Occam's razor and life after deathsteemCreated with Sketch.

in #spirituality6 years ago

This is a follow-up to this article in which I talk about God.

Occam's razor is a principle according to which you do not come up with superfluous assumptions when they do not serve the argument.

Life (consciousness) exists, you know that. If you are alive (conscious) at the time of reading this article, the existence of consciousness is a given, and I do not need to prove that.

There is no known connection between malfunctioning of the body and cessation of consciousness. Cessation of consciousness would mean a change from the presently observed state, and therefore it is an action, a positive thing.

Continuity of consciousness is just lack of change, therefore cessation of consciousness is a positive claim, that requires a proof, and continuity of consciousness, and therefore life after death, is a negative claim, a claim about the lack of something, and does not require a proof.

(According to the previous article only positive claims require proofs).

Only if you prove that something that happens during death affects the consciousness in any meaningful way you will have proven that a significant enough change occurs to cause the cessation of consciousness.

The opposite doesn't require a proof. It just means that nothing important happens, nothing changes. Negative claims do not require proofs.

Known examples of destruction of the container not affecting destruction of the principle

We all know that construction of the eye affects perception of the Sun.

Damaging the eye causes damage to the perception of the Sun.

Yet damage or destruction of the eye does not cause a destruction of the Sun.

Similarly, construction of the brain, chemical reactions in the brain, physical damage of the brain, affects human behavior or personality. It doesn't necessarily indicate that destruction of the brain affects or breaks continuity of the consciousness. These events might be just as well unrelated, just like destruction of the eye does not cause a destruction of the Sun.

Construction of the computer affects the speed at which it receives the internet, or even which portions of the internet it can access, if it has a filter. Yet destruction of just one computer does not indicate destruction of the information it just displayed, just like when I destroy my computer while watching a YouTube video it doesn't mean that that particular video is automatically removed from YouTube.

This principle is heavily used in bitcoin or steem blockchain. Destruction of one node, or one database, does not indicate a destruction of the whole ecosystem. (Hypothetical simultaneous destruction of all miners would indeed mean the end of bitcoin, but it is the equivalent of destruction of the whole Universe, as opposed to just one human body, and is beyond the scope of this article).

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