I noticed plenty of people are fond of loudly proclaiming the annihilation of the soul after corporeal death without giving any argument as to why a person should believe this specifically instead of saying “I don’t know” and moving on with their lives. Let’s take a proposition P. Now, you basically have three options: belief, disbelief, or suspension of belief. Assuming we have to support our belief in P with some form of justification. Likewise, we have to do that when we actively negate P or “disbelieve it” because negating P is affirming not-P which is technically another proposition by itself. If we can’t support either P or not-P with sufficient evidence, the only reasonable option left for us is to presently suspend the investigation and state our ignorance. Replace “P” with “belief in an afterlife” and you’ll get to the conclusion that suspension of belief about the state of our soul after corporeal death is the right choice assuming no valid justification is present. However, some unbelievers do make an attempt at arguing for their annihilationist views typically by appealing to the fact that when the brain is impaired in some way we lose certain faculties of thought or sensibility. Another argument they often give is that we don’t remember what it was like before our birth and promptly assume that it was nothingness, so it must be like that after death as well. Are there any other arguments you know of?
Until a positive argument is presented against an afterlife, suspension of belief is the best course to take for most unbelievers
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I noticed plenty of people are fond of loudly proclaiming a soul exits and that it’s either punished or rewarded after we die without giving any logical argument or sound evidence as to why a person should believe this specifically instead of saying I don’t know and moving on with their lives. Let’s take a proposition P. Now, you basically have three options: belief, disbelief, or suspension of belief. Assuming we have to support our belief in P with some form of justification. Likewise, we have to do that when we actively negate P or “disbelieve it” because negating P is affirming not-P which is technically another proposition by itself. If we can’t support either P or not-P with sufficient evidence, the only reasonable option left for us is to presently suspend the investigation and state our ignorance. Replace “P” with “belief in nothingness after death” and you’ll get to the conclusion that suspension of belief about the state of our soul after corporeal death is the right choice assuming no valid justification is present. However, some unbelievers do make an attempt at arguing for their afterlife views typically by appealing to an old book. Another argument they often give is that we have a soul that get rewarded or punished after we die because the old book says it. Are there any other arguments you know of?
Wow sounds kind of familiar…
Until a positive argument is presentedthat pink-winged elephants don’t roam outer space, suspension of belief is the best course to takefor most unbelievers
Disbelief is not a positive position. No argument against needs to be presented when no valid argument for has been presented. Disbelief is the rational position on this.
>I noticed plenty of people are fond of loudly proclaiming the annihilation of the soul after corporeal death without giving any argument as to why a person should believe this specifically instead of saying “I don’t know” and moving on with their lives
You should apply this notion of don’t know so don’t believe to the soul as well as everything else in life. We have reason to believe that material death is all there is.
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>Now, you basically have three options: belief, disbelief, or suspension of belief. Assuming we have to support our belief in P with some form of justification. Likewise, we have to do that when we actively negate P or “disbelieve it” because negating P is affirming not-P which is technically another proposition by itself.
This is what we have, we have the material reality, no one is claiming absolute knowledge that there is nothing else, but at this point there is overwhelming evidence for this, and nothing for anything else.
We can see why and how material life dies and that’s it, anything else would need a reason to support its belief.
Disbelieving or denying P doesnt necessarily entail proving it. We can make a probablistic assessment that it is more likely the case that we are annihilated after death based on the millions or billions? of people that have died and have shown no actual evidence of the afterlife.
Its simply stating I believe im annihilated after death. I may be wrong and am willing to change positions if shown otherwise.
Evidence of absence of the afterlife can be evidence that warrants belief. Its not proof of absence however.
I wish I could believe in the afterlife but unfortunately nothing to me suggests that there is a soul. Your personality comes from electrical signals in your brain. When you die they stop. That’s it. It’ll probably be nothing.
Souls do NOT exist. After lives which involves souks do NOT exist either. If they did we would see evidence of them in near death experiences which allow people to see inside sealed containers, and brain damage would look VERY different in terms of how it presents.
OP, close your eyes. Now start believing that the sky is yellow. Go on, just *suspend your belief* that it’s actually blue.
Can you do it?
>I noticed plenty of people are fond of loudly proclaiming the annihilation of the soul after corporeal death without giving any argument as to why a person should believe this specifically instead of saying “I don’t know” and moving on with their lives.
I don’t think I’ve seen ONE non-theist ‘proclaiming’ the annihilation of the soul after corporeal death ever, loudly or otherwise. If it’s discussed at all, I am more likely to see ‘what is the soul, what does it do?’ than “loudly proclaiming” ‘your soul dies when your body does’.
I for one won’t suspending belief on anything until I even know what it is being discussed.
Incidentally, nor will be so arrogant as to think i can tell believers what is ‘best’ for them to believe or not.
>I noticed plenty of people are fond of loudly proclaiming the annihilation of the soul
I doubt most atheist believe in a soul
>I noticed plenty of people are fond of loudly proclaiming **the annihilation of the soul after corporeal death**
This is the first time I have heard this phrase can you cite any reputable sources “proclaiming” this?
