There Is Probably An Afterlife

"One thing my opponent said in his opening arguments that stood out to be was having one life is extremely improbable. Having one life does not seem improbable at all, and in fact, we only have been able to obtain evidence that suggests that we only have one life to live"I feel that my opponent is simply asserting his opinion here without really engaging in the details of my argument from improbability. Again, my argument is that, under a physicalist doctrine, the objective probability of being a conscious subject, calculated from the beginning of the universe, at least seems to me that it would be extremely low. And considered along with my argument against physicalism (the view that all that exists is 'physical'), and in favor of idealism (the view that all that exists is mental), I think there's a compelling logical and empirical case for the probability of an afterlife.It is becoming increasingly more apparent through physics that the universe is fine-tuned for conscious life. In other words, the laws of nature allow life to evolve, even though it is much more likely that they would not. In order to explain this while avoiding any kind of spiritual ideas, physicists have begun to speculate that there is an entire multiverse of universes and that most of them do not permit conscious life. Additionally, they speculate that life emerged from inorganic matter and subsequent natural selection of accidental mutations, in an inherently aimless, random fashion, and they further speculate that consciousness emerged from non-conscious properties in a very loosely-defined way, creating an unnecessary explanatory gap known as the hard problem of consciousness, which seems potentially unsolvable even by neuroscience.So, simply put, most scientists propose multiple unneeded steps to explain how to derive consciousness from an unguided, non-mental physical world, all of them possible, but highly improbable. I offer an alternative: that consciousness is the necessary, fundamental substance from which all reality derives. I think this is far more probable, as it bypasses all the steps required by physicalism. Also, Con said that we have only obtained evidence to suggest we have one life. I suppose this is true enough, placing an emphasis on the word 'suggest,' although I would counter that this is true only if you presuppose physicalism, which I argue there are good reasons not to."What makes us conscious is located in the front of the brain, and scientists have explained what conscientiousness is. They have also discovered an "on-off" switch in the region of the brain and have been able to use the on off switch to make someone conscience or not."This is actually not entirely true. Scientists have not by any stretch of the imagination explained consciousness. That is, they have not defined precisely what it is, since it cannot be defined in a third-person sense, and they have not shown how it can arise from non-mental properties. In fact, it is hard, if not impossible, to imagine how they even could do this, in a specified way. Rather, what scientists have actually done is observe and quantify electro-chemical activity in the brain, and found that specific subjective mental states correlate with specific neural patterns (as one might expect), and from this they have made an inference that supposedly "physical" brain states cause subjective consciousness. I contend, however, that neural patterns do not cause consciousness -- they are consciousness. That is a distinction that could not be more important to our understanding of the mind, and of reality. And to me it implies that all of reality is an interconnected conscious experience which delineates itself into various individual patterns (such as humans). If this is true, it follows that when we die, these patterns decohere and re-assimilate with the fundamental level of experience, which is the afterlife.And on the subject of this apparent "on-off" switch, consciousness must exist in different degrees. For example, mice are more conscious than bugs, cats are more conscious than mice, humans are more conscious than cats. And when we sleep, of course, we are still conscious to some degree, although less than when we're awake, and often not enough to form memory of our sleeping experience, so we feel as though we had no experience. Also, remember that consciousness is a coherent pattern that "sews itself" into different shapes to form thoughts and experiences, and this pattern can decohere and be affected in various ways. This is what actually happened when these researchers triggered this "on-off" switch in the woman's brain. Her consciousness was significantly altered, not eliminated. Or at least I hope not, or else they killed her multiple times! Talk about scientific ethics. This also explains why people with brain damage have their consciousness affected. What they experience is not really a decrease in consciousness, but a decrease in the coherence of their consciousness."I have to ask though, if souls are needed, which I reject as real things, why can we not see or hear when we have been knocked out? If a soul was present, then consciousnesses would not be of the brain, only the soul. I also have to ask if there is an afterlife, life after death, than at what point does the soul go from the human to another life?"Here I actually agree with my opponent that there are no souls in the traditional, dualistic sense, thought of as something separate from the natural world that leaves the body and "floats off" after death. Rather, as I've argued, I believe that what the "soul" is made of is what the body is made of as well. The following is highly speculative and controversial, but some people believe that phenomena in the field of quantum physics, such as wave-particle duality, superposition, and nonlocality, are in some way connected to consciousness. And since quantum physics is the study of the most fundamental level of nature we know of, this could support my view that consciousness is the fundamental substance of nature, and that when we die, we become nonlocal, "absorbed" back into the rest of the universe. Again, this is a very general hypothetical notion, but it may be possible.