Is there anything after death?

The kind of evidence would depend upon the kind of afterlife. One notion of an afterlife that ought to get at least a little respect around here is this:

• We exist within a simulation.
• Within our simulated universe, reductionism works - our minds can be reduced to a computational process taking place within our brains.
• When our brains deteriorate after death, our minds disappear - at least within our simulated universe.
• Nevertheless, Omega, the dude who runs the simulation, is in the habit of making copies of the information in the simulation, including the brain information of certain favored simulated entities.
• When people die in our (simulated) universe, Omega creates 'reincarnated' NPCs into a different simulated universe - using the copies of our brains as the information source. Therefore, these NPCs have our personalities, and our memories (up to the point in time when our brains were 'backed up'). But they get new (immortal?) bodies. A completely naturalistic afterlife.

However, whatever "near death experiences" really are, they are not evidence for an afterlife as speculatively described here. Information about Omega's activities doesn't flow into our naturalistic universe. Instead, information about our universe flows out. The kind of afterlife I have described leaves no evidence.

So, what kind of afterlife does leave evidence? I find it hard to imagine an afterlife scenario in which the Omega in question is so sloppy as to allow information to leak back into his simulation.

ETA: Hmmm. Now that I think about it, my speculation described two universes - a completely naturalistic 'first-life' universe, and a less naturalistic 'after-life' universe. Information clearly does flow into the after-life universe. The origin of each reincarnated mind requires a miracle. So, I guess what I am saying is that I doubt the existence of evidence that there will be an afterlife. But I suspect that evidence for an prior life should be pretty overwhelming once you get to the afterlife. So, I'm pretty much ruling out Hinduism - at least as I understand it.

It depends on the nature of the afterlife. In that regard "afterlife" is like "God" in that there are so many different versions of what the term means that making the belief pay rent in any reasonable amount of time can be difficult. But if one looks at most traditional afterlife claims, then those which pay rent fail pretty miserably. at their expectations Take for example classical Spiritualism or Roman Catholicism as useful examples.

I really don't like saying that God can't exist, there can't be an afterlife, etc., because we don't have evidence for which isn't the same thing as evidence against. My reaction is make no beliefs, not update my beliefs against.

It would be interesting for you to consider why you give the afterlife weight in light of "absence of evidence." By that, I mean that it might be helpful to consider where the "seed" got planted in the first place. Do things like NDEs and OBEs alone lead you to think that there is a possible afterlife, or was the idea/half-belief already present and NDEs/OBEs only make it slightly more likely or difficult to rule out entirely?

I only ask because I would presume that in many, many cases (Xenu, thetans, fairies, the Loch Ness monster, aliens, and many conspiracy theories) you absolutely do treat absence of evidence as evidence of absence.

Without a significant difference in the quantity or quality of evidence between these various cases, and without a reason to think that an NDE/OBE implies an immaterial self rather than simply an unexplained phenomenon... I suspect that the belief or concept of the afterlife hypothesis originated somewhere else and your current grounds for clinging to it (OBEs/NDEs needing to be explained and absence of evidence isn't...) aren't really real.

To say it one more way: you might be discussing this topic as if a certain set of evidence matters, when it really has nothing to do with why you deal delicately with the afterlife idea while harshly with the other unsupported hypotheses I listed above.

What evidence might convince you? Simply curious, I can't think of any.

Well, the most obvious one is dying and finding myself in an apparent afterlife. But that's a bit flippant. Any of the following would make assign the idea of an afterlife a high probability:

1) A collection of mediums who are able to talk to the dead and can demonstrate that they are actually talking to the dead. Evidence that they can actually do so would a) correctly passing on pass-phrases to living people that were agreed upon before people died b) access to large amounts of information that the individual should not otherwise have (e.g. give them a simple number theory problem and they should be able to get a solution from say Erdos. And physics problems from Feynman, etc. c) the systematic production of information known to no living individuals which is subsequently confirmed by archaeology (the exact location of certain lost cities and ships would be the most obvious result). d) the production of new results in multiple areas of learning (again, people like Erdos and Feynman presumably have been working since their deaths). Any single one of these would be strong evidence and at least 2 of them would be convincing. (There are more likely hypotheses to explain any single one of these four by itself. For example c could be by itself explained by access to something like an Akashic record which seems unlikely but about as likely as an afterlife. )

2) This one has two parts a) There exist prophets who demonstrate repeatedly the ability to engage in miracles (and not silly miracles like making a congealed goo become liquidy when you shake it once a year. Miracles means repeated, testable examples of serious violations of the laws of physics in a variety of different ways) and the ability to prophesy. b) those prophets assert there is an afterlife and give a coherent description of it.

