What happens when you die?

Nero said:
Great discussion on here. For a sense of perspective; there's 7 billion people on this planet and the beliefs of mostly white blokes from a place called England will be very different to billions elsewhere.

Life is so random that I don't think it's a simple case of you life, die and that's it. I've also personally experienced what can only be described as paranormal activity that really does make you question things. I do accept that people would out up arguments against that and that's fair enough. I know what I experienced though.
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Your second paragraph is covered by the weak anthropic principle.

The universe had to have certain properties for intelligent life to exist. If it was less ordered we wouldn't be here on a message board discussing its meaning.

Paranormal things do happen. You covered this yourself. With 7 billion people on the planet there are billions of unexplained coincidences every day. Our brains have evolved as pattern matchers to help us survive. So we look for patterns everywhere. That's why a lump of clothes in the dark looks like a human face. A false positive can save your life, a false negative can kill you.
 
Laughing said:
Your second paragraph is covered by the weak anthropic principle.

The universe had to have certain properties for intelligent life to exist. If it was less ordered we wouldn't be here on a message board discussing its meaning.

Paranormal things do happen. You covered this yourself. With 7 billion people on the planet there are billions of unexplained coincidences every day. Our brains have evolved as pattern matchers to help us survive. So we look for patterns everywhere. That's why a lump of clothes in the dark looks like a human face. A false positive can save your life, a false negative can kill you.
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I read ( or tried to ) Pinkers book too!
 
Laughing said:
Your second paragraph is covered by the weak anthropic principle.

The universe had to have certain properties for intelligent life to exist. If it was less ordered we wouldn't be here on a message board discussing its meaning.

Paranormal things do happen. You covered this yourself. With 7 billion people on the planet there are billions of unexplained coincidences every day. Our brains have evolved as pattern matchers to help us survive. So we look for patterns everywhere. That's why a lump of clothes in the dark looks like a human face. A false positive can save your life, a false negative can kill you.
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All great insights from someone who clearly knows what they're talking about.

As I alluded to though it doesn't and cannot explain the activity I referred too. That was more about how we think as humans.
 
Nero said:
All great insights from someone who clearly knows what they're talking about.

As I alluded to though it doesn't and cannot explain the activity I referred too. That was more about how we think as humans.
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There is lots I can't explain Nero, and lots science can't yet explain. For example, Dawkins, probably the most famouse agnostic on earth, has not come up with a good biological imperative why we would evolve to believe, or construct gods.

There doesn't seem to be a survival imperative in religion, yet the vast majority of the worlds population still believe in one god or another. This doesn't make sense to a biologist because everything that drives natural selection is to do with survival.

At death, alomost universally our brain floods our system with seratonin, a happines hormone. It may explain near death experiences, but there is no explanation as to why our brain should do this. One thing we do know, at the point of death you will be as happy as you have ever been. Why? We simply don't know.

Do we have senses beyond the usual five? There are actually loads of senses, but let's just think of the five major senses. This has never been proven, and billions have been spent on it by the american government, and probably the russian government too.

OOB experiences have been tested and everybody who claimed to be able to leave their bodies at will has failed the most basic of tests.

However some things that we do know. The vast majority of our decision making happens at the sub-conscious level. For exmaple it is estimated that 90% of our desicion makine process' happen at the sub-conscious level. When buying stuff it goes up to 95%.

This is generally a good thing for a couple of reasons. Our subconscious mind never forgets anything. It has access to every word we have ever read or heard. To every interaction we have ever had. It can make connections that our conscious mind just isn't capable of.

We cannot describe what happened, mathematically, between the big bang and 1 second afterwards. Our mathematic models just don't work at the point of a singularity. We have no idea what goes on at the center of a black hole, another singularity.

What can and have created a map of the univers at 1 second after the big bang and that can be veiwed online, cern have a picture of it if you want to look.

There is some stuff we don't know. Some of it because we don't understand it, despite trying. Most of what we don't know, we don't know because no money has been spent on understanding it.

We don't know how gravity works, the weakest of the 4 forces. We don't know a unifying theory that describes particle behaviour and planetary behaviour. The two theroies are at odds with each other. There is absoloutely a theory that as yet we don;t have that describes perfectly how all the univers works all the way from quarks, the smallest know particle, to massive giant suns.

