Question by Clam Crunchy: Best scientific evidence for an afterlife?
(1) Materialistic Resurrection: Boltzmann’s Brain.
There is a hypothesis in thermodynamics and cosmology that if we wait for an EXTREMELY long time, a random entropy decrease in a cold, thin gas could produce a human brain. The amount of time for a human brain to appear from a random entropy decrease has been estimated by Andrei Linde to be on the order of 10^10^50 years.
(2) Materialistic Resurrection: Poincare Recurrence Theorem.
The Poincare Recurrence Theorem states that after some finite time, a dynamical system will eventually return arbitrarily close to some state in the past. This essentially means that the history of a dynamical system will repeat itself.
The amount of time it would take for the universe to undergo a Poincare Recurrence (loosely, the time it takes to repeat itself)
has been estimated to be between 10^10^10^10^2.08 and
10^10^10^10^10^1.1 years, which is vastly longer than the time for a entropy decrease to create a Boltzmann’s Brain.
Materialistic Resurrection depends on a certain philosophical problem, though. If we kill someone, and then recreate their body perfectly, down to the individual atom, would that person come back to life, or would another person come into existence?
(3) Near Death Experiences.
It is possible that NDEs are a glimpse into an afterlife, and that people who have come close to death really have experienced an afterlife.
There is some, although dubious, experimental support for the notion of consciousness existing outside the body. People have verified details about their operation while having earplugs in, eyes tapes closed, etc.
A possible mechanism for consciousness existing outside the body is the idea of a “consciousness field”. The brain does not generate consciousness, but simply receives the field. As an analogy, one may consider a radio receiving EM waves. The radio doesn’t generate the waves, but receives them, and the content of the waves depends on both the waves themselves and the radio.
One could even imagine that things like mental disorders could be explained in the context of this radio analogy; changes in the content of consciousness depends on how the brain changes in its ability to “receive” consciousness.
The idea of a consciousness field, however, is far from proven, and I can think of no way of testing the theory.
However, NDEs should be treated with skepticism, as it may turn out that even exceptional NDE cases that don’t seem explainable in naturalistic terms may have a mundane explanation.
Source(s):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1_E19_s
Information Loss in Black Holes and/or Conscious Beings?, Don N. Page, Heat Kernel Techniques and Quantum Gravity (1995), S. A. Fulling (ed), p. 461. Discourses in Mathematics and its Applications, No. 4, Texas A&M University Department of Mathematics. arΧiv:hep-th/9411193. ISBN 0963072838.
“Sinks in the Landscape, Boltzmann Brains, and the Cosmological Constant Problem”, Andrei Linde, Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, 0701 (2007) 022 (at arXiv)
My question is, how strong is the evidence that I have presented, in your opinion, for an afterlife?
Best answer:
Answer by Vaes
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Add your own answer in the comments!
What’s your question?
There is no evidence of after live, only Near Death Experiences, but that’s of course no evidence.
None of these qualify as credible evidence to decide the question. The idea of NDE as a glimpse into an afterlife is pure conjecture. The much more reasoned explanation is that any NDE deprives the brain, more or less, of the essential ingredients for its survival and proper operation. You can’t expect your computer to work properly when you unplug the power. Your computer is at least smart enough to do some consistency checks like parity checks to test the reliability of its own operation. If your brain is telling you crazy things, it’s more of a clue that your brain isn’t working properly.