Is there an afterlife or is it a state of mind?

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Some things just can't be explained. I would find a Mr Jones encounter frightening

I've always used 'jack' as the shortened and polite form of 'Jack s**t'

In UK slang 'jack' can also mean alone and is the shortened form of 'Jack Jones' ..

"I'm on me Jack Jones" = I'm by myself

'jack' is also a pejorative term used to describe residents of Swansea

And how come you have lumberjacks not lumberpeople

I never did find stuff like that as being anything other than interesting as they gave me a better grasp on social history, and I always enjoyed one to one conversations where people were actually keen to speak me ~ plus the people who the messages were for were considerably comforted by the information, so that was really nice.

Some were of course at first a bit freaked out that I knew stuff that was only known to them and the deceased, but I loved so much hearing the accounts of people's lives together that the widowed partner or relative related ~ as it put everything into a greater context and was really really heart-warming. I used to get to see family photograph albums also which I really enjoyed and the person who was no longer physically embodied ~ so that was super interesting in relation to my near death experience.

Because I have been through the dimensional plains (the seven heavens) and into the spatial domain (heaven) and back, I have been able to counsel those who cross over to a large extent in terminal care facilities before they actually pass over ~ as it is all well and good having read the books about it and having a faith in God but actually crossing over can be particularly disorientating, and in some cases very frightening. So being a guide in that respect has been a honour, plus freaked out patients in critical care wards tend to require drug regimens that are in fact particularly dangerous ~ so minimising that helps, most particularly for those footing the bill on a limited budget.

Well, dead folks tell no tales, so who knows?

If you guys want to believe or not believe in something, I won't force you.

What about "jack-squat"?

Personally, I tend to use that since I don't swear.

I think there are much more interesting way around this one than speculating on NDE's.

For example listen to the audiobook (if you'd rather not buy or read it - it's online free in a lot of places now), Donald Hoffman's 'The Case Against Reality' where he's looking at the implication of spacetime not being fundamental or the import of Darwinian evolution by natural selection very specifically selecting *against* organisms that see truth and rather selecting for organisms that see fitness payouts incredibly well and very little if any of the truth.

Someone mentioned energy not being created or destroyed, that's been found to be true as well with information - look up the No Hiding Theorem for example. Look at the evidence on that particular issue.

I think what's way more important than the question of 'is there an afterlife in the way we'd religiously or pop-culturally understand it' is the question of what choices we'd make differently if we took seriously the idea that our conscious constituents, if not eternal, at the last go on for significantly farther than one's 80 or 90 years. What would you be doing differently? What kinds of things that you might even be doing now aren't things you'd want to have stick to you? They're plausible questions because this is looking to be an increasingly plausible outcome.

The no-hiding theorem proves that if information is lost from a system via decoherence, then it moves to the subspace of the environment and it cannot remain in the correlation between the system and the environment. This is a fundamental consequence of the linearity and unitarity of quantum mechanics. Thus, information is never lost.

I was thinking about this earlier response this morning and I think there's a safeguard with Occam's razor that doesn't get used as often as it should, and Eric Weinstein phrased this brilliantly on one of The Portal episodes. I can't remember the precise wording or who he attributed it to but the effect is that unseen or unaccounted variables are found in 'reality's failure to close'. In a way when people try shaving with Occam's razor into those elements they're doing something similar to people saying 'That's not even wrong' anytime they hear a claim they disagree with. I'm still not sure what the right answer is - promote a one-liner and air-tight definition of Occam's razor which is phrased in a way to remove confusion about it's limits that can be brought out anytime someone's misusing it or whether we need a 'X''s razor (name a hack, lampoon, or comedian) where the definition of it is 'I don't like it therefor it's superfluous'.

"The invisible world is discovered by the visible world's failure to close" ~ which basically means whatever we set out to discover involving the invisible it is not unusual to discover something else that was not anticipated, such as more recently the discovery of the D-Star Hexaquark in the search for dark matter, which although not being dark matter it is by analogy like a shuttlecock in a game of Badminton (the racquet sport played over a net on a court) between light matter and dark matter as if energetically being the players.

The big difficulty currently is that most scientists are still looking for dark matter as distinct particulates that exist on their own individually or collectively, when they are in their most evident form inter-phasic in terms of coexisting together with light matter as unified by way of dark energy, and thereby emitting light energy ~ i.e., photons and electrons.

Dark energy is essentially the wholly spirit or God as being absolute space, dark matter is substantially the wholly ghost or Goddess as being infinite dimensions, and light matter is formationally all manifest things as being finite masses in both the temporal and spatial sense. So basically when your formational body stops functioning your dimensional bodies continue on until your spatial being is all that is left to take on another formational body here ~ or another dimensional embodiment elsewhere that will be formational on higher plains of existence.


