Theory of a scientific afterlife.

Let's get this out of the way right now- Metaphysics has nothing to do with the supernatural. It's about defining our perceptions of the world.

As it stands, the concept of a "person" has no meaning in a scientific context. "Person" is not a technical term, except possibly in Psychology, and even there it is not used in the same way that we mean "person" in day-to-day conversation.

I am not arguing that it would not be conceivable and coherent to duplicate a human down to the sub-atomic/arbitrary precise level. What I am saying is that, no matter how precise the duplication, it may be the case that you can only duplicate a "body" or a "human," without bringing with it the abstract concept of "identity" with a previous person.

It generally agreed that the thing to which we apply the idea/concept/property, "person" is just a bunch of chemical and otherwise physical processes, but when we talk about a "person" we are talking about more abstract properties of the higher-level patterns. Because these properties, as far as we know, are not necessarily tied to the lower-level processes that give rise to them, it is actually a bad idea to try to define them in terms of the lower-level processes.

My argument is actually much in line with Higgs'- I do not believe that the concept of a "scientific afterlife" is even coherent. One might argue that it is physically possible for the same matter to be organized the same way at two completely different points in time. Fine, few of us seriously dispute that. But connecting this thing with the idea of "afterlife" which necessarily involves the "person" from the first life and "person" in the next life to be identical, is a metaphysical question. It is not spiritual, because we aren't talking about "life" in a non-physical "plane of existence," and not "scientific" (which I use incorrectly, as we all have been, to mean "physical,") because we are not talking about a "person" as an organized collection of matter and energy. It is metaphysical because it boils down to how we eventually define and think about things like "person" and "identity."

Question to the thread: should I change the topic from "Scientific Afterlife" to "Physical Afterlife" to alleviate some of the confusion?

And let me propose a modification of the original question:

Lets say the universe is infinite. And that mass and energy are conserved. If that is true, wouldn't it also be true that the molecules that make up the culture we live in be reformed in the way they are now, eventually? As time goes on wouldn't such a thing occur? (As Higgs mentioned[see footnote 1], we do have to ignore entropy, which is described by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and this does necessarily mean that we are not actually talking about the universe we live in, but a hypothetical universe.)

How would you answer this? Having an entire culture being physically the same as a previous culture is just as coherent as having a single person being physically the same as a previous person. Or, I think, just as incoherent.

[1]

Spoiler

I will try to correct or clarify this description of the phenomenon. When Higgs says "the energy degrades" he means, something more along the lines of "entropy approaches a maximum," which itself means, "the organization of matter and energy approaches a minimum," which translates to layman's terms to something like, "everything becomes randomly arranged."

 

won't work. just because something's infinite doesn't mean things are guaranteed to happen. it just gives it plenty of chances to occur, but never guarantees it.

so the species of homo sapiens evolving independently on some other planet somewhere in the universe? chances are already practically zero. and then the chances of someone with your exact genetic makeup appearing over there? zero squared.

 

Given Infinite time something with the smallest chance to occur will happen, it will be given infinite chances to occur, and it will happen an infinite number of times. Remote possibilities are meaningless in the face of eternity.

 

no, that's false. given infinite time something with an infinitely small chance of happening still might not happen.

 

Why are people dragging spiritualism into this debate again... clearly the word afterlife has very little known ground in science but weve tried to stick to it the entire time.

little correction: it gives it infinite chances to occur.

practically zero (the way most people use it) != zero.

But even if we agree on the probability issue there are still so many unknowns and knowns such as entropy or expansion of the universe. It would have been silly to make any realistic predicitons. And for the fifth time, even if it would happen, its not freaking afterlife.

 

Its a life after death. Hence why its an afterlife.

 

But (if I understood properly) it isn't the life of the same person, it is the life of a similar person.

 

Well it would be the life of the same person. Because all of the molecules that made up the said person would be rearranged in the same exact way.

 

Let's say it turns out that you are, molecule-by molecule, physically exactly the same as Aristotle when he was your age.

By your definition, you would be living as Aristotle's afterlife.

In this situation, would you say that you are Aristotle?