There is no reason to think that twins share mental experiences any more than any other people who are close to each other. Unless you have something more than speculation, I see no reason to pursue this point further.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coincidence#Separated_twins_and_coincidences

http://phenomena.cinescape.com/0/editorial.asp?aff_id=0&this_cat=The+Ghost+Inside&action=page&type_id=5&cat_id=0&obj_id=1042

http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/bb/neuro/neuro99/web3/Varadian.html

...You assume that there might be something--a piece of the soul--that God could preserve, but you don't specify the nature of this "unique identifier".

Indeed, I cannot. And if the unique identifier is supernatural (as I believe), failure to do so is quite understandable. But there is something that distinguishes my consciousness from that of every other person on the planet, as I experience it.

Nobody disputes that your consciousness is unique and distinct from that of others. The question is whether your consciousness can survive death any better than it survives general anesthesia, deep sleep, or a coma. We lose our consciousness periodically even while our brains are alive. Why should we expect to when our brains have perished?

Again, you need to keep your eye on the ball.  I have been talking about the soul being placed in a new medium.  So, there would be a new brain, etc.   Something in common about your postulated states of unconsciousness is that at some point the subject becomes conscious again.  

What kind of salvation is it if there are no memories and no reasoning capability? You are nothing without your memories--and those are clearly dependent on the extremely complex tangle of neurons that make up your living brain. We have a good working knowledge of the physical components of the brain that grow and sustain memories.

You need to keep your eye on the ball. You've already conceded that reconstruction of memories is theoretically feasible. The question is copies vs. original in terms of the being who experiences life after death. If God can save the basic identifier that distinguishes me as an original, the rest (e.g. memories) could be duplicated (copied) in the new medium.

You were the one who brought up a "unique identifier".

True.  

My point was that this is nothing less than an entire mind, complete with memories and reasoning facilities intact.

That's your claim, but it is not necessary to believe that.  It is only necessary to believe that the unique identifier involves a unique sense of self.  If I became an amnesiac, for instance, I would still have a unique sense of self even if I did not remember who I was, where I was from, etc.  

Your "identifier" is a complete red herring.

Mere assertion on your part.

And the question goes beyond mere copying, but what gets "copied".   There are still lots of questions about memories, reasoning abilities, prejudices, sensations, and so on.

That would depend on God.  There is no guarantee that I will have all of my memories in the afterlife, for example.  If God wants to bestow all my memories, though, you have already conceded that as a theoretical possibility.

I would argue that not just the mind, but a functioning body, must also be supplied, because we imagine our post-life experiences to be a continuation of life's experiences.

And I have been suggesting that the afterlife as postulated in Christianity does involve a functioning body.

The worst thing for your case, however, is that you continue to ignore the difference between transfer and copy. You do not survive death if a copy of you comes into existence after you die. The copy is a different person. You are still dead.

I have not ignored this point.  You just seem to fail to grasp it.  There is something that identifies me as unique.  My belief is that uniqueness is the soul, a supernatural phenomenon, and God could certainly transfer that.  But even if it is something else, some sort of quantum pattern or whatnot, God could preserve or recreate that something.  More on this below.
 

Whoa! That last conclusion is a non-sequitur. Your entire paragraph is devoted to discussing the unbreakable link between brain matter and mental function. The "continuity of self" is directly tied to memory, and memories are theoretically duplicable by replicating the physical medium they are embedded in. You can copy any recorded media by duplicating physical structure, but the copies are not to be confused with the original.

This paragraph of yours leads me to believe that you haven't been paying attention. The point of my discussion was that the brain changes, even to the point that (at least according to one site I found) the atoms that make up the brain are completely replaced within a year. Now, I had some difficulty researching that question, so I am open to your saying (with support of course) that the neurons consist of the same atoms for life. That would at least get you some physical continuity even though it is still clear that some of those neurons are replaced. If the material that makes up neurons (i.e. atoms) are completely replaced within a lifetime, then you have a serious problem. Because then the continuity of the self remains even though the physical makeup of the brain completely changes.


I'm not arguing that point.

That suggests to me that you don't understand it.

The point is that a copying process produces a duplicate, not a transfer of the original to another location.

And my point is that the resurrection of a consciousness can involve more than mere copying.

In theory, one could produce 20 copies of you, all of which would be different people with different consciousnesses and different "senses of self".

And in theory, one could produce 20 versions of me that share a consciousness.

Religious opinion on the subject is about the survival of an existing soul, not the creation of a duplicate soul. This has nothing to do with whether your individual brain has the same atomic structure from moment to moment.

But of course it does.  If my brain's atomic structure can completely change while my sense of self remains the same, then something other than the matter making up my brain is responsible for the sense of self, and not just that but a continued sense of self (i.e. my consciousness doesn't wink out and get replaced by another consciousness).   That something could be recreated (or re-formed, or whatever), resulting in a resurrection of the original consciousness.
 

A lot of crazy subjects are. That's what makes the genre fun. But we ought to keep a firm grip on reality vs. fiction. DNA is a blueprint for building an organism. Unlike a working brain, it is not capable of reasoning, memory, or emotion. There is absolutely no reason for bodies sharing the same DNA to have some kind of mental connection any more than two buildings created with the same blueprint share a physical connection.

See the twin links above.  

