Agnostic.com

3 0

Is Life After Death Possible?

You can only hope to achieve an afterlife if you have some sort of immaterial or non-physical soul or essence or personality or spirit, etc. which carries on carrying on after the demise of your materialistic and totally physical body. When you die your physical body and your material brain go nowhere, so if a part of you goes anywhere after death, it has to be a non-physical or an immaterial part of you.

But in a really real reality world, the concept of an alleged afterlife is pure nonsense since the egg and sperm that conceive multicellular beings (like you) have no encoded immaterial or associated non-physical aspects to genetically pass on. Since your mother's egg had no mind, no essence, no spirit, no personality, etc. and ditto that for your father's sperm, at conception you had no immaterial essence or non-physical mind, no knowledge, no creativity, no spirit, and especially nothing in the way of a soul that you could possibly have had genetically passed on to you by your parents.

Of course at conception you also had no brains, no heart, no lungs, and no sensory organs of any kind or even any real body yet to speak of. All of that material stuff flowed on by the materialistic nature that was built into your genetics and the physical additions to your newly conceived 'body' (heart, brain, etc.) came via nutrients supplied via your mother's body; and post birth via your own feeding and breathing.

So any 'soul' or any 'mind' or any 'essence' that you acquired are material in nature just like your body / brain and thus its tough luck for any hoped for duality and the sort of benefits that might have resulted in, like say evidence of an afterlife. You are entirely 100% material at the end of your term since that's how you started out.

johnprytz 7 Feb 12
Share

Enjoy being online again!

Welcome to the community of good people who base their values on evidence and appreciate civil discourse - the social network you will enjoy.

Create your free account

3 comments

Feel free to reply to any comment by clicking the "Reply" button.

1

Who cares? You'll be dead, and have wasted your life Now thinking about this......

@johnprytz I am not, cannot, do anything about it, and neither can you, so why worry?!

@johnprytz If by some remote and totally illogical chance there is an "afterlife" which one would it be? The realm of Hel, the Christian heaven and Hell, purgatory, valhalla, elysium, arcadia, the realm of Osiris?
Or all of them, if so I will opt for the last one, becaus there you can opt to be eaten by Amet the soul beast, who destroys surviving souls by eating them and thus bringing to an end their existence.

But in point of fact since personality, mind, soul, call it what you will, is simply a collection of biological brain functions and neuro electrical energy, when you die it is the same as turning off a TV set, it has no after life and neither do you.

1

I believe that we are a bunch of cells and when they die, they decompose, and our bodies with them. I will be cremated, so in my case I won’t decompose completely, but will end up as ash which will be scattered and used to nourish the earth. I find the idea of any spirit leaving my body and going somewhere, fanciful, but, as always I am open to viewing any evidence that may convince me to the contrary.

@johnprytz As you said yourself...there’s no solid evidence, in fact I would say there is absolutely no evidence, solid or otherwise, so no I don’t believe there is an immaterial part to me or anyone else.

2

Of course there is life after death, you die and are recycled by nature and that which was you, becomes something else.

However since most people actually mean survival of the personality after death of the physical but cloud it in equivocation the straight forward answer NO, the whole concept is bloody stupid.

You can include a link to this post in your posts and comments by including the text q:287483
Agnostic does not evaluate or guarantee the accuracy of any content. Read full disclaimer.