Reddit mentions of Immortality Defended

> A bit yeah, just moved in to my own apartment!

congratulations

> I understand the logic, but I still don't think these things have been demonstrated outside of philosophy essays.

Remember, demonstrability is only a qualifier for empirical evidence, evidence in general can be taken to be more vast and up for debate.

> I would disagree, but I don't even know what this means, unfortunately ;)

If you're interested http://www.amazon.com/Immortality-Defended-John-Leslie/dp/140516204X/

I don't think I can do his ideas any justice on a Reddit forum.

> I have heard of this, but I've never talked to anyone who actually held that view. I would like to talk with them about it for sure. I disagree, but on what part I disagree depends on what they say.

Well, if interested, I would suggest Max Tegmark's book Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality. He holds that our entire universe is literally made of mathematical numbers. He's also a physicist at MIT.

> Eh. So far as I am aware again, these are akin to borrowing theology's word-games in philosophy to demonstrate different things. I mean, sure, people can think of that if they want, but I don't think it shows anything particularly relevant about reality.

I would think that topics as our eternal destination, the fundamental metaphysical makeup of the world and the nature of reality help to bolster and reinforce scientific theory. I would doubt that many physicists would have stumbled onto space time without previous discussion of philosophy of time for example. Not to mention the ability of certain cosmological arguments to predict notions of a universes beginning. They might not be correct in the long run, but do provide certain hypothetical frames for future discoveries.

> True that, there are also plenty of atheists who are not rationalists at all, and believe all kinds of weird/unprovable things. I would be one of those strict materialists however ;)

Sorry to be pick the knits, but you mean empiricists, not rationalists in this case. Rationalist tends to focus on concepts through the work of a priori knowledge and then place it in an overall framework. The Mathematical and Platonic notions I mentioned are achieved through a rationalist frame work.

Empiricists are more about the posteriori verification of these ideas through induction and falsifiability. This does not preclude empiricists of being Platonists (Arif Ahmed is an example of such a case).

According to the philpapers, skeptical materialists make up only 5% of philosophers. So I would say tread lightly to claim these other 95% are being irrational.