“Returning” and “remaining” (as you put it in your last bullet point) are very different things. The latter seems to require that we are, or have, something like souls that, despite their immateriality and apparent complete inaccessibility to any sort of scientific investigation, are the true bearers of our identity and consciousness. This is very, very hard to square with (e.g.) the copious evidence that “the mind is what the brain does” and I think it’s reasonable to regard it as pretty much refuted.
“Returning” is another kettle of fish entirely. It covers, e.g., (1) resurrection of the sort envisaged by religions like Christianity, (2) later reconstruction by some sort of superintelligent agent, and arguably (3) cryonics if that turns out to work. Not to mention other exotic options like (4) we are in a simulation and whoever’s running it wants to resurrect us. Note that for some of these options our putative resurrection takes place entirely outside our world. Evidence for or against is going to have to be indirect (e.g., some guy turns up, works a sufficiently dramatic set of miracles, and explains that he is an emissary of the gods, who by the way are going to resurrect everyone whose surname begins with a vowel; or many things of this kind that might have happened fail to happen, constituting evidence against resurrection).
Mostly, though, the reason to reject resurrection (unless you happen to think you are in possession of some kind of divine revelation or something) is Occam’s razor. Yeah, it might turn out that we’re in the Matrix and the computers running it are going to give us all second chances, but that’s a much more complicated possibility than that our world is “the” world. And no, the odds aren’t 50⁄50, for the reasons others have given and linked to; you can’t make everything equally likely on pain of inconsistency, and in-some-sense-on-average more complicated things must be less probable.
I think you’ll probably find a strong (but not unanimous) consensus among LW-rationalists that: consciousness is a property of physical systems and doesn’t involve immaterial souls (unless, e.g., you define those in some way reducible to properties of physical systems); it, or something “equally good”, could exist on other substrates besides ours; “survival” (consciousness remaining after we die) is monstrously unlikely; “resurrection” (consciousness returning somehow after we die) is possible in principle and may some day happen to some people via technological wonders like “uploading”; there is no good reason to expect “resurrection” to be on offer to the human race at large and it should be regarded as very unlikely for Occamish reasons.
(I would expect most of the dissent to come from people who, despite being LW-rationalists, are adherents of a religion that says there’s some kind of afterlife.)
[EDITED to add: there might also be a substantial fraction dissenting on the grounds that some of the key notions are ill-defined; for instance, that we don’t really know what “conscious” means beyond the fact that one particular bunch of things—namely, us—seem to have it; or that personal identity is fuzzy and in putative cases of “resurrection” there really isn’t a fact of the matter as to whether the “before” and “after” are actually The Same Person.]
I don’t like to say we don’t have souls. We do have bearers of identity and consciousness. They’re just not immortal, and they’re made of atoms. Or more accurately, they’re made of the data that the arrangement of atoms represents.
there might also be a substantial fraction dissenting on the grounds that some of the key notions are ill-defined; for instance, that we don’t really know what “conscious” means beyond the fact that one particular bunch of things—namely, us—seem to have it; or that personal identity is fuzzy and in putative cases of “resurrection” there really isn’t a fact of the matter as to whether the “before” and “after” are actually The Same Person.
I’m not sure I agree. “Consciousness” strikes me as being as well-defined as concepts like “anticipation” and especially “experience” that are used in the foundations of empiricism.
The latter seems to require that we are, or have, something like souls that, despite their immateriality and apparent complete inaccessibility to any sort of scientific investigation, are the true bearers of our identity and consciousness.
That’s not what I mean by “remaining”. Consciousness could exist on some small quantum or string level, or other small level we haven’t even discovered yet. It’s possible that this level is undisturbed when we die, and that we continue to be conscious. And it’s possible that as we continue to be conscious, we can’t communicate it to living people.
Consciousness could exist on some small quantum [...] level...
Absolutely not. Consciousness is not that basic, and it definitely doesn’t belong in the fundamental structure of reality. You’re making a huge leap that ignores several levels of organization (in order: atomic, chemical, biological, computational). Consciousness depends on the pattern of neurons communicating inside our heads; examining a single neuron nucleus in the microscope (or taking one of its carbon atoms into a collider) will miss consciousness entirely because you’ve set the magnifying glass too close to get the pattern.
