Tuesday 3 November 2015

An Unfalsifiable Proposition

Fantasy writers may legitimately assume a hereafter for fictional purposes. Poul Anderson sometimes did. Other writers express their own beliefs about a hereafter through fiction, although such fiction must still be classed as fantasy because the hereafter is not (yet) a publicly accessible realm. Arthur Conan Doyle believed in Spiritualism and also wrote fiction about it he but kept the supernatural out of the Sherlock Holmes series which is the part of his work that Anderson refers to.

Science fiction writers can devise scientific rationales for a hereafter, e.g.:

Midsummer Century by James Blish;
Immortality Inc. by Robert Sheckley.

The personality is neither a cerebral process nor a supernatural entity but a semi-stable electromagnetic field or etc.

There is something logically odd about the proposition that there is a hereafter. On the one hand, if there is a hereafter, then we will know about it. On the other hand, the question of whether there is a hereafter does not fully meet the criteria of an empirical question. Thus, if I predict that there will be a total eclipse of the Sun at noon tomorrow, then my prediction is both testable and falsifiable:

if there is an eclipse at noon, then at 12.01 pm we will know that there was an eclipse;
if there is not an eclipse at noon, then at 12.01 pm we will know that there was not an eclipse.

However, if I predict that, after death, you will enter a hereafter, then, if you enter a hereafter, you will know that you have entered a hereafter whereas, if you do not enter a hereafter, you will not know that you have not entered a hereafter. So is it an empirical question?

I discussed some of the issues here.

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