3) Any evidence that we are in a simulation drastically increases my estimate that there's an afterlife because keeping back up copies is a natural thing to do. That by itself isn't enough to assign a high probability because the entities running the simulation may not care enough about intelligent life (Tangent: We could have a Singularity, start modifying stars and building Dyson spheres and all that fun stuff. Then some higher-level equivalent of a grad student gets annoyed because its simulation of a what a universe with only 3 spatial dimensions would look like has developed some sort of self-organizing gunk that's messing with the macroscopic behavior. That's going to push its PhD back a while. Don't worry, it will keep the copy running long enough to figure out which parameters to tweak to prevent the self-organizing junk from showing up again.)

4) Any end-times scenario which fits in with a major religion that has an afterlife also elevates the chance of an afterlife. Thus, if most of the Evangelical Christians disappear along with every little child I will assign a high probability to the Rapture having just taken place and thus there's an afterlife.

Note that these are just off the top of my head. They are by no means exhaustive.

I really don't like saying that God can't exist, there can't be an afterlife, etc., because we don't have evidence for which isn't the same thing as evidence against. My reaction is make no beliefs, not update my beliefs against.

Well, by "beliefs against" do you mean certainty that they don't exist? A good Bayesian won't do that because assigning probability 0 or 1 to something is a bad idea. But, one can assign the existence of God or the existence of an afterlife a low probability. Both are extremely complicated hypotheses. That means they shouldn't get assigned a high prior probability, regardless of whether one is assigning priors using Solomonoff induction or some other approach. The fact that people have been searching for evidence of an afterlife and have come up woefully sort adjusts that probability downwards if it goes in any direction.

I understand that my personal experiences with what I believe to have been God could be explained by neural anomalies, but until I have convincing reasons to believe that, or convincing reasons to believe there isn't a God outside my personal experiences, or convincing reasons to believe that my experiences are evidence of something else entirely, I'm going to assume that there is a God.

Personally, I find Occam's Razor convincing. Doesn't it strike you as unlikely that there would be a God, but the only evidence for God would be subjective experiences?

Additionally, while one personal experience is not very convincing, many similar personal experiences can be.

It seems like many similar experiences only indicate that many humans have similar brains.

Weak evidence like NDEs still requires an explanation. The obvious recourses are hallucination, neural anomalies, etc., but until I have extra evidence to support them, I won't believe them. If studies have been done to show that they are hallucinations, etc., then that would be sufficient. I don't know of any.

There have been some studies about inducing NDEs with ketamine, as mentioned earlier. See this page for a few descriptions of various studies. There are also many studies about the brain's reaction to sensory deprivation, such as this recent one which demonstrated hallucinations after only 15 minutes. I wouldn't say any of this constitutes overwhelming evidence, but it's far from worthless.

My reaction is different, though: I simply say "if it is, I can't know" not "there can't be, because we haven't seen evidence for it." I really don't like saying that God can't exist, there can't be an afterlife, etc., because we don't have evidence for which isn't the same thing as evidence against. My reaction is make no beliefs, not update my beliefs against.

I don't think anyone here would say that. Absence of evidence isn't necessarily evidence of absence, but without evidence, the probability of God, the afterlife, etc. is going to come up very low from a Bayesian evaluation.

• You seem to think there's a difference between beliefs and assumptions. That is, you say your reaction is to make no beliefs about things like the existence of God and the afterlife, but you also say that you assume there is a God. Can you clarify what you consider that difference to be?

• If a patient happened to be hooked up to an MRI during what they later describe as an NDE, and the MRI recorded patterns characteristic of other events generally considered hallucinatory, would you consider that evidence supporting the explanation that NDEs are hallucinatory events? Would that significantly alter your beliefs about the existence of an afterlife?

