisciplinary and includes such things that you term nonsense, such as Psychology, Sociology and Philosophy along with Neuroscience, Linguistics and anthropology.
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Yes as long as its testable its fine. Basically the hypothesis needs to be able to put through a method / results / conclusion thing and thats all there is to it.
But a lot of ideas regarding possible afterlives would simply be conspiracies, not hypothesis as they not only cant be tested, but also nothing about them has really been observed.
I would think more along the lines of looking at people who retain their motor functions and are still capable of normal movement, but lose their mind entirely. In your cases of locked in theories, the mind would seem to still be healthy, but the brain would be uncommunicative to other parts of the body.
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Again, there is a difference between brain function with regard to the body and the correlative between the Mind and Brain Function. No-one knows how some Stoke victims for example recover or in some cases do not recover even thought the damage is either relatively severe or minor depending on the context we are talking about, and much of the issues relate to us not understanding how the Brain relates to our consciousness and our unconscious mind. If the patient cannot express for themselves then it is doubly difficult to gain any real insight into how or what they are thinking or feeling subjectively. We can speculate and offer hypotheses, but so far that is all we can do. In many Stoke victims for example they often exhibit stress, anger and frustration at not being able to express themselves physically in the way that their consciousness want them to. We simply do not know enough as yet to make an objective comparison.
In respect of people who have no discernible physical reason why they cannot express themselves, have Amnesia or some other form of disability between the function of the Mind, Brain and the Body, we have yet to discover the answers for the vast majority of these, again as we simply do not understand enough about the Brain or the Mind.
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But death surely causes a definite discernible physical reason for why nothing that would have been stored in the brain (i.e the mind) would be able to survive.
Even if you hypothesize that the mind somehow still exists after death and goes some place else, how to you account for it moving to its new place of storage? How does it remain perfectly intact during its travel?
Wouldnt this movement in energy be detectable?
Also if you hypothesize that the human mind survives like this after death, wouldnt this theory also apply to other animals? Wouldnt it be testable to see if you can measure an outward movement of energy originating from the brain after an animal dies?
Even if you hypothesize that the mind somehow still exists after death and goes some place else, how to you account for it moving to its new place of storage? How does it remain perfectly intact during its travel?
Wouldnt this movement in energy be detectable?
Also if you hypothesize that the human mind survives like this after death, wouldnt this theory also apply to other animals? Wouldnt it be testable to see if you can measure an outward movement of energy originating from the brain after an animal dies?
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It is hard to talk about the afterlife when we are not contemplating the spirit or soul of people. As the Bible itself tells us:-
Ecclesiastes 9:5.
"For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten."
Ecclesiastes 3:20
"All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again. "
Acknowledge the Spirit and the bigger picture comes in.
Ecclesiastes 12:7.
"Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it."
Ecclesiastes 3:21
"Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the earth?"
Ecclesiastes 9:5.
"For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten."
Ecclesiastes 3:20
"All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again. "
Acknowledge the Spirit and the bigger picture comes in.
Ecclesiastes 12:7.
"Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it."
Ecclesiastes 3:21
"Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the earth?"