Monday, November 20, 2023

Epistemology In The Afterlife

There is more than just the epistemology of the afterlife, of which possibilities, probabilities, and perceptions are all that can be known by humans in this life.  There would also be epistemology in the afterlife if there is an afterlife at all.  If my mind is to survive my biological death in one way or another, whatever the experience would be like or where it would take place, it is true by necessity that one of two possibilities would be the case: either at least some of my epistemological limitations would be shed like a person removing clothing, whether I like what I would discover on the other side or not, or none of my epistemological limitations would disappear at all.  It appears that the former is far more popular to think about than the latter.

Whether there is any kind of conscious existence after bodily death is an enormous philosophical issue with ramifications so weighty, one way or another, that it is asinine that more people are not desperate to dwell on the issue even if it pains them.  However, for those who do think about what would or would not logically follow from various ideas about the afterlife, which versions of an afterlife do not contradict logical axioms (and thus are possible), and how one cannot know in this life if there is another to come, a crucial thing is practically always left unspoken or perhaps unreflected upon.  Would someone in the afterlife even know if they are in an afterlife?

It would be logically possible, should my consciousness or my mind-body unity persist after biological death (either through an eventual resurrection of the body as in Christian theology or through a replacement body that is provided for me), that I would still retain my epistemological limitations in an afterlife just as I have them in this life.  Now, if I gaze at a door or a screen or a plant, I do not know that it exists, only that I am perceiving it in my mind and thus it seems like it exists; the same could be true of my epistemological status if I was to die and find myself gazing at a heavenly city or some sort of unexpected dimension.  

Just as I cannot know strictly from having memories if the recalled events actually happened, I might not be able to know such things in an afterlife.  There are strong suggestions that more perception-based evidences or perhaps total epistemological clarity will be granted in the eternal life of the righteous according to Christianity (1 Corinthians 13:12), but not even the truly immense evidence for Christianity means one can know ahead of time if there is an afterlife or exactly which logically possible scenario it would be like.  There is no logical necessity in the removal of the limitations that prevent certain things from being known beyond perceptions in a post-mortem conscious existence, and that could be terrifying to think about now or then.

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