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Kurt Gödel, his mother and the argument for life after death

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Re: Kurt Gödel, his mother and the argument for life after death

#11

[flagged]

Because you cannot yet explain something, it must be God?

Usually when something appears to violate causality, that doesn't end up being the case. The unexpectedness of the result is caused by our own incomplete understanding of the physics at play. So far none of these have ended up pointing to some supernatural entity secretly judging us.

Re: Kurt Gödel, his mother and the argument for life after death

#12
post #4

TLDR Godel believed we lived in a rational world. "Precisely in virtue of the fact that our lives consist in unfulfilled or spoiled potential makes him confident that this lifetime is but a staging ground for things to come. But, again, that is only if the world is rationally structured."

Yes, once you discover limitations of logic you start hedging your bets by believing in illogical things :)

Re: Kurt Gödel, his mother and the argument for life after death

#13
post #4

TLDR Godel believed we lived in a rational world. "Precisely in virtue of the fact that our lives consist in unfulfilled or spoiled potential makes him confident that this lifetime is but a staging ground for things to come. But, again, that is only if the world is rationally structured."

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/real-3

Re: Kurt Gödel, his mother and the argument for life after death

#14
Is there a reason we should care about his belief regarding this? Putting aside that smart people in one realm are often quite irrational outside of their expertise, e.g. Isaac Newton being super dedicated to alchemy, Jack Parsons at JPL believing he could summon demons, there is also a quite obvious limitation to this line of evidence. I have very good reason to believe I'm going to survive the next five minutes. That doesn't mean I'm going to "survive" in the sense that we care about regarding why religions draw people in, that is, even conclusive proof we survive past bodily death doesn't make us immortal. An immaterial soul that lingers to experience more stuff for another 20 minutes hardly makes a difference, but even if we can conclusively prove near-death experiences are real, that's all we'd be proving.

Same thing with the ontological argument. Even if you can convince yourself the universe must have some kind of intelligent creator that made it on purpose, that does not imply this creator has any kind of human-intelligible personality and monitors or cares what we do, let alone that it must be the Christian creator or any other specific religion's idea of what a god is. Ironically, my wife put on just this morning an episode of Rick and Morty in which Morty gets trapped in the Roy game and Rick has to go in and convince everyone they're in a video game and are really part of a larger reality, which was meant to be a parody of religion. That is, their universe truly did have an intelligent creator, but they were NPCs in a video game and the larger reality is they were really a 14 year-old boy in the real universe. We have no particularly good reason to prefer a priori Christianity versus Hinduism versus we're all 14 year-old boys trapped in a video game just because we're convinced we have a creator and some part of us survives death in this particular simulation. Notably, the real Morty is still going to die in the real world.

Re: Kurt Gödel, his mother and the argument for life after death

#16

[flagged]

What do we really know (most of us) besides that we exist? Nothing. It's funny that a lot of people believe things they don't know about and most of them are judged perfectly sane :o)

The only real thing I personally believe is existence because it is impredicative. That's true logic.

The rest is hogwash until proven otherwise.

(I do believe in some fringe stuff from personal experience but that probably has a perfectly normal explanation, I just miss the data to explain it for now)

Re: Kurt Gödel, his mother and the argument for life after death

#17

[flagged]

If so, let's start with the former (god) and point us not only to the proof, but also to the theorem and the underlying definitions. There are many logicians with a scientific interest in god, religion, and related concepts. Why not be open minded, after all? But we should expect more rigor in this case.

Re: Kurt Gödel, his mother and the argument for life after death

#19
post #2

Hopefully as an FYI that is free of too much skeptical criticism (I mean... I actually get it, but I just don't want to deal with negativity right now), there's actually a rapidly growing number of NDE accounts on YouTube right now. I am putting together a playlist of the most compelling ones: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvnDbwjRqIOkgR1eUMfpn... Some of these are from well-educated people like doctors, for…

I’ve noticed these near-death-experience videos coming up in my recommendations and found it truly odd. They don’t seem to have anything to do with what I normally watch. I have to wonder if they’re the top of the funnel for religion campaigns like “hegetsus”.
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