If we assume there is something of my mental life after death, what means, without authority, do we have to decide what? [closed]

Question

If we assume there is something of my mental life after death, what means, without authority, do we have to decide what? So, in effect, how do we decide about who's vision of an "afterlife" to believe? Without relying on other people's testimony.

Personally, I believe that I will exist as the limn of another life, generated by karma.

It is not the simplest explanation (the simplest would be that everyone becomes the exact same experience of nothingness or perhaps that everything repeats), but it less inflationary than heaven and hell (and perhaps repetition), and it includes reference to something else that I assume (the experience of karma), so could be seen as more powerful perhaps.

Perhaps this is non-philosophy (or too broad)

Answer 1

So this is sort of a question about epistemology: how do we know what we know? What justifies one's confidence in a particular position?

In the case of life after death, I suppose you could ask what methods you've used to justify your belief in karma, and whether the exact same methods could be used to justify some other belief.

Answer 2

I think this is a good question, generally neglected by religious practitioners. If you go to heaven, what goes to heaven? If you are reborn, what do you have in common or what continuity is there?

Even most Christian's don't know their own doctrines, about bodily resurrection, and a new Heaven and a new Earth. The idea of immediate transmigration into Heaven, is for saints. It occurred in a cultural context of Hellenic ideas of ascent to a position of being remembered and called on for guidance, through having constellations named after you (like Hercules and Perseus did). Discussed here: What are some philosophical works that explore constructing meaning in life from an agnostic or atheist view? The Jewish perspective on Heaven is quite different, in that Shabbat is literally practice for it - it's much more like making peace with your life, finding a way to be that you could be happy with for eternity.

In Buddhist thought the continuity of identity, is much less than practitioners generally reflect. The core doctrine of Anatta specifically rejects the idea of an inner essence providing a clear link between beings. The rebirth of causes and conditions, is more like using one candle to light another and how much the candles then have in common - as per the metaphor in The Questions of King Melinda, discussed here: Does Buddhism espouse reincarnation? Buddhist thought deconstructs the conventional self, as a tool to witness Sunyata, which Thic Nhat Hanh called 'Interbeing', the interdependence and conditionally of things. If you had experienced the causes and conditions of someone else, you would be them. So there is a deep commonality between us all. Discussed here: How would you apply John Rawls "Theory of justice" to everyday decisions?

For me the really important insight is about intersubjectivity. This is made really clear in the ancient Indian metaphor of Indra's Net. But it's also critical to understanding how morality goes beyond the game-theory of getting what we want. Discussed here: Is the Categorical Imperative Simply Bad Math? :)

The most detailed picture of rebirth I think, is the Yogacara Mahayana doctrine of Alayavijnana, or Eight Consciousnesses. This is an elaboration of the sense-gates picture of the arising of consciousness from the modes of interaction of each sense, and the associated domain or space of the information provided by it. Then the sixth 'mental consciousness' is very like Aristotle's picture of a Common Sense, where different senses construct integrated objects in the mind. The seventh is translated as 'deluded consciousness', we can relate to opinions, which Buddhist thought holds as problematic ("If you wish to see the truth, then hold no opinions for, or against, anything. To set up what you like against what you dislike is the disease of the mind."-3rd Zen Patriarch in the HsinHsinMing. Eighth is translated as 'storehouse consciousness, and I think this bears very good comparison to the Noosphere, or Memesphere. That is, the space of ideas which have their own ability to persist and achieve substrate independence. Taking this seriously, we can come to an understanding of rebirth that can be much better reconciled with science.

The picture I am increasingly drawn to, is more like the idea of Eternal Recurrance, in Nietzsche's thought. In a Multiverse, we can get an expanded picture of us following all our possible paths in life, and of all the very similar selves with subtly different initial conditions. In such, we can picture the movement towards being reconciled with our lives, to not wishing to go back and change things, to recover ideas about Bodhisattvas and their buddhasetra, and of Grace. Non-attachment as finding a way to live, being reconciled with our choices moment by moment, so we can at last let go with tinkering with do-overs of our life, or the lives of others only similar to us from wishing for changed initial conditions (see Teletransportation Paradoxes and the divergence of selves). With the static-block picture of spacetime, we could imagine rebirth as the momentary standing outside of the subjective experience of rolling through the moments of our choices looking at the structure as a whole and wishing for change. So the aim of rebirth as something like, creating a 4D sculpture you are happy with, to build a Good Life. Then we can truly let go, and go:

"Beyond, go beyond, go completely beyond. So be it." -closing mantra of the Heart Sutra

Answer 3

Your question is a very appropriate one. The methodology you use to try to answer it is seriously flawed.

The question falls into the general category of: "how we can know what is in a contingent universe?" And your question accepts that the circumstances for a spirit life are -- contingent -- there are multiple possibilities.

Note, however, that you pose that there are only two possibilities, and offer reasoning for one of them based on this false dichotomy. There are instead almost infinite possible natures to a spirit realm.

Early Greek and Medieval western thought sometimes used the method you propose -- "what is intellectually satisfying to our reasoning minds", to try to figure out the world.

But most rationalist thinking by the medieval era and later, looked to deductive reasoning, rather than rationally guided intuitions -- as our intuitions are so often shown invalid when exploring our world. Note in particular, the principle of parsimony -- that the world should be fundamentally simple -- has been shown to be absolutely false when applied to our material world. Scientists all need to focus on only a narrow field within a larger discipline, before they can even understand enough to then advance science themselves. Nobody can comprehend the esoteric details of all of even one general field of science, such as chemistry, or even crystallography within chemistry. Our world is not parsimonious. Our DESIRE for it to be simple is why we humans are always adopting universalized worldviews (dogmatic religion, or other ideologies) despite very limited evidence for their global validity.

Additionally of concern for the intuitionalist aspect of your intuitive rationalism, we humans have been shown to be very bad at judging the validity of supporting vs contrary evidences when we are operating intuitively -- basically we engage in motivated thinking to engage in confirmation bias.
See Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow to see how system 2 generally rationalizes the intuitions of system 1. https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0374533555

Even worse for the rationalist part of your intuitive rationalist approach, western philosophy has shown that rationalism is basically useless for contingent questions. Kant led off this attack on rationalism with his Critique of Pure Reason, and the fate of rationalism has suffered many further setbacks, like when we discovered that Euclidian Geometry did not apply to our world, that reason cannot close (Godel incompleteness theorem), and that both math and logic are infinitely pluralist https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/think/article/abs/guide-to-logical-pluralism-for-nonlogicians/EDFDFA1C9EB65DB71848DABD6B12D877.

In contrast to rationalist intuitions, eastern philosophy relies upon direct knowledge of the spiritual. This is also the case for western mysticism. Not everyone can achieve this direct access to spiritual reality, so per this method, we often have to rely upon the reports of those who can. When those reports vary and conflict, such as between the visons of Mohammed, and the inspirations of Gautama Siddhartha -- the character or the mystic, and the value to the life of humans of what they discovered, are generally cited as the metric for credibility (I.E. by their fruits you shall know them).

An alternate approach is to accept that all of these reports have grains of truth, but that the intuitions and desires of the mystics themselves for a global worldview that matches what they wished were so, may have colored their visions. If one accepts that the spiritual universe is complex, and mysticism is itself a fallible process, then it is possible that some aspect of reincarnation, and of Christian heaven, could both be true.

Answer 4

If you want to say that any after-life won't involve any agency (which I think is inflationary, against most authorities), free or otherwise, then maybe it doesn't matters what you call anything and how it fits into any religious system. Choose a means to it, at best.

The reasons for believing it occurs (or does not occur) should be sufficient to think clearly about it.