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Good follow up discussion - I like your style, A13! I think you are exactly right about the weight of that question, and I believe it is one that many people have wrestled with for thousands of years.

In particular, I appreciated your comment about Alzheimer’s. As I watched my grandmother progress through the stages, sometimes she would think I was me, sometimes I was my grandfather, sometimes my father, sometimes my uncle. It was like reverse schizophrenia. Always in her eyes was the spark of intelligence, just not always recognition. Once I listened to her vivid and animated description of riding horses across the prairie in about 1915, but then she couldn’t recall having eaten lunch 15 minutes earlier.

Anyway, now the question is really raised to the next level. If there is consciousness (which there obviously is), and if it is not extended into space (has no mass), then we can assume that things (for lack of a better word) exist outside of the material realm. So what are those things, of what do they consist, and what is their existence like?

Thanks for a most moving post, HC - I am deeply moved about your anecdote on your grandmother. Let me first say that I am quite wary of popular beliefs in reincarnation, or in the divine white light that people with near-death experiences report about - although I have nothing but the utmost respect for the motives that drive these beliefs. For the first we have no real evidence, and the second could potentially be caused by a common 'shutdown' mechanism in our brains just prior to death, e.g. one that affects our visual system (as a scientist I am skeptical in these matters; but I am certainly not a nihilist, neither a materialist). But you hit it on the head: assuming that consciousness has no spatial extension and no mass, then I am led to the conclusion that it can in principle very well exist when my material body has decomposed. As I wrote, it's accepted as so normal by philosophers and scientists alike that we regain consciousness after deep sleep that the sheer wonder of this is overlooked. One cannot regain something one has not lost, after all. And I refuse to accept that it simply ceased to exist at all when falling asleep and popped into being again when waking up. Now: I think it would be acceptable to surmise that 'I' did not exist as 'me' before my own conception. I am the product, if you will, of the love of my parents, and my consciousness is the product of both of them too in a way that is too mysterious to grasp for me. I think it is also acceptable to conjecture that 'I' will not 'disintegrate' back into my two parents again after my body has stopped to operate. For the moment I can only say that my (our) line of reasoning leads to the preliminary conclusion that it is in theory possible that our consciousness remains after our death; and this then would be valid for everyone. I am afraid that I would claim to be God if I would pretend to know what happens with the souls (I think it is perfectly admissible to name them thus). And I wouldn't have a clue either in what the soul of a deceased infant would be like compared to the soul of an elderly person who passed away. (tbc)