Sam Harris’s latest response in our blogalogue on faith and reason can be read here. Money quote:
Is it really so difficult to imagine one’s own nonexistence? I think it might be easier than advertised. Presumably, you don’t find it hard to accept that you didn’t exist before you were born, so why is it so difficult to believe that you will cease to exist after you die? Think of all the times and places where you now aren’t: The 14th century got along fine without you (well, not so fine). If you are in D.C. at this moment, you are utterly absent from every other city on earth. There are people walking the streets of Rome right now, carrying on without the benefit of your company. Is your absence from just one more point in time and space really so difficult to imagine? (This time and space argument doesn’t originate with me. I believe I’ve borrowed it from Douglas Hofstadter.)
Or imagine dying in parts: what if you had a stroke that damaged your visual cortex-where would your faculty of sight be thereafter? If a priest said that your visual self had gone on to heaven before you, would you believe him? What if another stroke caused you to lose your ability to speak and to understand language-do you think that your eloquence must survive in some immaterial form? There is simply no question that brain damage can cause any of us to lose the specific faculties that constitute our conscious selves. Why is it so hard to imagine that we can lose all these faculties at once?
He’s on a roll. The rest is here. I’ll respond within a week.
The Dish 