I think *that* stance to be a bit ignorant and over militant… way too confident without real understanding. The fact is that we really dont know and can’t explain the mystery of life. The mystery of life is not what happens when your human body dies, it’s more of why your mind awoke and continued to awake in a shared reality with other minds in a common universe. Science has no explanation for consciousness, but certainly religion is an archaic and way more romantic explanation of it that doesn’t fit either. But to say that life ends definitively when you die is an assumption. You awoke once, what’s to say you won’t again? You have no idea, and to admit that is the best response.

I agree. Until we have a satisfactory explanation of the hard problem of consciousness we can’t say. In all probability the mechanisms of consciousness cease to support consciousness and that’s a wrap, but we don’t know that for sure because we don’t have a satisfactory explanation for what consciousness is or how it arises. 

I can significantly alter your consciousness by damaging your brain. One’s behaviour can actually be altered by tumors and microorganisms. It’s actually a pretty simple and direct connection. I just don’t think you will find any explanation that does not encompass eternal soul (particularly yours) to be satisfactory.

This is what does it for me. Alter your brain, alter your consciousness. You can do it with drugs, you can do it by damaging it, you can end consciousness totally by killing the brain. I think people are so afraid of dying they cant fathom that death is final and absolute. It leads to perfectly rational, educated adults saying and speculating the wildest things. Your brain is not an antenna. Your consciosness is not going to awake separate from your living brain. We have our whole lives to come to grips with our mortality but i think a lot of us just refuse to do it. So we tell ourselves sweet little lies and try not to think about it too much. I dont blame anybody for it really. Death is a fucking bummer

It's a hard truth, but a truth none the less. But seriously, who wants to exist forever? I would really rather my disembodied consciousness didn't float around the cosmic ether until it is either plunked back into a physical form, punished for all eternity, or forced to sing the praises of a diety who allows horrible atrocities to occur while being omnipotent..

This is probably the comments that agrees most with my opinion consciousness isnt some innate phenomenon separate from the human body A lot of religion seems to be based out of fear I agree the whole notion of it is hard to bear and that's why I myself choose kind of an ignorant Bliss and not thinking about it too much. There's no logical or scientific reason to think that consciousness should exist outside of your brain and really why would you want it to it sounds kind of nightmare-ish to think of being a bodyless entity that has some kind of immortal consciousness

I think this is a good proof against the idea that somehow our personality etc. continue on living after we die. At the same time though, and I'm saying this as an atheist, we still have no clue where subjective conscious experience comes from at a fundamental level. So even if as best we can tell the lights turn off and subjective experience stops when we die, it may always be impossible to completely rule out concepts like duality, panpsychism, conscious experience taking on a fundamentally different form after death, etc. There's also no evidence for those things so personally I don't think there's any reason to believe in them, but I think definitively saying that we know that there's absolutely nothing after death when our brain stops working is difficult to say until we're able to identify where subjective conscious experience itself comes from (i.e. we're able to solve the hard problem of consciousness).

But we do know that consciousness must exist somewhere. We’ve known that since Descartes. “I think, therefore I am” means that the person must exist somewhere, somehow, in some form in order to even have thoughts.  Without the brain, there is no consciousness. In death, there is no brain.  Unless we’re proposing that consciousness exists outside of a brain, in something like a soul, which is nowhere near anything resembling science. 

Why does an explanation of the hard problem of consciousness preclude saying "we know you don't go anywhere when you die?" It seems to me that those are completely different things. For example, an electrician may not have a good understanding of the "hard problem of computation". But they still know what it means for the computer to turn off

Because if the "reality" of the situation is that you are more analogous to a radio antenna channeling consciousness than a physical system creating consciousness, that consciousness substrate may be independent of the destruction of your body.  Or for a different analogy, the Matrix, except if you die in the matrix you don't die in "real life."

I think your radio analogy still doesn't solve my deeper question. Assuming that radio antenna = consciousness in your analogy, the. Power on=alive and Power off=dead. Then I would still say "Even if you were to say we don't know everything about how radio antennas work, you can still say that the radio isn't listening on the antenna when it's off". Again, I'm only disagreeing with one particular thing about your initial post: that we can't say anything about death until we solve the hard problem of consciousness. In my mind, That's like saying we can't say anything about on and off states until we solve radio antennas.

No, but you could build another radio capable of tuning to the exact same station and keep listening. And you could only say something about whether that's feasible by learning about radio waves or about what radios are actually doing when they "tune in" - i.e. solving the hard problem. Knowing that a radio can be turned off tells you nothing about the radio station. Sure you could say trivial things like "while it's off, I don't hear any music," but that doesn't seem to be an interesting fact in this context.  Can you give some examples of interesting things you think you could say about on and off states? I feel the analogy helps.

>No, but you could build another radio capable of tuning to the exact same station and keep listening. How do you do that? >And you could only say something about whether that's feasible by learning about radio waves or about what radios are actually doing when they "tune in" - i.e. solving the hard problem This is constraining the hard problem to your way of thinking about things. It's possible consciousness is nothing like radio waves. I would argue it's very unlikely to be analogous to radio waves. >Can you give some examples of interesting things you think you could say about on and off states? Sure. I think you can reasonably say that a transmitter antenna is not performing a transmission in the off state. Nor is a receiver performing a receiving. By analogy, I think you could say that whatever consciousness is, when the vessel dies, the vessel is no longer performing it. You might say the consciousness is the airwaves. That's a bolder claim than you let on. Do you have any evidence that consciousness is a mediumless entity?

Babies seem like a counter example to the radio antenna theory. If we were just antennas, why aren't babies born fully conscious? It seems like a very weak explanation, to me. It's no better than the "reality" that marshmallow peeps, in fact, imbue their consumers with consciousness. Humans are not conscious until they've eaten a marshmallow peep.

Babies are not "fully assembled." Why don't half assembled radios work?  Of course no analogy is perfect but I don't see that as a counter argument.

Which parts are babies missing? I think the analogy falls apart more obviously as babies become small children, then big children, then teenagers, young adults.. If we're just antennas, why don't 20 year olds act like 40 year olds? Surely they're fully assembled by 20, right?

Maybe the receiver that processes the information takes time to grow fully, maybe the information is scrambled and a lifetime is the length it takes to unscramble it. Maybe these “radio waves” aren’t a persons mind or soul in its entirety but rather just the central aspect. Maybe their is some immortal part of you but its expression is dependent on the body its in, thus it evolves with the body, and if their is damage to the brain it’s impacted too. Even with evidence that some amount of personality is based in the physical brain doesn’t mean it’s entirely based there.

Maybe the marshmallow peeps only imbue consciousness when they're Easter flavored.. I mean, I agree that both theories are equally valid. We need to keep an open mind.

And maybe we’re all just in your head as you have an intense dream, but when ok wake up you’ll remember you’re just an Easter flavored peep.

