Naturalism and Death

[roflcopter]

Please read this article:

http://www.naturalism.org/death.htm

The topic of this thread, then, is "Is the above argument philosophically coherent?" Me, I'm basically a lay-man when it comes to philosophy, but I was very intrigued by the idea, so I would like to know if this is at all controversial.

[Formless]

Ah, metaphysics, i.e. utter gibberish. He starts by accusing people who say nothing comes after death of reifying "nothingness" without showing any understanding of what the reification fallacy is. When we say there will be nothing after death, we mean you will not be around to experience anything. Nothing more need be said about the subject (no pun intended). You will be destroyed. Your personality will cease to exist save for in people's memories. You will no longer be a causitive agent in the world. You have no immortal soul. And so on and so forth, etc.. There is no reification in any of those statements-- reification is when you take a word that deals with an abstract concept and treat it as if the concept were a physical object or causative agent within reality. Whereas this is simply a concept being treated as... a concept.

He's just playing with words, and failing to understand that said words are and always were intended to be metaphorical rather than litteral. Just look at how he uses Isaac Asimov as an example of what he is talking about. Really? A novelist using colorful language to convey an abstract concept? Stop the presses!

The thing is, there is no argument here. The people he takes issue with would no doubt agree with him about there being nothing after death and that by definition the word "nothing" refers to NO THING. NO OBJECT. NO EXPERIENCE TO EXPERIENCE. You don't have to have a college degree to figure that one out. Jesus, how do you make a thousand word essay out of this? Take this as a lesson about philosophers: there is nothing they love more than to pack as much vacuous, vapid, and vapourus verbage as possible into their writings and ponderings to mystify and befuddle others to obscure the fact that they're saying absolutely nothing profound at all. And apparantly there is an audience for this kind of shit. Mostly composed of other philosophers- regular people have better things to do than to quibble over semantics, you see.

[madd0ct0r]

Damn, i printed it off to read later and everything.

from the first page though, I've got to agree with Formless. The author seems to be assuming when someone say's there's nothing after death, they mean there is nothing to experience - just the consciousness floating in a black void.

Basically, it seems he hasn't let go of the soul.

instead of what i would argue the quoted eminents meant: a cessation of the verb, not the adjective.

[Simon_Jester]

The first part of the argument does seem to boil down to "if there is eternal existence after death, then the idea that there is nothing after death is false," come to think of it.

It's a tautology; he's trying to paper over the fact that his argument starts out by assuming as an axiom something that directly contradicts the idea he wishes to show is flawed.

Then he loops round and affirms what everyone knew all along: the concept of "nothing after death" does not mean "an absence of experience in which we are embedded," it means "there is no 'us' in a definable sense of the term."

And his conclusion boils down to "lives may begin and end, but the subjective perception of 'having always existed' goes on." Which is... well, pretty wonky.

[Master_Baerne]

This... May be the least coherent attempt at a logical argument I've read in recent years. Of course if there's something to experience after you die, there isn't nothing to experience after you die. Similarly, of course if there is not afterlife, you wouldn't notice on account of not existing to notice it. I'm not sure what he's trying to argue, just that he's trying really hard to argue it.