I’ve addressed philosopher Joshua Rasmussen’s counting argument against physicalism in another OP. While researching that argument, I added myself to his mailing list, and a few days ago, he presented a new argument under the title You Can Know There Is Life After Death — Without Dying.

In the other thread, I jokingly wrote:

The argument goes something like this:

Premise 1:

Yes, six plus one would equal seven even if there were no pinecones.

Premise 2:

Triangles can come and go, and I would still exist.

Conclusion:

There is life after death, and you can know it.

I’m quote mining for the sake of laughs, of course, but it’s actually not that much of an exaggeration to say to say that the argument boils down to the above. Those are the actual examples Rasmussen uses in the course of justifying his premises.

Rasmussen’s article can be found here, on Substack. Next I’ll describe the argument and how those examples fit into it.

The article begins:

I’m about to share something with you that you have never heard before, and it could change your life. I am going to show you, by a unique pathway of deductions, that your future does not depend on your body. There is life after death, and you can know it.

You don’t need to wait until you die to find out whether you still exist. Nor do you need to find a religion to trust, or to trust anyone who claims to have knowledge of life after death. Instead, you can gain this knowledge for yourself.

That’s a bold claim. The argument:

1. We know what it means for one thing to be independent of another and we can reason our way to conclusions about independence. This is where the pinecones come in. We can reason our way to the knowledge that the number 7 is independent of pinecones, and we don’t have to destroy any pinecones in order to reach that conclusion.

2. There is a principle of irrelevance that can be used to extend a determination of independence from one thing to another, or to an entire class. Rasmussen’s example is that having determined that the number 7 is independent of pinecones, we can declare that all of the prime numbers are independent of pinecones. That’s because while prime numbers differ from each other, they don’t differ in a way that’s relevant to the question of whether they are independent of pinecones. We don’t have to consider them one by one.

3. Just as you can reason your way to the conclusion that the number 7 is independent of pinecones, you can reason your way to the conclusion that you — your core being, your essence, your sense of self — are independent of certain things. He refers to this as your “me-ness”. This is where the triangles come in. We can tell, via reason, that we are independent of triangles. “Triangles can come and go, and I would still exist” is how he puts it.

4. We can apply the principle of irrelevance to establish that not only are we independent of triangles, we are also independent of squares, because the differences between triangles and squares are irrelevant to the question of independence. We can further extend the independence to all shapes, to motion, to transitions between shapes, etc.

5. The money shot: “From all of this, tracing irrelevant differences leads to the result: me-ness does not depend on any mere motions or changes in space. From here it follows that your existence (that which has your me-ness) persists independently from the annihilation of any body, including the one(s) you operate now. In other words, there is life after death.

I think this is a pretty weak argument, but I’ll save my criticisms for the comment section.