What we do know is that there is a single set of laws they all obey, we just don't know what those rules might look like. It won't be anything like relativity or quantum physics, thats for sure.
 
Laughing, what's your background? Your obviously a very educated and intelligent bloke.
FMTTM constantly restores my belief in Smogkind.
There are some wonderful examples of local boy ( girl) done good on this site.
 
Osboro said:
Laughing, what's your background? Your obviously a very educated and intelligent bloke.
FMTTM constantly restores my belief in Smogkind.
There are some wonderful examples of local boy ( girl) done good on this site.
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Raised in boro went to teesside uni and did a computer science degree. Worked all over the world since then. I have always had an interest in both science and religion. I read the bible, torah and Koran before leaving school. I have all feynman's lectures in physics and worked through them with pen and paper in hand before I left school.

I love science and it comes from a deep need to understand the world around me. We all have it to one extent or another, it just burns fiercely in me for some reason.

As a child I thought religion had the answers. I remember going with a friend through the school summer holidays to the church coffee morning at the oval. The vicar their spent a lot of time with me answering questions. Questions like, how could moses be 400 years old when we only live to 80 now?

I realised he knew no more than I did so started looking for answers in science and that suites the way my mind works much better.

I don't disbelieve in God but I am pretty sure there isn't one and if there is its not a benevolent creator from religious texts. Maybe a very powerful beings year 10 science project.

I dunno.
 
newyddion said:
you die every day, every hour, every minute, every second. every time you wake up in the morning you are a slightly different person to the one that fell asleep, you can see a difference in photographs but on a molecular level you can be made up of entirely different atoms over a period of years. what is the self? people struggle to come to terms with the idea of death.. but the truth is we die a thousand deaths and change from one person to the next on a daily basis.

what happens after? after what? after existence? first you need to prove that you ever existed in the first place!

you think therefore you are? not really, you think.. therefore thinking exists. the rest I'm afraid is pure conjecture.
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I was struggling to compose a Moon Pig birthday greeting for my mam's card.

Thanks!
 
Laughing said:
There is lots I can't explain Nero, and lots science can't yet explain. For example, Dawkins, probably the most famouse agnostic on earth, has not come up with a good biological imperative why we would evolve to believe, or construct gods.

There doesn't seem to be a survival imperative in religion, yet the vast majority of the worlds population still believe in one god or another. This doesn't make sense to a biologist because everything that drives natural selection is to do with survival.
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The concept of the Bicameral Mind (Julian James) which looks at the origin of consciousness explains this for me.

As human consciousness evolved we had voices in our heads which we thought were the gods. This was a product of auditory hallucination - we heard sounds in our head without there being any external auditory stimulus.

Defined as;

'The hypothetical mentality, neurology and sociology of the theory that before the historical emergence of introspective consciousness ancient humans and the earliest civilizations were governed by auditory hallucinations ‘spoken’ by the right cerebral hemisphere and ‘heard’ by the left hemisphere as the voices of gods.'

It may be that the biological imperative was the emergence of introspective consciousness but the process through which it evolved included a period where we were unaware of it and created religion as a means to explain the voices of gods in our heads.
 
Millbrook said:
The concept of the Bicameral Mind (Julian James) which looks at the origin of consciousness explains this for me.

As human consciousness evolved we had voices in our heads which we thought were the gods. This was a product of auditory hallucination - we heard sounds in our head without there being any external auditory stimulus.

Defined as;

'The hypothetical mentality, neurology and sociology of the theory that before the historical emergence of introspective consciousness ancient humans and the earliest civilizations were governed by auditory hallucinations ‘spoken’ by the right cerebral hemisphere and ‘heard’ by the left hemisphere as the voices of gods.'

It may be that the biological imperative was the emergence of introspective consciousness but the process through which it evolved included a period where we were unaware of it and created religion as a means to explain the voices of gods in our heads.
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Quite possibly, it's as good as any other explanation I have heard. You could argue that a conscious mind isn't a biological imperative and is accidental based on the complexity of our brains. In fact I think you wold have to argue that for it to make sense in the context you illustrate.

Some more supporting evidence is that science believes, but doesn't know nor can prove, that consciousness is in fact an emergent property of any complex system, of which our brains is probably the most complex system currently known.