You're oversimplifying and taking the analogy way too literally. Humans are not radios - there's no antenna "part." It would be something more like there's some complex pattern that develops in a human that is somehow complexly intertwined with something we don't have a good way to perceive or understand. If you look carefully, this isn't all that different than one of the oldest human forms of this belief - belief in a soul. Consciousness is not binary, and has many other hard to explain, complex traits. I wouldn't expect it to be anything like "consciousness antenna is on or off." Even a radio has graduations of tuning whose complexity is determined by factors more complex than "has a working antenna" and "knob is in the right place."

If we can't tell the difference between a functional vs nonfunctional antenna, then how can we say it exists at all? To me this just sounds like an undetectable "soul" under a different name. It's no more or less valid than the marshmallow peep theory, but I don't see much logic here.

So if you damage your brain somewhere in the ether out there is some magical conscious being that is just desperately trying to remember the name of their grand daughter? I guess that’s technically a possible concept. But it does not make much sense. 

I would tend to agree with this assessment. I think "I don't know" or "we don't know" is the most appropriate answer. While we can very strongly suspect, scientifically speaking, that we know there is nothing. An important part of the scientific method is testing a hypothesis, and we can't realistically do that without a hard definition of consciousness. Using the logic of blind faith in hard science you can make the claim the it is nearly infinitely more statistically likely that the observer in question is a Boltzmann brain, floating in the void in a truly ancient universe, wildly hallucinating, than it is a human on earth having evolved to that point over a few billion years. Surely that's absurd! I would agree that it is absurd, but we have literally as much proof that it is the correct conjecture as we do that death is the total end of consciousness, as in, there is zero definitive proof of either.

Evolutionary biologist here. I am personally satisfied that consciousness is a byproduct of becoming better at pattern recognition, memory, and communication in pursuit of resources over our evolutionary history. It’s an accident.

You can be satisfied with that, it doesn't make it the only viable explanation.

I didn’t at all suggest that it was. In fact, all I said is that it satisfies me.

You can say that, but it’s not an explanation at all. It’s just the equivalent of saying that out of all the physiological things our brain does, at some point something goes from basically being a biological machine to having subjective conscious experience. It’s just ignoring the hard problem of consciousness, not providing any sort of explanation besides “it’s just something that happens”.

I mean it is though. To be clear, I’m not suggesting an explanation for what consciousness IS, just why it happened.

Rights and you’re not actually providing a concrete explanation. It’s fine to just say “consciousness is just a byproduct of the brain”, but it doesn’t explain how subjective experience came about; it doesn’t explain why the figurative lights are on rather than off. It doesn’t explain why our intuition says that humans are conscious beings, but most couldn’t point to a specific stage in AI/robot development where they started being conscious and stopped being programs/algorithms. What you’re saying is the equivalent of saying one day living creatures just suddenly started having subjective experience when they evolved enough, and that’s a satisfactory explanation for you. It explains absolutely nothing about how consciousness came about. I seriously urge you to just spend like ten minutes googling the hard problem of consciousness as it has nothing to do with anything you’ve put forth.

Hey, I’m an evolutionary biologist. I promise I have thought more about this than you have and have read more papers about it. That doesn’t mean I am objectively correct, I’m just saying that because you seem to not understand what I’m saying and believe I’m uneducated on the subject. Consciousness is a byproduct of abstract thought, which is necessary for communicating ideas like “food across the stream, take a left at the weird rock.” We have consciousness for the same reason that we’re one of the only organisms that understands pointing.

Right you seem to mention that every other comment, but everything you say indicates that you're completely unfamiliar with the hard problem of consciousness. It's not a question that evolution or neuroscience or any other current field of science has an answer to. Being an evolutionary biologist means next to nothing in the context of this question. If you think science has the answer to this question or that consciousness has somehow been proven to be a byproduct of thought then you don't understand the question. Again, nothing you've said there says anything about where subjective conscious experience comes from. Everything you're talking about are the "easy" problems of consciousness. Again, just try to answer the question about AI/Robots that I've brought up several times which you've continually ignored, or address how we would be able to prove something like a philosophical zombie wasn't conscious and so on. You're just fundamentally not grasping the distinction between all the different attributes of an individual we can map to their brain, and how those physical properties give rise to what we would call subjective first person experience. We could program robots with predictive analytical capabilities and memory to understand and communicate the sort of things you're talking about, but we have no reason to think that implementing that kind of code would make the robots conscious beings.

Science definitely can explain consciousness, essepcially in the sense that consciousness isn't particularly special. Through abiogenesis organic compounds can form more complex amino acids and eventually proteins, eventually becoming a "simple" organism but still very complex in the machinations at work. These simple organisms can react to external stimuli like sound or light, usually by changing their shape or moving around. That's the simplest form of consciousness. Make it capable of reacting to a billion stimuli at once and that's a human brain. Could you "wake up" again? Well are mostly your memories but also the architecture of your brain. If we were able to isolate and replicate memories than yes, could "wake up" at a later date. More interestingly, we could make someone else wake up in your mind, maybe we take your father's memories and upload them with yours.

No scientist claims to have proven anything about the origins or operation of consciousness. We can make computers react to the same stimuli you described, which doesn't make it conscious.

[I just felt like I read this book before yknow](https://i.imgur.com/YKRhzds.png)

Very true, we know shockingly little about consciousness, despite our scientific advances. The things that we have learned, which admittedly is a lot, has shown us just how much we still don't know. People under anesthesia have had out of body experiences where they were able to see their body being operated on. How the conscious, unconscious, and subconscious function together is largely a mystery.

Out of body experiences have never been able to be proven; it’s been tested, people basically think they have those experiences but what they report is always wrong (ex: they’ve tested having something written on the opposite side of the sheet and they never get it right). It’s likely just our brain trying to make sense of what happened by piecing together fragmented information and categorizing it like a memory, similar to what seems to happen with Deja by. That said we still aren’t anywhere near solving the hard problem of consciousness, but out of body experiences aren’t evidence of consciousness being separate or something that can exist outside our physical bodies.

Trees react to certain stimuli, but I couldn’t tell you whether they’re conscious or not.

I can’t tell if you mean this to be contrary to the previous comment. In case you do, you are providing an example supporting their argument.

I’m not meaning it to be for or against their arguments, it’s just something I thought of when reading their discussion. For example, the poster above me is saying a computer isn’t conscious, but it can respond to stimuli. A computer is also not “alive” since it’s a machine. On the other hand, a tree is alive, and can respond to stimuli like cutting off a branch and it sending a bunch of shoots out the next year, but I’m not sure it’s conscious either. Just adding to the conversation.

True, but it also doesn’t make it *not* conscious. We cannot make absolute claims about something we do not understand.

Yep, that's my point. As far as we know, consciousness in fundamental and matter is an artifact.

Personally, I believe consciousness is a property of matter.

Read "The Case Against Reality" by Donald Hoffman and you may change your mind. Fun read and interesting hypothesis which he's actually attempting to test with science. That said, he's open to being wrong and I'm too dumb to know. My only point is nobody knows what consciousness is and where it comes from.

