Kurt Gödel, his mother and the argument for life after death
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> If the world is rationally organised and has meaning, then it must be the case. For what sort of a meaning would it have to bring about a being (the human being) with such a wide field of possibilities for personal development and relationships to others, only then to let him achieve not even 1/1,000th of it?
Far from my petty mind to challenge a great thinker like Gödel, but I don't follow this line of thinking.
First of all, the world being rational is a property humans ascribe to it. On an atomic level matter follows specific rules, yes, and we extrapolate a certain order from this on a higher level. But I don't see how any of it can be defined as rational, or having any sort of deeper meaning.
Even if we assume that to be true, why would that be a reason to believe that humans are expected to deliver some sort of "meaning" to the universe? And why would that entitle us to immortality? This all sounds deeply egotistical.
> Only the human being can come into a better existence through learning, that is, give his life more meaning.
I wonder what Gödel would think about modern AI. As we have found, learning is not a special ability of humans, and can, in fact, be simulated. That on its own doesn't grant eternal life, though AI certainly has more chances of survival, not being bound by our fleshy meat sacks and all.
I don't know. I'm not well read in philosophy, and my only exposure to it was during a semester at college, but this particular philosophy reads like someone trying to bring peace about mortality to their elder mother, and not like a fully fleshed out line of thinking. Which is fine. Life is indeed strange and confusing, and we should find peace in whatever way we can, but maybe there's a reason why these thoughts were never made public.
Instead bound by substrate and power grid that are both inefficient and minimally redundant. I'd wager more on the meat sacks.
Might turn out that organic life is pretty optimal already and we still dominate in numbers, or not, that kind of specific is really difficult to guess at even once the first example gets made (look at all the people looking at each version of GenAI, or even video game graphics 30 years before GenAI, and arguing that no further improvements are possible; or in the other direction, Concorde was both the first and the last supersonic passenger liner).
But I really like that the answer to a most ancient question such as "what is life" is building up to something like "it's all nanobots controlled by molecular computers"...
I think we can tell the difference between engineered and evolved (but note that simulated evolution is still evolution) — oddities like the path of the recurrent laryngeal nerve are cited as evidence against an intelligent designer, and I expect it isn't the only such oddity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recurrent_laryngeal_nerve
> But I really like that the answer to a most ancient question such as "what is life" is building up to something like "it's all nanobots controlled by molecular computers"...
If you've not already watched it, I recommend this video by A Capella Science: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObvxPSQNMGc&t=198s
Besides, it would be a very naïve stance to think the universe as it is today was drawn complete and definitively. There are a lot more nuanced and intricate creationist worldviews and they have been espoused in a clear headed way by some of the most fundamental characters in the history of science.
On the other topic, although the mere existence of errors would count against a supposedly all knowing and all powerful designer, that combination is not found in most religions, and not even all versions of Christianity.
You might not be read in philosophy, but surely you understand the word "if"
The axioms are of course suspect, but if you give reasonable interpretations to them then the conclusion is not far fetched as they basically necessitate some kind of creator.
If we ever have the means to accurately simulate reality - which we already do, at small scales and with significant time dilation - then it becomes almost inevitable that we reside within a simulation, as the simulations would vastly outnumber physical reality, and therefore the balance of probability is that we reside within a simulation - possibly nested within many other layers of simulation.
It isn’t necessary to simulate an entire universe at utter fidelity - just that which is observed - which rather neatly ties into the current understanding of quantum mechanics, and waveform collapse. It also isn’t necessary to do it in realtime, as from within the simulation all would appear synchronous regardless - aeons could pass between states, while the substrate orbits a white dwarf whiling away the cold eternity at the heat death of the parent universe.
Whether that implies an afterlife is another matter - perhaps we are ephemeral after all - but taking Gödel’s argument about the wastefulness of imbuing consciousness only to then snuff it out, half baked, it would stand to reason that any simulator would seek to accrue that experience, and use it for other purposes.
Perhaps there is only one consciousness, asynchronously living every life, every existence. I find this useful to bear in mind, as the person to whom I am asshole today may be an aspect of me from another iteration.
I prefer to look at this not as woo-woo, or belief, but rather logical deduction based on sound premises.
