Hello All, Here are 2 articles written by Robert Lanza with the arguments that death is not the end. I would probably be skeptical, but in first article he uses scientific word "experiments": http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-lanza/what-happens-when-you-die_b_596600.html "A series of landmark experiments show that measurements an observer makes can influence events that have already happened in the past. One experiment (Science 315, 966, 2007) confirmed that flipping a switch could retroactively change a result that had happened before the switch was flipped. Regardless of the choice you, the observer, make, it'll be you who will experience the outcomes −- the universes −- that will result. " And in second he uses the word "evidence": http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-lanza/what-happens-when-you-die_b_596600.html "Without consciousness, space and time are nothing; in reality you can take any time -- whether past or future -− as your new frame of reference. Death is a reboot that leads to all potentialities. That's the reality that the experiments mandate. " Please look through the articels,they are not big and let me know what you think. Thank you
"As long as I live I will remember that day. And though Mr. O'Donnell is gone now, there still remains in his shop that little iron dragonfly −- covered with dust now −- to remind me there's something more elusive to life than the succession of shapes we see frozen into matter." What does that mean? The blacksmith did make a succession of shapes frozen into matter.
This is essentially a fluff article from a guy that wants to believe that there is life after death. I believe he is talking about the delayed choice quantum eraser experiments, which are definitely weird, but have nothing to do with life after death. That is not what the experiments mandate, it is what he wants to believe.
Aside from a future technology enabling such, a literal "afterlife" (as in who you are right now, memory-wise, continuing) would be dependent upon a supersensible level, prior in rank, which made nature or the world of appearances possible. [Vaguely akin to a virtual reality being maintained by a computer, etc.] The rules of nature itself do not enable life after death except (again) by science fiction means or recruitment and artificial development and management of its physical properties. By its very character or definition, speculations about such a higher hierarchy (that makes nature possible) cannot be tested or validated (including any hypothesis that it provides afterlives for humans). Scientists can only interrogate a sensible level with their experiments (the phenomenal world, the spatial / temporal realm, nature, etc). A mind-independent world or a world devoid of mind by definition lacks any manifestation and understanding of itself (empirical and intellectual evidence). But that "absence of everything" outside the skull has little to do with your last coherent, conscious state (before brain demise or whatever) having a relation to another surviving or beginning brain, so that your particular "continuum of experience" resumes in association with a different body. Without your memories being carried over to another brain, what's persisting at best (in the context of what science could entertain) is any field pervading the universe that living and non-living organizations of matter commonly partake in, like electromagnetism. The latter's properties aren't taken to be conscious or "experience-worthy" by physics, however, when minus dynamic manipulation by special neural or electronic structure. So in essence, if you consider your identity to be determined by the specific memories you have now, then you'd be kaput after death. But if you consider your basic identity to be manifestations and thoughts in general still substantiated somewhere by specific brains / bodies, then I guess you could conceive yourself as continuing as that generic version of consciousness. You (as so broadly conceived) would already be at those other locations prior to death, though. But if they were "tools" that made the relational co-existence of manifested representations possible along with the latter being treated as causes of each other, then consciousness would actually be dependent upon space / time -- they would be two of the principles that experience conforms to or is regulated by. And such psychological templates are not the abstract models of space / time in physics (i.e., all conceptions using those word labels are not necessarily being addressed). In the context of eternalism, you would be permanently embedded in a block-universe or static framework of time where the "flow" of changes is an illusion (similar to the motion of a movie qualifying as an illusion when mistaken to be an original property of the film, video tape, optic disc, flash-drive, etc which those "changing images" are derived from). Accordingly the whole of your worldline (individual states of your body from conception to death) would never disappear from that extra-dimensional level of reality. However, once again the last coherent moment of consciousness you had before death only has a relation to the moment or brain state before it (which is to say, it is without a future moment). There's no "road ahead" for that oldest" or last version of yourself, albeit earlier versions would still be cognizing their applicable moments or dates in the past. "Bio" suggests a science-wannabe rather than being satisfied as a philosophical outlook. So this seems a contemporary, partial re-invention of Kantian thought, which unfortunately misses a key item which Kant understood: You can subsume naturalism and its methodological process under the liberal or more unfettered flag of a higher hierarchy, but you can't do the reverse of injecting speculations about the latter under the restricted jurisdiction of the other's domain. The first approach (Kant's) allows science to be left alone to pursue its progress, while also allowing broad characteristics of some traditional beliefs to survive if remaining on their own turf. Whereas the second approach directly interferes with the process that combines empirical and rational activity (the natural method) via insisting "_x_" is scientific, that _x_ should be subsumed under the category of science. It's a simple matter of keeping a hyponym and a hypernym in proper rank to each other: The sensible and the supersensible. Just stop trying to force square pegs (beliefs and hypotheses about a supersensible stratum) into round holes (the regulated enterprise which studies the sensible stratum or world). Cease trying to justify the former with science affairs or imploring that the former deserves science membership. By the very pre-conditional or a priori constraints placed upon philosophical naturalism[PN] -- which define it or make it distinct from other paradigms -- and the operating principles that regulate methodological naturalism (science) which proceeds as if PN is the case, transcendent matters therefore cannot qualify as [natural] science. It's ridiculously futile to keep trying. Even more baffling as to why so many would want to try to begin with -- why these traditional beliefs / theories crave science membership to begin with, which is in contradiction to what supersensible affairs are meaning-wise.
Alexander made exactly the same post (word-for-word) back in March of this year. http://www.sciforums.com/threads/arguments-for-lifet-after-death-from-robert-lanza.145452/ My opinions of Lanza's speculations (that's all they are) remain exactly what they were then. What Lanza has done is reinvent metaphysical idealism, the idea that reality only exists in and is created by consciousness. (Hence death of the mind-created physical body needn't be the end.) He seems to think that this idea is original with him and is some kind of huge scientific breakthrough, though he does refer inconsistently to philosophers like CC's beloved Kant, who had pretty much the same idea before him. Lanza terms his theories "Biocentrism" and claims that physics isn't the most fundamental science in understanding the universe, biology is. But 'biology' seems to mean something different for Lanza than it means for conventional biologists, since he isn't talking about the evolution, reproduction, development, anatomy, metabolism and behavior of physical organisms, he's talking about 'mind' as he conceives it. So in a way, his thoughts about death would seem to be circular. Assume the priority of 'mind', then deduce the priority of 'mind'.
Or more likely, wants others to believe that there is life after death (to sell books etc). He probably doesn't even believe his own woo bull.
Here Robert Lanza is along with all of the other lunatics in the Encyclopedia of American Loons: http://americanloons.blogspot.com/2011/06/227-robert-lanza.html "Humans never die, you see, because we are only energy, and our constituents only get rearranged (in other words, Lanza got stuck on Goodman-style extensional mereology and hardcore nominalism – he also seems to gleefully adopt while failing to recognize the solipsistic element of his view). He backs this up by – of course – further babble about how reality works at the quantum level."
