I came across this article and thought it would be interesting to share here...


A belief that heaven or an afterlife awaits us is a "fairy story" for people afraid of death, Stephen Hawking has said.

In a dismissal that underlines his firm rejection of religious comforts, Britain's most eminent scientist said there was nothing beyond the moment when the brain flickers for the final time.

Hawking, who was diagnosed with motor neurone disease at the age of 21, shares his thoughts on death, human purpose and our chance existence in an exclusive interview with the Guardian today.

The incurable illness was expected to kill Hawking within a few years of its symptoms arising, an outlook that turned the young scientist to Wagner, but ultimately led him to enjoy life more, he has said, despite the cloud hanging over his future.

"I have lived with the prospect of an early death for the last 49 years. I'm not afraid of death, but I'm in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first," he said.

"I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark," he added.

Hawking's latest comments go beyond those laid out in his 2010 book, The Grand Design, in which he asserted that there is no need for a creator to explain the existence of the universe. The book provoked a backlash from some religious leaders, including the chief rabbi, Lord Sacks, who accused Hawking of committing an "elementary fallacy" of logic.

The 69-year-old physicist fell seriously ill after a lecture tour in the US in 2009 and was taken to Addenbrookes hospital in an episode that sparked grave concerns for his health. He has since returned to his Cambridge department as director of research.

The physicist's remarks draw a stark line between the use of God as a metaphor and the belief in an omniscient creator whose hands guide the workings of the cosmos.

In his bestselling 1988 book, A Brief History of Time, Hawking drew on the device so beloved of Einstein, when he described what it would mean for scientists to develop a "theory of everything" – a set of equations that described every particle and force in the entire universe. "It would be the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we should know the mind of God," he wrote.

The book sold a reported 9 million copies and propelled the physicist to instant stardom. His fame has led to guest roles in The Simpsons, Star Trek: The Next Generation and Red Dwarf. One of his greatest achievements in physics is a theory that describes how black holes emit radiation.

In the interview, Hawking rejected the notion of life beyond death and emphasised the need to fulfil our potential on Earth by making good use of our lives. In answer to a question on how we should live, he said, simply: "We should seek the greatest value of our action."

In answering another, he wrote of the beauty of science, such as the exquisite double helix of DNA in biology, or the fundamental equations of physics.

Hawking responded to questions posed by the Guardian and a reader in advance of a lecture tomorrow at the Google Zeitgeist meeting in London, in which he will address the question: "Why are we here?"

In the talk, he will argue that tiny quantum fluctuations in the very early universe became the seeds from which galaxies, stars, and ultimately human life emerged. "Science predicts that many different kinds of universe will be spontaneously created out of nothing. It is a matter of chance which we are in," he said.

Hawking suggests that with modern space-based instruments, such as the European Space Agency's Planck mission, it may be possible to spot ancient fingerprints in the light left over from the earliest moments of the universe and work out how our own place in space came to be.

His talk will focus on M-theory, a broad mathematical framework that encompasses string theory, which is regarded by many physicists as the best hope yet of developing a theory of everything.

M-theory demands a universe with 11 dimensions, including a dimension of time and the three familiar spatial dimensions. The rest are curled up too small for us to see.

Evidence in support of M-theory might also come from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Cern, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva.

One possibility predicted by M-theory is supersymmetry, an idea that says fundamental particles have heavy – and as yet undiscovered – twins, with curious names such as selectrons and squarks.

Confirmation of supersymmetry would be a shot in the arm for M-theory and help physicists explain how each force at work in the universe arose from one super-force at the dawn of time.

Another potential discovery at the LHC, that of the elusive Higgs boson, which is thought to give mass to elementary particles, might be less welcome to Hawking, who has a long-standing bet that the long-sought entity will never be found at the laboratory.

Hawking will join other speakers at the London event, including the chancellor, George Osborne, and the Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz.

Science, truth and beauty: Hawking's answers

What is the value in knowing "Why are we here?"

The universe is governed by science. But science tells us that we can't solve the equations, directly in the abstract. We need to use the effective theory of Darwinian natural selection of those societies most likely to survive. We assign them higher value.

