: : This is exactly the reason that I became agnostic. Isn't consciousness the basic core of who we are? If this doesn't survive what does? If something other than our present consciousness does survive death exactly who will we be in the afterlife? If we argue that consciousness does indeed survive, what becomes of those who have had theirs altered by disease or injury. Would someone with senile dementia go into the afterlife with that state of consciousness? Could we argue that God would 'heal' the consciousness and take it back to a time when it was normal? What about those who have never been normal?

Cynthia: Good questions. We are apparently in agreement. Except that I am willing to assume that my consciousness will survive and I act accordingly while alive, whatever that means. I would hope that your fullest consciousness would survive or at least be potentially recreatable. Presumably karma would interfere with such a process. Part of my hope comes from physics, especially the physics of the last few years. We might call it New Age physics. It includes dark matter and quantum gravity. My hope is that dark matter includes a medium that is coupled to ones physical consciousness. Axions and/or their supersymmetric counterparts called axinos would have just the right properties for such a medium. Axions are essentially motionless. Therefore they are at absolute zero and can sustain quantum coherence, which is what I think consciousness is. Furthermore, an axionic medium would behave like a superconductor or superfluid and require essentially no energy to run processes like thinking. The most credible theory of physical consciousness requires energy in excess of a threshold for quantum coherence and therefore physical consciousness to turn-on. For example, when our energy level or metabolic rate falls below that threshold, that's when we fall asleep. This is the Froehlich theory, except that he never mentioned falling asleep, at least not in print. And then when asleep we still have some form of consciousness- called dreaming, which suggests a secondary source for consciousness. The axionic medium, which pervades our solar system and probably our galaxy, then allows our secondary consciousness to migrate most anyplace, provided it can break away from its physical confines. This I think could explain what is variously called the out-of-body experience or astral projection or human remote sensing. It would also be the mechanism for the survival of consciousness after death. I first turned away from atheism when I read several accounts of out-of-body experiences and encountered people who had had such experiences. Mitchell, the astronaut, even ran experiments on this and published positive results in a scientific journal, the Proceedings of the I.E.E.E. So there seems to be a scientific basis for hope, both in theory and experiment.

Regards, Richard David Ruquist

• Re: Consciousness, the middle ground - Cynthia_Loftin/">Cynthia Loftin - July 24, 1999 - 11:53 UTC
  • Re: Consciousness, the middle ground - richard_david/">richard david - July 26, 1999 - 12:16 UTC