>Let’s take a proposition P. Now, you basically have three options: belief, disbelief, or suspension of belief.
Disbelief and suspension of belief are not mutually exclusive.
> Likewise, we have to do that when we actively negate P or “disbelieve it” because negating P is affirming not-P which is technically another proposition by itself.
It seems like you are unfamiliar with the burden of proof.
> If we can’t support either P or not-P with sufficient evidence, the only reasonable option left for us is to presently suspend the investigation and state our ignorance.
Do you insist that for all imaginary things (flying reindeer, leprechauns, Spider-Man)?
>Replace “P” with “belief in an afterlife” and you’ll get to the conclusion that suspension of belief about the state of our soul after corporeal death
You are assuming there is a “soul” before death. How are you defining a “soul”?
It sounds like you believe a soul exists and that it is or might be separate from a “corporeal” body, do you have sufficient evidence for this belief?
I personally believe the current consensus in neuroscience that consciousness (and therefore any ‘soul’ a person may have) is an emergent property of a functioning brain.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/think-well/201906/does-consciousness-exist-outside-the-brain
When a person dies, their brain stops functioning. It appears to me to be no more sensible to assume that a brain will continue functioning after death than to assume that digestion will continue after death independent of the digestive tract, or that blood will continue to circulate after the heart has stopped functioning.
Beliefs can be held with differing strengths, although you try to force people into an ‘all or nothing’. My belief that consciousness will cease during or shortly after death of the body is never going to be 100.0000%. But, it’s pretty high.
This is incorrect at the most fundamental level. Your argument is a sort of side ways slant of attempting to shift the burden of proof.
The default position on any existential claim is that nothing exists until sufficient evidence is given. End of argument. It’s a matter of guilty vs not guilty of existing.
Also why did you make the distinction of that it’s the best course to take for “most” unbelievers? That presumes there’s others that suspension of belief is not “the best course to take”.
While I don’t think we have definitive proof (and really, what do we have absolute certainty or proof of?), I do think two key things are operating in swaying me to take the annhilationist position (or if you wish, the position that there is no soul or afterlife, that whatever ‘we’ are, it is a material phenomenon):
1. The soul, the afterlife, etc require an entirely new realm of existence, of which we know basically nothing. I reject explanations that require such a thing, until said realm or substance is demonstrated and studied like the material realm has.
2. While our understanding of how consciousness is generated is incomplete, I know of no serious model or research program that explains it in a non material way. Every correlation or link we know is material. Our minds, for all we know, are just software running on wet brain hardware. Turn off the computer, and the software stops (like a flame is no more if you dowse it).
Does this rule out non physicalism, at an ontological level? Well, no, but nothing can. For all you know, we all live in a simulation. The interesting question here is whether there is an aspect about consciousness that can be better explained by a non material substance within our experienced reality. I see no evidence of such a substance.
I see a problem with your contention that we must suspend disbelief and be perfectly neutral about our credences in this scenario. I think we can go with our best current hypothesis, and update if new evidence comes along.
You have it correctly stated, except you grossly overstate the equivalence of the positions. The not P position, in this case, has a lot of suggestive evidence, which you have summarized fairly well.
The P argument has no evidence of any kind.
The exact same reasoning could be used to “prove” that the rational position is to suspend disbelief in Santa, Aliens, the flat earth theory, invisible pink elephants that live in my garage, the tooth fairy, etc. For me to suspend disbelief, you are going to have to do better than “I have a book in which a prescientific sheep herder who believed in demon possession, magic smoke and other similar nonsense asserts that god told him he had a soul in a vision he had while suffering from sunstroke and dying of thirst.”
> Are there any other arguments you know of?
There is no soul to begin with. The soul is an outdated explanation for the emergence of our thoughts. We now have a good enough understanding of the brain to argue that it is responsible for 100% of our mental life: thoughts, sensations, feelings.
I think it is very reasonable to argue for annihilation of our consciousness after death:
– We do know that the brain causes the thoughts, and that it is essential, without it, thoughts can not form anymore than bytes can form in a destroyed computer.
– We do understand why a belief such as an immortal soul should appear: we fear death and want to be reassured that something survives it.
– The observations are exactly as we would expect: the theory of soul existence is infalsifiable, caters to fears of death (after all, an etheral soul could simply be trapped in the decaying body, could decay itself slowly overtime…) and has absolutely zero supporting evidence.
>I noticed plenty of people are fond of loudly proclaiming the annihilation of the soul after corporeal death without giving any argument as to why a person should believe this specifically instead of saying “I don’t know” and moving on with their lives.
There isn’t even a clear explanation to what a soul would be. Most characteristics which spiritual people credit the soul for, are products of the consciousness and therefore products of our brain. Death usually means brain death, meaning that the brain seizes to work, meaning that our consciousness disappears, meaning that our “soul” literally gets “annihilated” after death.
Until someone comes up with what a soul is actually supposed to be, belief or disbelief in it or it’s annihilation isn’t even a topic worth discussing.
You could still believe in an afterlife without believing in a magical soul, but that would beg the question, what part of you actually enters said afterlife.