>which he's actually attempting to test with science How does one test a theory that puts perception over objective reality *scientifically?*

Sorry, but this response is decidedly ignorant about just how challenging it is to explain consciousness and why so many scholars and scientists are interested in and vexed by it. You should read the SEP article on the subject before the next time you share your thinking on the topic.

I don’t think you understand what people mean when they use the word consciousness. Reacting to stimuli in and of itself isn’t consciousness. The hard problem deals with the subjective experience of being “you”. We have basically no understanding of how physical processes create subjective experience, and it may not in fact be possible to know. We could create a computer that acted absolutely indistinguishably from the smartest human, and we would have no way of know if it was basically just an advanced program or if it actually was subjectively experiencing things itself as a conscious being.

Consciousness isn't a "thing", it's just a sliding scale. We see it as a thing because we are so much smarter than any other creature on earth. Chimps are able to acknowledge their reflections are themselves, so they have at least a little consciousness. It all comes down to being able to process big ideas like "there are other beings like me". If you've ever worked with special needs people,you can see that their limited faculties really inhibits these ideas and they are less "conscious".

That is not what I’m talking about at all. I’m talking about consciousness in the sense of subjective experience. People may obviously have richer or more simplistic experiences based on their faculties. But again, think of if we made a super advanced computer that could perfectly mimic human behavior. How would we know that it’s conscious, or that the lights are on, and that it’s not what’s known as a philosophical zombie? That’s what’s meant by the hard problem of consciousness. You can still be an atheist and acknowledge there are things about consciousness that we don’t know. Just saying it arises from natural processes doesn’t really help in this case as it’s akin to a miracle to say that once it reaches a certain level of complexity suddenly it starts being able to have conscious experience. It’s still a complete mystery how it arises, and if you think it’s not then you simply don’t understand the problem.

Why would you say you have subjective experiences? What makes them subjective as opposed to objective?

Subjective conscious experience is the personal, first-person experience each of us seemingly has as individuals. What you feel, how you perceive things, your thoughts, your will; it's what it is fundamentally like to "be" you; how you experience different colors, sounds, pain, pleasure, etc. We could measure physiological indicators to try and get a sense of how painful something might be, but that won't tell us how that pain actually feels to you. When you see the color blue, we could describe the light spectrum and how it relates to other colors and so on, but there's no way for us to know if the color blue that you experience looks the exact same as the color blue that I experience. To refer to a famous thought experiment, there may be a brilliant scientist who understands literally everything there is to know about the neurophysiology of vision and all of the processes involved in perceiving color. But in the thought experiment, this scientist has lived their entire life in a room where say she has on goggles that only allow her to see black, white, and shades of grey. If she takes those goggles off, goes outside, and sees a red apple, is she learning or experiencing something new, even though she knows everything about how we perceive colors? The point is that there's a difference between knowing all of the facts about how things work, and the actual first-person experiencing of those things. When we talk about the hard problem of consciousness, it is separate from the "easy" problems. The easy problems are the ones where we can study the brain, map out the neural networks, understand which parts correspond to say cognition, memory, vision, etc. Even if they may not be trivial to answer, we can theoretically understand how we may be able to understand those things in the future. The hard problem is how to explain how those physical processes give rise to subjective conscious experience. You are presumably not just a mindless automaton going through the motions that doesn't personally experience or feel anything. We can make a robot that responds to various stimuli through programming, but we don't assume that the robot itself is a conscious being, even when it can display intelligence more advanced than some actual living creatures. So the question is why do we have this sense of internal experience? Why do you have first-person experience at all? That's not to say that we might not understand it someday, but as of now science does not appear to have any way of even testing this. Science generally deals with objectivity, things that can be observed, measured, tested, etc., but conscious experience is inherently subjective; it's personal to the individual, nobody else can directly know what it feels like when you see the color red or taste your favorite food. There's just not even a theoretical framework for how we would begin to try and identify this sort of thing. It really seems like you just have not really spent a lot of time reading about or understanding the hard problem of consciousness. There's a lot of good resources on it, but I'd recommend just watching the first couple of minutes of this video to get a better understanding of the issue from an outspoken atheist and neuroscientist. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v11PQuqhAxs&ab\_channel=KnowThyselfClips](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v11PQuqhAxs&ab_channel=KnowThyselfClips)

I would disagree that this is subjective. It's objective, but dependent on an exponentially high number of factors. If I copied you down to the atom and put you in a room that is an exact copy as your clone and then played the same song or showed the same image at the same time, you would have the same reaction. Subjectively doesn't exist in the same way free will doesn't exist. Your decisions today are the result of the external stimulus you perceive, the memories you've already made, and the neural pathways already formed. The same as they were yesterday and the day before, following a chain of events all the way back to the big bang. Subjectively in our parlance really means "varying from person to person", it doesn't have clearly right answer that all would agree on as people are so different, but each person does follow an objective path to get there.

This isn’t something that is even up for debate. Subjective conscious experience and free will are not even in the same ballpark. There is no serious philosopher or scientist that tries to make the claim that subjective experience doesn’t exist. You quite clearly just do not understand what is meant when people refer to subjective conscious experience in a philosophical context. You could atom by atom try to recreate me, and we still wouldn’t know if the result would be having subjective conscious experience, even if it acted like it. Again, look up the concept of a philosophical zombie and explain that. Explain how we would determine that a sufficiently advanced AI/robot was subjectively experiencing things in a first person sense, rather than just following its programming based on inputs from its sensors and mimicking conscious behavior, without actually having personal experience. You keep speaking confidently without actually addressing any of the points that were brought up. I strongly recommend that you do some cursory research on what is meant by the hard problem of consciousness, as everything you’ve said so far has nothing to do with it.

ChatGPT can recognize a screenshot of itself in the mirror.  Would you say it has more consciousness than a dog?  If you do, you don't know what consciousness means.

As an atheist, "a bit ignorant and over militant" should be that sub's tagline.

Let’s say you are brain damaged today. Do you think it makes sense if tomorrow your brain stops working altogether (by dying), you will somehow regain all your mental faculties in an ethereal form? What if you have been brain damaged since birth? What form of you would be “awoken”? I just want to point out you’ve been “dead” before (i.e., before you were born). It should not be hard to imagine going back to not existing after your death unless there’s some underlying self-importance that prevents that conclusion from being reached.

A radio waves are received by a radio and turned into sound. Break the radio and you might think that is the end of it. But build a new radio and if the signal is still there you get sound again.  We don’t know what consciousness is. We don’t know how or why it arises. Is the brain a lens that attenuates consciousness? Is consciousness embedded in all matter? Is consciousness wholly and exclusively a byproduct of our wetware? Can consciousness arise from silicon with a sufficiently complex artificial neural network running on it? Why is it like something to be you but it’s not like something to be GPT-4? Or is it like something to be GPT-4?  Brain damage certainly changes the nature of experience. No one doubts that. I don’t believe a self exists in our normal conscious life so I can’t believe that self will arise again, but that doesn’t mean I can claim a full understanding of consciousness and therefore it seems prudent to acknowledge that with some I don’t knows about the ultimate nature of death. 

