The judges enter the court: Fenwick excerpt #2

Dr Moretti            

"Honorable Advocate for the afterlife, please call your first witness."

In this session, before we start reviewing witness statements, we would like to look at the nature of evidence. So we call physicist Dr Pier Francesco Moretti:

“Dear honorable colleagues, today we are here to debate the existence of the afterlife and to identify evidence for this. I do not see or hear in this room any dead people, even if I always feel my father looking at me in these challenging situations.

So let us reflect on what could be an evidence-based demonstration for the existence of an “afterlife”.

In order to adopt commonly accepted scientific methodology, we need to focus on the concepts of “after” and “life”. We need to define time, and implicitly its unidirectional flow so that we can identify a before and an after.

We also need to agree on what we mean by life, at least in this context. We agree that our bodies stop functioning as a network of atoms localized in space when we verify the absence of breath, heart beat and cerebral activity. We are speaking about the identity of an individual that is incarnated in a body capable of interacting with other material entities during a period of time, and we call this period of interaction “life”.

Afterlife therefore refers to the existence of such an identity after an event that has caused that body to loose its capability to interact any longer with the same modality.

The existence of this identity should, ideally, be measurable. However, we do not have, at the moment, any instrument capable of detecting the presence of a dead identity directly: we always detect the interaction of matter with other matter, or energy (Mossio & Moreno, 2010)(Mossio, 2013).

If we adopt commonly accepted scientific knowledge, we cannot “demonstrate” any “afterlife” with an experiment. I want to be honest when referring to commonly accepted scientific knowledge. Let me use famous examples as follows.

Did humans walk on the Moon? We know that that event has changed many things in human history, but can we “demonstrate” it really happened?

If we point a powerful laser on a specific location on the Moon, the light will be reflected by a mirror positioned there by astronauts. We also have kilograms of rocks brought back and demonstrated to be of lunar origin through careful and accepted analysis. In the 1960s we had no robotic technologies to undertake such activities.

The other example is much more conceptual.

Is the Sun at the center of the solar system, or is the Earth?

We all know that for centuries no one had a problem with the Earth being at the center and the Sun rotating around it. Then, new technologies introduced greater accuracy in measurements of positions of stars and satellites. These were better explained if framed in a Sun-centered system. It proved to be a simpler, more useful theoretical framework capable of making accurate predictions. But any human, waking up in the morning, sees the Sun rising and appearing to rotate around us. Similarly, the commonly accepted scientific knowledge is mainly driven by the objectives and the use of that knowledge.

Let me conclude with a reflection. We sometimes believe in concepts assumed to be true. Often we forget the assumptions they are built on. We also neglect other theories that have the same right to be considered. The reality is that some theories are more fashionable. We are not saying that the Earth is flat, but that the Sun can be considered as rotating around the Earth for many applications.

Kepler and Giordano Bruno said similar things, but they used different arguments and in different historical contexts. One of them was burned. This modern era is now dominated by scientific methodology that requires specific, rigid rules to be fulfilled when referring to an evidence-based affirmation. Perhaps it is time to look again at these rules and the assumptions behind them (Bouratinos, 2018) ("Galileo Commission Report", 2019).*

*Galileo Commission Report. Galileo Commission: Expanding the Scope of Science. (2019). Published by the Scientific and Medical Network. Retrieved 1 July 2021, from https://galileocommission.org/report/.  

 

“To Be And Not To Be. This is The Answer: Consciousness Survives,” essay for the 2021 Bigelow essay contest submitted by Dr Peter Fenwick & Dr Pier-Francesco Moretti, Dr Vasileios Basios, and Martin Redfern.