[Cross-posted at Scientific American Blogs. Thanks to Bora Z. for the invitation.]
The topic of “Life after death” raises disreputable connotations of past-life regression and haunted houses, but there are a large number of people in the world who believe in some form of persistence of the individual soul after life ends. Clearly this is an important question, one of the most important ones we can possibly think of in terms of relevance to human life. If science has something to say about, we should all be interested in hearing.
Adam Frank thinks that science has nothing to say about it. He advocates being “firmly agnostic” on the question. (His coblogger Alva NoĂ« resolutely disagrees.) I have an enormous respect for Adam; he’s a smart guy and a careful thinker. When we disagree it’s with the kind of respectful dialogue that should be a model for disagreeing with non-crazy people. But here he couldn’t be more wrong.
Adam claims that “simply is no controlled, experimental[ly] verifiable information” regarding life after death. By these standards, there is no controlled, experimentally verifiable information regarding whether the Moon is made of green cheese. Sure, we can take spectra of light reflecting from the Moon, and even send astronauts up there and bring samples back for analysis. But that’s only scratching the surface, as it were. What if the Moon is almost all green cheese, but is covered with a layer of dust a few meters thick? Can you really say that you know this isn’t true? Until you have actually examined every single cubic centimeter of the Moon’s interior, you don’t really have experimentally verifiable information, do you? So maybe agnosticism on the green-cheese issue is warranted. (Come up with all the information we actually do have about the Moon; I promise you I can fit it into the green-cheese hypothesis.)
Obviously this is completely crazy. Our conviction that green cheese makes up a negligible fraction of the Moon’s interior comes not from direct observation, but from the gross incompatibility of that idea with other things we think we know. Given what we do understand about rocks and planets and dairy products and the Solar System, it’s absurd to imagine that the Moon is made of green cheese. We know better.
We also know better for life after death, although people are much more reluctant to admit it. Admittedly, “direct” evidence one way or the other is hard to come by — all we have are a few legends and sketchy claims from unreliable witnesses with near-death experiences, plus a bucketload of wishful thinking. But surely it’s okay to take account of indirect evidence — namely, compatibility of the idea that some form of our individual soul survives death with other things we know about how the world works.
Claims that some form of consciousness persists after our bodies die and decay into their constituent atoms face one huge, insuperable obstacle: the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely understood, and there’s no way within those laws to allow for the information stored in our brains to persist after we die. If you claim that some form of soul persists beyond death, what particles is that soul made of? What forces are holding it together? How does it interact with ordinary matter?
Everything we know about quantum field theory (QFT) says that there aren’t any sensible answers to these questions. Of course, everything we know about quantum field theory could be wrong. Also, the Moon could be made of green cheese.
Among advocates for life after death, nobody even tries to sit down and do the hard work of explaining how the basic physics of atoms and electrons would have to be altered in order for this to be true. If we tried, the fundamental absurdity of the task would quickly become evident.
Even if you don’t believe that human beings are “simply” collections of atoms evolving and interacting according to rules laid down in the Standard Model of particle physics, most people would grudgingly admit that atoms are part of who we are. If it’s really nothing but atoms and the known forces, there is clearly no way for the soul to survive death. Believing in life after death, to put it mildly, requires physics beyond the Standard Model. Most importantly, we need some way for that “new physics” to interact with the atoms that we do have.
Very roughly speaking, when most people think about an immaterial soul that persists after death, they have in mind some sort of blob of spirit energy that takes up residence near our brain, and drives around our body like a soccer mom driving an SUV. The questions are these: what form does that spirit energy take, and how does it interact with our ordinary atoms? Not only is new physics required, but dramatically new physics. Within QFT, there can’t be a new collection of “spirit particles” and “spirit forces” that interact with our regular atoms, because we would have detected them in existing experiments. Ockham’s razor is not on your side here, since you have to posit a completely new realm of reality obeying very different rules than the ones we know.
But let’s say you do that. How is the spirit energy supposed to interact with us? Here is the equation that tells us how electrons behave in the everyday world:
Dont’ worry about the details; it’s the fact that the equation exists that matters, not its particular form. It’s the Dirac equation — the two terms on the left are roughly the velocity of the electron and its inertia — coupled to electromagnetism and gravity, the two terms on the right.
As far as every experiment ever done is concerned, this equation is the correct description of how electrons behave at everyday energies. It’s not a complete description; we haven’t included the weak nuclear force, or couplings to hypothetical particles like the Higgs boson. But that’s okay, since those are only important at high energies and/or short distances, very far from the regime of relevance to the human brain.