Of course, it may all be bunkum, and we may be alone in the universe, and life may indeed be meaningless and fleeting - but we cannot know, as that would foul up the simulation no end.
One of my favourite parts of Bostrom’s seminal paper is an aside, but one I feel would have appealed to Gödel had he lived to read it:
> Reality may thus contain many levels. Even if it is necessary for the hierarchy to bottom out at some stage – the metaphysical status of this claim is somewhat obscure
Bostrom’s argument, although it starts from materialist premises, contains within it an anti-materialist potential: What if there is no basement universe? What if it is software all the way down? Given Gödel’s anti-materialism, I think that potential would have appealed to him
Are you saying that belief is woo-woo? Curious to understand how you're relating the two.
Knowledge is based upon rationale and testable hypotheses.
Free will is entirely debatable.
In the same vein, the consciousness of others is also not certain, but I err on the side of caution.
I don’t “believe” in human rights, however they probably create a better living environment for all, therefore I would say they are a good thing.
Your brain will act according to physics.
Also, for whom is it an illusion? ;)
For example, the table of elements expresses the properties of integers as inherent to reality. As such, it is rational and rationally-ordered.
This is not so much “philosophy” as it is “logic”, it is the conclusion of philosophy and mathematics and the subsequent origin of the computational reality.
Oh, and some of them (either nearly or exactly half) are negative.
The table of elements falls a little short here.
Well, it doesn't quite work that way. Yes, you can put the negative integers in 1:1 correspondence with the positive integers, but you can also put them in 1:1 correspondence with the positive integers that are divisible by 2, or 3, or 3,000... or, for that matter, the negative integers that are divisible by three thousand. All of those sets have the same cardinality (often called "countably infinite").
There are, however, provably more real numbers than there are integers.
It is unknown whether there are any sets whose cardinality lies between the cardinality of the set of integers and the cardinality of the set of real numbers.
Hands up anyone who hasn't considered a stay at the infinite hotel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert%27s_paradox_of_the_Gra...
"Counting stuff" can be generalised to infinite sets in different ways: cardinality is one (arguably the most common) of them, but natural density or measure are others.
That and being a genius was easy when the majority were functionally illiterate disciples of the religion they grew up in.
You also seem to be rationalizing an assumption that there were no atheists thousands of years ago, and yet there were.
There's no reason to believe that our critical thinking powers are any stronger today than they were in the past few thousand years, certainly when it comes to metaphysics. To me, at least, the relative prevalence of various beliefs through recored history suggests something very different about how people of any period, including our own, find and adopt knowledge.
He’d probably think what rational people think - it’s software and has no intelligence, no purpose, no meaning on its own.
Why believe in mainstream science, instead of believing in “creation science”, astrology, crystal woo, whatever? Because there is much stronger evidence for the former than the latter? But what are our standards for judging the strength of evidence? And why should we let those standards have control of our beliefs? Rationality is what gives us those standards, and tells us we are obliged to follow them. Is rationality objective or subjective? Well, if it is subjective, then proponents of those “alternative sciences” can just pick an alternative rationality which supports their own views instead of the mainstream ones, and if rationality is subjective, it ultimately makes the decision between mainstream and “alternative” science subjective too. But, if it is objective, how is it objectively grounded? If we ground its objectivity in empirical science - that is circular, we are grounding it in something which itself depends on it. So, I argue, the objectivity of mainstream empirical science requires the existence of objective rationality external to it. But, for that rationality to truly be objective, it must be an innate feature of reality, not something simply arbitrarily ascribed to it by the human mind. Hence, Gödel‘s premise, that rationality is (in some sense) an objective feature of reality, not just some subjective creation of the human mind, must be true.
I partly agree with that. The universe has a specific set of rules humans have observed, on which we base our understanding of it. What I disagree with is that these observations are proof that the universe itself is rational. There are many aspects of the universe of which we're still completely oblivious, and where our understanding breaks down. The fact we can observe some degree of logic in our observations points to survivorship bias, i.e. the anthropic principle. Simply, we wouldn't be able to make sense of the universe if the conditions didn't exist for us to observe it.
