Is there life after death? The clearest way to answer this is to die. Surely, if there is something beyond the grave, death is one way to find it. Fortunately, there are other ways to deduce this central question which every human being should ask himself.
Reason Testifies - without an afterlife, there is no justice. We see often good people suffer, bad people have it easy. How is this possible if a just G-d is running it all? How can Hitler just leave existence after all he did with a small pill. The only way things can be just is if there is an afterlife where all accounting is balanced. see this audio by Rabbi Simcha Wasserman zt'l for more.
Free Will - the brain is no more than a physical mass of biological matter, a sort of advanced biological computer which functions at whatever preset configuration/program is inside it. If so, where does its ability to exercise free will come from? The most advanced supercomputer can only execute instructions which were pre-programmed from the beginning. It doesn't really reveal its own independent ideas (we'll talk about AI shortly). Our brains are at the end of the day merely a mass of atoms which cannot go against the natural laws. It is important to realize that the universe is governed by natural laws which never change. These laws of physics act consistently in the same way always. This is why machines and computers are so reliable (and even in quantum mechanics, the probability distributions are always the same). If so, where does our sense of free will come from? Animals have will but they are compelled by their instincts. Man alone can rise above his base instincts and choose to override them. He has free will to choose between good and evil. This testifies on some non-physical component within him.[2]
Spiritual Longing - the physical brain should care only about physical things. By nature it should not search for spiritual meaning, truth, honor, justice and religion. These things are often the most powerful drives in a person. Animals, on the other hand, find complete satisfaction in physical things. Give a cow pasture and water and it will never complain or show signs of depression. But man's inner being is not satisfied with the physical. He seeks that which is beyond[2].
Search for Truth - related to the previous, the Ramchal writes (Derech Tevunot Introduction): "the desire to know the truth is a natural matter for the intellectual soul within us, to the extent that one will not find a man of healthy intellect who will not strive and endeavor, according to his intellectual ability, to reveal truth in the matters which he finds himself engaged in, and to refute and drive away the falsehood therein..." End quote.
Window to the Soul - when one looks into the eyes of another person, he is picking up vastly more information than he could possibly get simply from the surface of the face. There is some kind of interaction of consciousness occurring, a perception of another conscious being outside yourself only superficially represented in the face. What is it then that you are noticing when looking into the eyes of another person? This is the soul, the intangible, self-aware "personality" living in that body. You notice the soul through the medium of the eyes. It's an amazing thing. People can live a whole lifetime without realizing this. They are constantly noticing the souls of others without even realizing that this is what they are seeing. We tend to be so focused on the physical that we don't realize that what we are detecting is the spiritual. The face also reveals the spiritual state of the soul, i.e. whether the person in there is good or evil.
An animal's eyes, on the other hand, are lifeless in comparison. One doesn't detect much beyond the surface of its eyes. They are lifeless and dead in comparison for there is no higher order spiritual being wearing that body. Thus, our spiritual faculties do not detect anything much more than the physical creature.
Asking Questions - many scientific studies have attempted to teach apes and chimpanzees to communicate like humans. It was widely believed that a chimp has the intelligence of a human 2-year old. After long years of trying to teach apes and chimps via sign language and other methods, one crucial difference has emerged - the chimps never ask questions (wikipedia, "Great Ape Language - question asking"). A human 2 year old asks endless questions such as: "why is it like that?", "who is making that noise?", "when is Dad coming home?", "Where is the dog?", "When will we see grandma?", etc. etc. But the chimps failed to ask questions to their trainers such as: "where are we going?", "when are we returning?" or anything else. This indicates there is no "personality" in that body. There's "nobody" in there really. It is just an animal.
Empty Shell - we have a tradition that part of a person's soul leaves his body during deep sleep. Observe a person's face when he is deeply asleep. If you ask him to close his eyes, relax and pretend he is asleep. It will not be the same. In the former, the person appears like an empty shell of his usual self. Is this due to the facial muscles being more relaxed during sleep, or is there more to it than this?
Mystery of Consciousness
Anthony Flew, a British philosopher, Oxford professor, and leading champion of atheism for more than fifty years who renounced atheism in 2004 and declared himself a believer in G-d explains this enigma well. Here is a short excerpt from his book: "There is a G-d" (available online here. just skip the stuff on christianity):
We are conscious, and conscious that we are conscious. No one can deny this without self-contradiction - although some persist in doing so... All our mental actions are accompanied by conscious states, states in which we are aware of what we are doing. In no way does functionalism explain or claim to explain the state of being conscious, of being aware, of knowing what we are thinking about (computers don't "know" what they are doing). Still less does it tell us who it is that is conscious, aware, and thinking...