You've said there is no reason to invoke God to light the blue touchpaper. Is our existence all down to luck?

Science predicts that many different kinds of universe will be spontaneously created out of nothing. It is a matter of chance which we are in.

So here we are. What should we do?

We should seek the greatest value of our action.

You had a health scare and spent time in hospital in 2009. What, if anything, do you fear about death?

I have lived with the prospect of an early death for the last 49 years. I'm not afraid of death, but I'm in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first. I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.

What are the things you find most beautiful in science?

Science is beautiful when it makes simple explanations of phenomena or connections between different observations. Examples include the double helix in biology, and the fundamental equations of physics."



Below is the actual link to the article
http://m.guardian.co.uk/...science&type=article

I read that article a few days ago, but didn’t bother posting anything. But now that it’s up, I guess I will.

Stephen Hawking is a strict materialist, and he views all of human experience through the lens of strict materialism. There are no scientific tests to prove or disprove the materialist paradigm, and there are many other non-materialist paradigms that are fully consistent with scientific findings.

In rejecting the possibility of an afterlife, he is doing the same thing to the mystical that creationists do to science. The mystical cannot be explained via science, just as the physical cannot be explained via religion. It seems he doesn’t understand that there are spheres of human interest and inquiry that lie outside of science. There are some questions that simply can’t be answered by science. There are even scientific questions – questions concerned with the physical universe – that cannot now and can’t ever be answered by science.

Science can only describe and attempt to explain physical observations. This is its strength and its weakness. There are quite possibly many physical phenomena that lie outside of our capacity to observe. But just because we don’t see things doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

We can describe the universe only to the extent that our senses and instruments can observe it, and we can explain the universe only to the extent that our minds can comprehend it.

His claim that those who believe in continued existence outside/beyond our material universe are afraid of death is absolute nonsense. It’s also very unscientific and tells us more about Stephen Hawking than it does about those who believe there is more to existence than what we can observe.

His claims that universes spontaneously pop into existence out of nothing requires a very special definition of “nothing”. In truth, the definition of “nothing” used by physicists is closer to “an absence of matter and energy with a capacity to spontaneously create matter and energy” than it is to any commonly understood definition of “nothing”. After all, if a universe can pop into existence out of nothing, then, as indicated above, that “nothing” must have a capacity to allow existence. That “capacity to allow existence”, which is not itself material, is nonetheless “something”. True “nothing” has no capacities whatsoever – as soon as we assign it capacities or probabilities or properties or tendencies, it’s no longer “nothing”.

Steven Hawking makes alot of claims he doesnt have one shred of info to back up. The guy should stick to astronomy becasue the things he claims there is a lack of he just doesnt have one solid shred of anything to back up. The guy couldnt possibly know these things.

And what claims are those?

He's not making any claims (well, he has claimed that a "god" is not necessary for the universe we see to have spontaneously arisen--and he's certainly well-positioned to assert such a claim).

Mostly, he is REJECTING claims of others regarding "gods" and "heavens" and "life beyond the brain." It's easy to reject such claims, because they come with little or no evidence.

Hawking doesn't guess. He calculates.

Hawking rejects claims without eividence based on his own observations of that which grasps further and wider than most in this world.

My own understanding of heaven is from that based on a desparate man trying to understand the unexplainable, or to a further extent manipulate the misunderstandings of others. One could say that religion predates evidence which is where all this god shit came from. The young and uninformable could not comprehend the sun.

We know what the sun is and have a good guess on how it got there.

I trust Hawking over the fellow who slapped his 7 wives so that he could slap 7 more.

Many years after his death in Einsteins memoirs he wrote that while he never stated it publicly he thought faith in a god was utter nonsense. Which is ironic because one of his biggest blunders of his career resulted in the famous phrase "God does not play dice with the Universe'.Some of the greatest men in history were closet atheists. A fact that most tend to sweep under the rug. Atheism tends to go hand in hand with logical analytical minds whereas dogma tends to work well with those who tend to follow a more intuitional path.

