Hawking is a brilliant man.  Yet nowhere in this article does he discredit the afterlife, other than to call the brain a wonderful computer which makes consciousness and ceases to be when we die. 

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503543_162-20063168-503543.html?tag=exclsv

Hawking is a brilliant theoretical physicist but I don't think that being 'good at the math' necessarily means seeing the bigger picture. Other equally brilliant people in his field and others have thought differently ...

This is response to Hawking's remarks.  Admittedly from a Christian perspective, but it seems to apply.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/on-faith/post/stephen-hawking-what-he-doesnt...

Consider that Hawking has an illness (ALS) that most people only live 3 years with. Hawking has had his illness for 40 years.

He has had a lot of time to think about his situation. I respect his opinion.

He still gives lectures in physics.

Im not surprised of his beliefs. Hes trapped within a deformed and crippled physical body. He probably blames God for his condition. He will learn soon enough. Wonder what hes going to think then?

Hawking may be incredibly intelligent, but his views on afterlife and heaven are nothing more than his latest bid for attention.

Lakeman,
I completely agree with your insightful post. I would add one possible dimension to Hawking's refusal to consider the abundant evidence of an afterlife. Just beyond the fairy tale label attached to the christian view of heaven, lies the dangerous fringe of the New Age, a place rife with charlatans and very short on credibility, a currency that mainstream scientists, even one as pre-eminent as Hawking, rely on for success and self-respect.  To admit the existence of an afterlife would be to invite Cayce and Monroe into the fold.

In honour of Bob D : ' The Times They Are A-changin' .

I want to emphasize a thing which Lakeman already approached. There is a sort of predominant scientific view, often named as the opinion of the "scientific community". And this is, simplified and channeled through the media, the brain-religion.

I am, at least through my academical education, a member of the scientific community, but I can only shake my head about this naive and childish worldview which some of my "colleagues" are uttering.
Obviously, when someone has gotten the diploma in physics, this one feels to be competent as well in philosophy, and most of the media seem to share this opinion. Probably because it's much easier to repeat the common phrase "you are your brain" than to think about if this makes sense at all. It doesn't.

First, I have no clue what my brain does. Nonetheless I'm able to think.

Second, there are correlations between what we experience and activities within our brains. But correlations are not causations. Most natural scientists, when it comes to the brain, forget their proper education and declare experiences to be caused by activities within the brain. When confronted with the question how this mystical causal process is taking place, to transmute chemo-electrical activities into experiences, they fly to another phrase: They avoid causation, and start to identificate these physiological activities with experiences; because it spares them to explain how this causation would work; but this then is nothing else but mysticism in the bad meaning. To explain a correlation by an identification negates the correlation, as how can there be a correlation between one and the same thing? Some of the smartest of those scientists see this impossibility and therefore deny any correlation; saying our experience is an illusion, and there are only physiological processes. And this then is the end-point: Total delusion with a scientific diploma. As when experiences would be illusions, then their scientific work, together with it's objects, would be illusions, too.

Third, the brain is one of many objects in the world. When someone says that the world is nothing but a representation within the brain, then it is to ask how this one then could know anything about the world? Then the brain itself, and all theories about the brain would be themselves nothing but a representation, an image, within the brain. Therefore, we only could conclude either that there is no brain (or that we don't know anything about it and it's just an empty term), or that the brain is the brain. Congratulations!

Spooky

Hi,

Spooky, as a psychologist I like your logic very much 

Thanks!
It's better to be here than on some intellectual coctail-party, where such topics are discussed, and I couldn't hold back and tell them what I think about it, to the only result that they repeat their opinions without getting anything of what I've just said. I would then have some more coctails  .

Oh, there is another fine invention. It's called "epi-phenomenon". Our mind (our experiences) is, so they say, an "epi-phenomenon" of the brain. Now, a phenomenon, in my book, is a part of our experience, which we can more or less well discerned from the whole of our experiences, and which is not filtered by a rigid theory. So then they say the brain is a phenomenon, and our experiences are an offspring of it? Or what? Don't ask me, I don't know the answer. But you know what? No one knows what is meant by that  .

Spooky

Praise the Lowered! They are finally beginning to see something that forces them to reexamine the data.

.... big Ben chimes five times and workers leave their factories in Sheffield (200 miles north) every day thus Big Ben must cause the worker's exit...

My good friend, the athiest scientist, says that God (or spirit or afterlife or tooth fairy etc) doesn't exist, because there is no scientific evidence to support it. When pressed, he says that he lives in a world governed by facts. When further pressed, he says facts are articles of knowledge. Upon cross-examination, he asserts that knowledge, is defined (as it has been for millenia) as "justifiable true belief".
Leaving aside the "justifiable", because it is an entire branch of enquiry all it's own, he asserts that a true belief is a belief (agreement with a proposition), that is true (!). Under duress, he declares that if it is true, that it actually exists. That is, it stands up to the scrutiny of the scientific method. Under threat of torture, he declares the scientific method to be the systematic observation of or experiment with a system (usually of or in nature).  So finally, after some gentile waterboarding, he blurts out that his world is based on his "agreement with a proposition" that is based on  his "observations" of the world.

Now that is hard evidence, if I ever saw it.

Indeed the Double Slit is very cool to say the least. You would think that alone would make science a little more willing to open up beyond their Dogma.