Sunday 1 April 2018

At last I understand...

I think on reflection I have got everything wrong about there being an afterlife. We desperately want an afterlife, but we have to face facts. Just consider the radical personality changes that may be brought about by injury to the brain. Phineas Gage, to take the most famous example. If his new obnoxious personality was caused by his damaged brain, it would be silly to deny that his normal personality wasn’t caused by his pre-damaged brain!

And what is this thing, this “supernatural soul”, which is supposed to survive anyway? It’s invisible, has no mass or indeed any other physical properties. In fact it cannot be detected by any means whatsoever. What is left by saying it exists??

Since the birth of modern science in the 17th Century, science has been stunningly successful in furnishing us in with knowledge about the world, and has been an extraordinarily fruitful one in terms of the subsequent prediction and manipulation of our environment and in the creation of our technology. This strongly suggests that modern science pretty much accurately describes reality. OK, we have yet to fully explain consciousness. But the brain is the most complex object in the Universe. Give science a chance! Eventually we should be able to understand how the brain produces consciousness. There is no need to invoke a magical soul.

Are we really to suppose there might be supernatural and spooky entities and influences -- such as souls, magic, spirits, demons and what have you-- which somehow escapes the steely gaze of science, and to achieve this by having such supernatural entities exert no measurable influence on reality whatsoever! Why should we believe in the existence of the non-physical, which, by definition, our measuring instruments cannot detect?

People need to get real!

I have got real . .at last, finally I have got real. I now fully admit to my previous error in thinking there is an afterlife. Or sky daddies, or anything else magical. Let us henceforth trust what SCIENCE is telling us about the world.


HA HA!!!....No, not really ...APRIL FOOLS!!! 

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