Will we lose our consciousness after we die?

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Cogito, ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. We all have consciousness, at least if we exclude solipsism. Our consciousness allows us to experience ourselves and the world around us. But what happens to our consciousness after we die? Will it be lost or do we go to an afterlife?

Our consciousness can never be lost

Pro

• Pro If we are currently experiencing ourselves and the world, how can we stop doing this at some point? You cannot be nowhere, can you?
  • Objection "You cannot be nowhere, can you?" This question presupposes the continued existence of a "You" and is therefore a cyclical argument in favor of the existence of said "You." The loss of consciousness would also mean the loss of the You.
  • Objection Many things happen at some point and end at another from rain to the life of a bug. This argument does not make sense.
    • Objection Then you're talking about matter and energy. According to the law of conservation of energy, energy cannot be lost. A raindrop falls into a river, eventually reaching the ocean, where it then evaporates into the clouds and falls as rain again. The particles that make up the raindrop always exist in some form. Whether it concerns molecules, atoms or even smaller particles, they cannot simply disappear. The same applies to the bug. All the physical particles that the bug is made of continue to exist in some form after death. Why wouldn't the same apply to consciousness?
      • Objection The same applies to the atoms of the brain, the chemicals, electricity, of it and so on – it turns into other things such as soil, other chemicals, and so on. The particles of the brain are dispersed and don't turn into another brain again or only at a minuscule <0.001%. So it doesn't apply to consciousness because it resides in the brain and the brain stops functioning and degrades after death.
        • Objection But what if consciousness is something higher-dimensional, not matter or energy, but something rather metaphysical? Something we cannot observe or measure, but only experience? What if consciousness comes in and attaches to the brain (likely sometime between conception and birth) instead of the brain creating consciousness itself? How can we be certain that consciousness is created by the brain?
          • Objection There is nothing substantial that indicate or imply that which again would be against everything we know since it's an hypothesis that goes from the position that consciousness is outside the brain and tries to find a reasonable explanation for it rather than looking at the data and creating hypotheses that are most likely. It can also be quite mysterious and interesting even if it resides in the brain such as requiring quantum mechanics. Everything points to consciousness being created by the brain such as data on effects of brain injuries, correlations with alterations of brain activity or condition, and so on.
  • Objection Before we were born there was nothing either, because we cannot remember ourselves where we were before our birth. This means that we got consciousness at birth.
    • Objection The fact that we do not remember ourselves what we experienced before birth does not mean that there was nothing before birth. We might also have forgotten our experiences before or during birth. By the way, some people believe they have memories about past lives.
• Pro When we die we go to heaven, so our consciousness persists there.
  • Objection There is no reason for why humans would go to heaven or anywhere else after death, as such this claim is unscrutinizable but false.
    • Objection It is in the Bible and the Bible was written by God Himself. And since God does not lie, it should be true.
      • Objection Even if the Bible was written by a God, it's unclear what or who that God would be in specific, why what it or he says is true or to be trusted, or that it was understood appropriately among other issues.
      • Objection Who says that the Bible was written by God? It was certainly people who wrote it down. And if the Bible was indeed written through God, people will undoubtedly have twisted, invented and omitted things. So this means that the Bible as a whole is not reliable, including the assumption that heaven exists.
  • Objection How can we be sure we are going to heaven? Since there is no proof, we also do not know if consciousness persists there.
• Pro The existence of Level I multiverse requires no changes to the laws of physics as we know them, except for the assumption of an infinite universe. Max Tegmark has estimated that the nearest Hubble volume identical to ours is roughly 10¹⁰¹¹⁵ meters away. Within a sphere of 10¹⁰¹¹⁵, there are obviously a large number of human beings identical to any given human being on Earth today, most of whom will not die on any given day.
  • Objection Such a speculative multiverse is not reasonable and supported by data. Types of multiverse may exist and there are some reasons to infer them, but not such kinds of multiverse.
  • Objection That person will not be me; even if they're identical to some level (be it rough neural configurations, atoms, or sth else), the person is still separate and could e.g. diet at another time if the histories of the two worlds are different. In other words, these other people will be made from different atoms.
  • Objection Even if there are extremely many universes, there could still only be one where humans exist or only one where a being describable as the same person exists. If you count up to infinity, each number would only be named once.
    • Objection Your atoms are different than when you were younger.
      • Objection Atoms is the wrong level to look at when the subject is the identity of a person and so on, where it would rather be psychology, neurology, and so on rather than atomic physics.
        • Objection What you call the "psychology, neurology and so on", will be identical if the atoms are identical.
  • Objection Tegmark's calculation is only a "crude estimate". Real numbers are defined by an infinite sequence of digits. The odds of two randomly selected real numbers being identical is zero.
    • Objection They don't need to be identical. Suppose somebody invents a device that destroyed your atoms and created a nearly identical version of you somewhere else. For example, the other person might feel a bit tired. People are always slightly different at the end of a flight on a commercial airline. Either way: if its a conventional flight, or the "transporter" that destroys and recreates you, the person at the other end will believe that they are the same person.