Well according to William of Ockham (born 1285 and died somewhere on or between either 1347 or 1349) he himself stated that “Plurality should not be posited without necessity.” Meaning if one has two competing theories, the simpler explanation of an entity is to be preferred. Or in other words “Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.” The principle of Parsimony or Simplicity has though of course been stated and used by loads of philosophers, metaphysicists and scientists through the ages and across the continents.

But obviously if someone uses Occam's Razor to do a decapitation or amputation job on the facts of a matter ~ I am more inclined to either educate or remind them of the most pertinent facts. So rather than going for the symbolic representation of an internally confabulated state of mind regarding Dial1194's internally envisioned or narratively scripted pink unicorn ~ I instead answered the challenge of Russell's Teapot (to illustrate that the philosophic burden of proof lies upon a person making unfalsifiable claims, rather than shifting the burden of disproof to others) and gave as evidence the scientific principles of the first law of thermodynamics and electron releases and captures.

There is also the unfalsifiable claims glitch that according to physiological neuroscience near death experiences under deep general anaesthesia and during cardiac arrest are not possible, yet people repeatedly report verifiable facts regarding the appearance of the operating room and the medical team during their near death experience. So given the following statement:


We do in fact have a fair bit of information and indicators involving evidence for the affirmative regarding the question of "Is There Life after Death? 50 Years of Research UVA" as is presented by Jim B. Tucker, Bruce Greyson, J. Kim Penberthy and Edward F. Kelly from the Division Of Perceptual Studies (DOPS) as follows.


A link for the Division Of Perceptual Studies (DOPS).

Maybe after we die we enter a dormant state for eons and then our dust specks float through space creating life on other planets after ours is destroyed? Like a combination of purgatory and reincarnation?

Maybe all living organisms on earth are connected to each other this way?

I read that analogy a little bit differently. It seems like it's something one would offer when there's some debate as to whether there's any evidence that something is actually a 'thing', ie. whether the pursuit of it should be taken up or pejoratized as a flight of fancy. Reality failing to close means stories not lining up with facts and realizing that you can rip into those facts and find a completely different set of dynamics behind the curtain. As you mentioned above we've done that a fair amount with quantum physics. I think the next really big shoe to drop, and some people are trying to drop it already, is taking seriously that human beings aren't just products of evolution by natural selection but that so much of our social behavior and the cloak and dagger politics not just at the heights of power but at every workplace and in many families and circles of friends, that also is Darwinian game theory in action (it's also part of why many people seem like perpetual lying machines - they're treating life as a zero-sum war and it shows in how they use information and language).


This tells me that we're close to the end of what we can discover at this stage and that there's another contextual curtain that needs to be broken, such as we had at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. I think Donald Hoffman's got some very persuasive and powerful ideas, especially because they seem to square a lot of important circles for me regarding consciousness, occult phenomena, synchronicity, I'd reached a degree of certainty that the dynamics could best be described as functionism with multiple realizability and Hoffman goes on to actually reify how functionalism with multiple realizability could operate in how his theory orients conscious agents. That theory would suggest that not only that space-time isn't fundamental (and we already have that coming out in mainstream physics) but also that there's something we can understand about that being the case that we can interact and do something with psychologically, technologically, etc.. On a social level it also might help reverse part of our alienation from the universe if we come to the idea that distance (and quite likely time) are more like plotted vector points for a particular utility rather than a fundamental reality. As Hoffman put it, you need to take these things very seriously because your life depends on them but taking them seriously vs. literally are two very different things.


Quick side-bar question, have you ever read 'The Cosmic Doctrine' by Dion Fortune? I ask because you might find that one interesting - particularly in that she gets into the analogy of three rings - Ring-Chaos, Ring-Cosmos, and Ring-Pass-Not. Even though she was pretty straight-laced and solid Golden Dawn practitioner, someone a lot of modern ceremonial magicians and depth psychology neuro-hackers pay a lot of respect to, this was one of the only books I'm aware of that she channeled, which suggests to me that she hit a pocket of information much deeper in her psyche where she 'knew' certain things at a pre space-time level but obviously it had to come out through the human brain and thus the book ends up being incredibly Kabbala-bound (ie. 3 rings, 7 spheres, 12 rays, mirroring the Hebrew alphabet). You may or may not find it interesting, at worst it's a puzzle to speculate what she was actually seeing vs. translating through her particular meaning map and thus distorting a bit.

The only thing I'm doubtful with about taking certain aspects of the model you mentioned too literally - they could fit a particular scope, ie. our local universe, but I still can't shake the idea that there's no reason for literally 'everything existent' to be inside this universe. I do think some people have come up with quite interesting ideas on what's happening, like Sir Roger Penrose talking about the idea that everytime the universe goes to heat death and the black holes all pop out from Hawking radiation you have a loss of context for space and time and in a sense the hour-glass flips with another big bang. That could mean that in some ways our universe is self-sufficient (doubtful but possible), none of it tells us whether this is the only universe or not and I think we're still waiting to see whether we have any lines of evidence that could mean nothing other than another universe colliding with ours at some level. I do think it's quite possible that consciousness itself is something much more ancient than our universe, which is why we find it so troubling that it can't be traced back to basic building blocks or be causally found on earth. Consciousness will probably continue to be an incredibly controversial topic precisely because of that and perhaps we might be able to triage possibilities and close the loops down for snake-oil or grifting (Darwinian game theory never rests) but then we'd also have to learn to be somehow comfortable with our epistemic relationship to that information.