But even if I could concede this rational universe premise, my main objection is the leap of logic to then assert that humans are somehow special, and that our existence wouldn't have a meaning unless we can fulfill some sort of purpose, for which a human lifetime is not sufficient, and therefore, immortality. It's completely absurd. Gödel wraps this in pseudological premises, but it reads to me like he started with the conclusion that God exists, and is trying to arrive to that conclusion with philosophical mumbo jumbo. This is the complete opposite of the scientific method, and is therefore no different than "creation science", and all the other ontological arguments throughout history. I don't see why any _rational_ human being would give it more than the bare minimum of attention it deserves.
Part of the problem here, is what exactly does "rational" mean in this context? Gödel never published this argument of his in a paper, only in a letter to his mother–I expect if he had ever decided to publish it, he would have expressed it more precisely. It is difficult to judge the correctness of an argument when it is an open question what exactly key terms in it mean.
> But even if I could concede this rational universe premise, my main objection is the leap of logic to then assert that humans are somehow special, and that our existence wouldn't have a meaning unless we can fulfill some sort of purpose, for which a human lifetime is not sufficient, and therefore, immortality. It's completely absurd.
That "humans are somehow special" seems to be a near-universal belief found in humanity, across time and across cultures; it is only very recently in human history that any significant proportion of people have doubted or denied it, and even today its doubters and deniers are likely a rather small percentage of the total population, especially on a global level. I don't think we should rush to dismiss as "absurd" a belief which is (arguably) a product of human evolution – doing so calls into question the reliability of our evolved belief-forming machinery, but that questioning risks becoming self-refuting, since the belief in evolution is itself a product of that machinery.
> Gödel wraps this in pseudological premises, but it reads to me like he started with the conclusion that God exists, and is trying to arrive to that conclusion with philosophical mumbo jumbo.
Although Gödel did believe in God, I don't think this particular argument of his depends on belief in God in any way. This in itself is just an argument for an afterlife, and it is entirely possible to believe in an afterlife without believing in God–that's the position of many Buddhists, and also the late 19th / early 20th century British philosopher John McTaggart (who is probably most famous for being the mentor of both Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore).
> This is the complete opposite of the scientific method, and is therefore no different than "creation science", and all the other ontological arguments throughout history. I don't see why any _rational_ human being would give it more than the bare minimum of attention it deserves.
The scientific method deals in empirical arguments. This is not an empirical argument, so is outside the scope of the scientific method. There are many questions the scientific method, based on repeatable experiment and observation, cannot answer. For instance, it cannot answer many mathematical questions–Gödel‘s famous incompleteness theorems are not the product of the scientific method, since empirical experiments and observation are incapable of revealing to us the truth of mathematical theorems.
Gödel was quite ahead of his time. Even though he tended to prefer theory over practical applications, it would be really interesting to have his thoughts on prediction and induction as they relate to the recent advances in machine learning.
For a possibly not useless proxy, train an LLM on his oeuvre and ask it.
LLM is a language model, not Deep Thought from the hitchhikers guide.
all major LLMs are likely already trained on his works, so you can already ask: "Hi, ChatGPT, pretend to be Kurt Godel"
On the other hand, Incompleteness, which targets a specific subset of all possible truths or derivations, can achieve absolute consistency by avoiding these contradictions. This is because it deliberately excludes certain 'axiomatic regions,' maintaining coherence within its defined scope but at the expense of being incomplete.
Gödel's genius lay in unveiling the deceptive nature of mathematics when navigating these axiomatic territories. His theorems present a profound duality: the local context, where truths are confined to specific axiomatic systems, and the universal context, which can be akin to an 'ultimate truth' in spiritual terms. This ultimate truth transcends individual systems, offering a broader, more holistic understanding.
But the unknowability of that so-called "ultimate truth" implies that it's not offering anything, much less any understanding.
The article says Gödel thought that escape hatch for these contradictions is death, because all the local consistency and rationality hints at some greater consistency that must be there. However, that sounds a lot like wishful thinking.
Here, we might consider shifting our perspective from a purely rational approach to one that embraces intentionality and clarity. The journey from understanding Gödel’s theorems to grappling with the notion of contradictions could be seen as a metaphor for our search for truth. It’s not merely about accumulating information or solving logical puzzles; it's about the intentional pursuit of clarity. This pursuit often takes us beyond the realm of intellectual reasoning into a space where understanding becomes more about intuition and less about calculation.
