Posted: Aug 26, 2016 7:23 pm
ScholasticSpastic wrote:jamest wrote:The issue of life/consciousness after death is not something science can ever be involved within, for the very suggestion that life/consciousness can exist after the body/brain stops functioning would necessitate that life/consciousness be defined in terms other than a functioning brain/body.
If there is something that effects the matter of a human body, that something can be measured. It doesn't matter whether that something is material or not.
The possibility of life after death does not entail dualism, but let's ignore that issue. As a fact, IF there is life after the death of the brain/body, then life is NOT that brain/body. So anything measurable within the brain/body would not be indicative of said life. And since we are discussing the possibility of life AFTER the brain/body has ceased to function, then there would be no functioning event to measure anyway.
The bottom line is that science can only measure material occurrences, so IF life is distinct to those occurrences within the brain/body, then science isn't really measuring 'life' anyway.
If it causes changes in material things, it isn't beyond the purview of science. If it doesn't cause changes in material things, it cannot have had anything to do with animating a physical body because there's no way it could have interacted with the body.
You could say that life has agency, but that conclusion would have arisen from reason not a tape-measure. What else could you say about life in terms of physical measurements if it were [by definition] completely disassociated from the material body? Nothing.
The only way we make things work with a scientifically unavailable afterlife is if we decide that bodies are, themselves, immaterial. But then we have to chuck modern medicine out the window. Enjoy your homeopathic vaccines.... far away from me.
The consequence of deciding that bodies are not material does not entail that they themselves are an immaterial substance. It may well be, as per my own philosophy, that they are nothing but an experience interpreted from the constituents of experience (the sensations/qualia for instance).