That would mean that consciousness was entirely accidental and maybe the voices we hear are also accidental and nothing to do with natural selection, but are the driving force behind religion.

Dawkins for his part argues, rather weakly, that religion strengthens bonds and makes survival more likely.
 
I read Richard Reynolds "the making of the atomic bomb". I didn't understand the physics in it so I decided to read up on it.
I next read five easy pieces by Feynman. It was aimed at undergraduates. I didn't understand it.
I then read the physics book big ideas simply explained which is aimed at young adults. I didn't understand it.
Currently reading Roger red hat and Sally yellow hat investigate quantum physics. I'm finding it quite hard going.
 
Laughing said:
Quite possibly, it's as good as any other explanation I have heard. You could argue that a conscious mind isn't a biological imperative and is accidental based on the complexity of our brains. In fact I think you wold have to argue that for it to make sense in the context you illustrate.

Some more supporting evidence is that science believes, but doesn't know nor can prove, that consciousness is in fact an emergent property of any complex system, of which our brains is probably the most complex system currently known.

That would mean that consciousness was entirely accidental and maybe the voices we hear are also accidental and nothing to do with natural selection, but are the driving force behind religion.

Dawkins for his part argues, rather weakly, that religion strengthens bonds and makes survival more likely.
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The emergence of religion has an obvious cause once you understand that a human being is just a prematurely born ape that lives its life as an eternal child and seeks to be parented by the tribe, community, world, universe etc.

"OUR FATHER..."

If you map brain size to gestation period the relation is linear for all primate species except human beings, who should have a pregnancy of 21 months. A human baby is born early in a completely helpless state and must complete its development outside of the womb. This results in the initial learning phase of immature mammals being extended to almost the full lifetime.

Stephen J. Gould the paleontologist and evolutionary biologist wrote about this but it is generally not that well known. Humans are a neotenic mutation whereby juvenile features of ancestors are retained in adulthood. Mature humans look like juvenile apes. Foetal chimpanzees have flat faces and hairless bodies with tufts of hair on head etc
 
If a human being is an eternal child then are you saying it seeks to be parented by other eternal children in the form of the tribe, community and world?
 
Rauko said:
We might all be dying every moment and flipping through the multiverse as we speak .. I wonder if there'll be one where Britt scores 50 in a season for us ...

Anyway, it's not a "belief" .. just .. you know ..
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You are definitely living on a different planet now.
 
BoroBukowski said:
The emergence of religion has an obvious cause once you understand that a human being is just a prematurely born ape that lives its life as an eternal child and seeks to be parented by the tribe, community, world, universe etc.

"OUR FATHER..."

If you map brain size to gestation period the relation is linear for all primate species except human beings, who should have a pregnancy of 21 months. A human baby is born early in a completely helpless state and must complete its development outside of the womb. This results in the initial learning phase of immature mammals being extended to almost the full lifetime.

Stephen J. Gould the paleontologist and evolutionary biologist wrote about this but it is generally not that well known. Humans are a neotenic mutation whereby juvenile features of ancestors are retained in adulthood. Mature humans look like juvenile apes. Foetal chimpanzees have flat faces and hairless bodies with tufts of hair on head etc
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I have read some of Goulds stuff. I was never that convinced by a lot of what he says, though I didn't look very much into it.

The argument for example around the head size of babies being proportionally larger than in an adult is lagely to do with how our brain develops and also the shortened gestitation period for humans, which is to do with the pelvis size in women. Add to this the peramorphic human features, legs and nose and ears would be the obvious ones, then I was never very convinced.

As I say I never looked to far in to it as biology and evolution don't interest me as much as other strands of science, so I could be talking nonsense.
 
rkangel said:
Unfortunately, as an atheist, this thread leaves me thinking "In the beginning was the word."
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Rkangel are you really an atheist or an agnostic leaning heavily towards atheism. Even Dawkins describes himself as agnostic not an atheist.
 
Laughing said:
There is lots I can't explain Nero, and lots science can't yet explain. For example, Dawkins, probably the most famouse agnostic on................

etc etc etc
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Seriously?

If you're a scientist, you should know the how important it is not to confuse conjecture with fact
 
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