Death demystified.

"…life does not consist mainly—or even largely—of facts and happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of thoughts that is forever blowing through one’s head."  

—Mark Twain 

Update: I just found this great post over at Math With Bad Drawings, as well as the great little cartoon above which seem to be at odds with what I've said on the topic of death and transferring consciousness. Both use the Star Trek transporter, or something just like it. I wonder if I can convince them that there's nothing to be afraid of about these kinds of transporters? So here is a cleaned up version of my argument on the topic, presented as a thought experiment. Enjoy!

Think for a moment about what it's like to die.

Don't worry about how you got that way; there's no need to be gruesome! Just think about what it would be like to experience the moment or process of death, absent all of the messy, external confusions. If you think there is an experience of being dead that comes afterward, try and imagine that experience. Consider what you could imagine others coming up with in response to such a question. Imagine what your friends might think of death. Picture the death experience of anyone else—a psychic medium, a skeptic, a clergyman, an atheist, a neurologist, a suicide bomber—and just come to a conclusion about which one you think is most likely to be the actual experience for you before you read any further, OK?

Good. Now think of your favorite animal with a silly hat on. You just died. How was it?

Obviously you're not dead and you didn't just die insofar as we understand those words at the moment, but what I'm going to try and convince you of over the course of this blog post is that death (the root experience, not all the moaning and groaning leading up to it) is not really any different from the moment between two thoughts.

Going Deeper: "Is it wrong to talk people out of their faith?"

Hey everyone. I've noticed a few interesting points in the flood of comments on my article at RDFRS that I'd like to respond to. I'll keep updating this post as I find interesting points to comment on, so keep checking in.

About that headline...

"Take away someone's faith" and "Talk someone out of their faith" are the ways that it is commonly phrased by the defensive believer. Obviously it would be wrong to dogmatically assert that their religion is wrong, as it would be wrong to deceive someone into being convinced by bad reasoning and faulty logic to abandon their faith. That's not what I advocate, and it's why I explain how the wording of this dodge is meant to change the subject and make you seem like the bad guy. What I am doing when I have a conversation with a believer is (hopefully) having a plain and open discussion of the evidence and reasons for their belief. The goal is to get them to evaluate that evidence for themselves (as you should constantly do for yourself!). If you're both honest about it then you should together reach the correct conclusion (which I am currently convinced is non-religion and the abandonment of faith). You and they are learning to be better at reasoning!

Science vs. Wishful Thinking

"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." —Traditional

It seems that there is some distance between most people's understanding of this traditional aphorism, often mistakenly attributed in origin to Carl Sagan, and its meaning. The cause in most cases may be found in the nuance of its usage, but I'd like to explain another principle which is likely leaking into its meaning: the impossibility of induction.

Scientific knowledge is based on inductive reasoning; you take a small sample and infer the larger result. This is actually a very bad way of proving things! Imagine being asked to prove that there are infinitely many prime numbers and responding by listing all the prime numbers you can think of, noting that there are more than you can count, and pointing to a bunch of other problems in math that would be solved if there were an infinity of primes. You'd be laughed out of the room if you claimed this was proof of anything in front of a  mathematician! Mathematicians use this kind of reasoning to make conjectures and hypotheses, but since math is based on a set of axioms (facts that are considered true by definition), any claim in mathematics ought to be able to be proven deductively and inarguably (there are some complicated caveats to this, but for the kinds of math useful in practical problems, this is fair to say. Before anyone goes all Gödel on me, consider that you may be being an asshole, you know what I mean.)

Reason is what is left.

There is a problem with unconstrained human thought that dogmatism is fairly good at correcting over the short run: Sensible, coherent, valid arguments are far more difficult to construct than nonsense, but proper reason is often required in response to bad arguments. The result is that it is easily possible to spend all of one's energy debunking bogus critiques of good works, essentially spinning one's intellectual wheels in an unfathomable quagmire of ignorance or even dishonesty. This is one of the huge benefits of dogmatic thinking- It quashes the spread of heretical ideas and even their formulation in the minds of its subscribers. No lay Catholic need waste time grappling with the intellectual difficulties of salvation and damnation; they already know that the Church is guaranteed to be right.

Those of us who wish to forge ahead into the intellectual frontier are then deprived of the protected status afforded established religions and other doctrines. The result is the production of and response to articles such as "Christopher Hitchens' lies do atheism no favors" by Curtis White. I hesitate to attach adjectives to pieces like this unless they apply to the text as a whole so, while parts may be dishonest or ignorant*, I can't call it anything but depressing. The obviously interested and engaged White is so far off the mark that it enters the realm of things which make the aforementioned unfathomability of the pseudo-intellectual muck readily apparent. From a list of anecdotes as part of his response to Hitchens' so-called anecdotal God Is Not Great, to what seems like an out of hand rejection of the physical manifestation of conscience in the brain**, to a rather obvious straw man argument in which White essentially converts Hitchens' thesis from "religion poisons everything" to "only religion poisons anything".