This is why I think people have a way of using it any way they want - agreement would have to be consistent on what 'necessity' is, and the way human beings tend to pick and chose their facts for tribal and social purposes makes that nearly impossible.


So I'm on another forum where there's a guy who angrily barks at, mocks, and ridicules people he disagrees with and he's never inclined to admit he's wrong. The ways you can fudge and evade admitting to being wrong are just making incoherent grumblings at a person's point and/or simply withdrawing engagement. In that context arguers and debaters could theorhetically be wrong about almost anything, be reality solid on their social game theory, and hold a respectable place in an online or even offline social structure because they're just that good at being a***holes.

I'd agree with you that if you find people who actually care to get their facts or stories right, who are willing to change their mind if a more solid model than the one their currently holding fits, then it's worth pouring through the details of their assumptions and parsing the ground level stuff (I've gotten into deep parsings of 'emergence' with one or two naive realists and it seems like they have a foot in both worlds - ie. they care about getting certain facts right but beyond a particular threshold they're quite a bit like the guy I mentioned above). The sad thing is - Darwinian game theory seems to make any collective pursuit of truth, or Sam Harris's hope that most people would find a solidly built argument with all of the facts in order and all of it's principals lined up correctly to be irresistible, a flight of fancy and unfortunately that's a flight of fancy that secular humanists and liberals have been hoping for several decades would keep the Enlightenment project in order. What does or doesn't help in getting us laid, giving us status and power with a group, etc. are far more tangible than even the most persuasive argument about ideas or metaphysics for the majority of the populace.


This is what I meant by people picking and choosing their facts based on tribe. If they're in a Christian tribe they need to find facts that edify their place, status elevation, etc. in a Christian social hierarchy. If at some given point they decided to ally themselves with a new-atheist heirarchy then they're stuck playing by those rules with those anathemas, being up on 'non-rational' tribes is a quick fix for when you're out of content and feel like scoring virtue points with your tribe is in order. Similarly we have the modern Social Justice left, to whom I was listening to a new interview with John Gray and he considered them a form of hyper-liberalism of the sort that takes the same sorts of tribalism that liberalism was meant so address and injects them into liberalism itself - if you're in the Social Justice left points will be scored by sorting people into the neatest stacks of oppression you can, doxing people who've said things that are 'problematic', and if you're really all out on helping your tribe win you attack the scientific edifice and the Enlightenment project itself with Audrey Lorde's saying 'For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change'.

Humanity is unfortunately in what seems like a permanent and perpetual power struggle that seems like it will quite likely go on indefinitely or until humans stop existing. If there is some other way that we can both satisfy what Darwinian game theory does in terms of the fit surviving (ie. not getting conquered by an alien race or all having no resilience to some pathogen or some absurd ideology) then it's possible that some new dynamic could take shape but that's really grappling with a much deeper mystery than I think we're anywhere close to being able to solve even in the 21st century - rather it might take a whole century again for it to be considered a non-controversial idea that so much of human socializing is the Darwinian 'ball in the air' or in play.

Also it sounds like you've poured through these ideas as deeply, perhaps in some ways deeper, than I have so you may have already seen this panel with John Cleese. What's really good about it - they hit on some rather important empirical issues regarding reincarnation that don't seem to fit properly on any religious map and really map better if it were just a situation of physics:

When the process of death begins the seven physiological and psychological embodiments do go into a dormant state in which we are still involved in terms of getting a review of our life experiences, and once we have finished with each stage of which the embodiment in question disintegrates as an individual environment, and reintegrates into the universal environment of it's dimensional plain. The past life review is reincarnation in terms of reliving our experiences and the consequences of out interactions, and the consequential torment of those reincarnated experiences is what is referred to as purgatory, or hell. Many mistake reincarnation for rebirth.

This dormant state of the physiological embodiment seems to last about twenty minutes or so I believe, but no matter how long or short it is ~ linear time does not apply and seconds are eternities in the sense that time drags when you are not having fun, with some people having extremely long drags through the purgatorial or hellish bits and some very short journeys past ~ it all depends on how harsh people have been to or about others or even themselves through the course of their life.


Well with electrons getting released from one atom and captured in the orbits of others and atoms bonding to form gasses, liquids and solids at the microscopic end of the scale, and at the macroscopic end galactic emissions and planetary remnants of destroyed solar systems as meteors seed other planets in newer solar systems with minerals, water, bacteria and amino acids ~ all living organisms are as such either directly or indirectly connected in one way or another without a shadow of a doubt, most certainly.