Afterlife: Pinker's skeptical thought (Endings)

by dhw, Tuesday, June 02, 2020, 13:38 (1422 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Thus you maintain your non-belief stance. I deeply appreciate our friendship and the opportunity to proselytize. I fell no frustration from not altering you. If you capitulated, this site might have to end. So once again I will post the point. Something is eternal. If it is energy/matter in its simplest form (plasma) it has become something much more complex. Some force did that. Plasma, while not inert, will stay in that state unless something forces it to change. Your long explanation is fine and complementary, but avoids answering the issue presented. You've done this before. Think about it.

I have no answer. Nobody has. But that is not the only unanswered question to be considered! Consciousness is something none of us can explain. The only consciousness we know of is that of material creatures like ourselves, and evolution clearly suggests a bottom-up process of development culminating in our own. You laugh to scorn the very idea that this consciousness could be the product of chance. And yet you willingly embrace the idea that consciousness does not need a source, does not need a relationship with materials, can be on an infinitely higher level than our own, has no source and has always been there. Why can’t we see it? It conceals itself. How did you hear about it in the first place? Your fellow humans told you that it is there. How can consciousness exist without a source? “First cause” – which merely means you believe in a conscious mind without a source because you believe in a conscious mind without a source. I have offered you two other equally improbable “first causes”, but their improbability does not make yours any more probable. Your observation about plasma is fine “but avoids answering the issue presented” (how can a universal, conscious mind simply be there for ever?). “You’ve done this before. Think about it.”