Many misconceptions about the nature of thought arise from misconceptions about computers. But let's say we're dealing with a supercomputer like the Blue Gene, which does over two hundred trillion calculations per second. Our first mistake is to assume that Blue Gene is an "it" like a bacterium or a bumblebee. In the case of the bacterium or the bumblebee we're dealing with an agent, a center of action that is an organically unified whole, an organism. All its actions are driven by the goals of maintaining itself in existence and replicating. Blue Gene is a bundle of parts that jointly or severally perform functions "implanted" and directed by the creators of the collection.
Second, the bundle of parts does not know what "it" is doing when "it" performs a transaction. Supercomputer calculations and mainframe transactions performed in response to data and instructions are purely and simply a matter of electrical pulses, circuitry, and transistors. The same calculations and transactions performed by a human person, of course, involve the machinery of the brain, but they are performed by a center of consciousness who is conscious of what is going on, understands what is being done, and intentionally performs them. There is no awareness, understanding, meaning, intention, or person involved when the computer performs the same actions, even when the computer has multiple processors operating at superhuman speeds. The output of the computer has "meaning" for us (the weather forecast for tomorrow or your bank balance), but as far as the bundle of parts called the computer is concerned there are binary digits, 0's and 1's, that drive certain mechanical activities. To suggest that the computer "understands" what it is doing is like saying that a power line can meditate on the question of free will and determinism, or that the chemicals in a test tube can apply the principle of noncontradiction in solving a problem, or that a DVD player understands and enjoys the music it plays.
The problem becomes insoluble when you realize the nature of neurons. First of all, neurons show no resemblance to our conscious life. Second and more important, their physical properties do not in any way give reason to believe that they can or will produce consciousness. Consciousness is correlated with certain regions of the brain, but when the same systems of neurons are present in the brain stem there is no "production" of consciousness. As a matter of fact, as physicist Gerald Schroeder points out, there is no essential difference in the ultimate physical constituents of a heap of sand and the brain of an Einstein. Only blind and baseless faith in matter lies behind the claim that certain bits of matter can suddenly "create" a new reality that bears no resemblance to matter....
Although the new atheists have failed to come to grips with either the nature or the source of life, consciousness, thought, and the self, the answer to the question of the origin of the supraphysical seems obvious: the supraphysical can only originate in a supraphysical source. Life, consciousness, mind, and the self can only come from a Source that is living, conscious, and thinking. If we are centers of consciousness and thought who are able to know and love and intend and execute, I cannot see how such centers could come to be from something that is itself incapable of all these activities. Although simple physical processes could create complex physical phenomena, we are not concerned here with the relation of simple and complex, but with the origin of "centers." It's simply inconceivable that any material matrix or field can generate agents who think and act. Matter cannot produce conceptions and perceptions. A force field does not plan or think. So at the level of reason and everyday experience, we become immediately aware that the world of living, conscious, thinking beings has to originate in a living Source, a Mind. (Anthony Flew, There is a G-d, appendix A) end quote.
Similarly, in the book "Sefer HaYashar" (5:18) by Rabeinu Tam: "we see that the soul has 'knowledge' (daat) to study everything in the world. It also has another higher form of knowledge (daat) - knowledge of knowledge. With this knowledge it is near to the Creator..."
(regarding AI computing: while this technology is impressive, but one must realize that the computer itself has no understanding of its own whatsoever. This is indicated by the sometimes wild errors these AI machines make such as making up sources that never existed. For example, the New York times publicized a case where Stephen Shwartz (lawyer) used ChatGPT to arrange proofs in a court of law. The ChatGPT made up all the sources. The court weighed in whether to place sanctions on his law firm (see article: "Here's what happens when your lawyer uses ChatGPT"). In truth, the computer does not have "understanding" and does not have the ability to understand by itself the information fed into it. What it does in essence is just an advanced form of "fill in the word" like in smartphones. It collects vast information data and forms statistical answers. It builds a puzzle of all the parts it has without understanding the picture the puzzle is trying to form. Due to this it sometimes outputs a picture which is completely ridiculous and erroneous. (ex. a "salmon swimming in the river" shows a frozen salmon fillet swimming in the sea). Studies have also found the ChatGPT has a strong left wing democrat bias. This indicates that it is nothing more than a mindless "fill in the blank" optimization algorithm[2]).