Whether DNA is capable of reasoning, etc is a red herring.  DNA can obviously gives rise to a brain that is capable of reasoning, and identical DNA could be expected to give rise to very similar brains.  That similarity in brain structure might in turn produce the connection, or perhaps, it's a similarity in souls that originally sprang from a single source.  

As for buildings, your analogy is strained.  There are tons of differences between blueprints for buildings and DNA that could be relevant to the issue at hand.

...Explain how the concept of soul explains either of those things. Do souls have memories? What corresponds to short-term and long-term memory in the soul?

Non-sequitur. You have given no reason to think memories are the source of the sense of self or free will.

Your experiences are what make you unique. Without memory, you have no foundation on which to build a sense of self. Choices are determined by habituation, among other things. Without memory, you have nothing to base choices on.

That's patently wrong.  You just need to look at the behavior of babies to recognize that.  Biologists believe that there is a biologically inbuilt sense of self.  I suggest it goes beyond that, but the point is the sense of self is not dependent on memory.  

Does an amnesiac lose his sense of self and have it replaced with another sense of self?  As far as I know, the answer is believed to be no.

Introspection also suggests that I have a sense of self not dependent on memory.  I experience my own existence.  I also remember stuff, but it's not the same.

Does the soul have a hippocampus?

Again a non-sequitur. And ironic since I have already discussed how new cells are created in the hippocampus that can replace dead brain cells.

You must be arguing that the soul has a hippocampus of some sort, since it would be one of the things replicated in your imaginary copying process.

You are just being obtuse.  A new body (i.e. new medium) could have a hippocampus, or whatever fulfills that function.

Does one's judgment always remain constant no matter what shape one's brain is in?

No it doesn't. That doesn't mean that free will is a creature entirely of the brain, just that a healthy brain is necessary for its full expression.

If a healthy brain is necessary for the full expression of free will, that implies that free choice cannot exist without the "necessary" brain.

Of course, the brain could exist in the new medium.
 

The problem with your concept of death survival is that it idealizes a frozen state of a brain, when, in fact, the brain is constantly changing its own "program"--constantly making and breaking new neural connections.

That supports my point, not yours. There is a sense of self which has continuity despite all of these changes. If the brain can change so much but the self remains, surely an omnipotent creator could fashion its own changes to the brain (e.g. new medium) to which this sense of self could attach.

You've missed the point. The mind is different at every stage of life, because the brain is different. Your illusion of "self" obscures the fact that you are a different person as you grow older.

I assure you, my sense of self is quite real.  In fact, it is one of the few things that is undeniable.  It is true that my mental and emotional faculties change and even aspects of my personality but my sense of self has remained constant.

Indeed, you may have been more intelligent and had more sensible beliefs at an earlier stage than a later stage. As we get older, we can even have false memories of our earlier life, thus contributing further to the problematic nature of your confusing "sense of self" concept. Are those false memories preserved, or are true memories restored? Do contradictory beliefs get resolved? Do irrational prejudices melt away? Do you get the maximal IQ that you could have had at any point in your life, or do you get an IQ level that is as good as anyone could possibly have? To make any sense of your position, you have to be thinking that some idealized version of you survives death, because your final brain state might not actually be the best version of you. In fact, different aspects of your mind may have been better at different times in your life.

You are confusing sense of self with memory, emotion, and intelligence, but it is a separate thing from those.  All of those can change but my sense of self remains constant.  There is a lot of stuff that I don't remember that I know I used to remember, but I still have the same sense of self now that I did then.

I suppose that pointing out an argumentum ad ignorantiam fallacy is always a bit of a whine.  Whenever you get stuck in an argument, you pull out the God card. Since we cannot imagine how God does it or even what it is we are claiming that he does, the incoherence of your argument gets a free pass.

One would expect God to know things we don't.  I don't know what all goes into making an airplane fly.  It's not necessary for me to know the details to understand that it is logical to believe such a machine can be constructed (remember at one time, there were no airplanes).  Someone with superior knowledge than I handles those details.  That is really what we're talking about with your questions about details of resurrection.

Energy fields are physically detectable phenomena,

That is not necessarily so, as I pointed out to Cogito, with a list of several types of energy we cannot physically detect (at least at present).

Nonexistent energy fields are always the least detectable.  I don't recall your reply to Cogito, so I really don't know what you are referring to here. Energy is the alter ego of matter.

It was earlier in the thread.  I'll cut and paste:

But it's not true that all energy is observable.

dark energy
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/01/030102224136.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_energy

quantum level
http://www.physlink.com/Education/AskExperts/ae605.cfm

cosmic rays?
http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:-XfgcrQfhtIJ:hires.physics.utah.edu/papers/icrc857-159.pdf+energy+unobserved&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=30

The mind could be some heretofore unobservable energy. Alternatively, it could be observable but its significance overlooked.

You cannot treat it as a nonphysical phenomenon, especially if it is to somehow interact with physical objects. So all energy is, in principle, detectable.

Not necessarily.  You could have some sort of Heisenberg-type situation going on (impossible to observe both position and velocity electron).   But even if something is in principle detectable, that does not mean it is currently detectable.  And it also does not mean that its significance is recognized even if it is detectable.

It is not such a difficult question to answer. If one can affect choice predictably by introducing physical (psychotropic) substances, then the brain activity clearly does have a causal effect.

That doesn't mean it is exclusive, however.