• If it proved possible to experimentally induce an NDE experience by manipulating a subject's brain in particular ways, would you consider that evidence supporting the explanation that NDEs are hallucinatory events? Would that significantly alter your beliefs about the existence of an afterlife?

The universe with a non-Abrahamic afterlife is both more benevolent and more probable than the type of afterlife preached by modern theists.

Richard Feynman gave himself one on purpose and described it in Surely You're Joking. It's also quite interesting.

I need to read this! I'm intrigued!

One possible explanation of your dream is that we live in a world in which people's minds which are perfect for each other enter the dreamworld and find each other. We don't believe that because the world doesn't seem to work that way.

The world doesn't seem to work this way because there has been no reproducible empirical evidence that it works that way. This isn't a case of "The Earth looks flat from here, so it must be flat." You're postulating that there is another realm of existence out there that doesn't intersect with our reality in any detectable way. At this point, you're just arguing for an invisible pink unicorn or a Russel's teapot, but then you say that this undetectable 'dream world', does affect the physical world by altering our minds to act as though it did exist. It's essentially the same argument that the zombie theorists make.

But what if you saw on the news a special of Keira Knightley's crazy dream that she believed was about her true lover; what if she had gone to one of those people who draw faces based on descriptions and the picture drawn was eerily similar to yours? If the dream she explained was really similar to the one you had, would you possibly begin to question your beliefs then? At what point will you accept that your beliefs about there not being an afterlife as possibly worthy of review?

If all that happened, it would be slightly more likely that there was something to this telepathic dream. However, to accept that this was a true manifestation of a psychic phenomenon, one would have to accept that the standard models of physics and neuropsychology are wrong. This is not entirely unknown to happen, but such revolutions were driven by men like Copernicus and Einstein who supported them with evidence, and not revealed to laymen in dreams. There would have to be such a preponderance of psychic evidence that it would be more probable that the standard model were wrong than that the dream were 'real'. So either there is some sort of fifth fundamental force, heretofore undiscovered or suppressed by thousands of scientists across the globe, that is powerful and sensitive enough to affect single neurons from across a continent, and that the human brain has evolved a region for sending and receiving signals via this fifth force, or that someone else had a similar dream to mine. It's not strictly impossible, but its probability approaches zero.

Why aren't dreams allowed to be submitted as evidence? They are experiences we have; if we cannot explain them, we must change our beliefs. The reason we don't usually listen to dreams as explanations of our world is that we understand why they happen; they are perfectly explainable without any need for a supernatural explanation.

Bingo. We can explain dreams with psychology without resorting to 'parapsychology'. When in doubt, consult Occam.

But what if we found that dreams weren't explainable given what we know about our world? We would change our beliefs about the world.

Yes, if that were the case, we would, but it isn't.

So don't just say that dreams aren't evidence. You can say that dreams are poor evidence for an afterlife, but if I postulate that we enter the afterlife in through dreams or some other similarly creative belief system that would explain the dreams, we would test my belief system to see if the predictions it makes correspond to reality better than other belief systems.

And how exactly do you propose to test the existence of an afterlife with reproducibility? Are you volunteering?

But what if you saw on the news a special of Keira Knightley's crazy dream that she believed was about her true lover; what if she had gone to one of those people who draw faces based on descriptions and the picture drawn was eerily similar to yours? If the dream she explained was really similar to the one you had, would you possibly begin to question your beliefs then? At what point will you accept that your beliefs about there not being an afterlife as possibly worthy of review?

If all that happened, it would be slightly more likely that there was something to this telepathic dream. However, to accept that this was a true manifestation of a psychic phenomenon, one would have to accept that the standard models of physics and neuropsychology were wrong. This is not entirely unknown to happen, but such revolutions were driven by men like Copernicus and Einstein, and not revealed to laymen in dreams. There would have to be such a preponderance of psychic evidence that it would be more probable that the standard model were wrong than that the dream were 'real'. So either there is some sort of fifth fundamental force, heretofore undiscovered or suppressed by thousands of scientists across the globe, that is powerful and sensitive enough to affect single neurons from across a continent, or that someone else had a similar dream to mine. It's not strictly impossible, but its probability approaches zero.

A person still has a subjective experience of a false memory; it's just that eir proposed explanation ("I remember X, so it must have happened") isn't correct. A very similar scenario to NDEs, actually.