As we delve deeper into this journey, we arrive at a crucial realization: perhaps the reconciliation of these contradictions and the understanding of 'ultimate truth' is less about logical resolution and more about experiential realization. In this light, truth is not something to be dissected in the confines of rational thought alone but to be lived and experienced. The clarity we seek may not lie in the resolution of logical paradoxes but in embracing the experiential wisdom that comes from directly engaging with these truths.
Thus, while Gödel’s work brilliantly navigates the complexities of logical systems, it also inadvertently points us toward a different kind of resolution - one that is realized not through further analysis but through personal experience. In essence, the journey from completeness to incompleteness, from information to intentionality, leads us to a profound experiential understanding, an ultimate truth that is realized rather than deduced.
> there are truths which, though existent within the system, cannot be proven by it
This isn't what the first incompleteness theorem shows - rather, it shows that such "truths" don't exist within the system in the first place (in other words, there are some models in which a certain statement is true and others in which it is false - at least for first-order logic). Otherwise, this would indeed contradict the completeness theorem, but it doesn't.
I don't want to stop you from making your own metaphysical conclusions, but I'm not sure they're actually supported by the theorems themselves.
The fact that different set of axioms lead to different conclusions is... kind of obvious? And not at all what logicians (or probably anybody) mean by "contradiction". Moreover, incompleteness doesn't at all prevent that. You can take ZFC + CH and ZFC + not(CH), both are incomplete, but they obviously entail different conclusions.
In more standard terminology, there are systems that are free of contradictions, such as Presburger arithmetic or propositional calculus.
Gödel's completeness and incompleteness theorems are really about entirely different things, completeness is about first-order logic as a system, incompleteness is about consistent, effectively axiomatisable theories of sufficient strength.
I do not believe there is a heaven unless we build one.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universe, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_principle
In truth, I'm quite happy with the physical laws we have. It means that we are protected by a strong natural barrier. It gives us time to figure out how to become a great civilization without interference of a conqueror. Odds are against us[2], of course, but that need not stop us from giving it the old college try!
> No theory of evolution can be formed to account for the similarity of molecules, for evolution necessarily implies continuous change, and the molecule is incapable of growth or decay, of generation or destruction.
> None of the processes of Nature, since the time when Nature began, have produced the slightest difference in the properties of any molecule. We are therefore unable to ascribe either the existence of the molecules or the identity of their properties to the operation of any of the causes which we call natural.
> On the other hand, the exact equality of each molecule to all others of the same kind gives it, as Sir John Herschel has well said, the essential character of a manufactured article, and precludes the idea of its being eternal and self existent.
> Thus we have been led, along a strictly scientific path, very near to the point at which Science must stop. ... Science is incompetent to reason upon the creation of matter itself out of nothing ...
> ... But though in the course of ages catastrophes have occurred and may yet occur in the heavens, though ancient systems may be dissolved and new systems evolved out of their ruins, the molecules out of which these systems are built — the foundation stones of the material universe — remain unbroken and unworn.
> They continue this day as they were created, perfect in number and measure and weight, and from the ineffaceable characters impressed on them we may learn that those aspirations after accuracy in measurement, truth in statement, and justice in action, which we reckon among our noblest attributes as men, are ours because they are essential constituents of the image of Him Who in the beginning created, not only the heaven and the earth, but the materials of which heaven and earth consist.
But my initial take on Godel’s belief here is that even if he is correct, and the order of the universe demands that there is more to existence than this, why do Humans get the afterlife?
Parameciums don’t have the inherent consciousness or great individual potential, so there is a cutoff where beings would “qualify” for an afterlife to continue developing their potential, as he posits it.
Are lesser apes bound for the afterlife? Are dolphins?
Or are Humans just the first to get here, and we will be supplanted by an even more rationally destined species to be blessed with the afterlife?
Of course it's entirely possible for the universe to have been designed and still operate under purely naturalistic rules, without any hint of supernatural elements, but what would be the point of believing that?
Huh. Don't think I've considered those options before. I'm sure some religions have proposed these possibilities already, though?
