Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2021/01/25/you-could-win-up-to-500k-if-you-can-prove-life-after-death-exists.html
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Pah! I don’t get out of bed for less than a million.
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Plus, given that people who can’t prove that there is an afterlife manage to make a heck of a lot more than 500k by saying that there is and that they know all about it, the rewards seem a little low.
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The catch is that once you have proven the existence of life after death, the prospect of earthly wealth all seems a bit irrelevant, not to say problematic. Best to give it all away to some worthy charities in preparation for squeezing through that needle’s eye, or being reborn in a higher state of being, or whatever.
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But you can’t take it with you
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I suppose it depends which afterlife they manage to prove.
or
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I’m still waiting for my cool $mil for proving the voter fraud…
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People hate their bodies so much they’ll go to such ludicrous lengths to insist that they’re not their bodies. Cartesian dualism is probably one of the most harmful bits of nonsense to insinuate itself across human cultures (including lots of secular materialist and Abrahamic cultures that don’t really accommodate it very well as a concept).
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Depending on how you prove it, you might be able to get another $250k from the cfiig too.
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Setting up a prize like this is just commiting yourself to fielding nonsense from religious zealots, NDE crackpots, and paranormal believers for however long you can put up with it.
The problem is that people think their life experience is evidence. They think their feelings about something are also probably evidence (or at least directional). Throw in a lack of science knowledge, and you get things like people swearing they saw a brightly lit tunnel, or floated above the operating room table near death (both neurologically well understood phenomena related to your brain shutting down).
If 200 years of science haven’t turned up even a shred of evidence for dualism, then some rich guy scared of death sure isn’t gonna do it.
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I think I can qualify for the $150K third prize (“inconclusive”) by doing an extensive literature search.
To claim the first prize, one would have to prove there was no possibility of fraud by conjuring up the ghost of James Randi.
Oh wait…
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Meanwhile, if you can’t prove it, but you can make people afraid it might be true long enough, you can have billions and your own mini-country in a major world capital.
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I wonder how many disciplines have “serious researchers” who have yet to show evidence that their field of science even exists.
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Wouldn’t that be quite a lot of theoretical physics?
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Exobiology?
again, the illusion of ‘experience’ contends with knowledge, wisdom, technology, and now death.
YOU DO NOT NEED EXPERIENCE TO DO SOMETHING.
If you set your mind to something, don’t boot up world of warcraft - do the thing. YOU CAN DO IT.
(some training might help though)
Because Bible. I’ll take my $500K now. /s
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Well, I simply wasn’t going to bother with proving something that if true would be of central importance to understanding our universe and our own place within it, but I guess if there’s money I could try.
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Having had my own share of ghostly encounters, it’s not hard for me to think about life after death. What is hard for me to think about, is what it would take to process my subjective experience into objective data that could be tested and disproven.
Come to think of it, it’s probably just as well. Cold Souls(2009) and other films like it, show a fairly unpleasant outcome, should the scientists and engineers get a grasp on this kind of thing
It seems to me that the only way you could prove “life after death” exists is by proving that consciousness remains for some period of time after death (as it’s currently defined) in the body of a corpse. Which isn’t what they’re after, and would be a horrifying discovery rather than the uplifting one they want.
Anything else gets tangled up in questions of what you’ve actually proven. Let’s say you prove the existence of “ghosts” - that just raises the question of what the hell a “ghost” is, exactly. Any phenomenon you prove to be real then needs to be tied to specific person - and moreover that this specific person continues to exist after death in a form we’d recognize as that person. Rather than it being one of the many other things people believe in, e.g. a time-traveling psychic manifestation of that person from when they were still alive, a supernatural entity impersonating the deceased (i.e. a “demon”), a bleed-through of a doppleganger of that person from a parallel universe, a tulpa, an environmental recording of that person’s past actions (i.e. a “stone tape” phenomenon), “advanced beings” (i.e. aliens, “gods”) who are just fucking with you…
Once you bring in supernatural causation, the chain of logic required to prove something vanishes, you have no way to distinguish one supernatural cause from another, and you’re unable to prove anything at all.
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