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Is Death Final - An Intelligence Squared Debate
person
Don't believe everything you thinkThe liminal space Veteran
"Death is not final" is the subject of the most recent IQ^2 debate. I'm just about to sit down and watch it. I'll give my take on when I'm done.
http://intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/past-debates/item/1020-death-is-not-final
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Comments
Defining anything as final denies entropy.
A debate about death being final, or not, really just describes what anyone identifies with compared with what they don't.
Don't know. That said I think the near death experiences are silly as evidence of life after death. A brain starving of oxygen, flooded with neural chemicals may be responsible for inducing such experiences. Bob
Spot on @how! Arguing about concepts is a complete waste of time. Surely people have better things to do.
I'm watching the debate....and look forward to the conversation after.
Sean Carroll hit on most points just on the opening statement. For me, anyway.
Back to my watching tab...to be cont.......
Each side hit on most of the salient points. I thought it was another good debate from IQ2.
I guess if you don't like debate or find it pointless, I wouldn't bother watching it because there is a LOT of debating back and forth in it.
SPOILER ALERT - We're all going to die! .. :hair: ..
I thought it was a good debate too. The moderator was on it, wasn't he?
Each side hit most of the points? That's it? That's all?
I took notes, you know. .. :grumble: ..
Guess this is our 'first date' hahahaha....quiet ride home?
EDIT ( my last sentence is a reference to the end of the debate for those wondering where the hell that came from) hahaha
I liked the question about how come it's always heaven and not hell...??
The answer the for side gave was...... the Tibetan book. I will admit, this was the first debate about religion that I've seen where the religion was kept out of it. Even though the for side said "well...it's more of a philosophy question".
Duh.
Uh oh, I didn't know there would be a quiz!
I think the side against the topic (death IS final) did a better job in the debate.
I fall on the side of believing that death is not final. My belief is based on several things.
1)That my daily experience includes low level psychic events that I haven't been able to explain away that leads me to believe that a materialistic understanding of the world isn't a complete picture.
2)I trust in the testimony of experienced yogis, I feel that 10's of thousands of hours observing the workings of the mind provides some kind of protection against false impressions.
3)The hard problem of consciousness. This was brought up a couple times in the debate with the statement about how neuroscience doesn't have the first sentence as to how the brain produces mind. Essentially the argument that correlation is not causation.
I think I'm open minded about being proven wrong, but I see myself as coming at the issue as believing life after death as true and needing to be proven that the opposite is true.
OK....now we're talkin'....
I'm on death is final side. I have had some brain/CNS problems before so I can relate to what people describe...but it's like as soon as I 'came to' I knew it was brain stuff happening and it didn't change my view on this subject from before.
I guess it'll always come down to you can't prove a negative, huh?
Thanks for the vid, ..... Nice sit back on a Sunday evening. Notes and all. ..
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Many years ago I had a psychotic break that lasted about a month, the last week of which I believed demons were trying to take control of my mind, that dark turn led to my getting help. My point in bringing that up is that once I got on medication and was stabilized the thoughts went away giving me the view that what I thought was a 'spiritual' phenomena was in fact just my brain going haywire. So I have an appreciation that what I think may in fact not be true.
I can't make any metaphysical claims apart from my own internal views and experiences though so I don't really make a belief in an afterlife a part of my comments or arguments away from this issue.
I think if there was an explanation for how the brain actually produces our conscious experience I would really be forced to take a hard look at my position and probably reconsider.
I hear ya. I certainly haven't tried it all...but out of all the drugs I tried when I was younger...It wasn't anything like this NDE experience....so I'm hesitant to say it can be duplicated to the exact.
The guy said... ' BTW...we can make you float above your body'
Do you know what he was talking about? How do they induce this?
Was he referring to drugs,or no oxygen ....or something else?
I couldn't find a video clip but I saw a BBC doc on our identification of self. They put goggles on someone with screens in them and hook them up to a camera looking at themselves from behind and I guess the experience is that of being outside your body.
Here it is
I haven't watched the debate unfortunately! But here's my two cents based around what I've come to understand.
Firstly I do think debating and talking about life after death IS important. Why else do anything? Unless your 100% certain, even then you can teach others!
I think life after death is a human concept, if there is no self then how can you truly live after death? It's all thought! How can you think with no brain? If the consciousness is true in that it is not just the brain then are we talking about ALL the sense organs? (This is mainly why I don't believe in a spirit life after death)
I am not however a nihilist, what I do believe at this stage is that consciousness is a still a stream of experience and that stream doesn't end. When you die all the senses and brain functions die but a new consciousness emerges in the world. Still the same stream but not me
I think it's all just a flow of energy, my hope is that I can truly realise this rather than just believe it!
Safe travels!
I like your line of thinking @Earthninja. I struggle with the idea of senses outside of the body too. I think your thinking is more in accord with the Theravada view of rebirth. What the Tibetans claim is that at death the consciousness leaves the physical body and enters an incorporeal 'bardo' body which has senses and thinking. It's all largely based on anecdotal first hand accounts from reasonably trustable sources, who knows.
A couple points regarding the debate I wanted to talk about that were made by the con side (death is final). One of them said he was on the side of naturalism and looking for natural causes, I guess for me if something survives death then I think it must be natural as well and behave according to laws.
Then the other point was a criticism about how people from different cultures and beliefs see different things and that if there was a true reality beyond death then what they all see should be consistent. What about the Tibetan belief that the images we see are a product of our own minds and we see what we want to see? That is a possible explanation for differing images.
The best science right now seems to say that death is final, I bend gnostic so I think there are other ways to knowledge too.
Edit: Hmm 6 * makes a line
I watched the debate. Both sides were unconvincing. Anyways there's a flaw in the question. Who is measuring "final"?
this IS an important discussion, for anyone, but especially a religion should offer some up some answers and/or some comfort atl east.
there are those getting ready to pass, are grieving, or are watching their loved ones about to pass. to throw around the usual "its a waste of time" is insensitive, imo, since we are still all human and the experience of these things is very real. there may be a "no self" but there is still something that experiences this life, the body, its pain, relationships, dreams, goals, etc. to watch those older than you have some fun, then have to work all the time, then cant find work, then get sick, then suffer, and then just cease to exist is such a bummer to me and seems like a cruel joke. others have such strong faith in their tradition that they devote their entire lives to liberation.
I feel like there are Mahayana people who explain things that sound very Vedic to me (which I look to for answers as well), but I don't know how much of it is in line with Buddhist belief really, or if they're just trying to sound nice..
who knows. what did the Buddha say or did he not ever give a definitive answer? I may not be adding anything, i'm just thinking out loud right now and am in a shitty place..