He was/is correct about many things, but not about the afterlife. It's just because some people are so lucky to see the face of god by deep and hard mental studies, they believe there is such a thing. And if you have been told all your life that is reality and you 'saw' it, why question it?
What method did you use to objectively determine whether there is an afterlife, in a manner that is impossible to be incorrect?
> And if you have been told all your life that is reality and you 'saw' it, why question it?
You arrived at this extremely popular yet epistemically unsound "fact" entirely independently did you?
And you? Your past comments show you are religious and as such there is no point of replying with much else than this.
And me what?
> Your past comments show...
Do you play any role in this "showing" phenomenon, human not at all prone to cognitive error?
> ...you are religious...
Indeed I am - have you any interest in which religion I practice/ Because it matters.
> ...and as such there is no point of replying with much else than this.
Do you present (or even better: perceive) this as an opinion, or as a fact?
If a fact: from what source do you derive your omniscient knowledge of What Is?
"And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth."
More simply, if you're creating a moral system that values human life to prevent a number of bad things, it's useful to put humans apart from other beings, so that you can justify commandments like "don't kill yourselves please" at the same time as the people being commanded see all other animals killing each other, and themselves need to kill other animals for survival. Put more bluntly, how do you get masses of uneducated people to not behave like animals? You tell them they are special, and definitely not like animals, and you hold them to a higher standard.
Most of everything in the bible at least is used as an illustrative reason to guide you towards some specific behavior. If man isn't made in the image of god and isn't special there's a bunch of things in there that get harder to demand or explain.
In post modern philosophical thinking, there's a reinvention of nature where animals are more "all the same" and should have similar rights to humans, should not be killed etc, which is part of the wider movement to treat the whole earth as our home and to see humans as a part of a wider system rather than special.
And the important part comes right after this. What happens when you hold them to a higher standard? People then choose to accept or reject the standard, and they live according to their (personal) choice.
If some people accept the higher standard and live by it, they prove that they are special, definitely not like animals. That is free will: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will
First there was energy-mass, in one place. The laws of thermodynamics do not allow such an energy-mass.
The energy-mass is at equilibrium. Then the energy-mass is not at equilibrium, and it explodes outward, creating the mass-mass and energy-energy that we know.
Now there are laws, such as the laws of thermodynamics, that will not allow such an energy-mass to exist.
Where did the laws come from? An external source certainly. We know this because the energy-mass was at rest, not exploding; no laws.
Now there are laws suddenly. Laws don't make themselves. It takes external force to create a law. What was that external law-creating force?
I believe it was God with a big G. I have no proof except the very laws of the universe that were put into motion when the energy-mass exploded.
The "Big Bang" theory was literally created by a Catholic priest, the name was coined by an atheist physicist mocking it because it aligned too much with the Bible for his taste
"Notes on Complexity" by Neil Theise
A good chunk of the book goes into details on Gödel's interests in metaphysics (including this topic).
The book is generally a rational exploration of ideas that cross-cut metaphysics, spirituality, and science, and it goes into dialog and correspondence among some deep thinkers in science and philosophy in the past century or so.
Same thing with the ontological argument. Even if you can convince yourself the universe must have some kind of intelligent creator that made it on purpose, that does not imply this creator has any kind of human-intelligible personality and monitors or cares what we do, let alone that it must be the Christian creator or any other specific religion's idea of what a god is. Ironically, my wife put on just this morning an episode of Rick and Morty in which Morty gets trapped in the Roy game and Rick has to go in and convince everyone they're in a video game and are really part of a larger reality, which was meant to be a parody of religion. That is, their universe truly did have an intelligent creator, but they were NPCs in a video game and the larger reality is they were really a 14 year-old boy in the real universe. We have no particularly good reason to prefer a priori Christianity versus Hinduism versus we're all 14 year-old boys trapped in a video game just because we're convinced we have a creator and some part of us survives death in this particular simulation. Notably, the real Morty is still going to die in the real world.
The scientific method proposes begining with conjectures, have Gödel's afterlife hypothesis been disproved? Could it be disproved? Can it trigger thoughts in an intelligence? Are those thoughts valued?