Interestingly, I sent to ChatGPT in 2024: "are you sentient?" Response: As an AI language model developed by OpenAI, I don't possess sentience or consciousness. I can process and generate text based on patterns in data and algorithms, but I don't have subjective experiences, emotions, or awareness. My responses are generated based on patterns in the data on which I was trained and the input I receive from users, without any personal understanding or consciousness.
What Am I? - Robert Lanza points out in his book "Biocentrism" (pg.33):
All of us are taught since earliest childhood that the universe
can be fundamentally divided into two entities - ourselves, and that
which is outside of us. This seems logical and apparent. What is
"me" is commonly defined by what I can control. I can move my
fingers but I cannot wiggle your toes. The dichotomy, then, is based
largely on manipulation. The dividing line between self and nonself
is generally taken to be the skin, strongly implying that I am this
body and nothing else.
Of course, when a chunk of the body has vanished, as some
unfortunate double amputees have experienced, one still feels oneself
to be just as "present" and "here" as before, and not subjectively
diminished in the least. This logic could be carried forth easily
enough until one arrives at solely the brain itself perceiving itself as
"me" - because if a human head could be maintained with an artificial
heart and the rest, it too would reply "Here!" if its name were
shouted at roll call.
One can narrow this down further. For much of the brain is for controlling bodily functions or processing sensory information. Is our consciousness due only to a slab of neurons in the brain? This is difficult for as Anthony Flew pointed out earlier: "neurons show no resemblance to our conscious life..". More next point..
Information, Knowledge, and Mind - scientific experiments in quantum mechanics have shown that the mere act of measuring something affects the reality. Sophisticated experiments have even shown that this has nothing to do with any changes in the measuring apparatus. The mere ability to obtain information is sufficient to affect the reality[82]. But how can immaterial information affect material reality? Does this not indicate that information and knowledge which are related to consciousness have some sort of objective reality and are not just "accidents" of nature? see end section on quantum mechanics for much more.
Why Now? - Robert Lanza explains (Biocentrism pg.108):
If time is truly flowing forward into the future, is it not extraordinary
that we are here, alive, for a split instant, on the edge of all
time? Imagine all the days and hours that have passed since the
beginning of time. Now, stack time, like chairs, on top of each other
and seat yourself on the very top, or - if you prefer speed - strap
yourself once again to the front of the Time Train. Science has no real explanation for why we're alive now, existing on the edge of time. According to the current physiocentric worldview, it's just an accident, a one-in-a-gazillion chance that we are alive.
In other words, since time came into existence, our lifespan is a mere tiny slice of time relative to the big picture. The chance of us being conscious now is near zero. Yet here we are. Thus, isn't it more likely that our consciousness exists even beyond the tiny slice of time which is our lifespan on earth? This point is debatable but interesting nonetheless.
Music - music is the language of soul. It touches the deepest chords in our soul. It expresses at times what we can't verbally express. The cords and lyrics of a song can lift one upward to spiritual longing for the transcendent and to G-d. As such there is no instrument more beautiful than the human voice which comes from the soul. When a human being pours out his soul in song, it is recognizable to us and plucks at our heart-strings. On the other hand, animals and birds don't have a higher soul and thus, their chirping and song does not seem to have any spiritual content whatsoever.
R.Yechezkel AbramskyMorality - In the spiritual realm things similar are close together. Thus when one acts morally, he draws closer to G-d and when he acts the opposite he distances from G-d (See Ramchal's Maamar HaIkarim). This is something one can tangibly feel. Do a good deed and you will feel this spiritual light shining on your inner being. Do an evil deed, and you will feel a disturbing darkness and unhappiness. True it is not physically tangible but one can manifestly detect it with one's spiritual faculties, namely, the higher soul. This is why animals do not have a sense of morality. The lion can eat his prey alive and not feel any sort of remorse or pity. For it has no higher soul to feel good and evil and cannot draw nearer or further away from G-d through his deeds like a human. If one corrupts himself to a great extent, he can sever this connection and is left like an animal or worse - he actually enjoys cruelty and evil.
Inner Struggle - we have a tradition that as a person comes of age (13 for boys), the "good inclination" begins to enter him. From then on, he will feel an incessant struggle within himself between two selves or two natures or two wills with two different viewpoints and aspirations - the selfish animal who aspires to material, self-centered gain versus the spiritual soul who aspires to good, truth, and G-dliness. The mussar sages call this "the most difficult, incessant war". Most people can feel this inner struggle within themselves to varying degrees if they pay attention. (see Gesher HaChaim part 3 ch.4).
