The Mechanical Argument for Life after Death

It's not about opening minds. It's about testing assumptions.

The heart of the atheists faith lies in how they see the universe. Their primary assumption is that everything that exists boils down to a product of space, atoms, and pieces of light. With this view, the concept of some kind of God or an afterlife is logically absurd, and so their faith is reasonable based on those assumptions. But their assumptions are what need to be tested, because there are natural clues that they should be.

The idea that a consciousness can be somehow born out of a giant counting machine (also described as a computer, or biological computer - a brain) is objectively absurd to the human mind. Yet, the materialists assumptions demand that it somehow must be so. In turn, they embrace that faith. They have to.

However, due to the absolute incomprehensibility of a counting action experiencing itself, the computer-consciousness problem should in turn be respected as a profound anomaly (as it is) that should then drive us to test the simple materialist assumptions, as we know them.

-When things don't work you're supposed to take a second look, and assumptions by definition should always be open to challenge. Otherwise they're just dogmas - or religions.

There are other clear anomalies, the most obvious being the blunt fact that anything exists at all. Existence itself is actually absurd...yet, here it all is and here we all are. Clearly, the human mind cannot even touch ultimate reality of which is totally beyond us. This most basic insight alone should humble us.

We also know that there are a great number of anomalies based on decades of now stringent paranormal research, which has led to many interesting findings.

--Mark Gober offers a comprehensive overview on this, and postulates (questionably!) that consciousness 'dreams up' the material world, as opposed to the other way around.

Getting back to the materialists assumptions...

In my view, Einstein, though apparently believing in some kind of field, did the faith of raw materialism a major service by getting rid of the idea of an aether. Sensible minds have struggled with Einsteins abandonment of the aether, because Einstein effectively claimed the impossible - that is, the idea that a wave of light could travel through nothing (absolute space). To compensate, quantum physics postulated the idea that light is a particle and also a wave....somehow? Questioning physicists of the past believed that the aether, which is the material of the field, must exist. As the reasoning goes, if the aether doesn't exist then how can fields exist? It's like believing in the existence of sound waves without believing in the existence of air. A field can't be made of nothing. And no, "space-time" is not a something - it's a mathematical abstraction.

I can't tell you what Einstein was smoking, but there's a problem when physicists get so absorbed in their maths that they forget to think in real physical terms (the same problem that economists sometimes have!). It's important to remember that maths, ultimately, is only a mechanism by which we measure quantities. Maths cannot in itself tell us anything that a slide-rule can't tell us, because an elaborate slide-rule is all that maths really is. If the maths tells you that time speeds up and slows down, for example, then you can know that the technicians have missed the plot. No 'slide-rule' can validate the absurd. And note that measuring a phenomena--which is what maths does--is not the same as understanding it. Quantum physics (quantum maths, really) is still a world of often wild speculations. Sure we know what subatomic stuff does, but truthfully we still don't know how it does it - or even what it is.

So now let's look at the new (old, actually) faith -- that is, the faith of the field, as supported by some kind of material medium which we will call the aether. When we embrace the idea of the aether, it opens a grand new world of legitimate theoretical speculation.

We know that matter is deeply linked to the field (as experiments in quantum physics have in fact validated) so we can comfortably speculate on the idea of the consciousness being based within the field, not the brain, as a tangible hypothesis. That idea is as structurally reasonable as the idea of computing via the cloud as opposed to the desktop (perfectly possible). In fact, 'field physics' opens the plausibility of many interesting things investigated by paranormal research, such as:

-Past lives (logging on to another terminal when the given physical body dies? No problem in a 'field based' reality).

 -The existence of other experiential domains, loosely [though erroneously] called 'other dimensions' (Logging on to a different group of harmonic frequencies, of which compose gross matter as we know it? No problem).

-Psychic communications (via the field, again no problem).

-Psychic predictions of future events, assuming that the field--or whatever is within it--can compute (simulate) cause-to-effect like the brain does, though only to a far grander and maybe more accurate degree. (Note, the far reaching computational power of any system based within the field may be incomparably more vast and powerful, as compared to any known or even theorised computer, be it mechanical or organic).

-Remote viewing, which has been apparently validated and even exploited by the US military over a number of decades.

-Tens of millions (literally) of Near Death Experience accounts, with remarkable reported consistencies, and countless bedside apparitions, etc.