Many intellectuals have a mindset based on logic and deductive analysis. When the concept of god is put through a process such as this then there is no way that one could believe in him.

Religious people do not place such significance on 'truth' they consider it subjective. They see the world through a different lens than atheists. It is this reason why religious people cant believe in anything and why non religious see the faithful as mind-washed drones. There are two totally different states of mind at work here, neither being superior to the other regardless of what some will claim. Both carry their benefits as well as their hindrances.

I don’t see this as a science vs. religion debate, but rather a debate about what can be known vs. what can’t be known. Hawking wants to make it a science vs. religion debate because it’s such an easy debate for him to win. Depending on how one defines terms such as “God” and “afterlife”, it’s very easy to show that neither exists. Of course it’s possible to change the definitions so that such proofs are no longer valid.

Anyhow, there are claims he makes that he doesn’t have evidence to back up:

First, he links belief in existence of an afterlife with a fear of death. There is no evidence of this. I’m sure there are plenty of people who don’t believe in an afterlife yet fear death, and plenty of people who believe in an afterlife and don’t fear death. Whether or not one believes in an afterlife probably has little to do with whether or not one fears death.

He claims that universes can be created out of nothing, yet this is logically not possible unless “nothing” is defined in a very special way. So special, in fact, that it must be defined in such a way that “nothing” is actually “something”.

He believes in the “primacy of matter” paradigm, yet not only is there no evidence to prove the primacy of matter, but it’s not possible even in theory to prove this. We cannot know about that which we cannot observe.

He claims that there is “nothing beyond the moment when the brain flickers for the final time”. This is something that can’t be proven. If consciousness is a product or epiphenomenon of the brain, then this is true, but there is no way to prove this, even in theory.

What he’s really claiming, and he’d never state it this way, is that if a phenomenon or thing cannot be observed, then it doesn’t exist. Scientists don’t study “true” or “ultimate” reality. They study that which can be observed. It is arrogant and almost certainly incorrect to assume that reality consists only of that which can be observed.

That's hardly a "hard" claim. Just an offhand opinion about the reasons people create mythologies. Even so, it's easy to support: humans have ceremonialized burials for EONS. Is it really such a stretch to suppose an association between after-death myths and people's "feelings" about death?



This involves his work--which I'm hardly in a position to challenge (and I'll presume that neither are you in such a position). He works at the cutting edge in that field. His "claim" would be a "best hypothesis" that he feels might have general consensus or decent support among his peers--and there we're talking about quite a small group. Certainly, he has every right to think of it being more substantial a claim than those who claim to know there's a "heaven" because some goatherder a couple thousand years ago said so.




Actually, the "identity" between brain and consciousness is extremely well supported. When brains are perturbed, consciousness is perturbed. There's even excellent correlation between specific areas of the brain vs specific aspects of consciousness. Futhermore, there is NO mechanism known (or even imaginable, at this point) for consciousness to exist outside a brain. It would be up to those who would CLAIM such an existence to demonstrate it--Hawking doesn't need to do anything to merely reject it, as he has.



Nope. He's saying that those who DO claim something must PRESENT some kind of observation or evidence for their claim to have ANY VALUE. He's not saying that unsupported claims are WRONG, he's saying they have no WEIGHT, that they're easily dismissed in favor of current understanding. I think this quote is attributable to Christopher Hitchens: "That which can be asserted without evidence can be DISMISSED without evidence."

Of course, science gives an alternative to mere dismissal: a TEST. Unfortunately, those who makes claims of gods and heavens seem to have neither evidence NOR tests to offer as REASONS to accept their claims. Those who wish to dismiss such claims have the same reasonable rationale that ANYONE has who chooses to dismiss ANY extraordinary claim.

If something arises sponateously, you can never claim that there isn't something behind this spontaneity that you just haven't seen yet. I am agnostic myself, but if there's ANYTHING that would give rise to assumptions of a divine puppeteer pulling our strings, it would be an entire universe that spontaleously pops-up out of nowhere.


There is much to say for this. Anybody who claims that there is a god and that he knows this is a big lier. We cannot even know if there COULD be such a thing as a god, let alone that we would know all sort of things about this god.

