Posted: Nov 16, 2010 5:52 am
darwin2 wrote:byofrcs wrote:Did anyone explain how the one year old baby who has just died of some disease knows and understands the "scientific method" ?
The baby is clearly an atheist with no clear belief in any god, heck it can't really talk enough to pray, and I know of no kindergarten/nursery school that focuses on science at such an early age.
Those who believe in reincarnation can give a possible answer. There is a lot of anecdotal information on reincarnation but unfortunately there is no scientific evidence to support it.
The mechanism that you described was not reincarnation. Also with reincarnation very few suppose that you retain your memories of the day-to-day life from this current life. You retain some rolled up assessment (e.g. karma) of your life implicitly in how you come back thus a bad person comes back lower down the pecking order in the karma.
As a materialist I already subscribe to the concept of information theoretic death. Your consciousness is formed from a combination of your memories and a platform that gives you sufficient sense data (i.e. your body). You may be physically dead but you are not completely dead until the memories i.e. the information that makes the "you" is sufficiently destroyed. In most cases this is usually one in the same thing but in some cases the physically dead have been recovered (e.g. children who have had their body temperature reduced from extreme hypothermia so they are clinically dead have been brought back to life). To me when that information is destroyed then your are dead and there is no mechanism in this universe that can recover that information. Same as erasing a hard disk. The information is gone forever.
To suggest that your information survives the destruction of the media in which it is stored presumes the supernatural exists. Does that work for hard disks ?. Last summer I had a 500 Gig portable hard disk get knocked off the table by my dog. Will the data on it be floating about in some afterlife ? I had duplicates of the data but it was annoying. It was SATA disk - I don't know if this helps.
Without evidence for this supernatural realm anything said about what happens in that is complete conjecture. Face facts - you're going to die and you will cease to exist. It is far better to plan for that then conjecture your survival. Using the "scientific method" as some pixie dust to add verisimilitude to your conjecture is nonsensical given the "scientific method" is methodical naturalism and so the supernatural realm just doesn't exist for that. If it did work out as you describe then (well excluding the time I spend looking for my 72 virgins) we would look at the world around us the same as we look at the world now. For most people that would revolve around sex, food and drink.