I am pretty damn sure. Your brain, everything that makes you you, is a biological computer (for lack of a better word) of which we have an extremely comprehensive understanding of how it functions and the processes, both biological and psychological, that form a personality. There is no magic sauce or spirit that leaks out into the void when you die. It is your biological circuits ceasing to function and decaying.
I say this as someone who believed in an afterlife well into my late 20’s. It is a belief we tell ourselves to cope with the reality of our own mortality. We will die and there will be nothing, so we tell ourselves that maybe there will be something because it makes the pain easier to handle.
That’s the physicalist perspective, but there are other perspectives, and the philosophical debate on physicalism vs dualism is far from settled.
Plus, our scientific understanding of consciousness is far from comprehensive. We still have no idea how our experience actually emerges from neurological activity.
We still have no idea how our experience actually emerges from neurological activity
You don’t. Science has a pretty decent idea.
Maybe we are not done yet with understanding how our biological computer works.
On topics like this, I like to think about bacteria:
Before microscopes, it was unimagible to have little organisms on us and everywhere around us. People have been labelled crazy for believing that there is a whole small universe of organisms everywhere.
Then came microscopes, and suddenly everyone could see it for themselves.
What if we just don’t have the right tools to make our magic sauce, spirit, soul, whatever visible to us yet?
Oh for sure, that might be the case. But everything already written in some holy book or told in some ritual now definitely lacked those sophisticated machines, making all their content moot and you can safely disregard them.
So due to the lack of any information, you can’t prepare and therefore can’t expect anything. So it’s better to be good for its own sake, then trying to appease some bronze/iron age divinity.
It is not wrong nor necessarily bad to constantly question things and to desire to look deeper into information presented to you
But continued denial of something that is extremely well understood, studied, tested, and researched isn’t healthy skepticism - it’s wilful ignorance for the sake of soothing one’s fears.
The human brain (the brains of most creatures, really) is now better understood than it ever has been and new technology is making studying it easier and faster than ever before. At no point, past or present, has there ever been even a tiny minuscule sliver of anything even remotely similar to a soul or afterlife being detected or observed. What we have observed, however, are the parts of a brain that are responsible for emotions, memory, personality, logic, reasoning, etc dying and ceasing to function.
The brain is an extremely awesome and complex thing but it is not powered by magic. I am trying my best to not mean any disrespect here - like I said I believed in an afterlife well into my 20’s - but the entire premise of an afterlife is basically magic. It’s fantasy. It makes the crushing pain of our own death easier to deal with.
It’s quite likely that our personalities and memories disappear upon death, since they are stored in the brain. But my consciousness, the subjective qualia of existence cannot arise out of physical matter. So what happens to that when my brain dies is a mystery.
