Sunday, August 05, 2012

[alvsudqv] Afterlife as incentive

How can we prove or disprove the afterlife exists and functions the way Judeo-Christian religions portray it to: the bad are punished, the good rewarded?

We need a communication mechanism from the afterlife to this life.  That communications channel currently takes the form of prophets who deliver messages, visions, of the afterlife to us.

We can explain away prophetic visions by determining their neurological basis and ultimately showing how to artificially induce arbitrary messages into arbitrary people.

It disturbs me if people are making very important life-altering decisions in this life based on extremely scant evidence of their effect in the afterlife.  It seems far more likely to be a completely human-invented mechanism for controlling people.  Actions ought to reflect that uncertainty, but the theory of utilities fails according to Pascal's Wager.

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