How Would You Debate Against This Physicist's Argument For Oblivion At/After Death

[Scott Hernandez]

"There's been enormously strong evidence from all that we understand about matter and energy and consciousness and so forth, that says that when you die there's just no way for the information that is contained in your brain to persist in anything outside the brain" - Sean Carroll

I asked Lawrence Krauss two questions that I think coupled together show how we're not just irretrievably erased, consciously, at death. Here they are:

http://m.askers.co/landing/message/7587?1489535828102 - first, a question regarding a thought experiment, physics and personal identity

http://m.askers.co/landing/message/16552?1492440391673 - second, a physics question involving the nature of what the far-future of the universe will do

It's just peculiar how these physicists can't put it together in their heads to apprehend that even naturalistically you'd have a chance of being eternal.

So yeah, the answers given point to how you'd be continuous across any transformation. There's no line that demarcates when you stop being you. And because of the nature of infinity + Poincaré recurrence + quantum fluctuations I fail to see how quantum copies aren't produced by the universe an infinite number of times. Not even mentioning how every several years, ostensibly, all the atoms are replaced and yet you still remain you. The way the atoms are arranged (information) is irrelevant because your atomic arrangement is different than what it was when you were 10 yet you still find yourself as you.

Here's a great article from a naturalist which surprisingly supports eternity of self:

http://www.naturalism.org/philosophy/death/death-nothingness-and-subjectivity

By the way, thanks Bernardo for answering my last topic and linking me your paper you wrote for Europe's Journal Of Psychology. I've bought every one of your books and I really sense you're onto something. A way of looking at reality in a manner that my scientific indoctrination prevented me from realizing.

[tjssailor]

First of all Carroll assumes there is information in your head although there is no empirical proof of that. All there is in your head is electrical impulses. Are electrical impulses thought or other mental activity?  If so then your blender is a genius.
As to the transporter question. Let's say your sweltering on the equator and we attempt to transport you to the north pole.  The transporter malfunctions and creates a copy of your physical body there but leaves your original body on the equator. Now where do you exist?  Are you feeling the heat of the equator or freezing your butt off at the pole?  What most materialists fail to realize is that according to their own philosophy the only coherent answer is that you would have to exist in both places at once.  You be in the confusing situation of sweltering and freezing simultaneously.  If some physical configuration of matter is generating "you" and that same configuration exists elsewhere then "you" would also have to exist at that location.  To say that some else exists at the other location means that something other than a configuration of matter is responsible for "you" and the materialist argument refutes itself.  The other question of identity that should be asked is why do you exist as the individual you seem to be at the time you seem to exist?  There were billions of bodies around before and after "you" showed up so what decided "you" should show up associated with your specific body when you did? What was different?  Why isn't your body just running around like the billions of others without "you" having anything to do with it?

Materialism has no coherent answer to these questions, Idealism does.  It doesn't matter how many copies of your body there are "you" would still seem to be associated with just one and the others would be someone else because the illusion of individuality always occurs whenever Mind @ Large shows up in form.  As to the second question "you" didn't show up at a specific time or place.  "You" have always existed and are always showing up. You're being born right now and are dying right now as the One Consciousness doing everything.

[Peter Jones]

Krauss thinks he has scientific evidence that information contained in the brain does not survive death. If he'd been a philosopher he'd have worked out that the idea is a tautology and he doesn't need any evidence other than noting that the brain doesn't survive our death for long.

As tjs says, the real question is what information is stored in the brain and what is stored elsewhere.

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[Larry Schultz]

and don't forget, no one has actually found this stuff called 'matter'