Wisdom of Elders - as a person ages, his body becomes weaker and weaker. His strength wanes and his organs weaken. But this is not so for the minds of great torah sages. On the contrary, the older they get, the wiser they become. This indicates that wisdom is not entirely from the body (from Kuzari ch.7, see also Talmud Shabbat 122a). (for example, Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv zt'l reached the age of 102 and was of extremely weak body. But his vast Torah wisdom and reasoning power only increased more and more over time and he was the address for the most complicated, most difficult Halachic rulings in the world.)
Near Death Experiences - many people report seeing themselves and their surroundings while they are clinically dead. For example, the Lancet Journal, one of the world's oldest and best known general medical journals, published a scientific study in 2001 of the phenomenon documenting several verifiable cases and concluded "Our results show that medical factors cannot account
for occurrence of NDE". see the original here with a few examples of verified, true out of body experiences. see also this Shmuz by Rabbi Ben Tzion Shafier.
Recently, a large scale highly scientific study by NYU concluded consciousness indeed persists after the threshold of death. see this CBS video for details (female interviewer).
Clairvoyance - some rare people possess certain powers of clairvoyance. I realize most people have not been exposed to this and will be skeptical. But I can testify from my own experience that it is real. Rabbi Yaakov Hillel is considered the expert on the subject in the Jewish world. He wrote a book against dabbling in such things called "Faith and Folly". Nevertheless, even he concedes that such things do exist and are real. Here is an excerpt of his words from an audio lecture which he gave on the topic: (at 46:01)
"sometimes some of these people seem to have some sort of power of intuition. they can be quite prophetic. impressively. they can know hidden things. sometimes I've checked it out and I found out they have well organized system of obtaining information (i.e. they are charlatans) ... but others really have this type of power... (skipping to 51:18) we should not be impressed when we see someone who knows hidden things...there are these types of things. It exists. but that's not what impresses us."
Likewise, the Ramban commentary on the torah regarding the "false prophet" (Devarim 13:2) writes: "it seems the verse hints at what does in truth occur. For in the souls of some people is a prophetic power, whereby they sometimes know future events. These people do not know from where this comes..." (see there. I have personally met such people. Many of them wind up in Jerusalem.)
Seances - this is popular among young secular Israelis (it is forbidden by the Torah (Lev.19:31) and can also be very dangerous). Granted some are hoaxes but there are far too many first hand accounts out there to just dismiss it. I have personally heard from reliable sources that it is sometimes real. I realize many will reject this, but for those who have had been exposed first hand to communication with the dead and know that it is sometimes quite real, I ask you to consider the following story. Eran Benezra, a formerly secular Israeli lawyer relates in his book Hochachot (vol.2 pg.216):
When I was in the army, I served in a small base. Sometimes we were on night guard duty in pairs. One time, after I had already become religious, I was with Yisrael, the "heretic" of the group, who boasted to all that he was an atheist and could do whatever he wished. I was studying a Torah book when Yisrael asked me if we could speak to pass the time. I asked him what he would like to speak about. He asked me if I truly believed in all this (Torah). "certainly, I believe, but even you Yisrael believe". He told me: "what are you talking about? it's all foolishness. I don't believe any of it."
I asked him if he believes in Seances. He thought for a moment and then answered affirmatively. "why do you believe in that?" I asked him. He answered that he once attended a seance and is certain that it is true. "maybe they tricked you". I asked him. "why are you certain it is true?"
Yisrael told me that when he was studying in college, a good friend of his died in a car accident. After the accident, the fellows made a seance to try to contact him. They succeeded. Yisrael told how at first he thought it was fake, some kind of trick, but he then asked him questions that he alone could know the answers to, and related to him experiences only the two of them knew about. Hence, currently he is certain it is true.
I asked whether in the seance he contacted his body or his soul. Yisrael did not know. I asked him whether he saw or heard him. Yisrael said no. But the glass moved on the board with letters and numbers (ouija board). Thus they communicated with him. I told him that if he did not see a body it indicates he contacted the spirit (soul). I asked him if he now believes in life after death and that man has a soul. He answered yes. I asked him: "where does the soul come from? from monkeys?! Have you ever tried to bring up a monkey in a seance? That is not possible because the monkey has no soul (only a nefesh-life force), and no life after death. But man has a soul. How can you explain through random Darwinian evolution the existence of the soul?" Yisrael asked me where the soul comes from. I answered "from G-d. He created the body and the soul." I asked, "do you now believe in G-d?" Yisrael answered: "Yes".