As for alchemy it's a meditative practice that makes sense if you understand it. Where the external alchemists went wrong was no one told them what the symbols meant so they thought it was a physical transformation of base metals rather than of consciousness, which is what it is. In fact, the alchemists aimed for direct spiritual knowledge, not faith. From that perspective it's perfectly rational.
However, historically the instructions were kept secret and shared using coded language. All that philosophers stone business, changing lead into gold etc. But they were just symbols which basically refer to sexual energy and consciousness.
Here's an example of some of the symbology from the Taoist tradition: https://www.mantakchia.com/inner-alchemy-level-iv-lesser-enl...
So, as far as someone like Newton was concerned, a quest for direct spiritual experience rather than just belief makes sense. Some of us just have to know.
This experience - raising the kundalini underpins most major religions IMO. A simple look on reddit should convince you this is a very real phenomenon [1]. Gopi Krishna is the canonical case illustrating the dangers, which is likely one reason the meditation was kept secret.
Interesting, for sure, but some reddit wiki is not convincing in any shape or form.
The warnings section about possible death chimes with Krishna's experience, but also browsing the posts is interesting. People talk of intense heat, strange sensitivities etc, but I can see how someone new to this would probably just write them off as a load of weirdos.
"Hearing this, I mentally repeated the mantra, I noticed that my breathing was getting heavier. Suddenly, I felt a great impact of a rising force within me. The intensity of this rising kundalini force was so tremendous that my body lifted up a little and fell flat into the aisle; my eyeglasses flew off. As I lay there with my eyes closed, I could see a continuous fountain of dazzling white lights erupting within me"
Although I respect meditation and the religious beliefs of all, I don't believe any of this is possible. I don't know if an afterlife exists, but find it telling that nothing paranormal has ever been recorded in a verifiable manner.
In Indian yoga these abilities are known as siddhis. But as they seem impossible the only way I could be convinced is if they happened to me.
Healthy scepticism is the point though. If we were content just with belief, we'd never need these practices.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8417526/
Psychologists have accepted the experience as real. The American Psychiatric Association added a diagnostic category for religious or spiritual problems some time ago.
Curious to learn more, kept secret by who? And why was he the lucky one to receive that information?
Just spent the last hour reading his work here: https://www.ecomall.com/gopikrishna/. Sounds like any other charlatan and guru. From his last interview, seems like a lot of his foundation comes from the same principle that Godel invokes: "Now, please tell me, can such a vast creation be purposeless? Can such a vast creation come out of nothing? Can such a vast creation ruled by laws be all composed of dead, insensitive matter? The very idea of being - existence - - comes from the mind. A rock or a mountain or an ocean has no idea of existence, this existence comes from intelligence, and the author of the universe must be intelligent. If we didn't have an intelligent creator, there would be no purpose to this existence. There must be a purpose".
Additionally, the site's claims are frankly funny: "All of these books are scientific wonders—miracles! Each is packed with new information not available to scientists and scholars. It was easier to sequence the human genome than it would be for any person to write the books Gopi Krishna wrote.What do you think will happen as soon as thousands of men and women begin to manipulate human DNA for the “fun of it?” It will easy to do. Wait just two more decades, less than 20 years, and hundreds, if not thousands of bright, young boys and girls will be able to clone just about any animal (including humans). Who will stop this from being done? The reason why Gopi Krishna’s miraculous writings are not known by more than a few is because they are beyond the grasp, or comprehension, of our many of our present-day intellectuals."
Are non-believers are too stupid to comprehend his great works?
I don't care for anyone's beliefs tbh since it's direct experience that matters. But in aggregate there are sufficient similar reports to convince me kundalini is a real, universally accessible experience (and now my own experiences are enough to keep me moving forward).
And I meant the techniques to awaken it were kept secret. Possible reasons were that it was viewed as too powerful for the masses, but also that without proper preparation it can make people think they're going mad (hallucinations, etc).
BTW if you do want to learn more, the best resources I've found are [2] (lessons) and [3] (for anatomical locations).
[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Kundalini-Evolutionary-Energy-Gopi-...
[2] https://aypsite.org/MainDirectory.html
[3] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Kundalini-Tantra-Swami-Satyananda-S...
To add to it: I guess this all hinges on what 'positive' means. Christ, I sound just like Socrates now, don't I? Glad it's Friday.