I’m familiar with the current scientific literature on the neural correlates of consciousness (I was a neuroscience major and did my senior thesis on it). But these are correlates. We indeed don’t know of any correlates on a level smaller than the neuronal level, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
“Returning” and “remaining” (as you put it in your last bullet point) are very different things. The latter seems to require that we are, or have, something like souls that, despite their immateriality and apparent complete inaccessibility to any sort of scientific investigation, are the true bearers of our identity and consciousness. This is very, very hard to square with (e.g.) the copious evidence that “the mind is what the brain does” and I think it’s reasonable to regard it as pretty much refuted.
“Returning” is another kettle of fish entirely. It covers, e.g., (1) resurrection of the sort envisaged by religions like Christianity, (2) later reconstruction by some sort of superintelligent agent, and arguably (3) cryonics if that turns out to work. Not to mention other exotic options like (4) we are in a simulation and whoever’s running it wants to resurrect us. Note that for some of these options our putative resurrection takes place entirely outside our world. Evidence for or against is going to have to be indirect (e.g., some guy turns up, works a sufficiently dramatic set of miracles, and explains that he is an emissary of the gods, who by the way are going to resurrect everyone whose surname begins with a vowel; or many things of this kind that might have happened fail to happen, constituting evidence against resurrection).
Mostly, though, the reason to reject resurrection (unless you happen to think you are in possession of some kind of divine revelation or something) is Occam’s razor. Yeah, it might turn out that we’re in the Matrix and the computers running it are going to give us all second chances, but that’s a much more complicated possibility than that our world is “the” world. And no, the odds aren’t 50⁄50, for the reasons others have given and linked to; you can’t make everything equally likely on pain of inconsistency, and in-some-sense-on-average more complicated things must be less probable.
I think you’ll probably find a strong (but not unanimous) consensus among LW-rationalists that: consciousness is a property of physical systems and doesn’t involve immaterial souls (unless, e.g., you define those in some way reducible to properties of physical systems); it, or something “equally good”, could exist on other substrates besides ours; “survival” (consciousness remaining after we die) is monstrously unlikely; “resurrection” (consciousness returning somehow after we die) is possible in principle and may some day happen to some people via technological wonders like “uploading”; there is no good reason to expect “resurrection” to be on offer to the human race at large and it should be regarded as very unlikely for Occamish reasons.
(I would expect most of the dissent to come from people who, despite being LW-rationalists, are adherents of a religion that says there’s some kind of afterlife.)
[EDITED to add: there might also be a substantial fraction dissenting on the grounds that some of the key notions are ill-defined; for instance, that we don’t really know what “conscious” means beyond the fact that one particular bunch of things—namely, us—seem to have it; or that personal identity is fuzzy and in putative cases of “resurrection” there really isn’t a fact of the matter as to whether the “before” and “after” are actually The Same Person.]
I don’t like to say we don’t have souls. We do have bearers of identity and consciousness. They’re just not immortal, and they’re made of atoms. Or more accurately, they’re made of the data that the arrangement of atoms represents.
Is this any more than a semantic quibble?
No, but I think there are times that semantics matter.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/od/37_ways_that_words_can_be_wrong/
I’m not sure I agree. “Consciousness” strikes me as being as well-defined as concepts like “anticipation” and especially “experience” that are used in the foundations of empiricism.
That’s not what I mean by “remaining”. Consciousness could exist on some small quantum or string level, or other small level we haven’t even discovered yet. It’s possible that this level is undisturbed when we die, and that we continue to be conscious. And it’s possible that as we continue to be conscious, we can’t communicate it to living people.
Absolutely not. Consciousness is not that basic, and it definitely doesn’t belong in the fundamental structure of reality. You’re making a huge leap that ignores several levels of organization (in order: atomic, chemical, biological, computational). Consciousness depends on the pattern of neurons communicating inside our heads; examining a single neuron nucleus in the microscope (or taking one of its carbon atoms into a collider) will miss consciousness entirely because you’ve set the magnifying glass too close to get the pattern.
I’m familiar with the current scientific literature on the neural correlates of consciousness (I was a neuroscience major and did my senior thesis on it). But these are correlates. We indeed don’t know of any correlates on a level smaller than the neuronal level, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
Elsewhere on this thread you also said,
Are you seriously going to posit a belief in the afterlife just because neurology can’t prove a negative?
No, I’m just saying that it’s possible, not that I believe in it.
Not with quantum consciousness. That’s not even in “possible” territory.