Should We Worry About The Afterlife?🎞

I’ve noticed a rise in the number of people who say they take it for granted that there is no afterlife.

As heavens and hell fade from secular society, the scientific worldview offers no decisive proof about what happens when the physical body dies. That should make the afterlife an open question, like speculating about whether a plant orbiting around a distant star might have life on it. But somehow the absence of proof has made countless people decide that death is final.

As sticky and complicated as this issue is, it can be broken down into three perspectives that in themselves are simple. The perspective of a devout believer supports life after death; the skeptical perspective denies it; the undecideds stand in the middle. The fundamental issue is whether the afterlife can be transformed into a viable question.

I believe it can, once we return to basics, including the most boring basic, which is to clearly define our terms. That sounds boring, but as it turns out, defining our terms answers the question.

The most basic term in this case is consciousness, because when arguing over the possibility of an afterlife, much confusion is caused by asking the wrong questions. If you don’t specify what consciousness is, you wind up worrying about the survival of the soul, or of “me,” the individual ego-personality. And if those pitfalls are avoided, Eastern traditions are filled with equally misleading notions of Jiva, Atman, and Brahman, or of Nirvana and Satori.

If two people agree on their definition of consciousness, they will agree on the existence or non-existence of an afterlife. For a skeptic whose core belief is that all things can be explained through materialism (data, experiments, measurements, etc.), there is no doubt that the afterlife is spurious — not because it actually is, but because a skeptic’s worldview forbids it to exist. By the same token, a devout believer holds fast to a worldview where the non-existence of a personal God is impermissible, even unthinkable, and therefore the afterlife acquires its reality by association with the deity.

Seeing this rigidity on both sides, is there a definition of consciousness completely detached from all belief systems, which means the absence of bias, predisposition, received wisdom, rumor, myth, group pressure, wishful thinking, fear, and mental figments of every sort? I believe so.

Every reasonable person, I think, will accept that consciousness, as experienced by humans, is the awareness of two things: that we exist and that we experience. By extension, a reality that cannot be experienced is moot. By this measure, UFOs, angels, the afterlife, and the quantum vacuum exist on the same playing field. They are suppositions and inferences.

If we toss out suppositions and inferences, what can we truthfully say about consciousness? By this I mean what can we say that no reasonable person will disagree with? Here we run into a complicated situation because certain aspects of consciousness require extended discussion and a back-and-forth between people of good will. Such a setup is rare, unfortunately, but at least I can relate a few things that I’ve been able to convince people of over the years.

To subdivide it makes no sense. This point is lifted almost verbatim from Erwin Schrödinger, the eminent quantum pioneer. Philosophically, the “one consciousness” position is common to monistic schools, because they repudiate any true difference, onto-logically, between the one and the many. Yet when dealing with everyday people, it’s obvious that we all cling fervently to being individuals, outfitted with “my” family, house, body, mind, and soul.

To crack this allegiance requires arguments like the following:

That the discussion can crack open the presumption of isolated, local consciousness. There are many ways to get at this, not just the few questions listed above — the second point is that this “one consciousness” cannot be located. It is everywhere, all at once. This point sounds like a hard sell, as it would be if everyone held an advanced degree in philosophy, I imagine.

But in everyday life, the argument is fairly easily based on physics.

How do we decide between them? The difficulty is that being monistic, the two are incompatible and, more critically, totally self-consistent. It isn’t possible to step outside the framework of “mind first” or “matter first” to gather evidence. All the evidence lies within the worldview that produced it.

Even if other, as yet unknown, kinds of evidence emerged — such as the current, quite baffling existence of so-called dark matter and dark energy, which don’t follow the rules of visible matter and energy — it would be absorbed into pre-existing stories that we live by.

In deciding between “mind first” and “matter first,” the crux is a single question. Is it more probable that matter somehow learned to think or that the mind can create matter? It seems astonishing to me that more than 90% of scientists are so conditioned to reduce every issue to matter and energy, that they accept without investigation the assumption that the sugar in a sugar cube, once ingested, can travel past the blood-brain barrier and suddenly think, feel, wish dream, and do science.

No one has remotely come close to showing the point in evolutionary history where ordinary molecules acquired consciousness. Therefore, the very notion that the brain is a privileged object, the only “thing” in creation that has consciousness, is untenable. The brain is simply an ordinary object composed of ordinary atoms and molecules. It didn’t become consciousness through the random combination of complex organic chemicals.

The contrary position, that consciousness pre-exists the physical world, has some simple evidence on its side. The simplest, of course, is that the impossibility of the “matter first” position leaves only one other viewpoint that can reasonably be true. But to most people, such an argument feels like sleight of hand. Therefore, we can point to the human brain, where every sensation, image, feeling, and thought pushes brain chemicals around, redirects them to various parts of the body, causes vital signs to change either slowly or abruptly, and actually produces some chemicals, such as neurotransmitters, out of nothing.

The creation of something out of nothing has been lurking in the background as the ultimate question, yet concerning everyday experience, the mystery becomes both personal and self-evident. If someone whispers, “I love you” in your ear, the mind-body system will display hundreds of changes dissimilar to what occurs if the whispered words are “I have a gun pointed at your heart.” The deciding factor isn’t material in the slightest; it consists of mental activity, the continual production of thoughts, words, meaning, purpose, direction, intention, and so on.

It is far from impossible to convince reasonable people that these points are true, and they stem from defining consciousness in the most basic, intuitively validated way.

As to the specific issue of an afterlife, consider what lies on the side of its existence:

Having laid out, in truncated form, the argument for consciousness as the basis of reality, not everyone may be willing to follow the clues that lead to an afterlife. But that isn’t as important as realizing that we have tended to ask the wrong questions.

One can devote a book to untangling the various possibilities for consciousness to persist after the end of the body (I wrote one, Life After Death). In the end, however, the stubborn way that old stories cling to us, and we to them, muddies the issue and opens the way for vehement partisans who refuse to see that they are flogging second-hand opinions.