Some of these are from well-educated people like doctors, former skeptics and at least 1 neuroscientist.
I honestly don't believe there's much money in the "NDE space". Certainly less than "hegetsus". Which is funny because the vast majority of NDE accounts really make all of the most popular world religions look pretty wrong (including Christianity, although its message of love over all remains... Not that its adherents follow that much or anything).
If your answer to that is "no", you're not being reasonable. The courts of most countries would also disagree with you. This even takes into account the fact that "eyewitness testimony is bad"... Like sure, maybe if it's 10, but if it's 100 people all making extremely similar claims? 1000? 10,000?
The NDE people often use language like "realer than what I thought was real". While some drugs can induce this too, drugs also give quite random experiences, while the NDE thing seems fairly well-structured with few exceptions.
It also seems internally-consistent (as in, within the realm of itself and its claims about reality, it doesn't seem to violate its own rules).
If I was anorgasmic and thousands of people told me that orgasms are real and "you know it when you have one," why should (or shouldn't) I believe them?
Have you heard of the Kalman filter? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalman_filter
Consider that every eyewitness can be mathematically treated as a "noisy sensor" (who might also be a bad actor via lying). What if we applied a Kalman filter to quantized claims made across thousands of self-claimed NDE experiencers? Might this be a way to quantify (and therefore bring into the realm of rationality) eyewitness testimony of this nature?
There are many things we consider "real" that we can't directly measure, btw. Why (from a science or mathematical perspective) is Taylor Swift so popular? How would we determine this without asking people (which puts us right back into "eyewitness testimony" again)?
To take another example, many people report the experience of waking up with a demon, visible or invisible, sitting on their chest. I've had this experience. Should we accept this eyewitness testimony at face value? Isn't the simpler, more naturalistic explanation of sleep paralysis more fitted to the evidence?
https://health.clevelandclinic.org/what-you-should-know-abou...
Regarding brain activity or lack thereof during an NDE, here's a perspective:
https://old.reddit.com/r/NDE/comments/188i98i/ndes_with_conf...
“In cardiac arrest, even neuronal action-potentials, the ultimate physical basis for coordination of neural activity between widely separated brain regions, are rapidly abolished (Kelly et al., 2007). Moreover, cells in the hippocampus, the region thought to be essential for memory formation, are especially vulnerable to the effects of anoxia (Vriens et al., 1996). In short, it is not credible to suppose that NDEs occurring under conditions of general anesthesia, let alone cardiac arrest, can be accounted for in terms of some hypothetical residual capacity of the brain to process and store complex information under those conditions.”
“Michael Sabom, MD, a cardiologist in Atlanta, Georgia, monitored the brain waves of his patients using an electroencephalograph (EEG) and was able to show that some who had reported NDEs had been clinically dead, meaning they registered no electrical activity in their brain.”
Most NDE's are associated with heart stoppages. And in fact, NDE's started to begin to be reported more after working resuscitation techniques became more fleshed-out.
Exactly...so, when a human on planet earth, 2023, encounters such a scenario (indeterminateness), they project an illusion upon it, declare that illusion to be true, and most other humans will agree with them, depending on the metaphysical framework (aka:culture - currently, we are in the age of "science", before that it was "religion") they have been trained upon (like an LLM....if there are differences, I'd very much like to know).
You can literally see this in action as people talk, relatively highly rational people will literally make things up, utilize very well known (by science) cultural/psychological exists, etc etc etc.
For fun, try this: point out where they claim something (in general, or specifically), and then ask them for proof/evidence - then, do this 1000+ times - you will see a normal distribution of stories emerge, reliably.
There is something very weird about humans in 2024.
Part of the point I'm completely unsuccessful in making here, or a way to look at it, is: different ideologies have different methodologies and standards for practicing epistemology (belief, "reality", etc) - the "NDE type" (religion, woo woo, etc) of thinkers have their form and quality, and "scientific"[1] thinkers have theirs. To me, the scientific folks have an objectively and vastly superior methodology to the others....however, it is far from the best - the best genuinely wonders what is true, which in my experience is always(!) considered a literally unacceptable approach (as can be seen in such conversations: I have been told that asking such question is not allowed here on HN).
