Phillip Clayton - Is There Life After Death?

Do we survive bodily death? Can our personal awareness transcend physical decay and dissolution? There are no bigger questions and there is no shortage of answers. Religions offer hope, with extravagant promises that are founded on the existence of God. For life after death, would God be required? If so, how would God do it?

[uremove]

I like Dr. Clayton’s logic and tentative hypothesising. I think what he is saying is that consciousness/experience is universal, like waves on the ocean (ie. individuals are instantiations of something universal), whereas our individual identity/personality/memory is what dies.. if so, I wholeheartedly agree. It fits very nicely with a Panpsychist ontology.

[BradHolkesvig]

Of course there is life after the death of the body which is only an illusion being formed in the mind. We haven't even begun to live the good life yet.

[TheCarnivalguy]

As I think it was Woody Allen who said, and I paraphrase "I'm not scared of dying. I just don't want to be there when it happens". That pretty well sums it up for me also. 😁

[MOHNAKHAN]

God is out of dimensions that We know and is out of those dimensions which we don't know or will know...
God is creator and beyond our scientific and mathematical equations...
And Yes,
There is Life after death...

[TheRISINGSTAR]

"If there"s absolutely nothing after death, and were 100% unaware of the nothingness for eternity... Then that would even be better than heaven... So that'd mean all of the most evil, terrible people to ever walk this earth, would die, and be in the exact same place as those people who were good hearted people and shared that frequency with others in life? No way.. I believe and the truth is, we all judge ourselves in this life. Everything we ever do and feel, all connects to our spiritual body. If you are a bad person, then after death, your soul may not be punished, because you will go to the same bad realm in which you obviously desired. And if in fact we do reincarnate, then when we do, we will have no idea we have done this before. Every birth will be your first time on this earth, but with the same soul, and this process will repeat over and over again. This is how God tricks us into eternal life, without being doomed to an eternity anywhere.. The fact that YOU didn't decide to be born at the time you did, to the parents you did, and your "consciousness" just appearing in YOUR body, instead of anyone elses, is something... Why wasn't your consciousness spawned 1, 000 years ago as a baby instead of the year you were born? ((YOUR brain at the time it was developing in the womb, did NOT decide on it's own, to be YOU..., what did, is the question.)) Think about it. That is what people need to figure out."

[dondattaford]

One of the greatest things is not knowing if we knew the latter's we would be taking it into our consideration and choice can not be known

[mitseraffej]

On course there is life after death. It just doesn’t involve the dead. Very old joke but true.

[eltonron]

There simply is no life after death.
The God of the bible says so.
The dead can only come out of the grave in a resurrection.

[xspotbox]

If we stick to first condition, answer must be yes, lucid dreaming is a common phenomena, so "we" can exist outside our body, also from notion of space and time. Life is divine, by definition. And space is obviously remembering all past, or we would not be able to see anything really, specially not stars.
Maybe we should ask the other way around, why do we think we exist only in "now", maybe "now" is always when we have time to think about ourselves. It's like we are caught is a stream of light, now is always relative to what was before and what we can imagine future will be like. So we think we already asked ourselves this question, but asking this question is always just a place inside our light stream we can experience as coherent hierarchy of past events.
Than consciousness is just a ground hog simulator, it will keep on rearrange magic dust of reality front of our eyes until we will be satisfied with an answer. This is what exploration of time and space physics is telling us possible, we are living light manufacturing reality inside our brain anyway, so for light maybe it doesn't matter when is now and than, or even when we ask this question. We are born to this world, our sense are telling our brain this is reality, but we are not aware of it until age 2-3, when we could theoretically form our first lasting memories.