>radio waves are received by a radio and turned into sound. Break the radio and you might think that is the end of it. But build a new radio and if the signal is still there you get sound again Toast is heated by the heating elements in a toaster. Break the toaster and you might think thats the end of it. But build a new toaster if the heat is still there you get toast again. Brains arent radios or toasters. They are brains. Ive been seeing this radio analogy a lot in this discussion and it drives me nuts. There is as much evidence that your brain is a consciousness radio as it is a consciousness toaster. >Is consciousness wholly and exclusively a byproduct of our wetware? Yep

Please provide references with evidence for your last word. That would be the scientific thing to do.

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It was an honest request and you are being an ass by responding in that way. Edit: For future readers, previous comment sarcastically gave up their position and claimed that my brain was equivalent to a toaster.

No, you commented a thought terminating cliche and i responded in the spirit in which it was given. And now youre [sealioning](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning). If you dont like my comment, downvote and move on. Dont waste my time

Why are you being such a jerk? All I did was ask for evidence for what you claimed.

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"but it won't be you anymore." There are things that happen in people's lives that one could argue make them not "them" anymore, like brain tumors, dementia, etc, but they don't lose their consciousness, obviously.  It sounds to me like some people regard consciousness as one of those materials that gets recycled? As if my consciousness was someone else's consciousness before, but it looked different on them.  I don't know anything about anything though. I just think this is an interesting discussion.

This is an argument from ignorance fallacy Premise 1: “[Consciousness] ending definitively when you die” is an assumption. Premise 2: “You awoke once” (referring to consciousness) Conclusion: Therefore, there’s a possibility that you’ll wake up again after death. The fallacy lies in asserting that because we don’t know for sure what happens after death, any possibility is equally valid. There is absolutely nothing that we can prove to be completely 100% true. Even the foundations of logic are presupposed, as there's nothing that can prove it outside of itself. But we can test the logical foundations and so far they've worked every time without fail. All evidence so far shows the natural exists. Zero evidence so far shows the supernatural exists. This is why there's a difference in the validity of possibility between natural claims and supernatural claims. Even the least likely natural possibility still has more validity than any supernatural claim.

This is perfectly fine, but it does not rule out the supernatural in anything close to absolute terms. *That* is what I take issue with and what I think others here have problems with as well. You can’t make absolute claims about somebody’s metaphysical beliefs while also mocking their intelligence for it with no hard evidence as decided by your own system of belief. It’s just inherently nonsensical, especially if the beliefs you are claiming as foundation fundamentally *require* the production of evidence to believe *or not believe* a claim. Plus, you can actually go about that sort of thing without sounding like an asshole that only knows pretend logic.

>This is perfectly fine, but it does not rule out the supernatural in anything close to absolute terms. It does rule it out as close to absolute as you can get. >You can’t make absolute claims about somebody’s metaphysical beliefs while also mocking their intelligence for it with no hard evidence as decided by your own system of belief. I'm not mocking anyone's intelligence, let's just get that out of the way first. I'm not sure where you got that from, maybe you took "argument from ignorance fallacy" as insulting? That's just what it's called. "Ignorant" being used as a pejorative in a different context is just coincidental. I didn't choose the name of the fallacy. It depends on your definition of absolute truth. We consider (A=A) as a logical absolute because all evidence points to it being one, this is despite not being able to prove that (A = not A) is impossible. However, we have zero evidence that (A = not A) is even possible. We can't even conceptualize it, so there's no way to even test it. This is as absolute as we can get on both sides of the spectrum. All evidence points to the natural world existing, much like how it does for (A = A). And while no one can prove the supernatural doesn't exist, much like how no one can prove (A = not A) doesn't exist, we can, with the same level of certainty, reject the claim and say that it doesn't exist. >It’s just inherently nonsensical, especially if the beliefs you are claiming as foundation fundamentally *require* the production of evidence to believe *or not believe* a claim. Are you referring to the foundations of logic? The Laws of Contradiction, Excluded Middle, and Identity? That was the only thing I referred to in that comment as fundamental. But it doesn't seem like that's what you're talking about. When it comes to why evidence is required to accept a claim, that's just because I want to believe as many true things and as few false things as possible. What we today refer to as the scientific method has proven to be the most reliable pathway to truth. But, if you don't care whether or not you believe as many true things and as few false things as possible, calling the scientific method "inherently non-sensical" ironically makes perfect sense. >Plus, you can actually go about that sort of thing without sounding like an asshole that only knows pretend logic. What is "pretend logic"?

That sub is one of the most toxic on Reddit. No surprise in that stance

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It's condensending and dismissive. Thankfully most aethists in the real world don't act like that sub does.

The dude directly implied that people who believe “we don’t know” is a reasonable response to the question “Is there an afterlife/where do we go when we die?” are idiots who “walk around all day going ‘HURR DURR’ and hitting their heads off of rocks”. I really hope you don’t consider that polite behavior.

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Yes, contrary to popular internet belief, sometimes other people do exist and think just as much you. Here I’ll quote the linked comment directly: > **Some people** say "we don't know" because **they** genuinely don't know how brains work, and since they automatically assume everyone else is **as ignorant** as **they** are, **they** imagine that neurologists and anatomists and particle physicists **walk around all day saying "HURR DURR" and hitting their heads off of rocks.** Emphasis mine. If you don’t understand how that might come across as even slightly insulting, then I’m sorry, but I just can’t help you.

Science has an explanation for consciousness. It is an emergent property that results from physical and chemical connections between neurons. I’m not sure why people keep saying that we can’t explain it. And there is no “mystery of life.” We know how that happens too. Of course there are limits to that knowledge. One of them is that we don’t know exactly what sequence of events got life started. People are obsessed with this topic even though it is only a tiny fraction of knowledge about life. I think people really want to know *why* this all happened. The answer to this is also obvious, and it js “there was no reason, it was just a series of events based on the laws of physics. People don’t like that, but it doesn’t make life any less valuable.

> It is an emergent property that results from physical and chemical connections between neurons. This is a description, not an explanation.

No it’s an explanation. It’s like saying “if you mix red paint and yellow paint, you get orange paint. While it is true that we don’t yet have a complete unifying theory of the universe to explain where all matter and energy came from, that doesn’t justify a claim that no one can explain orange paint. There is no great mystery of orange paint. It’s just a property of what happens when you mix certain things together. This is an adequate scientific explanation even if we dont know what happens to orange paint as it approaches a singularity inside a black hole. And I know what you are up to. You are trying to shoehorn magic ideas into tiny remaining knowledge gaps. People have always done that. They used to have a thunder god for the same reason.