Con

• Con Consciousness is a product of the brain. So when we are brain dead, consciousness is lost.
  • Objection That is a materialist assumption. Many idealists, for example, believe in the immortality of the soul. They argue that the spirit or consciousness is not dependent on the physical body and therefore continues to exist after physical death.
    • Objection There is no reason why the spirit or consciousness would not dependent on the physical body.
      • Objection How do you explain the near-death experiences of people who were declared brain dead? Many physicians and psychiatrists have been deeply affected after hearing the near-death experiences of patients and cannot explain how and why they had these experiences. No functioning brain means no consciousness, so how could they have consciousness?
        • Objection Example of a highly unlikely but naturalist scenario is that advanced aliens invoked this using advanced technological means. This would be more likely that consciousness somehow resides outside the brain just based on a few people's experiences when this would be inconsistent with every observations, such as people in coma, and everything we know.
          • Objection People in a coma have brain activity, so that should mean the consciousness is still there. They may be dreaming, but then consciousness is therefore in that dream or consciousness is causing the dream.
            • Objection They may have consciousness in many or even all cases but even when assuming they have that it is a much different and reduced form of consciousness. They same applies quite simply to what nearly every human experiences frequently: sleeping. In particular dream-less deep sleep which is similar to death and has reduced, if not arguably absent, consciousness.
              • Objection Could it be that during sleep, consciousness is not entirely in the body but also exists simultaneously in a kind of metaphysical world? That might explain why the level of consciousness in the brain decreases, doesn't it?
          • Objection It is not a few people who have experienced this. Thousands of near-death experience survivors recount leaving their injured bodies and entering a realm beyond ordinary existence, free from the usual constraints of space and time. If many people experienced the same things independently, without knowing from each other what they experienced, how could you explain it?
            • Objection That is still a few people but that is irrelevant. A problem is that it's subjective anecdotal evidence. But even that can be ignored: the point is that it can be readily explained rationally and naturalistically without inferring some kind of fundamentally different reality where absurdly consciousness does not reside in the brain.
          • Objection How would you explain out-of-body experiences? About 45 percent of people who have near-death experiences report out-of-body experiences, where they see and often hear ongoing earthly events from a viewpoint separate from and usually above their physical bodies. Is consciousness then still in the brain or is it outside?
            • Objection It is still in the brain. There have been experiments that successfully induced such experiences (ex. 1 2 3 etc) and it is likely that in truly extreme situations such as close to death or due to drugs these could be more vivid than in such experiments.
              • Objection How can you observe actual events happening at that moment, which patients can recount later, from a helicopter view—without being in your body—if your consciousness is confined to your brain? Some patients are even able to accurately report events that occurred while they were clinically dead.
                • Objection Because that vision is constructed in the brain and based on sensory data gained from the environment from their position and likely partly imagined. They can hear people around them, maybe remember that just a few seconds ago medics in blue where around them, fill gaps using constructed DMT-fueled hallucinative imagined data, have heightened altered senses, and synthesize all that into a realistic roughly accurate depiction from above. This may be a byproduct or a natural resolution of human neurological evolution, the latter for example because it had survival benefits in our ancestors compared to those with no such experience when close to death.
        • Objection They were not brain dead (truly dead) but in another kind of death. If brain activity came to halt according to measures, that doesn't necessarily mean sentience fully stops and that the activity stops entirely.
        • Objection It can be explained by the human brain being incredibly complex and evoking such experiences similar to how psychedelics evoke them.
• Con There is no or no at least slightly significant reason for why it would be any different than before birth even if we'd like to believe it was different.
• Con Consciousness requires memory formation or else that which is supposed to be experienced by the conscious agent would be a non-processable stream of data and therefore not conscious. Memory formation is demonstrably tied to physical properties of the brain.

See also

• Can something come from nothing?

External links

• Is there an afterlife?, related interactive structured arguments tree on Kialo