If you believe in an immaterial soul that interacts with our bodies, you need to believe that this equation is not right, even at everyday energies. There needs to be a new term (at minimum) on the right, representing how the soul interacts with electrons. (If that term doesn’t exist, electrons will just go on their way as if there weren’t any soul at all, and then what’s the point?) So any respectable scientist who took this idea seriously would be asking — what form does that interaction take? Is it local in spacetime? Does the soul respect gauge invariance and Lorentz invariance? Does the soul have a Hamiltonian? Do the interactions preserve unitarity and conservation of information?
Nobody ever asks these questions out loud, possibly because of how silly they sound. Once you start asking them, the choice you are faced with becomes clear: either overthrow everything we think we have learned about modern physics, or distrust the stew of religious accounts/unreliable testimony/wishful thinking that makes people believe in the possibility of life after death. It’s not a difficult decision, as scientific theory-choice goes.
We don’t choose theories in a vacuum. We are allowed — indeed, required — to ask how claims about how the world works fit in with other things we know about how the world works. I’ve been talking here like a particle physicist, but there’s an analogous line of reasoning that would come from evolutionary biology. Presumably amino acids and proteins don’t have souls that persist after death. What about viruses or bacteria? Where upon the chain of evolution from our monocellular ancestors to today did organisms stop being described purely as atoms interacting through gravity and electromagnetism, and develop an immaterial immortal soul?
There’s no reason to be agnostic about ideas that are dramatically incompatible with everything we know about modern science. Once we get over any reluctance to face reality on this issue, we can get down to the much more interesting questions of how human beings and consciousness really work.
@jumbo: Are you suggesting that our will, emotions and conscience etc. violate the known laws of physics? Because if you are not suggesting it, then you are not contradicting me in any way. And if you are suggesting it, then I will patiently wait for you to show me some experimental evidence to back up your interesting claim. Thank you.
This is my favorite post so far in this very interesting thread:
“There is no evidence for life after death, supernatural phenomena, free will, unnecessarily complicated physical theories, or any number of other fantastical things. The reason why many people believe such things anyway is because if they didn’t, then they would probably conclude that existence is the ultimate trap in which they have no power, no control, and no purpose. Thus, natural selection will favor those that believe in these things (even if these beliefs are false) to the extent that such beliefs allow or encourage them to reproduce rather than kill themselves in despair.”
This is the fact on the ground that the atheist/scientific community always seems to ignore. You are not dominating the memetic/genetic landscape; in fact you may be headed for extinction. How many children did Richard Feynman have? How many cultures did he conquer? Sorry, but this matters!
Science tells us that humans are just another animal species engaged in a Darwinian struggle for power, yet how poorly most scientists fight this struggle! Where is your will to power? Where is your Mohammedan spirit of conquest? This was the genius of Nietzsche and the proto-fascist Futurists; they offered an aggressive brand of modernity that celebrates the will to power and can overthrow all that is obsolete, primitive and weak. This is the ideological direction scientific atheism needs to go in if it wants to survive, because I hope it’s clear by now that the Einstein/Sagan brand of scientific liberalism leads to nothing but impotence and extinction!
Arko Bose, in my view the current knowledge of consciousness is poor and it is premature to say whether it can be fully explained by current physics. Saying that, I have also to admit that I find some current research on near death experiences intriguing and worthy of further continuation (for example blind patients describing colors of various physical objects around them after coming back from a coma). This would suggest that consciousness may be more complex than we thought. In fact I find a bit funny that brain is always likened to the most complex machines known at a given time (mechanical instruments full of cogwheels, telephone exchange, computer, internet,… ).
@jumbo: I have answered your latest concerns here: http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2011/05/24/136607035/you-and-your-brain-on-agnosticism-and-consciousness#commentBlock
By the way, if you close your eyes and then apply some pressure on them, you will see colors. Just to remind us that we do not need to keep our eyes open all the time for our brains to register the information of colors. The cones present in our retina already have the information to decode colors embedded in them. Perhaps, the brains just has a hotline to access some of that information? Occam’s razor, again.
in my view the current knowledge of consciousness is poor and it is premature to say whether it can be fully explained by current physics.
It would be premature to invent a need for new physics.
Sean– build the bridge! Your argument is persuasive, and yet I have to admit feeling stymied with any thought experiment that begins with “How does QFT explain observations of human consciousness?” Its a bit like the chasm into which so many fall when confronted with “how do successive random mutations turn a skin cell into an eyeball?” The answer is not obvious, and requires a kind of thinking that is often unfamiliar.
Innate to all organisms is the need to survive and reproduce. Finding food and escaping predators is critical to all forms of life. Homo sapiens, with an imagination, created the soul for life-after-death as the ultimate continued existence, supported within primitive religions. With our imagination, we have created stone tool technology, languages, religions and art, all these have become more complicated over time. Religions have become very complicated but kept the concept of the soul to give hope to some.