Nobody knows what this all is, we are just telling stories to each other, because we all use similar language and share same concepts. And there is also a question of dreams, it would be weird to wake up in eternal bliss without ever be able to dream again. And i know what i dream after i get drunk in some average space bar, heh, heh... :)

[MrSpacejase]

I've looked under chairs
I've looked under tables
I've tried to find the key
To fifty million fables

They call me The Seeker
I've been searching low and high
I won't get to get what I'm after
Till the day I die

I asked Bobby Dylan
I asked The Beatles
I asked Timothy Leary
But he couldn't help me either

They call me The Seeker
I've been searching low and high
I won't get to get what I'm after
Till the day I die

People tend to hate me
'Cause I never smile
As I ransack their homes
They want to shake my hand

Focusing on nowhere
Investigating miles
I'm a seeker
I'm a really desperate man

I won't get to get what I'm after
Till the day I die

I learned how to raise my voice in anger
Yeah, but look at my face, ain't this a smile?
I'm happy when life's good
And when it's bad I cry
I've got values but I don't know how or why

I'm looking for me
You're looking for you
We're looking in at each other
And we don't know what to do

They call me The Seeker
I've been searching low and high
I won't get to get what I'm after
Till the day I die

I won't get to get what I'm after
Till the day I die



Songwriters: Peter Townshend

[dapc]

~when ZEN* master Hukuin asked Bodhidharma"what happens to a ZEN* master when you die?"~Bodhidharma, the most revered man on earth and awakened besidies Buddha said and I love this response~"why ask me?"~Hukiun's reply was~"but you are a ZEN* master"~and Bodhidharma's reply was~"yes but not a dead one"~so it is interesting to say about this as the same person who studied under Prajnatara before he became Bodhidharma as he was like Buddha, a prince was asked a question and it went like this~"who was I before I came here and who am I now?"~


~so you see the emphsis is not so much on leaving here without knowing who you are~but the emphsis here is in knowing who that essence was before a physical being was created from it before it ever arrived as it does rioght now~man has it all backwards in where he is going as he really does not know of anything who he is but a physical being defaulted to his ignorant way of life through cause to condition~even the Tibetan Book of the Dead shows where man came from as he has inhereted a SOUL*~and sought what form it would take during a physical bond between male and female~


~man is more preoccupied on what is coming up such as his inevitable rather than the Source he came from where is origin always has been~sadly enough only a few awakened individuals seen this with the veil of ignorance cleared eternally from their eyes indeed~hence one should see where they came from rather than where one is going which is inevitable~at least that one will see who they are so they will never have to come back to an ignorant world again and relive the KARMA from past reincarnations in knowing in the first place who they are~Namaste~_/|\_~*

[myopenmind]

Sounds like he’s selling Robert something (an idea), rather than explaining something that is actually real.

[usertsmstsuser]

We subconscioly entangled to all places we've been, people we ' ve seen, in short images, those images fixed in our brains and keep us fettered to this reality, when links to the body are loosened due to sickness or death, a human automatically thrown to all points of entanglement of his life, that is after death experience
Which occurs when body is not present anymore, but when a body is still alive under before mentioned conditions, we usually say that a man has lost his mind, or this man is not able anymore to control his automatically working subconscious functions....

[mithrandir]

What kind of freedom is this that is only finite? Maybe it's like an axiom of life. That's the best I can say for now.

[primatesrusb.p]

I've always loved the guy on the lefthand of the screen, but I wish he could find a way to conquer his own insecurities about dying.

[Epoch]

IT is not an "afterlife", it is just more it what it is. And sure you might live about a googolplex to the googolplex years, someone who is nearly identical to you will probably bad part is that this person will not have your memories, so can you still call it you? Or is the thing we call ourselves just a collection of memories?

[louisnasi]

If is for children, building their daydream

[nickpmusic]

The LHC has better critiques on this subject.

[mnptm]

'imagine, imagine, imagine, imagine, if, if, if, think it into the future, if, if, if'... fiction for fiction can be interesting, entertaining, but fiction for truth is desperate, pathetic and sad; why is the religious so grubbily greedy anyway?

[Dazzletoad]

What can traditional theism do?

Well, I'll tell you what it can't do. And that's provide sufficient evidence to warrant belief in the absurd theistic claims made.

But we can't be too hard on religions. They've only had hundreds of years 😂😂😂