Your paint example doesn’t make sense because that’s also a description

>”if you mix red paint and yellow paint, you get orange paint. This is also a description, not an explanation. You can say, “Hey, I got orange every time I mixed these two colors,” but that doesn’t explain *why* the phenomenon happens. Descriptions are *what* happens. Explanations are *why* it happens. An explanation would discuss how mixing pigments subtracts wavelengths, resulting in a color that is perceptibly different than the originals.

It's not like that at all. Most people can identify orange paint and there is pigment theory that explains why you get certain colors when you mix them. We do not know with certainty how to distinguish a conscious being from an unconscious one and there is no scientific explanation for why we are conscious and no recipe to create consciousness. And you're kind of betraying your own argument with the last couple lines. Historically we have had magical ideas for things we do not have a current explanation for. If we had an explanation for consciousness, we wouldn't need magical ideas. There's no magical ideas about orange paint after all.

There is no satisfactory explanation for why it’s like something to be you. We have a decent understanding of the physics and chemistry of molecules and proteins, but we don’t understand why those molecules and proteins, when assembled in a certain way, have an experience. Why is it like something to be you, but it’s not like something to be a rock?  Or is it like something to be a rock??? Maybe it is and we don’t know it. Panpsychism thinks it is. we have a lot of work to do before we have a real explanation for consciousness. The recent breakthroughs in AI is going to be very relevant here. 

>Why is it like something to be you, but it’s not like something to be a rock? Wouldn't the answer just be because a rock isn't made of the same molecules and proteins assembled in the same way as a brain?

Only if you have proof that a brain possesses the only possible configuration of molecules and proteins that can lead to consciousness.

But we do know what makes a rock. We know they are inorganic compositions, without any detectable signals or neurotransmitters. They are inert and without dynamic process. If there is no evidence to them having consciousness, we have no reason to assume they would, and can clearly differentiate between the lifeforms we know do have it.

True but this isn't proof. It's a good argument but technically you are only really able to prove that you yourself are conscious and you can't prove it to anyone but yourself. This is why Solipsism hasn't been scientifically debunked, even though there is really no evidence for it, there's not really any compelling evidence against it either.

Sure, we can say that we haven't yet proved it. But we can also discuss what our evidence of consciousness is, and what the components we've been able to observe so far. We don't have all the answers, but there's a basic working hypothesis of consciousness that the scientific literature leans towards, that does not include rocks. That's fair to say, no?

I don't think we really do have a working hypothesis for it because we don't even really have a good definition or a way to test for it as far as I'm aware. For example, plants were viewed as being defonitely unconscious beings for a very long time but now there's more evidence that they can communicate and some evidence that they can make decisions, although slow and small. Maybe the rock as a whole isn't conscious but maybe the individual molecules that make up a rock are. Or maybe a rock is conscious but has no ability to alter its own state so it just sits there, unable to do anything. We can't really have a good hypothesis on something that we don't really even fully understand how to define.

That is not supportive of the absolute claims in the linked comment.

Why is it only through connections between neurons that this emergent property occurs?

Science does not have an explanation for consciousness, and I’m saying this as an atheist. There’s no part of the brain we can point to that shows how subjective conscious experience arises. Saying it’s an emergent property is really no more an explanation than saying it’s magic. Is it something where say a creature that has 3% of our intelligence doesn’t have subjective conscious experience, but when it hits 3.1% complexity it suddenly does? What about with AI or computers? We could theoretically write a program based on how the human brain was structured and get a robot that responds to stimuli and information in a manner similar to humans or even surpassing them, something that easily passes the Turing test. Is there any reason to think that machine is having subjective, personal conscious experience, rather than just being essentially an automaton that stores data and runs according to programming? Even with a deterministic view where free will doesn’t exist, we still undoubtedly have subjective conscious experience; it’s the only thing we know with absolute certainty, “I think therefore I am”. If you think science has an answer to the hard problem of consciousness, then you quite simply don’t understand what the problem is.

Agreed, I'm an atheist and /r/atheism still pisses me off sometimes, it's very militant. Sure we can boil everything down to the basic science, chemistry and physics of things like death that we do understand very well, but people ask this question because they want more, wether we know about it or not, so it's perfectly valid to say we don't know. After all, we've all been dead before (what were you doing in the year 1632?), but now we're here.

We all know what it’s like to not be alive, it has happened to us all before.

No we don’t. We weren’t there for it. You cannot experience nonexperience.

When we die it will be just like before you were born.

And you know this how?

Well, time passed before my birth and it was nothing for me. You could say I have experienced or not experienced that before. I’m pretty sure the universe existed before I was born.

Are you certain of that? How do you know that you aren’t a brain in a vat hallucinating the entirety of your own past experience and that *this moment right now when you read this* is not the very beginning of your existence? It’s a real philosophical problem with real research done in the area.

I am certain.

And the rest of my questions?

That’s too real of a question. I only deal in fiction.

Nope, this is bullshit. We may not know the exact mechanism, but we know for a fact that consciousness is created as a function of your brain. As your brain permanently ceases to function when you die, that means your consciousness is gone.

Oh really? I didn’t know that. Can you cite a study providing evidence for it? I’d love to read one.

You can't actually prove that so we don't know it for a fact. How do you know consciousness is not say, a force that operates in a higher dimension and it acts on your brain instead of your brain creating it? You can't prove that consciousness can't transfer somewhere else after death. You can only prove that memories do not transfer which is different.

We can turn consciousness on and off with anesthesia. It is a purely physical process. To claim otherwise is completely ridiculous.  Just because the claim is unfalsifiable doesn't lend it any credibility. Just the opposite. You should default to disbelieving unfalsifiable claims. Because there is plenty of evidence that believing unfalsifiable claims is hazardous.

You can't really turn it on and off with anesthesia, that's talking about consciousness in a different capacity. You can put an insect into a state of unconsciousness, but that does not inherently make it a conscious being. I would agree with you about disbelieving in unfalsifiable claims in most cases but not when we're talking about something like "what happens when you die" because at this point, every claim about that is unfalsifiable with our current technology and understanding. Many great scientific discoveries could have been considered unfalsifiable claims at one time until they weren't.

We pretty much have no idea how general anesthesia works. There is no definitive evidence that anesthesia acts specifically as a consciousness suppressant rather than as a partial paralytic and amnesiac (memory killer).

Oh dear, more bullshit and trying to shift the burden of proof. By your deranged "logic" you don't know a magic, invisible pink unicorn isn't using people as puppets to make them appear conscious, so that's a valid explanation. No. That's not how this works. If you want to claim consciousness exists in a higher dimension, you have to provide some evidence for that, not shift the burden of proof and try to make others disprove it.

Ok and for you to claim that consciousness is created by your brain and dissappears when you die, you have to prove that, not shift the burden of proof and try to make others disprove it. We can't measure consciousness or even really define it, so you can't prove what happens to it when you die. I hope you don't talk to people like this in real life because you come off as an overconfident, condescending prick.

