Thompson withholds judgment RE whether consciousness survives after death. Do you agree?
what are your thoughts? you seemed very dissatisfied with Batchelor-esque non-commital.
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Agnostic atheists are atheists because they don't believe in the existence of deities and agnostic because they claim that the existence of a deity is either unknowable in principle or currently unknown in fact
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So it is possible to say, this thing is unknowable, but I have no good reasons to believe it's true.
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that seems very close to Batchelor's position to me. I agree that it is reasonable to not believe an unevidenced claim by default. I sometimes like to think about the psychological utility of it though, which is why I mentioned Pascal.
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Pascal's wager tries to set up an asymmetry in the downsides of belief vs. disbelief but I don't accept the framing that Pascal used. I do find the utilitarian argument he makes to be a decent reason _not_ to believe. False beliefs are potentially immediately harmful.
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I think we've previously discussed my rather heterodox supposition that one of the goals of Buddha's teaching was to get people to stop believing in reincarnation. Harmful belief when constructed into a metaphysics with social consequences.
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IMO the most likely, and simplest hypothesis is that we are primates with creative minds. These minds can imagine that they transcend matter. It's rather cute. But also very silly.
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by far the most parsimonious view, which is a major epistemic advantage. from a Buddhist perspective it has the side-effect of concluding that one attains nirvana by default at the moment of death.
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All of this academic masturbation around consciousness is certainly intellectually interesting, but I find it more useful to cultivate a deep practice.
End of conversation
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