On the other hand it's also not true that the assumption that there is 'counsciousness' outside the brain would be rejected by the fact that features of counsciousness are linked to certain areas of the brain.

Contemporary neuroscience has a great understanding of the brain. But yet, there's nobody who can explain the phenomenon of self-awareness.

Any explanation you'd come-up with, and i am well aware there are quite a few, falls short in one way or another.

The essence of this is that all explanations reduce counsciousness to 'information'. But information cannot be counsious, or books would be counscious.

The assumption that there is more to counsciousness than we can know is not strange at all if you realise that all neuroscience in the world still doesn't explain anything about counsciousness except the way in wich it's structured.

There is only one reductionist assumption that would stand and that's the idea that we aren't counscious at all and that the whole idea of counsciousness is merely an illusion that has been rooted so deeply within our brains that we've come to believe it.

SWIMfriend, you make some very good points and by and large I don't disagree with them. But to my mind this about sums it up for me (very well put gibran2, I love watching the way your mind works in these debates):

Simply put...regardless of what he may or may not hypothesize, that which is beyond our ability to measure/observe/experience cannot be known to us, making (at least to my mind) such hypotheses rather pointless.

Awesome quotes from the very episode of Coast to Coast AM that I learned about DMT on, featuring Graham Hancock being interviewed by Art Bell:

Graham Hancock: "If you go into the ancient Egyptian sacred texts; For example the famous Books of The Dead, or the pyramid texts, or the so-called coffin texts (so called because they were written inside coffins in which the dead were mummified), you will find a complete map of the afterlife realm. And actually I have a chapter on ancient Egypt in my book Supernatural, and on their ideas about the afterlife. And I'm certain ancient Egyptian priests used altered states of consciousness, deliberately induced them, in order to map out and in a thoroughly systematic manner explore and explain what happens to us after we die.
It's very interesting.
They indicate that we make a journey after our deaths, that when the material body dies, and the soul leaves the body, it then undertakes a journey thru a strange parallel universe, that the ancient Egyptians called "The DU-AT" - it might be roughly translated as the underworld, or the netherworld, or the afterworld.
And In this journey we are confronted with the consequences of everything we have done - and failed to do, in this material life."

Art Bell: "That's terrifying."

Graham Hancock: "Extremely terrifying. You see - those scientist that say we have afterlife beliefs simply to comfort ourselves, and that of course it's all nonsense, really have no idea what they're talking about.
If you go into cultures that really examine the mystery of the after-life you'll find that the beliefs are really not comforting at all. And that we are tested, weighed up, measured - on what we did or did not do with our lives. And every negative action, every cruel thought, every vicious word that we have spoken - will come back to us during the afterlife journey. In the form of monsters, and demons, to punish us, to terrify us, to confront us. We have to confront the consequences of our own actions."

That quote is a perfect example of the sort of arrogance I’ve been trying to highlight.

First off, I’m not defending people who make factual claims without any supporting evidence. That’s ridiculous. But what I’m trying to show is that scientists such as Hawking (and to a much greater extent, Dawkins) are guilty of the same sort of unsubstantiated claim-making that they ridicule when made by religious fundamentalists.

In this thread I address a similar issue, using a box full of marbles to explain the idea:

Let’s say we have a big box of marbles that represents all possible knowledge of existence - knowledge of things observable and things that can’t ever be observed. We’ve already removed some marbles from the box – marbles that represent our current scientific understanding of the universe.

Someone (a religious fundamentalist) claims that there are 3 red marbles, 2 blue, and one yellow marble still in the box. Someone else (a scientist) ridicules the fundamentalist for making such a claim without evidence, and then goes on to “dismiss without evidence” the claim by counter-claiming that there are NOT 3 red marbles, 2 blue, and one yellow marble still in the box.

The scientist’s knowledge of the unknown is in no way superior to the religious fundamentalist’s knowledge of the unknown – by definition, they both have ZERO knowledge of the unknown. If the scientist and the religious fundamentalist both wanted to let go of their arrogance, they would have to admit that they don’t know what’s in the box. They have beliefs about what might be in the box (or what isn’t in the box) but they have no knowledge of the box contents.


