10.19.08
Where will you be after you’re dead?
Myers (citing another article we will look at later) asks, Where will you be after you’re dead?,
answer: not in space-time, so the ‘where’ part is answered with ‘nowhere’, which is probably not the end of the matter.
Ask the same question about an isoceles triangle. Where will it be after it is dead???? It was never alive, so could’t die, and doesn’t exist in space-time, but apparently exists somehow. Soul questions seem to be hybrids between body questions and silly-putty questions like those about ‘isoceles triangles’.
Schopenhauer on death, one of the favorite old posts on this blog, shows how your views on this issue can be on shaky grounds no matter what you believe.
So the answer to the question is, whatever is left over after you subtract the space-time part of ‘man’.
The language and imaginary myths of ‘soul’ given by religious believers have completely confused the issue, but refuting those beliefs doesn’t resolve the mystery.
There are lots of things to consider here, but consider Kant’s transcendental deduction in his famous critique (REALLY HARD, don’t worry if you don’t understand it, and the argument might fail), which is NOT an attempt to prove the existence of souls, but rather a proof about the categories of experience, and the way there arises a ‘something’, the ‘transcendental unity of apperception’ that is ambiguously beyond experience, since it is the integrating factor in experience, not experience itself.
That ancient and elegant tho super arcane line of reasoning, which many ‘philosophers’ in later times have tried to throw out the window, breaks, it would seem, the space-time barrier, somehow, by definition. So we are confounded by some very simple considerations at the limits of experience, that is experience as we know is constructed via the categories of space time. But something ought to exist beyond that framework of existence.
But the main issue with Kant is the warning that ANYONE (scientists are no exception) who tries pontificate on issues of ‘god, soul, and free will’ has entered a terrain where standard understanding is likely to fail. That includes claims that ‘god, soul,and free will’ don’t exist, which doesn’t imply they do exist.