As an artist, I see creations as the product of the brain that stops functioning at the time of death. Only the objects produced in a lifetime live on to show how the mind worked to reveal ones values, knowledge, empathy, anger etc., that must surely turn out to be a representation of our soul – now transferred into other medium. Think Plato, Bach, Van Gogh – and all the other important individuals that have made humans the intelligent ape. This is only where our souls survives – in the knowledge of future generations.
Wow, reading the comments, i am noticing a huge swath of debris left by human hubris and exceptionalism. It reminds me of something Douglas Adams wrote: “Man always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much–the wheel, New York, wars and so on–while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man–for precisely the same reason. So long and thanks for all the fish.”
If someone not exposed to our modern technology hears music on a radio, he might think that the radio is the source of the music when it is nothing more than transistors and circuits reproducing information on a radio wave. If the same person destroys the radio, he might believe he has destroyed the source of the music.
The point about being agnostic is we really don’t know how ignorant we might be.
Just to continue the analogy a little further.
Right now, we can take apart the radio and see the circuits but we don’t know where the music is coming from.
I am just writing to say that I liked the post, and it will be useful to me. So thanks, and keep up the good work.
It is likely that nano-technology, genetic engineering, and robotic technologies may eventually produce self-replicating machines that are indistinguishable from biological systems. If that point ever arrives, it will be difficult to draw a line between natural and engineered machines, and indeed Occam may be inclined to dictate that the observable engineered processes are more likely than postulated unobserved ones. Following this line of thought, future engineers would likely program complex systems the way they do now, with remote control at critical control points. Will future generations more clever than us figure out how to use entanglement, tunneling, or other quantum effects to relay information? If so, my control points would be in the microtubules and ribosomes (where quantum effects have been observed) in the heart of the manufacturing and control process so I have a back door to each cell. I would keep the control software, that took so long to develop and exceeds the value of the machine, in a safe place so it would not be lost if the machine were damaged. Speculation you say? Maybe, but I wouldn’t bet everything against it. Perhaps the answer to the question of life after death lies in the future instead of the past, where even the existence of intelligence changes everything…
Good riff, Sean 🙂
Could the Earth’s magnetic field be a medium for us to exist after our physical bodies die?
Perhaps you could do an article or three on information being physical? Or what a typical portion of universe would be like? Or how an ‘uncollapsed wave function’ could be intentionally utilized by us?
I’ll admit that I do believe in the existence of a soul. While being interested in supernatural things, and interested in science, I’ll admit that I’m a far cry from being either a mystic or a scientists. My belief in the supernatural comes with a belief that I may be wrong.
When I think about the future of scientific discovery, I do expect that there are still discoveries to be made that will be game-changers. The kinds of discoveries that will make our great-grandchildren think of our current scientific understanding as being very immature, the way we see science in the past, even as those scientists felt they were closing in on a full understanding of nature.
A lot of people are only interested in science insofar as they can use it to try to support their supernatural claims use this reasoning to claim that, sooner or later, something will be discovered and the entire spirit world will be visible on a meter in a lab. I’m not saying this will happen. But, I do think you underestimate the anecdotal evidence with the words, ” a few legends and sketchy claims from unreliable witnesses with near-death experiences.” I believe that out-of-body experiences have a little more prevalence and consistency between them to be dismissed that way, including my own. It’s an interesting subject, even if you only take it as psychology (rather than parapsychology).
So, if coming scientific discoveries did back up that these experiences are outside of the mind, I wouldn’t be surprised. And if they didn’t, same answer.
No. Not least because the magnetic field collapses every now and then, so all your putative information would fade away along with it. Not a very useful sort of afterlife…
“The nonexistence of something is established as highly probable, not through a single experiment demonstrating its nonexistence, but through acceptance of an explanatorily powerful framework that has no place for it.”
-Patricia Churchland, Brainwise, 172
Hurray! There are some philosophers who make sense!
@Kevin R. Bridges:
You clearly did not read Sean’s post, to which he links above, about the laws of physics, as they relate to our everyday life, being completely understood.
Really. It’s true. No, we don’t have a Theory of Everything. We will discover new and unanticipated things in the future. But that’s not relevant to this discussion.
A little Humor from NPR?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWDMjg0K8PM&feature=player_embedded
In the case of Meno and the Slave Boy the question arises for me as to what can exist as immortally, through phases of life and death “through rebirth” that the innate understanding of each soul carries with it all that it has learn in it’s evolution.
obviously consciousness is not the “soul” – yes we lose consciousness when we die – but don’t bet on the loss of your soul – it will still be there – at least as long as other humans live – moreover the world is not just made of atoms – it is also made of “justice” “freedom” “evil” etc… and of course consequences: the consequence of being atheist for one – God is not just a “useful idiot” – He is at least the true lighthouse of evolution
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Unless I’ve missed out on some major research, consciousness has not been explained by the laws of physics. As far as I know, it hasn’t even been described coherently. If it has I’d appreciate someone pointing me in the right direction.