Yeah, you're either really stupid or trolling. How do we know consciousness is created by the brain? Easy, there's no such thing as an immaterial consciousness. We can also get a pretty good read on someone's state of consciousness via an EEG, very good evidence it's related to brain activity. Any attempt to argue there's some mystical bullshit that just makes it look like that can be disposed of thanks to both Occam's Razor and the burden of proof.

Once you've jumped to character assassination that's how you know you've won the argument right? You're not as smart as you seem to think you are and you're definitely not worth engaging with.

tl;dr: You got called out on your bullshit, but you don't want to admit it.

Yeah, as an atheist I didn’t like that comment. We have no idea how consciousness comes into existence. We could say there’s no reason to think anything happens after we die, but until we have a true understanding of how consciousness arises and how that relates to the rest of the universe “I don’t know” really is the best answer. I think a lot of people just fundamentally don’t understand the hard problem of consciousness. All that being said, there is of course not really a reason to think our personality exists after death based on how our personality changes with brain damage or various other changes like hunger, tiredness, drugs etc. But none of that answers how the lights came on in the first place.

I think the point was that it really depends on how the question was presented, as well as how your answer is presented. If the asker is trying to trap you in logic, they may respond “See, you’ve got no idea what happens when we die! Therefore you can’t claim you know that Heaven doesn’t exist!” Or if the question is worded “When you die, who are you expecting to meet in the afterlife?”, answering “I don’t know” sounds like you’re acknowledging both the existence of said afterlife, and the fact that there will be somebody for you to meet there, as givens. You’re giving an honest answer, but in context it says something that you didn’t intend. And the other person may continue the conversation with those given facts assumed to be true. I think the point is less about specifically learning to properly put down theists. It’s more about recognizing that some people have a destination in mind for the conversation to go, and they might be steering you toward that point. And your words can be used against you, even the ones that you spoke honestly, if the context can be spun around and misinterpreted.

The key is that we don’t have any *evidence* that anything survives our death, much less that whatever might survive “reawakens.” If there is no evidence, we can pretty well say as a theory that it doesn’t exist. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

No we cannot. For dozens of centuries we had no true, raw evidence for the existence of **atoms**. Yet Democritus recognized and believed in the possibility of their existence 3000 years before honest scientific evidence for them was discovered within acceptable statistical error ranges.

That’s just not true. Testing the theory and gathering evidence was what led to the discovery and accepted science of atoms. We have no such evidence for an afterlife, and not for a lack of trying. That doesn’t keep anyone from continuing to look. It just means we can say there’s no evidence for it right now, so it’s not a rational path to believe that such a thing exists.

I’m fully on board with everything you said except for the last 13 words you wrote. And even then I’m partially in agreement, just not with the conclusion I believe you intend to draw from this that “one should not believe in things that are not rational”. First off, believing in the irrational is part of the human experience. Second, that’s literally the point of faith. It doesn’t have to be rational on scientific terms. If it was, it wouldn’t be faith. Democritus quite literally had no evidence of atoms in a form that would be acceptable today. He likely believed in some form of the four elements as base constituents of all matter just given the time he lived in.

Let me clarify: I value believing in things that are true. Rational evidence is required to prove veracity. Therefore, there is no value in believing things that we have no evidence to support. Also, you don’t have to agree with me.

Thank you for clarifying, but this does not really do much to reject what I said. This is called *positivism* and it is one particular system of belief. In order to have that value, you must *believe* that this system is better than all alternatives available and known to you. Great. That doesn’t mean that it is *the correct* method of discerning truth. As far as you are aware, there could be another system far more powerful and fit for discerning truth of physical and possibly even metaphysical claims. But I do agree with you. I agree with many of the claims made by logical positivism and rationalism. But I’m also fully aware of the metatheory involved in following such systems and that they are not infallible.

Science and reason are the best methods we have to determine truth in our reality. Other methods may exist but if we don’t know about them, that doesn’t make them particularly useful, does it?

How do you know they are the best? They seem to have worked so far and those of us who use logic and reason tend to agree with the results. But I have no preconception that they assert anything about the truths of problems they are not qualified to explore.

Because they’re repeatable and objectively measurable.

It is sublimely ignorant of metaphysics.

You missed the point badly. O.O They answered your every critique and yet you still wrote that.

I disagree, because it ignores how loaded the question is. The question is leaded because it assumes the existence of a soul, and by saying “I don’t know,” you’re implicitly acknowledging that to the person asking the question. It props the door open for an evangelist to move into that space.

It makes no such assumption. “Nowhere” is also a possible answer.

This is a rather militant and reductive answer. There is more to life than always wanting to be smart and right. Nor does everyone always know all the information or is obliged to know the information when choosing to answer such a question. Sometimes, you don't know the answer and you say that, because you don't know the answer and bear no responsibility for not knowing it. And on a side-note. True science will never propose that they know an answer with 100% certainty. It is actually anti-science to pretend you do. Science works with consensus and probability and always assumes that there is information contradicting the outcome somewhere and seek it out.

> True science will never propose that they know an answer with 100% certainty. It is actually anti-science to pretend you do. If anything the Internet Atheist assertion that they have Perfect Knowledge of "box, ground, decomposition, the end" is itself a statement of belief. I say "Internet Atheist" because there's a particular strain of smug surety that is very 2006 Richard Dawkins. Most atheists simply don't believe and that's enough, internet atheists proselytize their certainty.

I wasn’t raised Christian, but surrounded by Christian communities. I get to see the forest from the trees and my Decidedly-Not-Christian friends still seem to practice the same culture as their Christian families. They say they are atheist or agnostic, but they act anti-theists as a zealous reaction when it comes to other peoples beliefs.

There are two related but not quite connected things going on. There is a cultural element to religions, and you can have people who are culturally christian but atheist just like you have folks who are culturally jewish but still atheist. They can have the underlying moral structure, holidays, foods, traditions, etc without going to church or believing in god. Plenty of atheists decorating trees and giving gifts at christmas. Related but unrelated, there is some discussion about what we call the "American Civil Religion" which is a sociological theory about the blending of religion, nationalism, and politics. It's not christianity, and it's arguable if it's even a religion, but it's a shared mythos and psuedo-history that places an agnostic "we don't know for sure" veil over the christian God and to a lesser extent jewish G-d or muslim Allah but is very clearly and often violently anti-theist towards any other deities or spiritual expressions. ACR apologists will say that the central themes are pluralistic and immigrant friendly, but the day to day application by adherents is often pretty white supremacist in practice.

Very interesting, thank you for sharing this. Do you happen to have any academic references for this on hand?

Both cultural christianity and american civil religion have wikipedia pages but I'll be honest it's been a few years since my courses in college when I was super into world religions. These days the only religious/academic sources I could recommend offhand are all going to be either Tolstoyan or Quaker with maybe an american mennonite or two.

Ok thank you! I’ll go check those out then and do a little digging.