The analogy often used to support the possibility of independence of consciousness is that of a television and the signals it receives. The picture on the screen is very much dependent on the hardware/circuitry of the TV. Adjust the knobs on the TV and the picture can be radically altered. Modify the circuitry of the TV and the picture changes in a corresponding way. Unplug the TV and the picture goes away.

A materialist who knew nothing of electromagnetic radiation would be forced to conclude that the picture arises from the complex circuitry of the TV. After all, there is ample evidence: perturb the TV circuitry, and the picture is perturbed. There's even excellent correlation between specific areas of the TV circuitry vs. specific aspects of the picture. Seems pretty ridiculous to even suggest the possibility that the source of the picture lies outside of the circuitry of the TV, doesn’t it?

Took the words right out of my mouth...it's like a quote I can't for the life of me remember exactly (or who said it, any help would be greatly appreciated), that goes something like "If you were to enlarge the brain to the size of a room and walk around in it, you would not find the source of consciousness".

EDIT: Thanks to dreamer042 "As Leibniz remarked three centuries ago, if you could blow the brain up to the size of a mill and walk about inside, you would not find consciousness."

Darn it gibran, you make it awfully difficult to disagree with you sometimes

I would like to add one point though: If something interacts with the material world in any way, it is by definition observable in this interaction. This interaction could be subtle to the point where our ability to notice it is scant and might require means beyond those which we currently possess, but it is in principle observable. Of course we cannot obtain any detailed information about it beyond the nature of it's interaction with the material world... but then, that interaction is the only aspect of it that is significant to us. Any non-observable aspects have, by definition, no effect whatsoever on the material world.

I realize that this does not contradict your argument. With respect to consciousness, it is entirely possible that it originates outside of the brain (as with the analogy of the television)... but if it does originate outside the brain, this external origin must in principle be observable (even if we haven't the means to observe it yet) because it would by some means be interacting with the material world, just as the the electromagnetic waves that give rise to the picture on the television are observable, whether or not the investigator has at that moment the means to observe them.

I think that this the motivation behind strict materialism. Because we experience the material world, and anything which has an effect on the material world must in principle be able to be observed, anything beyond the material world (i.e. unobservable phenomena) may be regarded as essentially irrelevant... if they were relevant, then they would by definition be observable.

The reason it’s sometimes hard to disagree is because I try to take a very agnostic position. A good scientist, uninfluenced by his ego, personal prejudices, likes and dislikes, etc. benefits from agnosticism. Atheist scientists would no doubt be better scientists and more open to new discoveries if they were agnostics rather than atheists.

The quote often used by theists to defend their position is “Absence of evidence IS NOT evidence of absence.” The statement is true, but it obviously does nothing to support the existence of God or anything else for which we have no evidence.

Atheists (including atheist scientists such and Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins) implicitly use a variation of that statement: “Absence of evidence IS evidence of absence.” That statement is false. So, for example, a scientist who denies even the possibility of the existence of an afterlife because it doesn’t fit his worldview is, in my mind, reasoning in the same faulty ego-based way that a theist might reason but coming to a different conclusion.

Regarding consciousness and interaction with the observable physical world: It’s possible that consciousness doesn’t interact with the physical world, at least not in a way that changes anything in the physical world. Consciousness may be an “impotent observer”, in which case it might not be a phenomenon that we can observe.

The argument often brought up when discussing unobservable phenomena is that, as you stated, if a phenomenon is unobservable, then it’s irrelevant. In a practical sense, this is true. But science isn’t concerned with only the practical. It seeks to discover the nature of how things actually are, not just how they appear to be.

edit:

Here’s an article just posted today: WiggleZ galaxy project proves Einstein was right again

And here’s a quote:


The article goes on to say that dark energy is real, confirming the predictions of Einstein’s equations. It’s interesting to note that some scientists can arrogantly proclaim what is true and what isn’t, given the fact that all known physics is based on material that comprises only 4% of the visible universe!