Just as consciousness cannot be explained , language acquisition is also NOT explained by the laws of physics. Linguists cannot explain it, nor can biologists, despite 40 years of research. There are models, but little evidence (or none, depending on whom you ask) of appropriate hard-wiring in the brain. For example, there is no grammar gene in the geonome, but we know that grammar is somehow hard-wired into humans. If not in the brain, then where is it located ?
So “the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely understood” .
surely should be : ” Except for consciousness and language acquisition, the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely understood.”
I think this affects the basis of the argument made above in a fundamental way.
I pasted in my comments from the NPR forum – Let me guess, you mentioned Adam so he would mention you so you both could criss-cross social networks to increase traffic flow and insure keeping your little blogger gigs for supplemental income? Anyway you and most of your commentators are boring limited thinkers.
@ Adam – Good for you for clarifying and sticking to your guns. God forbid your boring orthodox secular colleagues think you believe in souls! I’ll take Wigner’s “consciousness causes collapse” over Sean Carroll’s limited perspective. His comments about Physics being complete is so ridiculous it’s hard to believe he would say such a stupid thing. I recall a Lord or Sir ? respected scientist back at the end of the 19th century saying that science/physics had gone as far as it could go and then Einstein released his first Relativity paper just a few years later in 1905. We are on the verge/threshold of a huge paradigm shift that will leave in the dust closed minded atheists or anyone else who is so extreme as to close their eyes to alternate realities that do exist – this includes religious extremists as well. Consciousness comes from outside the body and is channeled and takes a temporary home in our brain/bodies. Everyone knows this deep down but many suffer from denial. Denial has become a major factor in hindering our cosmic spiritual evolution as well as locally on this little blue planet we are collectivity messing up to our own detriment. God I am glad I stuck to Music & Art. Contemporary Scientists are a drag.
Oh yeah – Galileo, Newton, Descartes & Einstein all believed in God. These are the true earth shakers – paradigm shifters in science/math history. They are still proving many of Einstein’s less famous theories today – over 50 years later! He was a spiritual or even a ‘religious’ scientific genius. He believed in a ordered universe, yet quantum mechanics has thrown a wrench into this concept – but it may still turn out that he was right – and we may find that Heisenberg uncertainty is wrong regardless of the experiments. There may be an underlying order we just do not understand yet within the Quantum framework. Anyway these men are the top of the science hierarchy and they all were humble and believed in a greater force. The jaded scientists and philosophers that dominate this forum and Academia in general nowadays could not touch these great geniuses’ with a google foot pole.
So “the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely understood” .
surely should be : ” Except for consciousness and language acquisition, the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely understood.”
The laws of physics are completely understood, even if consciousness and language acquisition are not. Much about the brain is not completely understood, but the laws of physics that underlie the operation of the brain are. It is ridiculous to propose new laws of physics just for the brain.
Re #98 DaveH, the laws of physics are human inventions. Of course the inventors understand them. The question is whether the manmade “laws” explain or even describe physical reality. And the answer is, almost certainly not. The quantum theories do not explain or describe any physically real mechanism for spin, notwithstanding Dirac’s equation. Nor is it reasonable that an electron is a mathematical point particle with no spatial extension. And when an electromagnetic wave propagates, what is the physically real entity whose collective motion forms the wave? There is much more, so much that like an earlier commenter said, it is hard to believe someone would say such a stupid thing — unless he is being cagey like a politician, counting on people to believe that the laws of physics are the laws of nature.
Sean’s post reminds me of the story of Euler, who was asked to confront Diderot, who argued that there was no god. “(a+b^n)/n=x”, Euler said. “Therefore, god exists!”
Diderot, who knew no math was convinced. I think Sean was hoping his bit of field theory would have a similar effect.
Now, I don’t believe god exists, nor do I hold out much hope for an afterlife. But to argue that the current state of science can be summed up by a Lagrangian is, I think, naive as Sean would, in another context, certainly agree. We live in a time in which physicists freely posit hidden dimensions, parallel universe and other entities that are either unobservable in principal or merely unobservable in reality. So to dismiss the afterlife on the notion that physics is complete and there is no place for such a thing is absurd.
The analogy with the question of whether the moon is made of green cheese is also a little too cute. By Sean’s reasoning we can never know if this is the case or not. Even if we dig a tunnel to the center of the moon it may be the case–who can say?–that when moon cheese touches our shovel it turns to stone. This reaoning, of course, means that we can’t really know anything. It’s impossible to refute such radical skepticism, so to proceed we just ignore it. But you can’t employ it when you want as a tool of ridicule.