How do we/can we gather any information about life after death?

Ways to know and learn information about life after death (or anything else)

1. Experience. One way we learn about many things is to experience them in some way.

• We could die. If we survive death, then, it seems likely that this will help us to learn about life after death--about whether there is life after death and what life after death is like. The only problem here: we are dead. Death is the "great divide"--once dead, we can't come back.
• Unless there was a way to die and come back to life. Then we would have experience of death (and sure knowledge that there is life after death). This is the circumstances of the so-called "Near Death Experiences." The movie Flatliners was an example of persons who "flatlined" themselves--"clinically died" and then resuscitated themselves. One problem: if you come back, were you really dead? So can we really be sure that you experienced death and lived to tell about it. Anyone want to try?

2. Empirical investigation. Another way to gather information about life after death would be through empirical investigation--observation, data collection, experiment, and the analysis of these. The idea here would be to gather concrete evidence to support the conclusion that dead people exist, and perhaps evidence about the nature of this existence. This would be similar to gathering evidence from the scene of a crime, and trying to reconstruct whether anyone had been involved, and who.

The possibilities for empirical investigation here would include

• ghost hauntings-supposedly the visitation of the earth by people who are dead.
• other reported communications with deceased persons, such as those furnished by mediums
• reincarnation reports-the existence in a "new" form of a person who has previously died.
• near-death experiences that others claim to have had

3. Inferential knowledge. A third way to gather information about something is to drawn conclusions (inferences) about it from already known facts, definitions, or accepted propositions about reality. This would be the method used by philosophical analysis, where one starts with acceptable beliefs, and then makes inferences about the possibility and/or nature of life after death. Some such analyses might lead to the conclusion that life after death is impossible; or that it is possible; or that it would require certain characteristics in order to be a certain way. Though none of this is experienced or experiential sort of knowing, this still constitutes knowledge about life after death and should be considered proofs.

Example

Descartes believed that he had established, through conceptual analysis, that the mind or the self was a necessarily existing, changeless thing.

We can infer from this that the mind or the self will not be affected by bodily changes, including death. Therefore, such a mind (or the "mind" so conceived) would survive death.