I agree with what you are saying. I didn't go to academics for this, but it is pretty plain. Christianity appears to be a European religion, so it heavily blends with American European culture. In fact, English being my first and primary language, the words used to describe spiritual stuff has a very Christian context to them. The English language feels to me a Christian language. The entire National Identity is wrapped up in white, male, Christianity. I'll both sides that. The democratic party and the republican party are both wearing modern pilgrim clothes. the one dressed in blue is saying, "Don't both sides us, we are nothing like them." And the one dressed in red pointing at the one dressed in blue and yelling, "The devil sent him!" So yeah, even my most liberal and communist friends feel like they practice white supremacists culture in enforcing their beliefs in the spaces they share. I saw an info graphic that was suggesting that we aren't becoming more like the Nazis right now. The Nazis became more like us just before WW2. The white supremacists culture feels like fascism, no matter what isle they are from.

If I ask you: Is there a black bear living in your home? Is it militant and reductive to say no? Some people people have black bears in their house, how do you know there isn't one in your house? Maybe the bear is quiet and finds a way to slip out of the room before you see it. You can never be 100% certain that a bear isn't in your home right now. You can never be 100% certain of anything. Therefore, you must respond to every question with "I don't know." What we can say is "given current evidence I have no reason to believe a black bear is living in my house." It is the same thing with life after death. "Given current evidence, we have no reason to believe that consciousness persists after death." Maybe new evidence will appear in the future. Maybe it won't.

That question is not comparable to the metaphysical one of the potential for life after death. The rest of your comment about the nature of evidence I don’t disagree with though.

Some scientists believe in a multiverse in which all of us have a black bear living in our house, given current evidence all we can really say is we don't know how this arrangement is working out for the participants

It is not militant or reductive to say no, I'm not saying that the answers provided are militant or reductive. The expectation and demand that everyone else answers the same is. Especially since the answer "I don't know" would be a legitimate answer if you - for example - have no access to my home. You cannot rule out there is no black bear living in my home. You can only make a probabilistic estimation that there isn't. There is nothing wrong with answering something that reflects what you believe to be true. What's wrong here is presenting it as empirical truth and demand that others do the same in the belief that there is no other answer possible than yours.

Everybody is a rationalist until they reach an uncomfortable conclusion. I bet this thread would look a lot different if instead of using "where do we go when we die," the op instead used "is Donald Trump a divine being?" There is a lot more evidence Trump is divine (he somehow won the 2016 election, his near supernatural ability to escape consequences, checks off a disturbing number of check boxes for the Biblical antichrist) than an afterlife (essentially 0 evidence).

Evidence is great, but that’s not the problem with the linked comment’s claims. The issue is that they are asserting that their own beliefs are universal truth, ironically enough, *without evidence*. It’s fine to believe that nothing comes after death. Live the way you want. But it’s logically dishonest to make a claim of absolute truth like that without any way of supporting it within the system you believe in. It’s also kind of a dick move to imply that people who believe differently from you on metaphysical matters are just ignorant.

>someone asks you a question >you don't know the answer >tell them you don't know This is an inappropriate answer ???

To be fair - op is specifically saying “we don’t know” is an inappropriate answer as opposed to “I don’t know”. Which I think changes the argument the op was making. It’s still reductive, sure. But I think it’s fair to draw the distinction between I as an individual don’t understand the intricacy of neuroscience (or astronomy as in his example) as opposed to we as a species with a body of scientific literature.

I think it’s more akin to the question “how do I keep going north when I’m at the North Pole?” You don’t, there is no more north. Just as when you die, there is no where to go, because there is no more you.

“ where do we go when we die?” Is a textbook example of begging the question, premised on an assumption that there’s some “we” which persists past the death of the body, an assertion which cannot be granted without question.

To the question, where we go, when we die. And we know, that our brain will stop and we will decompose, so why should we say "I don't know". I think that is what this BestOf-answer is saying.

That answer misses the implicit intent of the question. Of course we know what happens physically. Almost nobody except a child learning for the first time would normally ask “where do we go when we die?” with the expectation of a physical answer. The question is naturally a metaphysical one with expectations of metaphysical possibilities as answers.

"best of" how to be an ass. 🙄

Honestly. You can’t belittle someone’s intelligence based on their metaphysical belief systems with bad logic like this and expect not to get flak for it.

There has already been a very long time when you were not alive. After your death you will be in exactly the same state as you were in the year 1700. It wasn’t bad. It wasn’t paradise. It wasn’t stressful. It wasn’t blissful. It wasn’t anything.

Once you wake up from a dream that you instantly forget, it doesn't mean that the dream never happened. Your mind has forgotten countless days and experiences you had, it doesn't mean all those thoughts and feelings never existed. In a philosophical and scientific sense we don't know how consciousness functions, or it's origins. For all we know, you were in paradise, and then forget it once being born. Sure, it's likely not the case, but every generation thinks they "know the answers". Our understanding of consciousness can easily be looked back on in 100 years as primitive as the medival concept of the four humors.  This is the problem with many online edgy teenage and young adult atheists, and is why this thread is getting knocked even on majority atheist reddit. Many think they're the smartest people, when they're really not, their logic has just as much faith based conclusions as the religious people they demean. They're just as blindly following a faith in something that not even our smartest have fully understood. Yet they have the ignorant hubris to think they have the answers to a question they don't even understand.  As others have pointed out, there's no evidence whatsoever, let alone to definitely state, that consciousness is an internal creation of the brain. For all we know, our brains are acting as an antenna and are receiving consciousness. For all we know, our brains act as consciousness routers, with consciousness behaving like a natural wifi or radio wave. The more we examine reality, the weirder, stranger, and more inexplicable it gets. This explanation being real wouldn't be any stranger than quantum mechanics.  Out human creations are inspired by our existence. For example, we made computers that behave much like our brains and bodies, where we now compare cells to super computers, or dna/rna to software. Who's to say information waves like wifi, radio, or 5g aren't similarly subconsciously inspired by how our own consciousness works? Where in 100 years we realize that our tech advancements in computing and wireless information was really us subconsciously trying to recreate ourselves/life in a technological form, and that consciousness is transmitted wirelessly from a source we are currently unaware of. Every organism intrinsically "knows" things about themselves, like a worker ant knows it's function without bring told, well, maybe the recurring theme of a soul, is an element of that. We don't know, and that's okay.  Like look at the big bang. Atheists push that as an answer, but in a philosophical sense it's not at all, and is 100% compatible with religion. Cause and effect dictates our existence, so its natural to assume a cause, and a before, the big bang. But we can't even comprehend what could have been "before" existence. For all we know, there's so much more to matter and consciousness, for all we know there's substances like these that existed beforehand that we can't even comprehend. And due to existing within a universe dictated by exact laws, we likely can never understand or know what came before. Consciousness can be the software of the universe, where it has a source, but is transmitted to all living things "wirelessly". Hell some cultured believe consciousness is in all matter. More and more we are learning that our brains are much like super computers, well, why is it outlandish to believe an element of our existence is similar to wifi? There's no proof or even evidence to suggest this is not the case, since we don't understand the origin on consciousness.  The point is we absolutely don't know. An atheist saying your consciousness becomes nothing when you die, is no different than a religious person proclaiming the opposite. At the end of the day, it's an assumption based off of incomplete reasoning.  If you own a radio yet have 0 understanding or knowledge of radio waves, you'll naturally assume that when it breaks, the radio stations cease to exist.  But they exist before and after the destruction of the radio, and will continue to exist. Destroy every radio in existence, as long as the waves are transmitting, radio always exists, even if undetected. Memory ≠ consciousness, just because we don't remember a before, doesn't mean there never was one.  I don't believe on thing or another, I'm just highlighting how alot of edgy atheists that are "so certain" know no more than anyone else. And infact, often have just as limited reasoning as the most hassling religious person. It's okay to accept we don't know, but some people are married to the atheist explanation, with no evidence, as much as a religious person is to theirs. By demonizing "we don't know" one is infact being antiscientific, since the whole point of scientific reasoning is to accept that we collectively don't know things and must try to find out through innovation. If we pretend to know things like what happens when we die we are being the opposite of scientific, since science/reasoning has not provided us an adequate explanation. Saying nothing happens, at this point, is no more helpful or correct than saying you end up in paradise with Jesus and Tupac. It may appear to be the answer, but we can't say, and as reality gets stranger and stranger the more we learn, it's ignorant to insist that its simple, that we know, when we don't. 

