You're thinking in terms of your existence on Earth (and the knowledge you acquired while here on Earth). What if there are elements to life hidden from view such as the "soul" - which could possibly be pure thought with no physical substance. Can't you at least admit there could be possibilities us mere mortals can't conceive of.
Yes, possibility in the sense that we can't rule it out. But what does it mean when you can't rule something out. There is a long long list of things one can come up with that we cannot rule out but no one really wants to believe are possible.
The point is that people propose that there is an afterlife, but they leave out how all this happens. To me this is a big problem. To me the idea of an afterlife is meaningless until it is completed. Really, I can't know if it is true or not, no one can, for the sole reason of its uncompleteness. No one can logically comment on the idea because it is incomplete. First it has to be completed. If it is not completed the idea should just be disregarded.
The only way to comment on it is for me to fill the gaps with thinks I know about, earthly things. If you propose the gaps should be filled with non-earthly things then you propose to fill the gap with things we know nothing about, either because they don't exist or aren't part of our reality, which probably makes little difference. So you aren't really filling the gap. Instead of leaving it totally open you say 'it just magically happens in ways we cannot comprehend because of our earthly knowledge'.
I can't do anything with ideas like that. They aren't part of our reality and I doubt they will ever have anything to do with it.
You’re forming your opinion of death via the decomposing of the brain. Maybe the “soul” is like an invisible USB device that stores our brain data; thus the essence of whom we are.
I have made this argument again. No one really knows what a soul is and what it does. But generally the soul does something during a persons whole life. We know the brain largely works through neurological cells, that are connected through neural-nets. But lets say humans also have souls. This would mean that the soul has an interaction with the neurons. Because the neurons operate through electrical signals and neuro-chemicals, which both can be measured, the soul needs to use either of the two to influence the neurons. If the soul does this it will no longer be 'invisible', it is observable. For something to be truely invisible it needs to have no interactions at all with our reality. It has to have no mass, no charge, it must not reflect photons, etc. If something does that then we cannot see it, but it can also not see us. This means if an invisible soul would exist it couldn't do anything and its existence would be irrelevant.
Just remember there are things that we know exist today that couldn’t be conceived of a century ago – like cyberspace for instance.
What is cyberspace? You mean the way people connect through the internet. Well, that is a really a sociological developments. They can never be predicted and will be hard to be conceived. If we talk about a soul then we talk about a new form of energy or matter. Phyisics involves the most simple things in the universe. Human behavior is the most complex thing in the universe, beyond any doubt the most complex of all, more complex than amino-acid folding and the like.
The fact that we can't predict human behavior doesn't mean that we can't exclude a new form of matter or energy that has been sitting in our brains all the time we considered the standard model.
But if you are proposing new matter or energy, be more concrete; what is it? How does it fit in the standard model. Is it made of particles? Mass? Charge?
Poll
Topic: reincarnation