I propose that if even our very best "intellectual hangouts" culturally insist on suboptimal thinking, if not denying that it is even possible (~trying to cover it up), it increases risk within the system (I always like to use climate change to substantiate the claim).
[1] to some degree - like the religious, science practitioners are also unable to follow their scriptures to a T, like remembering that their theories are theories (that is just one example).
This is pure gold analogy, if you don't mind I am going to borrow it.
> There are many things we consider "real" that we can't directly measure, btw. Why (from a science or mathematical perspective) is Taylor Swift so popular? How would we determine this without asking people (which puts us right back into "eyewitness testimony" again)?
I believe Taylor Swift is a substantial glitch in the matrix, I wish I had something more insightful to say on the matter.
What he described actually sounds a lot like lucid dreaming. Even complete with waking up. I am still interested in watching a few more of these but I'm getting the feeling that I'll be thinking that a lot.
(There also appears to be an unrelated video in the playlist, FYI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bzQYKm3xTA.)
This bug/behavior has existed for years, apparently: https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/bywczb/youtube_add...
> but know enough about our brain to be fairly certain that there is nothing even close to any afterlife
You can't say that for sure. The brain might be a consciousness conduit and not a consciousness generator (which is pretty much what these testimonies are saying). If I step on a garden hose (assuming I can't see beyond it) and the water stops, and I stop stepping on it and the water resumes, you're basically saying the garden hose must be the source of the water, when we know that isn't true (but only because we can see beyond the garden hose). A naïve individual from, say, 10,000 years ago who has never seen seemingly unlimited pressurized water on tap who encounters a garden hose might initially conclude that the hose produces the water...
> it makes humans feel good
There's a large set of things that are broadly agreed to be true which do not make people feel good and a large set of things that are broadly agreed to be true that do. "Feeling good" is therefore orthogonal to veracity so this is a non-argument.
I'm disappointed that you're responding as a person who literally hasn't watched a single one of the videos (because the very things you said prove that). You're just yet another human who prefers to bury their head in the sand than confront evidence against their pre-existing worldviews, like most people. And "with all due respect," that's not rational at all.
If so is my grandmother that had Alzheimer's destined to experience the eternity in that horrible state?
The far reaches of meditation (dhyana, yogic self-cultivation) can provide such. But that requires a lot of work and a deviant lifestyle. Something a rare few are prepared to invest in.
I don't think that being private necessarily means that it is showing his true views. In private, we often feel more relaxed and express ourselves differently than in public. But in private conversations, you can express a point of view in one conversation and a different one in another. We often tend to accommodate our audience.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_accommodation_th...
https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/finally-we-may-h...
What if the only reason we exist is... what if we are just a tool for... entropy?
This is the core mistake, I believe, to assume that causation implies meaning, instead of causation just being a logical correlation, and meaning being a construction of the human mind.
It’s interesting, though, that Gödel took his incompleteness theorems as an indication that materialism (or naturalism) can’t be the truth, while still thinking that the world is rational.
I agree with you. If anything, saying everything having a reason seem to me like applying human interpretation to Determinism.
I think that his assumption that: 'meaning' and 'causation' are the same thing, is similarly tied to his works. For someone like Godel, I'd imagine that he has no conception that they could be different.
I must have read it wrong, because I couldn't see the causality at all.
Einstein: "I believe in Spinoza's God." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_and_philosophical_vi...
Schrödinger: "Consciousness, by its very nature, exists only in the singular. I would like to say: the total number of all 'consciousnesses' is always just 'one'." https://de.wikiquote.org/wiki/Erwin_Schrödinger
Gödel: "God must exist." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel%27s_ontological_proof
Why when actual evolutionary biologists disagree with Peterson on most of his "takes"?
Please don't turn an unrelated topic into a flamewar about Jorpson
Can you describe the methodology you used to determine that this is necessarily true, with zero exceptions?
> I just understand the limits of what we can actually know...
Ah, a perfectly rational human....this is like the 50th or so I've encountered this week!
Careful...faith is fundamental to human consciousness, and cultures, it comes in a wide variety of forms, and those who suffer from it typically are rendered unable to self-diagnose.
edit: wait a minute....wtf am I quoting from here? None of what I quoted now exists, yet there's no edit indicator on your comment....hmmmmm.