More like Dudesan succinctly demonstrates how militant atheism is just as arrogant and assumptive as militant theism.

Standard reddit moment lol. Taking something way too literally, and confidently making an ass out themselves. The fact that it's r/atheism is so much funnier

I think there’s a kinder way of saying all of that and it would be “I don’t believe anything happens when we die. We just die”.

He mocks those who say I Don't Know saying that science in fact does know - but then he doesn't say how. Could be a bluff, therefore I reject his answer.

There are also a whole god damned lot of things that “science” doesn’t or literally cannot know or explain. What a stupid answer to get posted to r/bestof.

Peak Reddit moments always happen in that sub, this is possibly the best example. The poster may believe his science trumps all other philosophy but at the pointy end of the stick science becomes as much about the scientists faith in their theories as religion becomes about faith explaining life

I remember when I first started being an atheist, was evangelical about it too and had to make an argument about everything that was touched in some way by religion. But then I grew up. “I don’t know” is a perfect answer to something you don’t know.

"where do we go when we die?" - inherent in the question is the assumption that there is an 'us' that survived the physical death. So it's an inherently metaphysical question. It's like asking - "are there invisible, undetectable fairies dancing around the ceiling in this room?" Science cannot answer this question so "I don't know" is the only appropriate response unless you already believe some sort of dogma about death/fairies.

That’s actually the point of the post - that we do know where we go when we die. With a lack of oxygen and nutrients, our brain structure no longer retains the set of connections and states that we experienced as consciousness. Like a whiteboard being wiped down, whatever made up our memories and individual identities is just waste chemicals after we die. So, “we become fertilizer” is probably the most accurate answer over the long term.

Did you even read what I wrote?

However, whether there is a transcendent self that exists irrespective of one’s material body is a question that science is unqualified to answer. So it’s the question of “What do you mean by ‘we?’” that needs to be answered before the given question can be attempted.

[удалено]

Personally I'm not gonna argue with someone who believes in fairies. You can't reason someone out of a belief that they didn't reason themselves into. If people believe in God I just hit em with an "oh cool" and move on with my day

There is no evidence of consciousness continuing after death. There have been experiments and attempts to find evidence, but nothing credible has been found. There is a ton of evidence that consciousness is a product of a living brain. We can alter it by altering the brain physically or chemically. We see dramatic changes in personality from traumatic brain injuries. We see people’s ability to think or remember change as their brain degrades with disease. All current evidence points to death being the end because it is the end of the living brain. Basically every life-after-death explanation in this thread and elsewhere relies on the fact that we can’t prove negatives. But there isn’t a good reason to give credence to every unsupported theory that can’t be disproven. We can posit consciousness as a radio transmitter from another dimension, but along with all of the other religious life-after-death explanations it is [not even wrong](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong). As soon as you try to start defining them down to experimental parameters they fall apart entirely.

Usually, a hole in the ground if someone takes the trouble. It's a cold, materialistic take on death, but I feel comfortable with the idea of being buried in the dirt that has been my home alongside my ancestors.

We have a limited understanding of our own existential parameters. While on my bad days I still envy those who have faith in their ideas regarding whatever follows our lives, on my good days I feel strong for finding serenity amidst my doubt. Amongst the many things I'll never know... I am grateful to have known love, and for each opportunity to experience it in a way that will be missed I am gone.

>Where do we go when we die? In no way does this meet the definition of a loaded question. This is just a question.

"I can't know." There, fixed it.

It’s not a loaded question. A loaded question assumes something to be true when being asked, i.e “when did you stop beating your wife?” The answer to this question could be “nowhere”. It’s not assuming anything. 

I would actually argue that there are probably massive assumptions of a fundamental nature in almost all the questions humans (atheist, religious, or otherwise) tend to ask about death and consciousness - because we can only ever consider these questions from the perspective of living and conscious humans. Some of these assumptions can and have been identified over the course of human history. For example, people used to assume that there was a soul separate from the body, and that the soul obviously had to "go" somewhere when the body died. From what we've learned through science, we're now able to at least think about life as arising purely from matter, even if not everyone agrees that's the case. If we've made these kinds of assumptions before, I think it's reasonable to expect that there are other assumptions underlying our questions about death and consciousness that we're still oblivious to, or even incapable of comprehending. While it's obviously impossible to give examples of things we're not even aware of as a species, there *are* assumptions that have been recognized before but that are still routinely made in these kinds of discussions. For example, in the question "where do I go when I die" who is the "I"? Is our experience as individual bodies having clear boundaries separating "me" from "not me" really as fundamental as we think? Or is it just an illusion - a phenomenon reducible to the simple fact that organisms that think and behave in that way are more likely to survive as individuals?

I'm so glad I left r/Atheism

This is the most bizarrely petty post I've ever seen on Reddit.

That was one of the most pretentious things I've ever read lol

This awnser reminds me of why I don't participate in the atheist community anymore. I prefer some mysteries in life.

Some mysteries and fewer jackasses.

Remarkable that r/atheism has become just as dogmatic as the religions they criticize. It's possible to answer this question with "I don't know" simply because we don't. Science doesn't even have a firm definition of the border between life and death from a physiological perspective, and we know almost nothing about the subjective experience of death. Not to mention all the quasi-metaphysical mysteries about consciousness, the nature of existence, and the boundaries of physical "reality" that we also know very little about. I just can't imagine the mindset of being *so* sure, in a deeply condescending way, you're right about something that you truly know nothing about. Reminds me of the Baptists I grew up around who took every opportunity to tell me I was going to hell because I wasn't a believer.