![]() If it's really nothing but atoms and the known forces, there is clearly no way for the soul to survive death. If we tried, the fundamental absurdity of the task would quickly become evident.Įven if you don't believe that human beings are "simply" collections of atoms evolving and interacting according to rules laid down in the Standard Model of particle physics, most people would grudgingly admit that atoms are part of who we are. Also, the Moon could be made of green cheese.Īmong advocates for life after death, nobody even tries to sit down and do the hard work of explaining how the basic physics of atoms and electrons would have to be altered in order for this to be true. Of course, everything we know about quantum field theory could be wrong. If you claim that some form of soul persists beyond death, what particles is that soul made of? What forces are holding it together? How does it interact with ordinary matter?Įverything we know about quantum field theory (QFT) says that there aren't any sensible answers to these questions. But surely it's okay to take account of indirect evidence - namely, compatibility of the idea that some form of our individual soul survives death with other things we know about how the world works.Ĭlaims 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. #LAST SOUL ALIVE PLUS#Admittedly, "direct" evidence one way or the other is hard to come by - all we have are a few legends and sketchy claims from unreliable witnesses with near-death experiences, plus a bucketload of wishful thinking. We also know better for life after death, although people are much more reluctant to admit it. Given what we do understand about rocks and planets and dairy products and the Solar System, it's absurd to imagine that the Moon is made of green cheese. Our conviction that green cheese makes up a negligible fraction of the Moon's interior comes not from direct observation, but from the gross incompatibility of that idea with other things we think we know. (Come up with all the information we actually do have about the Moon I promise you I can fit it into the green-cheese hypothesis.) What if the Moon is almost all green cheese, but is covered with a layer of dust a few meters thick? Can you really say that you know this isn't true? Until you have actually examined every single cubic centimeter of the Moon's interior, you don't really have experimentally verifiable information, do you? So maybe agnosticism on the green-cheese issue is warranted. But that's only scratching the surface, as it were. Sure, we can take spectra of light reflecting from the Moon, and even send astronauts up there and bring samples back for analysis. By these standards, there is no controlled, experimentally verifiable information regarding whether the Moon is made of green cheese. But here he couldn't be more wrong.Īdam claims that there "simply is no controlled, experimental verifiable information" regarding life after death. When we disagree it's with the kind of respectful dialogue that should be a model for disagreeing with non-crazy people. (His coblogger Alva Noë resolutely disagrees.) I have an enormous respect for Adam he's a smart guy and a careful thinker. He advocates being "firmly agnostic" on the question. If science has something to say about, we should all be interested in hearing.Īdam Frank thinks that science has nothing to say about it. Clearly this is an important question, one of the most important ones we can possibly think of in terms of relevance to human life. The topic of "life after death" raises disreputable connotations of past-life regression and haunted houses, but there are a large number of people in the world who believe in some form of persistence of the individual soul after life ends. ![]()
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