However, all those asserted phenomena are silly if you dismiss the idea of the aether. I assert that the death of the aether was always a theoretical mistake, and a strange one at that. Everything that we have observed in physics absolutely reeks of being supported by an aether, with the physical world as we experience it being a collection of harmonic vibrations born out of it. In fact the aether model is the only way the material universe can operationally "work" in terms of how humans could possibly understand it at least. It's only the institutionally-enforced faith in 'superman Einstein' that stops people from seriously considering what Nicola Tesla, a true technical genius (he practically invented the 20th century), considered to be obvious -- the existence of the aether.

So far my structural argument is about reconsidering the universe's potential in terms of communications and computation, in an aether-based reality. I'm suggesting that the consciousness could be anywhere within the field, and that humans can communicate, potentially anyhow, as the aether can function as (or simply be) a direct extension of our nervous systems.

However, I have not explained the consciousness itself on any level, or even suggested how it could be explained. Field or no field, the hard truth is we cannot even begin to understand how a structural system can experience itself. Again, the idea that counting machines can experience themselves is completely absurd to the human mind. Though the consciousness may be based within the field, the consciousness is still not necessarily composed of the field, itself. Again, mechanistic wave behaviours alone cannot conceivably experience themselves, no matter how complex.

Finally, if we can at least appreciate that a brain cannot experience itself, which is our best objective thinking, then we can rightly say that the physical death does not necessarily lead to the conscious death - that we can know of.

Anyway, I myself am inclined to see reincarnation as the most reasonable and even evidential option. My arguments are more complex on that, and I have made my case in the following video. Regardless, what I can say conclusively is that the materialist-atheist should not be so bold as to assume that basic materialism as we commonly know it is the name of the game. That position is in fact quite irrational and there's a lot of robust evidence against it - both philosophical and empirical.

                                           -Andrew Atkin

The Mask of Sanity

I remember watching the show, the dog whisperer. An emotionally unstable dog was introduced to a placid pack of dogs. The dogs in the pack immediately sensed the instability of the newcomer, and barked in unison to reject the new dog. The unstable dog later had to be put down.

We know what unstable dogs are like. They bite and snap with impulse for no apparent reason or in gross over-reaction. So what makes dogs emotionally unstable? The same things that make humans unstable. Trauma, abuse and neglect, especially at the earliest periods of life.

However, we do not usually see humans acting-out with aggressive or uncalled for impulse, unless the internalised trauma is chronic. This is because humans have what dogs don't have - a giant neocortex. The neocortex is a major player in repression and emotional control. It allows us to mask emotional madness, and likewise mask the worst effects of a problematic childhood.

But like dogs, other humans sense our madness instantly, though we don't worry too much about it because it's so common, not usually dangerous, and we usually come to be skilled at dealing with 'difficult' people. And indeed, in our world there's almost not a single human that can say they are without trauma and its effects. We're all a bit "rabid dog" to some degree.

However, that giant neocortex is both a blessing and curse. It allows us to carry the species on in spite of ourselves, which is kind of great, but at the same time it can stop us from getting rid of mental sickness as well. You could crudely argue that it would be better for heavily damaged humans to kill themselves off, so healthier specimens can take over the resource base they're occupying. Indeed, some would argue that wars--at least some of them--are an unconscious form of mutually-assisted suicide, to achieve exactly that end. Life is usually cheap in highly damaged societies...but that's another story.

There's a point where the controlling neocortex fails us, in part. That is, conditions where the social pressures are weak, which in turn makes us free to overtly act-out the private madness that's really there. That is in the private home. This is where the madness within can let itself loose - and on the people we can get away with losing it with. Mainly, our children.

This is how child abuse becomes inter-generational. You can't rehabilitate someone out of a nasty childhood. That would be like rehabilitating someone out of autism. It sadly doesn't work that way. When mum and dad don't have to be nice and socially acceptable, they let it all out for better and worse. In turn their children will end up pretty much like them - damaged.

The mask of sanity is created when we're under pressure to play it cool in public life. And we have a pact of silence between each other when it comes to our private truths. Indeed, the very conversation I'm trying to provoke is in itself politically taboo. No one wants to talk about it. We only like talking about child abuse at its most gross extremes, not so much the normal-level abuse which is too close to home. Hence, though people don't typically argue against what I'm talking about, trying to get a conversation going on abuse, neglect and infantile damage, is like trying to start a fire with wet wood. It falls flat. We don't want to know. We would rather just preserve that mask of sanity.

                                                 -Andrew Atkin

Note: I do not want to appear too black in this article. There's a lot we can do to step by step, generation by generation, liberate ourselves from our damage - especially the worst of it. I made a video on this [here] and have written a lot throughout this blog on mental sickness.

Nadine Harris has made an excellent video on mental health, as well.