I have to say that I agree completely with Gibran on this. I couldnt have stated it any better.

While Steven Hawking is definatily an expert when it comes to astronomy, I find him to have such a dark and depressing take on humanity in general, almost to the point where I would say he is a negativist, but that is beside the point. Saying things like "belief in heaven or an afterlife is a fairy story" is such an easy way out-blanket statement that it becomes rediculous. Any kid who made it through high school should be qualified to make such a statement reguarding the popular context of such ideas in mainstream dogmatic religion. That context however is far from a rational inquiry into the possability of such things as a type of afterlife etc..Steven Hawking has basically gone out on a *very* thin limb here spewing out what essentially seem to cop-outs when removed from any relevance to popular dogmatic religious views surrounding such things.

Of course we can say that based on what we know scientifically silly ideas that manifest from biblical texts taken literally etc are not very probable..but to then state matter of factly that you know what happens when a human dies for example is just rediculous. The guy is egotistical.

Ahh...I see it over and over--there's no escaping it: "If you can't prove my idea is WRONG, then my idea is just as PRESENTABLE as any other idea."

Well, that may be nice for those who wish to present wacky ideas...

...but those of us who wish to come to KNOW things, and WORK with knowledge (rather than only babble) need to try to WADE THROUGH the mystery of existence and try to DISCERN the true from the false (and never forget: an INFINITY of false things constantly vies for our attention. Apparently, only the human mind can create ENTIRELY FALSE THINGS and intrude them into our consciousness).

So, when science (through a LOT of careful work--NOT just "squishing" brains) says it finds a one-to-one correlation between the matter of the brain and the manifestation of consciousness...well, it's perfectly DEPENDABLE (based on the history of science) to INFER that the form and function of the brain is what generates consciousness, and (and here's the important bit), begin to construct FURTHER HYPOTHESES and experiments from that inference. After all, the brain is SHOCKINGLY complex in it's form AND function. It's quite reasonable to suppose that complexity might serve to generate SOMETHING quite extraordinary.

Ahh...but there's a GAP, isn't there! Science can't PROVE that the material of the brain is what generates consciousness! No. But that's what science is WORKING ON; and it has made significant progress. Until there's ENOUGH progress, however, those who look for scientific GAPS so they insert their GODS into them, will continue to pretend they have something useful and meaningful to say on the matter; even when they have no good BASIS to say what they say--but instead have only a wish for reality to be the way they personally want it to be.

This is a rather ad hominem attack. Would you really argue that science presents a truly holistic and non-reductionist approach to understanding reality? Science is a tool that serves a great many useful purposes, as you point out. However, just because people are saying that it may be possible that there are things science can't prove or areas it may not be an appropriately suited tool for really shouldn't make you so defensive about it or elicit such fallacious arguments.

Perhaps science will show that consciousness in the brain...or perhaps as with the atom, every time they think they are at the final gap, they will realize there is another level into which they will need to probe in order to find where in the brain consciousness originates from. I think it is foolhardy to take the stance that things inexplicable through science are entirely without merit. I consider myself a rational, logical and mostly scientific individual, but at the same time, I try to bare in mind that science is a tool created by man and should be viewed as such.

Actually, the point for you seems to be that "not liking" what he has to say is reason enough for you to dismiss it. But you need to face the fact: that "style" of thinking is childish. Adults, OTOH, have come to know that sometimes (rather often, unfortunately) true things are..."not as we would like."



No. Tales of heavens and afterlives are EXACTLY "fairy stories." Now, of course, there's nothing to say that fairy stories can't turn out to be TRUE. But at present, none of them have; and given what we know is their SOURCE (people, after all, just make them up--even though they sometimes come to REALLY BELIEVE THEM, and become prone to click their heels together three times, quickly), it's not very risky to, at least initially, merely dismiss them outright--as Stephen Hawking has done.

Sorry, it's not at all meant as an ad hominem attack. It was just a throw-away phrase. I in fact DO NOT intend to seriously characterize any idea posed in this thread as "wacky." I agree that kind of characterization offers nothing to a rational discussion.