>I noticed plenty of people are fond of loudly proclaiming the annihilation of the soul after corporeal death
I don’t believe in souls so I don’t proclaim their annihilation. But it’s true that I don’t believe in an afterlife. In order for an afterlife to happen, we would need some kind of soul, right? And yet I’ve seen no evidence of that sort of non-material component to humans.
You’ve made a strawman with a position you find comfortable to argue. Nice enough for you however its not gonna get anyone anywhere. For the afterlife to be real you must first establish their is some part of us that is not our body. A soul, spirit, life-force, Chakra, whatever the heck you want to claim. I see no reason to believe any such thing exists and every reason to doubt that it’s possible. I’ll give one reason why I doubt it, mental disease. If a soul existed why would a physical defect change so much of a person’s personality?
Death is something we can literally observe in others, and have seen it frequently throughout our life.
We understand to good extent now how our bodies work, how our brain functions, how our consciousness is effected by physical trauma, drugs, diseases, birth defects, and so on (as well as differences in other animals). You mention this, but then you just ignore it and don’t even touch upon it. I’m sorry, you don’t get to just ignore that. That’s the evidence.
So we all know what happens. We just don’t want it to happen. So many have faith that something else magically happens, that we’re secretly immortal in some fashion completely contrary to all the evidence in the world.
Ahh yes, the argument of ‘plenty of people are fond of’…
Also the argument of ‘moving on with your life’…
Covered with some sort of solipsistic glaze…
And a reduction of strawman…
Fantastic.
What you seem to be saying, and then making some sort of attribution to ‘unbelievers’ generally, is that if we cannot know something we should not ‘proclaim’ a position on it.
To an extent this is accurate, but I seriously wonder exactly how many people actually do this in the way you seem to think they do.
If someone. says they do not believe in any afterlives because they have seen no evidence to support any kind of afterlife do you think they are actually saying that it’s impossible for there to be an afterlife? If there are a lot of people actually doing that then fine, they are being irrational.
But, it’s mostly down to colloquial speaking I would imagine.
The idea of a continuing existence after death really is a very extraordinary concept, more extraordinary than even the notion of a god, which I suspect often came about in part to justify the afterlife. If you take it all they way back, our lived experience since forever basically has been that everything dies, and very firmly stays dead, been that way since before caves.
Of course we like to think we humans are special, and we do have sentimentality and wishful thinking hardwired, so for the longest time could kid ourselves we were different. Now we know we are not, we are just clever bits of meat, there has never been a shred of evidence for life after death, not a single scrap.
Its a fairy tale we told ourselves to ward off the long cold night, and over the millennia we have erected a huge edifice of thought to support a special place in the world we don’t have. We no longer need that placebo of a better place holding us back from making this place better, time to put away childish things and face death like grown ups.
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The whole proposition is built on a house of cards. *What* soul? How do we examine to see if it exists, let alone can survive the death of our bodies? What ways have we explored this question in a way that can eliminate confirmation bias?
Before we even begin to examine belief in an afterlife, we still need to establish that an afterlife is *possible.* Until that happens there’s no reason to even address the question.
>assuming no valid justification is present
But there is a justification, likely several. The justifications have to do with understanding what being alive is, the locus of identity and metaphysics.
All the evidence points to life ending with the body. The evidence implies the mind is identical to the activity of a living brain. I’d even go so far as to say materialism is true.
All these would take lots of space to set out but, this is why I don’t suspend disbelief on a life after life ends.
You say it is best to suspend belief. But what do you believe is the PRACTICAL difference between assuming annihilation and going on with your life and suspending belief and then going on with your life?
I mean in practice, “I don’t know” what I will experience, if anything, when I die. There simply is no way for anyone to know that. Even if you believe in an afterlife, it would probably be nothing like Hollywood notions of heaven or hell, you’d have no context for it. And even if there is no afterlife, it’s possible you would experience SOMETHING as the lights go out for good. So I think regardless of the BELIEF one might profess, nobody can have KNOWLEDGE of this, and belief and knowledge are different things. So given that knowledge of this is impossible, what specifically makes professing belief in annihilation based on the scientific understanding that our thoughts, emotions, and memories all rely on physical brains worse?
Your whole argument pre-supposes the existence of a soul. All available evidence indicates the mind is purely physical.
In order for an afterlife to be possible you’ll need to demonstrate that souls exist first.
When faced with a substantial, highly important claim that has no supporting evidence then the default position is to assume the claim is false. Which is the default position that most people make about most hard-to-believe claims (“I’ve got a fully grown giraffe living in my fridge!”) without even thinking about it. Well, most hard-to-believe claims except those about religious beliefs, anyway.
Plus when you talk about our souls surviving our corporeal death you first need to demonstrate what it is you mean by “soul”, then show that said soul actually exists, and only then can we get on to the question of whether such a thing can survive brain death. That’s a big hill to climb.
If I said to you I had an invisible, immortal giraffe in my fridge would you “suspend the investigation and state our ignorance” or would you assume I’m simply talking rubbish until I can produce any kind of evidence to support my claims?
My justification for disbelief is the lack of evidence for an afterlife.
Also, could you define what a “soul” even is? How can something be “annihilated” without even knowing it exists in the first place.